Category Archives for "Mutuality"

1 On the Scarcity of Mentors

In two previous Wednesday posts, I suggested the basic elements that lead to successful local activism include the systematic practice of running meetings and the principles of mutuality. In the nineteenth century, if people needed to start a co-op or similar organisation, they would ask someone with experience for support. This is a mentoring role and ideally the role of community development workers, who themselves also need mentors. So, I’m onto the third of these four topics:

I reckon it took me 20 years to learn how to be an effective development worker.  I’m sure it would have been a lot less had mentors been available.

Mentoring in Community Development

Chiron and Achilles c1922-1925 John Singer Sargent. Centaurs: the first recorded mentors according to Greek mythology.

I know many development workers share my experience; indeed many don’t stay in the work for long because they do not have the support they need.  Local authorities and churches usually appointed development workers, dropped them into a community, offered little or no support and then blamed when things go wrong.  It happened to me and I can remember many others treated in the same way.  Things always go wrong.  Development work is about knowing what to do when things go wrong.  Self-blame or blaming others is never anything like an effective solution.  Problems that should be seen as a stimulating challenge become a major trauma that can take years to process.

The support of a mentor is essential in these situations.  Someone experienced and distant from the situation can make a world of difference.  And they can support not only the inexperienced worker but also workers with many years experience.  When immersed in a situation, it is easy to lose perspective.  An experienced worker knows when they are losing perspective and so when they need support from someone with an independent view.

Where are the Mentors?

Community development has never had a career structure and so the employer often has no way of knowing how much experience and insight the person they appoint has or how to support them.  They leave the employee to find their own way.  Encounters at conferences and through local groups of workers help but offer limited support.  It’s not easy when it feels like a request for help is to admit to not being adequate for the job (it’s actually a part of doing the job) and so there is a steady attrition of workers, frustrated by the lack of support and the lack of career structure and low-income.

In England, we have seen a catastrophic decline in community development.  Local Authorities no longer appoint them and churches have moved onto other things.  This can be attributed to the lack of career structure, which means experienced workers move into other fields, leaving no-one with authority to argue the case for development work or to provide support.

And so we contemplate the period between the seventies, when the need for development workers was first identified, through to the beginning of the twenty-first century when the idea was all but abandoned.  This is the theme of my e-book, “Community Development is Dead! Long Live Community Development!”.  There’s no charge for it and you can download it at the end of this post.

How to Respond

The decline of community development is a pity but there is a wealth of experience out there that would help development workers and activists if only it were available.  So, my aim is to build an online community committed to sharing good practice and encouraging new ways of doing the work.

We need to re-learn the roles of mentors for activists and for development workers.

Use the comments to tell your story about poorly supported development work.

Why do you think community development workers never developed a career structure?

Is community development dead?  If not, who is doing it now?

If you need help finding a mentor, you could talk with me.  I offer a free consultancy session where I help you work out the support you need.

0 Inequality and the 1%

Friday is review day and this time the book is by Danny Dorling, “Inequality and the 1%”.  My aim in my reviews is to commend the resource and then to apply it in some specific way.

This rather dull cover belies the compelling content of this book.  Imagine a book about economics you can’t put down; this is it.  After each of its 5 chapters, I thought it cannot possibly get any worse: it did!  This book clearly demonstrates the wealthiest people in this country are not an asset.  Indeed they are a liability. Their wealth is a disadvantage to the poorest and all the 99%. They are disadvantaged by their own wealth, although most don’t get it.

I am not anti-wealth and I’m sure the same is true of most people on the left.  That the left opposes aspiration is a myth by politicians on the right with vested interest in inequality.

I oppose inequality because it disadvantages everyone.  The society that is so careless as to take away the welfare safety net and consign new generations to poverty is perverse.  This book demonstrates what happens when a very few people buy up the state, make it less democratic and take away the modest livelihoods of the majority.

Wealth Equals Money Circulation

One of the comments I received about my ebook (see below if you would like to read it), “Community Development is Dead!” reads as follows:

I agree with most of what you have written but profoundly disagree with this sentence. (p24) “Any increase in the flow of money in the economy will in time impact the lives of the poorest.” Money can flow at any rate, but if you have an underclass that is totally marginalised from the economy they will never benefit from it. I’m very surprised you appear to be supporting the trickle down theory of poverty alleviation!

I replied:

I may need to rewrite this paragraph to clarify what I’m saying.  It is not in support of trickle down and that’s why it might be ambiguous as the thought was far from what I had in mind.  Trickle down implies a global 1% élite who by accumulating unbelievable wealth are supposed to somehow trickle it down to the rest of us.  Indeed it doesn’t only disadvantage the most disadvantaged, it disadvantages everyone else – certainly the 99%.  That doesn’t mean all the 99% understand the implications of inequality.

In that sentence, I mean the opposite of trickle down, where the 1% contribute by reintroducing their fortunes into the economy.  This is not going to happen overnight, so when will it happen?  It will never happen if we do not have the economic structures to accommodate it.  This includes social enterprises and mutuals as well as local businesses.  What we have failed to do is to build the infrastructure that supports local businesses.  I was talking to a trader in Sheffield recently who understands this and looks out of his shop window at shops converted into houses.  He’s actively supporting traders on the street where he is based.

What Happens When Talent is Scarce?

I’m self-employed and not a social enterprise or a mutual.  Why?  Because I’m developing something at my risk.  If my business proves to be viable, that’s when I’ll look at making it a social enterprise.  My long-term aim is to support those seeking ways to build an economy that serves the interests of all.

In my review of Della Rucker’s book, I said her undercurrent about talent is worth reading.  She flags up a dilemma. Talent disadvantages many people because they don’t have the talent they need to take part in the local economy.  My plans will not directly benefit the disadvantaged.  So, provision must be made and integrated into plans to rebuild the economy.  The state has no problem funding wealthy corporations who somehow wriggle out of paying taxes.  At the same time it labels those who need benefits as scroungers and skivers.

Citizens’ Income

The approach I would use is the Green Party’s Citizens’ Income because it guarantees everyone has a basic income, introduces more money circulating in the economy and does not penalise small businesses as a living wage would.  It is funded by a tax on everyone earning above the basic Citizens’ Income. The rate increases, so high earners make a higher contribution.

I do not accept the label of left, if by that people mean Stalinist.  We should never forget that despite the rhetoric, Soviet Russia, was unequal.  The élite lived in luxury whilst millions starved in the Gulags.

There is no neat solution to poverty but we can choose to support economic policies that are more or less fair.  Dorling provides a valuable insight into why our economy is progressively becoming less fair and it our task to find alternative approaches that work better.  It won’t happen overnight and that is not complacency, it is a realistic appraisal of the economic system we live in and massive changes we will need to turn it around.  We gain nothing by not naming those who are responsible for keeping it as it is.

2 Beatrice Potter, Development Worker?

Last time, I described how meetings once empowered participants, generating massive change in the UK. What we experience today as a tedious chore was once key to social change. What has gone wrong? To understand this we need to look at the second of four topics, key to understanding community development:

This is the story of my hero, perhaps an early development worker – EV Neale, Edward Vansittart Neale.   He was a barrister during his working life and a member of the Christian Socialist Movement during its first incarnation in the middle of the nineteenth century.   He drew up the first Industrial and Provident legislation, which to this day governs co-operatives and Working Mens’ Clubs in the UK.

Upon his retirement at the age of 65, he was appointed President of the Co-operative Union and remained so until the end of his life, 18 years later.  He grew a bushy white beard and became what was known as a GOM, a Grand Old Man.

Every year at their AGM, he gave an inspirational speech about the potential of the co-operative movement.  He visited many European worker co-ops and they convinced him they were the way forward for working people.  Every year he received a standing ovation for his inspirational speech.

Every year his great rival JTW Mitchell – President of the Co-operative Wholesale Society – reported on the growth of the wholesale co-op sector.  Growth was steady but hardly inspirational.  But people went home and carried on building retail co-ops, in practice ignoring Neale’s speeches.

Beatrice Potter (later Webb)

Neale’s nemesis was a young woman called Beatrice Potter.  She was a reporter and listened to his speeches.  She did her own research and concluded worker co-ops were a non-starter.  Look, she said, the interests of workers and consumers are opposed.  Workers want to drive prices up and consumers want to cut them.  The retail co-ops were very good at the latter which meant that income from wages tended to be reduced.

She argued Trade Unions were better placed to represent the interests of workers and so the new Labour Party (we’re in the early years of the twentieth century now) should be allied with the Unions and not the Co-ops.

For those of you hoping for Peter Rabbit or Mrs Tiggywinkle, I’m afraid this Beatrice Potter is the one who married Sydney Webb and is better known as the redoubtable (always wanted to use that word) Beatrice Webb.  Together they founded the Labour Party.

So, Neale’s ideas were side-lined and in time we lost track of mutuality as a value underlying our economy.  In the 1980s, carpetbaggers led a campaign to demutualise many of our building societies and other financial institutions.  So, now in England they are mostly forgotten and frequently not understood.

Potter’s approach may have been the right one for its time. At the time, large employers employed most workers and so it made sense to organise the workforce. The trade union spirit was essentially mutual, although perhaps more confrontational than the retail co-ops. The challenge for any community development worker or movement is to ask how we can find our way back to co-operative principles.

How did working people support development of mutuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth century?

1 Wise Economy

Last Friday I started to review Della Rucker’s book, The Local Economy Revolution.  Today I shall return to the book, picking up on the rather negative implications of her three undercurrents and show how Rucker introduces a more positive note.

If you would like to read the book and you are UK-based, click on the image to the left to go to the UK Amazon site. If you’re in the US, you can get access to it through The Local Economy Revolution website. If you’re anywhere else you’ll need to work it out for yourself!  The website is mainly a blog and it provides case studies supporting the book, allowing the ebook to be kept up-to-date without constant updates. The blog is up-to-date and new posts appear a few times a month.

Here is a passage I found towards the end of the book:

“The work of setting up art shows or fighting for better transportation systems, or cleaning up neighborhoods, or opening businesses, matters.  It matters furiously.  It matters a hell of a lot.  It matters because it shows us why these places are loved.  And it shows us that somebody loves them, deeply loves them.  Despite everything.”

This is perhaps one of the most convincing reasons for community activism.  In this blog I occasionally touch on spiritual issues.  Sometimes it’s not appreciated spirituality relates to the material world.  It is grounded in the streets we walk along, the particularities of the place where we live.  Being fully alive connects us to the places we inhabit.  To be a spiritual person is to commit to a place, to live there and become a part of it.  Then our activism becomes an act of love for our place and it is only when we love it that we can effect its transformation.

This is why big schemes don’t work.  When the council spends a fortune to draw a big employer to a city, what happens?  First, the model of the big anchor employer, providing jobs for the community died in the 1980s.  Second, it is usually short-term profit that draws employers  to a new place  and not commitment to the place.  Third, such investment endangers communities because when they withdraw, it knocks  them back.

A local business on the other hand, built slowly and grounded in its place will if it’s successful be committed to stay there.  We need to learn how to build economies from dozens of these businesses, investing in the infrastructure that supports them.

Thus Rucker introduces four incentives arguing (1) the focus must be on supporting those things that enable local businesses to grow, (2) identifying what makes this neighbourhood, city or region unique, (3) understand what small businesses can or can’t do and then (4) looking at how to use grants properly.  These are my glosses on her long and stimulating arguments, so if you are interested please read the book!

We need it seems three secret weapons to enable us to do all of this: (1) research and understand our communities and how they work, (2) pool our knowledge and understanding with others and (3) be courageous in our initiatives.

All of this contributes to what Rucker calls Wise Economy and her website offers resources for those who share her vision of a difficult but possible future for our most challenged neighbourhoods.

Last time I showed how Rucker’s undercurrents applied to Burngreave New Deal for Communities.  I wonder what would have happened had the £50 million been spent according to her incentives.  I was actually asked this question a couple of weeks ago, “What would you have spent the £50 million on?”  I replied I would have spent it across the city supporting local businesses.

On reflection I think it would still be the best approach.  The big drawback would have been the loss of the support for children and young people in Burngreave, which was New Deal’s greatest contribution.  However, this is a thought experiment and what has been done cannot be undone.

Here are reasons support of my approach:

These are the lessons I have so far taken from Rucker’s book.  Some may be tangential to her intentions and there will be some I have missed.  I will be returning to her book for inspiration in the future.

1 A Case for Public Toilets

Public urinal (Limbourg, Belgium) – similar to Clochemerle

Older readers may remember the 1972 television series, “Clochemerle”, written by Galton and Simpson of “Steptoe and Son” fame.  The story is about a small town in 1925 France, where the socialist mayor (Cyril Cusack) tries to build a urinal in the town square.  Wendy Hiller plays a prim spinster who campaigns against it on the grounds of public decency.  Over several weeks the catastrophic consequences play out.

As far as I’m aware Clochemerle is the only television series ever centred on a public toilet.  It is, of course, a comedy and perhaps this is no surprise because public toilets are usually considered comic!

What Happened to Public  Conveniences?

If you go back a few decades the “public convenience” was a common site on street corners.  Local authorities maintained most of them and so today they are closed, demolished or adapted to other uses.  This is a pity because they have an economic purpose and are essential for public health.

Imagine you are a parent with a small child.  You have 30 – 60 minutes from leaving home before the child needs to go.  In this time you need to get to the shops, buy what you need and return home.  With the best will in the world, you will have no time to shop around and find the best bargains.  To get the best deal, the chances are you buy unhealthy processed foods.  Removal of public toilets means for many there is less time for socialising, you are under constant pressure to get home.

Much the same applies to the elderly as bladders seem to become less capacious with age.  This is no joke!

Of course, the old style public toilets had drawbacks.  The continental Clochemerle variety was sexist, designed for men between pubs or pub and home.  The UK variety usually catered for most sexes but the old style were usually not particularly clean, often neglected and too often attracted unsavoury characters.  I remember as a child in the 50s and 60s, warnings not to use them because of the nasty men who inhabited them.

Toilets Today

The solution these days is to open toilets to the public inside other buildings, frequently department stores and supermarkets.  This way the store can maintain standards of cleanliness and safety.  You may have noticed department stores always house them a few stories up and at the back of the store.  This is deliberate as it increases footfall.  After the shops close pubs provide the last resort for the desperate.

Community or business centres are other options.  Such a centre might place them within a café.  If so, they should be clearly labelled as open to the public with no obligation to buy.  If you aim to create an unstructured meeting space, your toilets are crucial to introducing new people to your centre.  Strategically placed notice boards may be all you need to increase participation.

We need to see toilet facilities as a valued public service, not a music hall joke.  Their provision benefits not only those who use them (that’s everyone) but also local traders.

What are the benefits of clean, safe toilet facilities?  Isn’t it time national and local government took this seriously?

2 Meetings, Meetings, Meetings

Last time I introduced four key topics to illustrate the differences between activism and development work.

Meetings may seem an odd place to start.  But consider the standard meeting.  You know the drill –

I’ve sat through enough meetings to know it’s easy to make heavy weather of them.  Dull meetings with lots of procedures, mastered by a few activists, are not only boring but also dis-empowering.  Their purpose is to exercise power and control.

The Meeting as a Powerhouse

Where did this style of meeting come from?  I’m no historian and I would be delighted if anyone can prove me wrong but I think it was the eighteenth century evangelical revival!

Portrait of John Wesley by Frank O Salisbury

John Wesley organised the new industrial poor.  I don’t know where he got the model from but it seems this type of meeting was not generally known before him.

He passed his approach to the Methodist societies and their members passed them onto other organisations.  During the nineteenth century almost everyone used this approach to meetings, particularly among the working classes.  All sorts of local economic initiatives developed that helped people organise and make the most of their incomes, for example worker and retail co-ops, insurance companies, building societies, friendly societies, penny banks, sick and dividing clubs, libraries, educational institutions …  None of these would have been possible without Wesley’s approach to meetings.

Trade Unions organised in chapels, beginning meetings with a hymn and a prayer and were one type of organisation representing working class interests.  Others included non-conformist chapels, temperance halls and pubs.

What Went Wrong?

Meetings we experience today as dull were a powerhouse of innovation 100 – 200 years ago.

Why are meetings so often experienced as dis-empowering today?  With the welfare state (arguably the greatest achievement of this movement) and mass media, perhaps there was a decline in opportunity and purpose for the autodidact, the self-taught man or woman.

Maybe the rise of community development in the nineteen seventies, reflected this decline in innovative change from the working classes.  Perhaps we need to understand this change.

The point is meetings don’t have to be this way.  It is the role of the development worker to help activists organise participative and enjoyable meetings.  The role of the activist is to organise meetings, introduce topics, help people participate and follow-up once the meeting is complete.  The developmental role is watching how the meeting is organised and helping the activists improve their performance.

Throughout the nineteenth century, working people built the institutions we take for granted today.  I’ll tell you about one of the great debates of the time in my next post: Beatrice Potter, Development Worker?

One comment I’ve received refers to the “curse of structureless meetings”. Would you find a review of the purpose of the elements of a typical meeting helpful?

Do you think it is true there were no nineteenth century development workers because the people were able to organise themselves?  Or if there were development workers, where do we look for them?

2 The Local Economy Revolution

This is the first in a series of reviews of resources about the local economy.  It reviews the ebook, “The Local Economy Revolution” by Della Rucker.  If you’re interested and in the UK, click on the image to go to the UK Amazon site.  In the US, you can get access to it through The Local Economy Revolution website.  Anywhere else and you’ll need to work it out for yourself!

The website is mainly a blog and it provides case studies supporting the book, allowing the ebook to be kept up-to-date without constant updates.  The blog is up-to-date and new posts appear a few times a month.

I’ve started with this book and website because Della Rucker is one of the few people I’ve found who is taking on the local economy.  Someone has suggested the term “local economy” is vague and so it is good to find an activist in a different context, using it.  Further, Rucker has masses of experience and so the book substantially grounds the topic.

Three Undercurrents

Rucker begins by identifying three undercurrents (actually there are four but I’m ignoring the fourth for now) by which she means issues commonly ignored by practitioners in urban regeneration.  So, I’m going to apply them to my experience with Burngreave New Deal for Communities in Sheffield, UK.  If you follow that link you’ll find a summary of my posts on the topic.

Economic Systems and Natural Ecosystems

I was really pleased to see Rucker compare economic systems to natural ecosystems.  This is something I’ve thought for a long time but never written about.  We underestimate natural systems’ complexity at our peril; it is ecosystems that evolve, not individual species.  Evolution is not possible for individual species because it needs the challenge of interaction between species.  Remove one seemingly unassuming species and the system might collapse.

Rucker argues economic systems are similar.  We tend to think of local economies as shops and, if we think a little more deeply, other businesses with maybe a few hidden self-employed.  However, I have argued local markets are more than economic transactions.  The local park, for example, may draw people into a neighbourhood.  So, we need to understand how everything in a neighbourhood or city interacts to support or impede the economy.

Burngreave New Deal recognised this to some extent, involving a range of partners although, like most community projects in the UK, it marginalised the private sector.  To arbitrarily select a neighbourhood of a few thousand houses as an economic unit, perhaps failed to take seriously Sheffield’s complexity.  To spend £50 million pounds in that area did not recognise Burngreave’s connections to the rest of the city.

Economic Systems are Unpredictable

Which brings me to Rucker’s second undercurrent.  Economic systems behave in unpredictable ways.  We fool ourselves if we believe any intervention will have predictable results.  Things are perverse.  They do not behave the way experts say they should.

This explains how Burngreave New Deal could at the same time be the third best New Deal in the country and a total failure. I’ll look at its successes under ‘3’ but it feels like a failure today because when you compare Burngreave with other similar Sheffield neighbourhoods, it is the only one with no forum, no trust, no physical assets and no partnership.  New Deal tore out the infrastructure that made Burngreave a community.

This was not an intended result, its byline was “Legacy not History” – so what went wrong?  Perhaps conflict between the forum and New Deal, the recession, a change in council leadership to a party with its power based in affluent parts of the city, poor decisions about community assets all contributed.  Who would predict that it might be an advantage to live in a neighbourhood that has not had £50 million invested over 10 years?

Talent

Burngreave New Deal did indeed invest in people and its educational results for example were impressive.  What we can’t know is the long-term impact of those results because there is to be no long-term evaluation.  The people who benefited may go on to brilliant careers and make a stupendous contribute for the good of humanity.  But how many will live in Burngreave?  In Sheffield?  And what of those who have not made it?  What has happened to them?

Rucker’s third undercurrent is talent and she makes the point that although many recognise why talent is important, for example, when you set up a businesses, there will always be people in a neighbourhood who do not contribute talent.  One of our greatest challenges is to support the disadvantaged whilst at the same time encouraging those who can contribute talent to step forward.

To a significant degree New Deal recognised this challenge, focusing resources on education and support for young people.  We’ll never know whether that investment was worth it or indeed whether its legacy is better services supporting children and young people today.

Implications and Secret Weapons

All three undercurrents are powerful ideas and certainly the New Deal programme recognised the first and third.  Some of us were aware of the second and watched as our worst fears materialised.  Rucker goes on to name four implications and three secret weapons for the local economy activist.  I’ll review these next time as this post is getting to be rather long.

Do you recognise these undercurrents in your own community?  Are there others you would add?

1 Do we need a campaign for real community development?

Do you know why our neighbourhoods are poorly organised, how they can do better and how to promote real community development online?

You can read about how community development has lost its way in my free ebook, “Community Development is Dead!”.  Find out how to sign up for it at the end of this post. If you are in the UK, you’re sure to disagree about some things I write about.  So, write and tell me what you think! You can comment on the ebook by visiting the post I’ve provided for that purpose.  If you’re not based in the UK, please comment about how your country compares with community development in the UK.

The Central Role of Activist

This sequence of posts, complements the ebook.  I wrote it as an email sequence about a year ago.  My aim at the time was to share some practicalities.  What is real community development; the best way to support community activists?

Not everyone who works in the community is a community development worker.  There are other equally valuable roles; many agencies provide local workers in the community.  So, we need to be clear about what community development is and how it supports the other roles.

In the ebook I explain how we confuse the roles of activist and development worker at our peril! Activists need support from development workers and so confusing the two roles tends to devalue the work of activists. Community activists actually do the work and need the support of development workers.

So, I’ll start by exploring four topics, key to understanding community development and how it differs from the role of activists:

These might not look exciting but together they define some of the problems community development has encountered in the UK.  So next week it’s “Meetings, Meetings, Meetings” – won’t you be glad when they’re over?

0 My Vision for the Local Economy

Over the autumn I’ve blogged about the local economy, supported by posts on Tuesdays and Wednesdays comparing the private and third sectors and considering organisational structures.  These are links to the first post in each sequence and I will prepare cornerstone pages soon.  So here is my vision for the local economy from August 2014.

My Vision from August 2014

My vision is of bringing the marketplace back to the centre of our lives. I don’t mean the marketplace politicians drone on about. They mean the market in financial assets, mediated by banks and institutions in the City of London and other global centres.

I mean the centre of community life, where people go to trade, yes indeed. But that is not the main reason they go there – the market is where you visit the library, go for a swim, enjoy a concert (on street or in a concert hall), join in public worship, meet friends and build relationships with acquaintances. Giant corporations, who dominate the shopping streets and malls, have takenthis from us in recent decades.

It has been eroded by the activities of large corporations, and this corporatism is not the same as capitalism. It is the enemy of small businesses, sucking finance from local economies.

Online Implications

The Internet is also dominated by corporations. But if we plan to reclaim our neighbourhoods as marketplaces we must also claim the Internet for the same cause. It can support local economies. It can encourage collaboration between small businesses in their neighbourhoods. We need to learn how to use it to help rebuild local economies wrecked by the plundering corporations. This is what this site is about.

It is about how we can use our online presence to support local economies. It is about creating a positive interface between small businesses and community, voluntary and faith groups.

This will need a great deal of collaboration between many people if it is to become a reality. Politically the aftermath of the Scottish referendum in the UK may be an opportunity to devolve power from the London-based establishment to the regions. I will write about this and other developments that have a bearing on local economies.

But my contribution is to support small businesses and voluntary groups who want to work together online to support their local marketplace.

What do you think?

0 Effective Local Economy

I have discussed a new vision for a national localised economy. It would run alongside the neo-liberal economy. It needs to be rebuilt following the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s.  Today I shall describe three qualities I see in the retail co-operative movement that I believe led to its successes.  These are just as applicable to localised economies today as they were in nineteenth century.

Democracy

The retail co-operative movement, in common with all types of co-operation, thrives when its members share decision making. The UK retail co-operatives have struggled with this concept in recent years because they have become  large remote institutions.

The early co-ops were successful because their members were enthusiastic and could see the impact of their decisions first hand. They learned from their own and others successes and failures.

Many small retail co-operatives created the massive institutions we see today, by working together to create networks for wholesale (for example) to serve their interests.  They were pioneers and most of the large retail empires we see today are copying the old co-operatives.  Contrary to political rhetoric, it is democratic institutions that find creative approaches and not top-down experts.

Education

It wasn’t the dividend that kept them going, it was their vision. The first retail co-op at Toad Lane in Rochdale had a library and meeting room above the shop from day one. Education of the membership was central to what they were doing. They learned not only the practicalities of setting up and running a co-op but also how mutual principles can transform society for the better.

Perhaps these days people are less likely to voluntarily go to regular meetings for education but maybe online education can to some degree replace those meetings.

Quality

The Rochdale Pioneers founded retail co-ops to tackle food adulteration. They were able to guarantee the quality of their products to their members. Where people know one another and work together they are in a better place to establish their quality standards.

The retail co-operative movement was the first movement of active consumers. They were not just consumers but actually members, a part of the movement. For all the talk of the consumer economy, we have lost sight of what it means to be an active participant in the economy.

The local economy is an opportunity for everyone to take responsibility for the environment and the shape of society and not to leave it in the hands of government or the corporations.