USU Special Collections has a variety of materials on the cooperative movement in Utah, through the work of Joseph A. Geddes and the records of the Utah Cooperative Association that he helped organize. It also has the papers of Leonard J. Arrington who co-authored a book on the cooperative movement in the Pioneer period in the LDS Church and early Utah. Dr. Hansen's donation augments these materials by adding a substantial number of items and documents about the lesser known but very significant worker-owned cooperatives in the United States and Europe, and especially the story of their expansion in the 20th century.

The worker cooperative movement in the United States and Canada was revitalized in the 1970s and 1980s with the help of a number of people, including Frank T. Adams and Gary B. Hansen. This section includes the correspondence and materials that Dr. Hansen accumulated in his 23 years of collaboration and friendship with Frank Adams, writing about worker cooperatives. Their cooperative work, together with the development of Employee Stock Ownership Plans promoted by the 1971 Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) legislation passed by Congress, are now important components of the worker cooperative, workplace democracy and job creation movements in North America, Europe and elsewhere.

The section also includes the documentary materials generated by Dr. Hansen during his work with the International Labor Organization (ILO) Cooperative Branch from 1990 to 2004. During that time he helped conduct workshops and wrote documents on worker cooperatives for use by the ILO at their headquarters in Geneva and at the Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok to assess the need and interest in using cooperative forms of entrepreneurship to generate jobs and employment in several of the countries in the region as well as in other parts of the world. Also included are materials about the Mondragon Cooperative, a worker-managed manufacturing and retail company based in Spain. The materials in the Helen Foster Snow Section add an important dimension to those contained in this Section.

These materials can provide researchers and scholars of worker cooperatives and the cooperative movement in general with an extensive set of published and unpublished materials about the expansion of these unique forms of economic activity in the latter part of the 20th and early 21st centuries and complement the other cooperative materials at USU.