where they already existed and in new ones such as research, the primary sector, or the educational one. In addition to linking employees and industrial cooperatives as partners, Arizmendiarrieta wanted the rest of the population to get involved, and for this he used simple and popular messages. Thus, at the inauguration in 1960 of a new Labour Bank office, his motto was “O notebook, o suitcase”, that is, save to invest and create jobs, or emigrate. Mutual assistance Like the financial entity, in June 1959 the EPSV- Voluntary Social Welfare Entity called Lagun Aro was created to respond to the cooperative members' need for social protection. The reason was that due to their status as self-employed workers, they were excluded from the General Public Social Security Scheme, alluding to their status as owners, as opposed to that of employed workers. Its function was, on the one hand, to provide a mixed coverage system that included Benefits from the Public Social Security System, through the Self-Employed Regime to which the cooperative members were affiliated. And on the other, Lagun Aro's own benefits, such as coverage for illness, unemployment in the event that a cooperative was in difficulty, retirement, widowhood, and complementary health care. As in Laboral Kutxa, the cooperatives were members of Lagun Aro. Agricultural cooperative Arizmendiarrieta came from a family of peasants from Barínaga, and did not understand social development without the primary sector. After the first industrial cooperative, he promoted the LANA cooperative, integrating the livestock, agricultural and forestry sectors of the Alto Deba Valley. It would be a mixed cooperative with two types of partners, the producers of the villages, and the workers of the transformation cooperative. After several years of dynamic growth, specialization took place, creating three divisions: dairy, livestock and forestry. Over the years, the first two were integrated into the Erkop agro-food group, and the forestry activity into the Construction Division. Cooperative university At the beginning of 1961, Arizmendiarrieta began to structure the idea of a new Professional School with a higher academic level in the Alto Deba Valley, with opening centers in the three main towns, Mondragon, Bergara and Oñati, which had a population of 50,000 inhabitants. As an indispensable condition for the development of industrial cooperatives, he wanted students well trained by the best teachers in workshops and laboratories, who were close to the levels of research and development of the leading European