 Hello everyone and welcome to co-ops empowering arts and culture. It's a webinar brought to you by the business support for co-ops program, and the program is delivered by co-operatives UK in partnership with co-operative bank. It offers tailored support to start-up and existing co-ops, and it's one of a series of webinars to introduce people to co-ops and signpost the support that they can get to start a co-op. And certainly arts and culture is an area that's absolutely prime for more co-ops. So what we're going to cover in today's seminar, when I can move the slide along, here we go. So what we're going to cover is what is a co-operative and introduction, how co-ops can empower people and organizations in the arts and cultural sectors. With examples from myself, Terry Tilsley, I'm a music and tech consultant, creative technologies producer and musician, and we've got Matthew Otridge, founder of Music Venue The Exchange in Bristol and ownership coordinator for Music Venue Trust. And Pat O'Shea, who's a member of the Ultimate Picture Palace, a community owned cinema in Oxford. And we'll talk about the support available from Cooperatives UK's business support for co-ops program to help you start a co-op. There will also be a question and answer session to close, so there's going to be plenty of time for that. Okay, so what is a co-operative? Well, a co-operative is a business or an organization that's owned and controlled by its members to meet their shared needs. They're not owned by shareholders who may not even be in the same country, who hold the power and take profits out of the business with little or no involvement in actually running the business. And what it means is that people who are closest to the business are the ones to benefit from the business's success, the co-op's success. And those members can be customers, employees, residents, suppliers, audiences, listeners. There's lots of different kinds of customers in the culture sector. It also means that co-ops don't just focus on making a profit, they focus on how they make it. And that's something that's really important, the kind of values and the ethics, if you like. What they do with a profit and how they bring value to their members and their community. And co-operatives can be pubs, energy suppliers, music venues, taxi firms, bookshops, farmers, sports clubs, and I even have a new co-op that's a promoter co-op in Birmingham. So there's lots of different varieties. In the UK, there are 7000 co-operatives, that's a part of more than 3 million co-operatives globally. And in the UK, co-ops contribute over 40 billion to the UK economy. So they're really, really important to the economy. And something that's been very interesting through recent research and obviously all the very difficult pandemic times is proof that co-ops are resilient. So there were five times less likely to close down in 2021 than UK businesses generally. So that's a really important thing. And co-operatives are proven vehicles for collective action, enabling people to achieve more together than they can on their own. And I think we'll be hearing about that from our guests and from some examples I'll be telling you about in a minute. Now the key thing about co-ops is members are the foundation of every co-op, it's why they exist. They can be customers, employees, residents, suppliers, and they all have a say in how the co-op is run. And members put something in and get something out and that can vary. So each member contributes but receive something in return. They could contribute time working for the co-op, investing in the co-op, shopping or trading with the co-op. And any surplus made after all the costs are covered can be shared between the members. It's sometimes known as the dividend or it can be reinvested back into the co-op. Members have an equal say. It's really important that it's very kind of demographic kind of thing a co-op. So how can co-ops empower arts and culture? Well, I'm sure we all know about squeezed funding, digitalization, and there are many creatives in unstable freelance work. So sustaining careers, spaces, venues, opportunities and morale can be a real challenge in the arts and cultural industries. And that's where co-ops can help. When people come together to form co-ops, they can empower creativity, create work opportunities, preserve vital spaces for the communities, provide support that empowers individuals to thrive within their chosen field of work. I'm going to give you some examples of co-ops in areas you might not have thought of before, before we come to our guests. So first of all, there's a co-op difficulty felt now. And it's a really interesting arts co-op. So it's a northeast based co-op of comedians who formed to give local stand-ups more work. So they wanted to create the right kind of gig economy in the area. And in 2022, they generated £60,000 worth of paid work for comedians. They gave work to 70 acts in 18 venues and gave eight comics their first paid gig. So bringing on new generations of comics and includes 57 comedian members with benefits. They also have headshots as part of membership, free comedy writing workshops, new acts nights to bring on people as comedians and free use of podcasting facilities, which I mean a different cultural area, but that sounds like a brilliant package to me. And then let's take a quick look at crescent management. Now it's an actors co-op and there are many actors co-ops throughout the UK and the actors agencies for their members. They submit them for roles and negotiating fees and contracts. And the actors usually commit to a set amount of days each month working at the agency and acting as the agent for their colleagues, which seems like a good idea. It's so hard to represent yourself. I think so to have someone acting as your agent is fantastic. And so their benefits membership full transparency and decision making in the process of submitting for acting roles, which actors don't have with traditional agents in a co-op they're much more in control of how they're represented. And again, we'll be hearing more about transparency during the webinar. Actor members work as agents for each other, which develops their connections in the industry and gives them greater insight into how it works. So network buildings comes with being a member and connection and support from other actors within the agency in what is a highly competitive business. And I can imagine sometimes it's quite an isolated business as well. So to have that extra support must be very valuable. So those are a couple of examples. But what I'm going to do now is hand over to Pat from the ultimate picture palace. There we go. So this is the story of the ultimate picture palace, a cinema in Oxford, which opened in 1911, one of the first cinemas in the country. It's had a bit of a checkered history over the over 100 years 100 over 111 years that it's been in existence. And it's only very recently been become a community owned cinema just in just two months ago, having been a privately owned business so it's an example of a cultural venue that's moved from being privately owned by one individual to being owned by the community and I'm going to try and tell that story. It's the only independent cinema in Oxford. It's what's called a second run cinema which means it shows films two or three weeks after they've been released into mainstream cinema so people can come and see them. If they miss them, first time round or, you know, because they want to patronize their local independent cinema. I have to move on the slides. Here we go. That's what it looked like at one point earlier in its futures probably I should think that's probably the 20s or 30s wouldn't you looking at those hats. So I was just saying a little bit about the context of the UPP. So in the Cowley Road, very vibrant very lively part of Oxford, very diverse. It's where many of our global minority communities live and the street is lined with food stores from representing cultures all around the world. I mean it has got a test goes on the boots but it's also got a couple of sex shops, lots of bars and restaurants cafes, and in the bottom right there you can see the annual Cowley Road Carnival underway great events so it's a really vibrant bit of the city. And so what happened, sorry. So what happened was that the cinema had gone through as I said checkered history in 2011 it was bought by a woman called Becky Hogg Smith who ran it as a, she was a passionate about the cinema, was able to restore it get it going run it as a really thriving, lively cinema throughout that decade but sadly very died died before her time in 2018. And in her will, she expressed a wish that the cinema should become a community asset, but without any detail about how that was actually going to happen. So, the executors of her will got together a group of people of which I was one volunteers to try and work out how this could happen and to, and to try and make it happen. There were various options as a group, we decided we, we didn't want to be a charity because we wanted to continue to run it as a business. We wanted it to be a cooperative for all the reasons that Terry has already explained to, to sell shares into the community. So we decided we looked at there's a couple of options there was one, there's one called a community interest. Anyway, we decided on becoming a community benefits society that was the model we chose. And it's, it was ultimately the way of saving the venue. So we became a community benefits society, and we had to help in in this process it was an informal process. We had help from the Plunkett Foundation, who helped us to set up our model rules in keeping with their advice, and also lots of help from cooperative futures. What we wanted to do was to promote those cooperative values and community values and to serve our diverse community even better by broadening the audience base broadening the kind of program that we were going to offer. So we had some help from the cooperative power to change community shares booster, who we had to make applications we got 10,000 pounds from them. We also got 10, 15,000 pounds rather from social investment business, the Reach Fund. So we had 25,000 pounds fairly early on to help with the costs of getting the share off of going doing the work, paying for the survey of the building, the dilapidation survey, the valuations, the legal work and all of that kind of thing. We also, incidentally, have a former lawyer on our committee who proved to be absolutely invaluable. He was a human rights lawyer but nevertheless he was sufficiently obey with the legal framework to really help us. So that 25,000 pounds that we got at the beginning was really really helpful. And all the way through this process of work of putting our share offer together, we were guided by, we were aiming at two things, we wanted to achieve two things to give ourselves the confidence that we were doing it well, that we were doing it with high quality. And one of them was that we were working towards the cooperatives, community shares standard mark where the criteria are really clear and detailed as to what your share offer should look like. It set standards for high quality share offer documents which are clear, honest and transparent and ensure that investors have all the facts they need to make an informed decision and that these facts are supported by annual accounts and or a business plan. So we were aiming to get that that helped us make sure that all our work was of that was going to meet that standard. There was some money in it as well but that wasn't the only motivation. Another thing we were aiming for was to get what we became we came familiarly to know as sitter or social investment tax relief and again if we met certain criteria through HMRC, all of our investors could get 30% tax relief on their investment so those were sort of guiding aims that we were going to work towards. So there was a lot of work I don't want to underestimate the amount of work that went into creating the business plan and the share offer document. These were the two key documents that we needed to produce in order to launch our share offer. We decided to use FX platform to manage our share offer. It's an ethical investment program and it happens to be based just across the road from the cinema, although it does work nationally but they were there they were very very helpful and supportive with giving us guidance and hosting the share offer when we finally came to launch it. So we worked with that startup money and the advice to work out what a business plan would look like. There was a lot of detailed financial work in there. Financial analysis of the trading situation of the cinema in previous years and also projections as to how the business might run if and when it was successful in becoming a community, community owned business. And also we had to produce a share offer document, which was going to a more accessible document for people deciding whether or not to invest. As you can see from the cover there of our share offer document, the target was 312,000 pounds plus. That was based on the value of the business, not the building, it's a listed building, which the cinema leases from the free holders, and we had a minimum amount that we would raise which would enable us to buy the business, but not much more. Our target amount and a maximum amount which would allow us to buy the business and do some improvements, which I'll say something about in a moment. So we also got preferred bidder status, which meant that the executors of Becky Hall Smith will would would give us first option to buy if we could raise this money. And this was a lot of work, a lot of detailed work from a group of volunteers on this committee. I'll just say at this point I got into this because I'm very keen on film I just finished a master's in film studies and the person who put the group together was a friend and knew that all of this work was nothing to do with film at all. It was all to do with communications with the financial conduct authority, model rule business plan and so on. Okay, so we became after about two years of this preparation we were ready to launch. And that was in the spring of 2020. And then of course, two major hurdles hit us the first was COVID, which hopefully won't happen again but close the cinema down for months, and then had periods of closure and opening and mainly partial opening. And of course this through all our financial projections into into chaos, and we had to wait until the cinema could fully reopen and that we could demonstrate that financially it was secure again, before we could get ready to launch again. So our second move towards launch, we then hit another problem, which again was probably a one off for us, but it was to do with the lease. Because, unbeknownst to us, we will, the lease was of the UPP limited the Senate the privately owned cinema was just coming up for renewal, we've been involved in negotiating a new lease with the free holders which we were about to sign. We handed over to the community cinema, when we, even when we took over the cinema, but unbeknownst to us the free hold was sold to another free holder who was one of the Oxford colleges, and their approach to the lease was very different so it took months and months of negotiation to try and get them to offer a lease which would be, which we could confidently offered to potential community shareholders that was long enough, and secure enough to do that so that was a big problem, but we did manage to get over those hurdles. And we were finally ready to launch our share offer in April 2022. We decided to keep the shares very low one pound per share, but with a minimum of 50 pounds for all investors, or 30 pounds if you were under 30, or lived in one of the adjacent post codes. So highly democratic structure as Terry has already said, so one member, one vote, so whether you bought 30 pounds worth of shares, or 20,000 pounds worth of shares and that was our maximum so we, we didn't want it to be dominated by big, big contributions. You have one vote as a member of the society that's member with a capital M. So we then had a huge launch lots of excitement publicity we employed somebody for a few days over a period of months to, to set this up for us, local radio local television, national press, and, and quite a few stars as well so we had Sam Mendez who's local to us and was interested Pippa Harris of BAFTA Hugh Bonneville, Peter Bradshaw came down and introduced a film and Richard Curtis, director of love actually and there's other films did a little video from his home, supporting us in which he talked about the crucial influence that small independent cinemas have in providing platforms for independent film. So we finally launched in April 22 as I said, and we made the maximum of our target few days before the share offer was due to close. So we had to, we closed the share offer we've made our maximum, and we had over 1300 investors from the, from the local community. And as I said reach the target before the closing date so we now have over 1300 members of the Community Benefits Society, which is the UPP, the ultimate picture palace community cinema, which has been up and running as that for two months. So I can't really say much about what's how how it's doing, although I'll say a little bit more at the end. So because we raised our maximum target, it meant that we could make some improvements to to improve access in particular. There is no accessible loo on site, we have to use one in another institution across the road so we'll be able to do that. We are able to provide a safe access to the protection room at the moment it's a very rickety ladder. We will improve the ticket office, the bar area in the website invest in some technology, and you can see that the seats are not very well rate so we're going to improve that so that if you sit behind a very tall person, you'll still be able to see the film. So that's our little bar that's inside the cinema. So I like most of our members we have have now stepped down from the committee, because as you can see it's been four years of quite extensive work to get to where we are now. We had our first annual members meeting in November, and two or three members have continued on to the committee to provide some continuity but we put quite a lot of care into encouraging people to stand for election to the committee we had quite a lot of candidates, we got a new committee with new energy, new ideas, and quite a good range of skills because we knew we needed legal expertise, financial expertise, probably marketing, probably HR expertise in the committee so we've got we think we've got that range. So part of the, the transfer was to. With you, we took it transfer of public undertakings, all the employees of their, their employment has continued. We've upgraded the director who runs the place from day to day, and the program manager. Job descriptions have been enhanced their salaries improved so we further professionalize them. And so jobs have been saved upgraded, and the cinema is thriving so I've stepped down from the committee, as I say, but I am now a volunteer. Staff that little bar on a Thursday afternoon I'm going down after this to run the bar mate tea serve homemade cakes, pour wine, and so on, we have had mulled wine up until just recently. And then to watch the film tar with the wonderful Kate Blarchett as part of my volunteer work there. So, so I'm still involved. And the cinema is launched as a community asset. So I'm going to stop there and I can take some questions later. So, just to recap very briefly and what I was saying earlier. So when properties UK were speaking to us about being participants and doing presentation they were quite keen to hear about our journeys towards coctives, how are we going to them in the first place. So I'll tell you briefly about mine and then talk to you a bit more about resonate, which is an ethical music streaming cooperative. So I've got quite a few different hats and music. I'm a musician, a producer, I play grassroots venues. I also produce events as well like music tech fest now known as mtf labs. I'm speaking, including a corporate is Congress, and that's mentoring. I started a music website to try and give female artists more exposure, particularly around their craft and the producing side of it. There's quite a 360 view of the music industry and have recognized like most people in it that there's a lot that needs to change about the industry. I'm also a member of a group called 2% Rising, which is a group for women and non binary producers and recording engineers. I'm very aware that historically, the music industry has been very exploitative, and it would be a very good thing if we can create new structures to create a fairer ecosystem. So while I was at music tech fest in Berlin, I met some of the team behind resonate, and I swiftly joined as an artist, and it's a cooperative music streaming platform and run by members. I joined in 2016 so quite early days, and they we had a very small crowd funder around that time to get some funds together to turn a proof of concept if you like into something more proper. Now resonate is quite a different thing from some more local co-ops. It's a platform cooperative. And what that means is it's online. So it's like other software platforms that you might be using, except it's streaming. So it's international. It has music on it from almost every country in the world, which is very exciting. And it's a really big project, technically, cooperatively, ethically, there's a lot going on at resonate. So, after some time I was invited to stand for the board, and I was elected a board member, and eventually chair of the cooperative so I was chair for a couple of years. And I benefited hugely from co-ops UK directors training. It was great to see how other copies was set up and get a sense of, well, more than a sense, training in best practice in working at a cooperative. And then with board renewal and also wanting to focus on my upcoming album. I step back and now I'm an artist member but not involved in the core team. So what drew me to resonate was, I found it really inspiring. And I really liked the values and what they were setting out to try and do, which was to create a fairer ecosystem for artists, to go around streaming artists are very exploited to get very little money, even artists millions of streams. You know, get very little in return, and that's really come to the fore during the pandemic when other sources of income for artists, such as playing shows with much more cut off than usual. So the technical term for how resonates set up is a multi stakeholder cooperative. So in our case that means the stakeholders, the groups that share and organize share in the cop and organize it artists, listeners and workers, and the artists actually get the biggest share. And workers includes both paid workers, and also volunteers, there's a sort of mechanism which I'll explain a little bit later about that. So, yes, so just to pick up on something I mentioned earlier, the creative industries have a very bad record for exploiting people and I think in music, perhaps more than many others. And so to be part of something that's trying to change things is a very exciting thing to do. And one of the things about co-ops is you can hardwire your values into how you work, and not just around payment, but around all sorts of other things. Just this week, there's an artist called Mary, and she gave an interview to attack magazine. They interviewed a group of artists who had taken their music off Spotify, and they came back to them this week, one year on to see how they were doing. And Mary's got her music on a few different platforms, but had something really nice to say about resonate. And she said they seem to be going from strength to strength, and building their community. Obviously, that's a key thing from cooperatives, the community. So with resonate being a platform cooperative, the community is online, there's a community forum, and people can take part in discussions, make suggestions, vote on certain things. So that will happen as part of the forum. When it comes to money, and resonate is completely transparent about the finances, about pricing, about what artists get. And that's something that you don't really see anywhere else. In fact, a leading streaming platform, I won't name. Basically, you stream, the money goes into huge pots, and then they kind of divide it up behind closed doors and you don't know that the money that you've put in is necessarily going to pay the artist to that you listen to. So I'll elaborate on that in a little minute, but so pricing so resonate. It's you join as a member. There's a small membership fee. It's not a subscription, you buy credits, and it's like pay as you go. And one of the other things that's hardwired into the way resonate works is a commitment to privacy, and not selling your data, because a lot of commercial platforms they do sell your data on and that's why you get targeted ads and you feel like they're listening in on you and that kind of thing. So, many different kinds of values are hired, hardwired in there. And yes, it's pay as you play no monthly subscription, and they've even invented a whole new way of paying the artists, which is called stream to own. So it's kind of form as a form of micropayments really, and if you can see just at the top on the right so there's a track that's uploaded called reclaim these streets by loud women, which is an amazing it's like a sort of feminist punk bandaid is a track to raise money for and violence against women. So, when I'm actually on it that's why I got even got a bit distracted for a minute, remembering that epic moment. So you can see a dot in the right hand corner. And when you play a track. And that signifies that your payment has been registered. And then after you've played track nine times, you've paid the equivalent of a download, so that in the future you can actually download and own that track, but it's wonderfully transparent so you as a listener can see, oh yes, you know my play has actually registered for this artist. And when it comes to payouts. It's still early days and resonate but artists that getting payments, getting paid I think the current rate is about six times as much as Spotify. It could even be more than that. So everything's, you know very clear on the site. And that's what when we're talking about cooperative benefits. Well, in this case it's not like a shopping discount or something but the listeners know that they've got a direct relationship with the artist in that their money is going to that particular artist. Now one of the things about being in the creative industry, and being a cooperative and having values are very clear is that you attract other people who believe in things like, you know, for a fairer ecosystem, sustainable careers for artists and so on, and resonates had some great support. This is a photo of an in conversation I hosted a couple of years ago at the great escape festival. It was an amazing Grammy award winning artists and producer Imogen Heap, and Matt Black, who was a founding member of cold cut and founded the Ninja tune label, and resonates done a development project with Imogen for her artists app called the creative company and Matt Black has got some of his cold cut tunes on resonate. And there are a lot of opportunities and creative co-ops especially I think to share resources resonates been developing some open source tools are opened other cooperatives, but also to think about a sort of end to end experience. So for example, we're not there yet, but you could have something like, you know, you could buy tickets through a cooperative and go to cooperative venue and stream the tracks on a cooperative and get a cooperative cab home. So, so there's lots of potential that I think for that kind of thing. In terms of organizations wanting to support resonates had a lot of support from a US organization called Black Socialists in America because they feel that resonates values aligned closely with theirs, and some of their members come and do bits of development work and so on. Part of the ecosystem is recognizing that in music, it's not just about the audio and resonates is designing ways to make sure that release artwork gets displayed well, and also has a label pages. So that labels are often the brilliant curators and talent spotters also get the get the credit and presence on the site. This is a photo of a resonate volunteers meeting a little while ago, and it was used in an article I think the unfound accelerator. So resonate has some paid staff but also relies on volunteers, which hopefully will change, but under the stakeholder system, their work gets kind of counted, and they get a share in future profits as well. And we have volunteers from all over the world, and whether it's helping with some coding or social media, that kind of thing. And we also sometimes when a high profile artist has a new release on resonate we get an influx of their fans, and that's very exciting. There's an American artist who's also a comedian called Zach Fox, and every time he does something we get lots of his fans coming to volunteer meetings. So that shows as a very sort of direct relationship there. One of the things I think resonate has done, I mean it's still building there still needs to be a mobile app there's there's lots more to do, but there is a fully functioning player so you can join up and start listening today, if you want to. But I think resonate has really changed the debate about around streaming it's been going for quite a long time now. And I think it helped create the foundations for some great campaigns that have come more recently like the broken record campaign. And for those of you who are musicians or know about music may have heard of it but for those who don't. It's a campaign for a fairer streaming system, and various music organizations in the UK have come together to try and make things happen. And they've done brilliantly they actually managed to get a an inquiry working with some MPs from the parliamentary DCMS committee. So there's been a music streaming inquiry, and resonate contributed some evidence to that. It contributed a survey of members what they want to see it contributed a sort of details about the cop show how copter streaming could be really beneficial, and it also contributed some policy ideas as well. Now, I think not every co op is going to want to be so big or international. Not every co op is going to want to campaign in a big way. Although I think by being a co op you are campaigning but I think I can say definitely that resonate just shows how empowering cooperatives can be in terms of changing the way people work in terms of enabling people's contributions, and also trying to change the way business is done. So that's my contribution. And I'm going to stop the screen share, and I would like to hand over to Matt, who's from the exchange in Bristol, and also part of music venue trust which is an organization. Fantastic work and I'm past few years I've been volunteering on music venues day to help out. Yeah, great. Nice. Okay, let's get in third time's a charm. And I'll press the right button this time, which is slideshow. Thank you. Thanks, Terry. So yeah I'm Matthew church I'm one of the founders of exchange in Bristol which is a community benefits society and I also work for music venue trust as the ownership coordinator and part of my work at the moment is to manage the music venue properties project which is another community benefit society so I'm going to try to breeze through this because I'm conscious of time so. It's a big change it's in Bristol. It's four floors there's a lot going on there. It's primarily grassroots music venue is a picture of a band playing certain bands who played there is 10 years old now, or was last year it'll be 11 this year. Over the years include Hame rag and bone man in the 1975 idols. In fact, the idols basis with the bar manager there for for many years so it goes to show about that grassroots music ecosystem which we've which Terry picked up on as well about how feeds into one another and I got nice slide about that right at the end of the presentation. As well as being a grassroots music venue. It's also vegan cafe. It has I don't have a photo of it but an anarchist bookshop in the first floor it also has a record shop on the first floor and it has a recording studio in the basement. So it's a place that with a lot of interesting creative musical things going on. There's a lot of grassroots music venues do keep diversifying. But yeah, primarily, you know, we can consider ourselves a grassroots music venue. You know we're putting on gigs up to what and I think we probably do about 5600 a year because we have two stages. We also have DJs and club nights and producers on the weekends often following the gig sometimes daytime events as well so there's a lot, a lot of gigs going on down there a lot of creative opportunities. And so with the exchange. The story is there is that I used to actually own another venue beforehand called the Croft in Bristol which are closed in 2013. It was on a lease, which we, which was good, you know, it's the venue that I kind of grew up in it was a venue that I was working out for many years before I got the opportunity to buy the lease but we could see the writing was on the wall it was a common problem for music venues is that they move into parts of the inner city where people don't necessarily want to be and then make those parts of the city cool so the developers come in and follow them and then suddenly you can afford to be there anymore so we've seen that we took the opportunity to move over to the different part of Bristol which you know 10 years later has very much gentrified but this time we actually took on the ownership of the building which secured our long term future, but we did that as individuals, which has been really positive, but we did realize as the years went on that it wasn't necessarily the complete solution to the problem, because we were all getting a bit older we were sort of being pulled in different directions as the three of us. So, at around this point, we happened to notice. So this is probably 2017 what the pub in Newport were doing and I know Sam's in the chat today, which was they just become a community benefit society, and we read up about it and made sense to us and it appealed to us a great deal. And because not just to an idea that we could raise some capital to make the venue even better but the idea of longevity for years to come that the venue could almost, you know, outlive us as directors if you will so. So basically, we looked into that at the time we were actually a community interest company so we'd already decided that our activity was really not for profit and was community focused after years of being a limited company before that and then just understanding well actually what we're all about sits better within that ethos. And again, the natural kind of evolution of that was to become a community benefit society. So in 2018 we launched a save exchange community share offer. I always sort of feel like it should have probably been called secure the long term future of exchange as opposed to save exchange but the community share expert we were dealing with said, better keep it with two words and it probably made more of an impact when people read it. So, essentially we looked to raise £300,000 and that would buy the assets that were there at the moment, get a long term loan, long term lease on much more favorable terms and would be available in the market, and to be able to just make a lot of improvements that would make the business more sustainable, not only economically but because of the membership structure. Allowing you know that longevity that there'll be other directors you could take over who also invested into the idea of what the exchange was. And yeah we looked to raise £300,000 and we were successful in doing that much like Pat we used effects. We did charge a little bit more than the minimum, the minimum that Pat's organization charged but we managed to raise £300,000 and the share offer was successful. And yeah, that and I guess where my sort of experiences with exchange differ is that was a few years ago so thinking about now. I think it's a little bit more from the share offer and it shows a bit how how it keeps it accountable with the members and we have a member's form as well. But the big difference is that we've got the several years that are followed to talk about what happened, you know, how those benefits have played out, you know how how it all worked out after the share and it's been really really successful I mean obviously we've had to endure the pandemic as everybody has, but even that in itself going into the pandemic with the assurity of having funds in the bank knowing that we wouldn't go bankrupt, which wasn't the case for a lot of other music venues and at that time is when I actually started working for music any trust and I was supporting a lot of venues who were having the terrible difficulties with landlords and what have you, you know it really highlighted how secure and you know how our situation was compared to compared to others. But during that time and before it, we did actually start to sort of, you know, take those share the shareholders money that we'd managed to raise. We reopened the basement stage, we installed lighting and aircon. We put in a new stage on the main room which is not mentioned here we put in a PA. We actually put in an accessible toilet on the ground floor which again something that Pat was saying that the cinema was going to do. And yeah we just made vast improvements across the plate, the whole building has just made it way more sustainable way more successful and just a much better place to be really to be honest. Along the way, we've actually received a lot of funding, which was something again that we didn't get before even when we were a community interest company. We just were never successful in any of the applications we did, but being a community benefit society and also being able to leverage the money that we've raised through the share of offer as being match funding really helped. So like the Arts Council, for example, we used some of the share offer money to purchase the PA that we put in and the rest came from the Arts Council. We've used the West of England combined authority money to install, in fact the installation is actually happening over the next two weeks at about 25 solar panels into the building so that we can be more environmentally friendly moving forward. So yeah, it's been really positive. It's really brought more people to the venue. And yeah, it's just our input is just so much better and impressive because of essentially that community share offer. And as importantly, we now have several people on the board who had nothing to do with the exchange before, who are helping to sort of chart the future, the future of the business as we move from the point of realizing everything that was in the share offer document towards just the future of and you know quite difficult future to be honest. I don't think anybody saw all of these different crises coming and you know it's good to have a team of people who are sort of, you know, young and dynamic and you know ready to sort of face those challenges head on. One big thing I wanted to touch on around the accessibility was the because of all of these efforts and just because of the result of becoming a community benefit society. We actually became the first gold standard grassroots music venue to achieve the attitudes everything live events access charter award. And so that's just been really, really positive. You know to be the first ones to achieve that was amazing. We've also running a couple of different projects with gig buddies and go gentle which have made the venue more diverse and more accessible and just, you know just supporting different areas of within the community. Yeah, so that's that's that's been really good. So, moving on from the exchange that was a whirlwind stop. I essentially, as I mentioned during that pandemic I became a member of music venue trust, and I took my experiences of exchange and said to to the people who run it. Before I knew that one of their long term goals was was the ownership of music venues not to run in themselves that complete opposite just to remove them out of the commercial sector, and away from landlords who didn't have the same objectives as the people who ran it. So I suggested, could a community share offer be be an option. And it was an idea that they liked like before of, but obviously that was during a pandemic point. So, yeah, that was something that we started to work on with with the music venue properties so just just to give a bit of context of that music venue trust. And it is a charity that acts to protect secure and improve UK grassroots music venues for the benefit of venues communities and up and coming artists you can tell that I just read that can you, but it represents over 900 music venues which including the iconic ones such as Hull or Delphi, etc. So, yeah, it did a lot of great work, you have really really great work during during the pandemic in representing music venues at a point where it could have they could have easily been passed over when it came to funding distribution. And yeah, just just a really, you know how I say this with my exchange hat on I know I work for the organization now but like so much great support over the years we've received from MVT and you know I think I'm really, I'm really glad to be part of that organization now trying to move things forward. So, main issue issues that we deal with we often feel like they ultimately come back to the ownership of the venue even when it's things like, you know, environmental sustainability for example. It quite often you don't think that would be something to do with the ownership of the venue but actually we do believe it is, and I'll tell you why so obviously 35% of grassroots music venues closed in the last 20 years. And here's the main thing, 93% of grassroots music venues are tenants, and the outreach operator has less than 18 months left on their tenancy and that is really where the big problem comes, you know, people aren't able to unlike the exchange for example, invest into accessibility into environmental impact into all of these important things or even their programming because ultimately they know that well they can invest in their programming that was a bad example but yeah they ultimately know that in 18 months that investment is just going to go into the pocket of their landlords who can use it to either put up their rent or look to sell the building on. So, as I said, they have different, sorry I've just, my computer's just got a bit funny are you still there? Yes. Oh, okay, great. Okay, so yeah, I have different motivations. The majority of the crisis cases that we deal with are ultimately related to issues with the commercial landlords and funding the purchase of property can be difficult for operators and cross succession issues. I mean even in the case of the exchange the thing I didn't mention with the share offer is that it really just took me out of the day to day. It took me back to essentially for nine months, you know, bring in somebody else to run the day to day because it was just so much work. And, you know, a lot of operators just aren't in a position to even consider doing something like that. So, our plan was music venue properties which I'm going to try to condense down really quickly. It's going to be a community so it's a charitable community benefit society is looking to raise money through a community share because this is ongoing at the moment. We've just passed the 50% mark so we've actually raised 1.25 million so far. And what we're looking to do with that money is to purchase the freeholds of nine different pilot venues we're calling them. What we'll do then is rent them back to the operators on more favorable rates with longer term tendencies and by and we'll also look to make improvements to the buildings been repairs and insurance contributions which landlords at the moment just simply aren't doing. Yeah, that covers a lot of that so yeah people can invest from from 100 pound. They can get 3% on their investment which actually unfortunately hasn't aged very well since we opened the share offer in May but I mean you know it is an ethical investment. And this is what we're planning. Yeah, there you go. There is the process I just tried to sort of to distill into a one minute explanation written down so I'll leave that page up for a little while. Yeah, just just to finish off I think I just wanted you know the idea of who it benefits is not always the commute you know when we think of that communities quite often we think about them as being geographical but in this case, you know we see it as a community of the best of and you know in our case it's music and we would do we talked a little bit earlier I started it by talking about the music ecosystem and and Terry talked about beforehand and here's a nice little diagram that I really enjoy about the live music ecosystem and the idea of all the areas where people are basically seeing benefit from from music venues and and and what have you and the idea that by saving them money on their rent, it will be reinvested into this into this world so I'll leave that up for a little while but I think I can wrap up my my whistle's top store of what I plan to say there so and bring in some questions and I'm sorry if that was very brief I just it was conscious of time there so I glossed over some of it. It's really inspiring things there. I loved hearing about the exchange I want to move in record shop coffee what do you want. We're very slightly over but we're not going to go too much longer before we come to questions. I'll just give you some information about how to get started, because that's obviously a really important thing to know about. So I'll just do a little screen share thanks very much about this absolutely brilliant. So let me go to the right PowerPoint because I have to in my system. Here we go getting started right so I'm assuming that quite a few of you I hope you are raring to go. There's a brilliant tool that. I've started in the wrong place actually you can have to bear with me while I stop sharing and go back to the right now actually I'm going to whiz through okay close your eyes think think think while I try and whiz through the right place. There's a brilliant tool that cops UK have I've tried this out myself actually because once you're into a co-op you want to start about 5000. It's an online step by step tool. So it takes you through the start up process offers advice information guidance from testing your idea to registering as a co-op. And there should be a lovely link in the chat box, but I'm sure you'll also be getting that information afterwards as well. And this is a big one business support. Finally, there is an offer business support access of up to six days of tailor business support. You get a co-op development expert and a baiser, and they help you decide what's the most appropriate kind of co-op help you with governance, and with the incorporation that's a registration process, developing membership criteria business planning you can't get enough help with business planning I think, and there can be skills training or peer mentoring so there's a really good range of things on offer there if you want to start a co-op and and get some support and that's all from cooperatives UK in partnership with the cooperative bank. So I'll start thanking everybody. And if anyone pops up with a question in the meantime, you're still in thanks to thanks for bearing with us we've gone a bit over, but we've had a few interruptions for Wi-Fi issues and various other things. So, a big thank you to everyone who's joined I think it's a really exciting time for co-op for starting new ways of doing business new ways of working in communities. It's great to have such a large number of people. I believe you will get sent a video so that if you want to watch it back, you can see it again. A big thank you to Pat and to Matt. Co-op UK for putting on the cooperative bank and everybody involved in the scheme to support new co-ops. All right, bye bye everyone.