2025 was a year of intense work, profound challenges, and collective learning for the Social Solidarity Economy (SSE). In the midst of a global scenario marked by crises, inequalities, and setbacks, the SSE once again showed itself for what it is: a living practice, a political commitment, and a concrete way of caring for life and sustaining the dignity of peoples.

Throughout this year, RIPESS has walked alongside organizations, movements, communities, and networks around the world. We have woven alliances, raised our voices in international spaces, strengthened territorial processes, and continued to defend economies based on care, solidarity, and social justice.

This end‑of‑year message gathers that journey. Through the video and the words of the General Secretariat, we share some of the milestones, encounters, and learnings that marked 2025, with the conviction that transformation is built collectively and from the ground up.

Message from the RIPESS General Secretariat

As we close this 2025—an intense, challenging, and deeply transformative year—the RIPESS General Secretariat wishes to thank all the organizations, networks, collectives, movements, and individuals who are part of this great global community of the Social Solidarity Economy (SSE). Your commitment, creativity, and daily struggle are the heartbeat that keeps alive this network that does not give up, that continues to weave hopes and concrete practices of another way of inhabiting and organizing the world.

2025 was not just any year. It was a year of reaffirmations and real advances, of learning, of political confrontations, and of construction. We made the SSE visible in international spaces where our voice had not been heard before; we promoted policies in different territories that recognize the value of economies centered on care rather than profit; we strengthened ties among social movements, cooperatives, Indigenous and peasant communities, feminist organizations, youth collectives, and workers’ networks worldwide. Each action, each encounter, each alliance woven during this year brings us one step closer to that common horizon of social, economic, and environmental justice.

But we know our advances do not occur in a vacuum. The global context is worsening: wars, food crises, forced displacements, climate denialism, and the dismantling of the multilateral system threaten the foundations of human coexistence and the sustainability of life. Faced with this reality, the Social Solidarity Economy emerges not only as an alternative but as an urgent path to reorient the course of the planet. The SSE is not a small margin of resistance; it is a social and political force that demonstrates that other ways of producing, distributing, caring, and deciding collectively already exist—and they work.

We do not accept the normalization of inequality, nor the invisibilization of care work that sustains life. We do not accept that democracy be reduced to an empty exercise while peoples lose the power to decide over their resources, territories, and future. That is why we will continue to strengthen the SSE not as a sector but as a political and transformative movement; a network of hopes woven from below, by those who imagine and practice plural economies that defend the commons, food sovereignty, climate justice, and human dignity.

During 2025 we promoted intercontinental dialogue spaces, strengthened our advocacy before multilateral bodies, and articulated diverse voices around a shared agenda of just transitions. We built bridges among agendas—the feminist, ecological, peasant, cooperative, and community—because we know that transformation will be collective or it will not be.

We know the path is not easy. Institutional resistance, lack of financing, and attempts at cooptation or commodification of the SSE are real. But so too are our capacity for organization, our political conviction, and our solidarity across territories. If this year taught us anything, it is that the SSE remains alive because it is nourished by the experience of thousands of people who believe in the possibility of living differently and are not willing to renounce that dream.

RIPESS will continue weaving global networks, strengthening local capacities, promoting public policies consistent with the common good, and advancing financial mechanisms that foster autonomy and economic sovereignty rather than dependency. We believe structural change requires articulation and coherence: between global and local, between discourse and practice, between communities and institutions.

As we bid farewell to 2025, we thank every shared step, every sustained struggle, every project that was born or resisted. Thank you for walking alongside us, for building movement and hope.

May 2026 find us more united, more determined, more rebellious in the face of injustice, and more committed to that common horizon: a world where the economy serves to care for life, not to destroy it.

Let us continue building a future of solidarity, justice, and dignity.

Because the future, if it is solidarity‑based, will be!

With our best wishes and with the strength of collective hope,

RIPESS General Secretariat

Sandra Moreno Cadena and Isabel Pascual Díaz