Place based enterprise often find expanding beyond their home community problematic. Local development motivations seem to be at odds with expansion beyond the region. This is particularly highlighted in some of the rhetoric around the social economy which locates the root of and solution to regional decline within local communities. Place-based social enterprises are presented as ways for communities to amass their own resources to address their own problems. There are other models, such as fair trade coops, which - almost by definition - need to be embedded within global commodity chains. They are therefore particularly instructive for examining how place-based cooperative enterprise may internationalize. This paper will examine in what ways cooperative enterprise may root itself in place, and perhaps more importantly, the ways in which they engage in components of external value chains. Responding to depletion is therefore not a process of turning completely within the community but one in which the community organizes to find ways to engage with the external world, by creating relationships and (re)establishing economic flows within and through the community.