Credit unions currently serve over 110 million members in the United States. This is surprising, given the challenges associated with forming cooperatives. This paper explains how grants were used to overcome these challenges and create the modern credit union sector. Edward Filene, a wealthy 20th-century department store owner, provided philanthropic funding and technical expertise to early credit unions, resulting directly in the creation of 26,000 American credit unions over a 45-year period. Filene's leadership helped overcome the various social dilemmas associated with creating cooperatives, reforming institutions, and establishing an institutional framework that enables and supports cooperatives.

Consumer cooperatives in Japan, which is by far the United States' largest overseas market for agricultural commodities, expanded rapidly in the 1980s. Their recent success, according to Japanese reports, has been due to their responsiveness to increasing consumer demand for foods produced with minimal use of petrochemical inputs. I present data that confirm this claim by showing that the high level of concern that Japanese consumer cooperative members have about food safety is the main reason they give for joining cooperatives. I then discuss the significance of this trend for American agriculture, in particular whether Japanese consumer cooperatives could become a marketing channel for Americans who specialize in producing food with less intensive use of agricultural chemicals.