 Can you take them now? We are. I've always wanted to say that. My name is Rose Mali. I am the CEO of Co-op Shoe K. I'm just going to do a little bit of housekeeping. Something I've never said before. You normally say we're not expecting a fire alarm today. This is a new one on me. We are trying to get the venue to test at three o'clock every Friday. So if you hear a short alarm at three o'clock, please don't evacuate. It is just a test. It might not happen, but just in case it does. If there is indeed a long continuous alarm that we're not expecting, you will be directed out of the building by the Co-op Shoe K staff and hotel staff into the muster point over the road. As always these days there's no smoking venues, smoking including vapes outside please. I just wanted to welcome you here all today. We are battling with Covid still across the world and certainly here in the UK. So we've tried to leave you as much space as possible. We have had a couple of speakers including Cherine Corrie-Hack who has now got Covid, but she will be with us again online. But we have got sanitizers around the place and I say give us as much space as you can as possible for the whole day. It's brilliant to see you all here and we're just finding our feet. We had a fully online event this year. Who knows? I've got I think as many people if not more online today which is brilliant. We've got breakout rooms and sessions taking place throughout the whole of the venue and we've got an absolutely packed programme. You will also have in your packs an evaluation sheet a feedback form because people are coming in and out so you've all got that now rather than at the end and we'd be really grateful if you filled that in because we have no idea like I say we're all coming back from a pandemic dealing with the cost of living crisis, battling with the sunshine today actually in Birmingham. So it's good to see what you think about how we're working with all sorts of on-site sessions as well as the main room being broadcast online which is of course thanks to the cooperative bank. It's really important to us that we provide as much access as possible to our members and our members members so we're really grateful that we can share these sessions online. So again if you do know people that are interested in things like climate change for example we've got brilliant sessions tomorrow please do let them know that they can join us online for free and it's just on the Co-op UK website. So like I said we've got a full impact programme to get today whether it's about membership in the Co-op ID or whether it's about communities organising themselves to be more effective if there's a subject matter to do with cooperatives we've pretty much covering it in the next couple of days. Today's highlights we do have Jess Phillips MP joining us this afternoon and we'll be doing with Big Issues editor Paul McNamee and in conversation and then we'll have our keynotes at the end of the day. We have an international supper this evening which is a new one very excited about that with Preakill MP joining us. If you booked on specific sessions and you want to come to more just go and speak to the reception desk let's say we've got lots to talk about lots to share and we want as many people involved in the conversation as possible. I joined cooperatives at UK just over a year ago and this is my first Co-op Congress in person and one of the key things that I really want to do it's like it's the UK's best kept secret cooperatives it's amazing what you know all of you in this room are achieving and that opportunity that we do have with this structure that gives people power in decision making and shares the wealth so we want to make some noise yeah you'll see hashtag Co-op Congress everybody get on your Twitter all on your socials now let's get trending in the West Midlands but again like I said let's make sure that we invite as many people as we can to join these sessions online because we really do well you'll see today we have really amazing hope and opportunity for the future and we just need to let everybody know about it. So without further ado I am now going to introduce my chairman chair of Co-op's UK Don Morris thank you. Well thank you thank you Rose I don't know if you notice but Rose and I are trying to colour coordinate so we're both wearing a bit of a bright colour today unusual unusual for me hello I'm Don Morris I'm chair of Co-op's UK and it's my privilege and absolute honour to open Co-op Congress 2022 it's fantastic to see everyone here before me and in the in the wonderful east side rooms in Birmingham and it really is up quite a venue and also to welcome the hundreds of online delegates and wow what a line up we have our speakers for you over the next few days we've got musicians, mayors and MPs, we've got the movers and shakers from the movements federal bodies, experts across numerous fields from climate and sustainability to care community shares most importantly we have you. Co-op Congress is themed under empowering co-operation we're here to inform and debate to share and build knowledge to learn from experts to be empowered to take action there's an unbelievable knowledge and skill base and passion for cooperative working in this room and in front of the screens watching online what we can't do is that these things end here ultimately this conference is about action to take the learnings back to your cooperative and help enact change we need to be empowered to act and we're living in very strange times we've not experienced anything like the last few years ever before we've got covid a major war and the cost of a living crisis there are tough times for people and business now in these tough times it does feel like there is a growing appetite for change and we know co-optives have the potential to play a huge role in creating a better world co-optives have always served people's needs but we need to be pushing for awareness of co-optives as a solution and pushing for real action to make a real difference so enjoy the conference we're going to have a great few days and let's make sure each and every one of us acts on what we've learned at co-op congress thank you now i've just got one delightful thing to do before i sit down and that's to introduce our sponsors from the co-op bank we're so grateful to you thank you so much Mayor Maria Kearns director customer and people the co-operative bank thank you thank you very much don and rose thank you for the lovely welcome and good morning to everybody who's here in the room today and also everybody who's joining us online it's a gorgeous day in Birmingham today and i am delighted to be here and really delighted that the bank is sponsoring and supporting co-op congress again this year the theme behind today's and tomorrow's congress is all about empowering co-operation and i think that's one that you know everybody in the room can can get behind very easily it's something that we've been doing at the bank for many years and it's a commitment we've reaffirmed this week because we launched or relaunched our updated customer-led ethical policy so back in 1872 in the early days of the cooperative movement and the co-op societies that made up the cooperative wholesale society or cws and i can see people in the room who will not in fairness know since 1872 but we'll know a lot of this history you know Alan and I have worked together for many years on some of these pieces so it's great to see kind of old friends in the room and but the cws decided they needed to create their own bank in order to make it easier to trade and grow their market share so that was the origin of the cooperative bank and it's a proud heritage you know that began 150 years ago since then many things have changed but the one thing that hasn't is our kind of unwavering commitment to cooperative values they're enshrined in our articles of association and they're at the heart of the ethical policy which celebrated its 30th anniversary today and again there's people in the room today who who worked on that policy in the early days so Mel's here and it's brilliant to see you know old friends who kind of helped get to where we are today um you know last year we asked our customers to tell us about ethical issues that concern them and we've used their responses to update the ethical policy but for me personally I've worked with the cooperative bank for over 20 years and the ethical policy is the reason I joined and it's the reason I've stayed because it's really important to us it's important that we offer something different in the high street banking environment and either our values and ethics poll a significant number of respondents told us they want to see us actively promoting cooperative businesses and supporting the cooperative sector so we're not just here at co-op congress and helping to support it because it's good for business we're here because it's what customers have told us that they want us to do and it's it's where we should be you know part of a sector that we should embrace and be part of so with that mandate we will obviously continue to support cooperative businesses through all our products and services we'll continue to work with our friends at co-ops UK and across the movements you know we've launched the Hive business support programme for the last five years and we're hoping that as we work together we will inspire the next generation of cooperators I'm very excited the bank is supporting the youth summit on cooperation this july so delighted to get as many people involved as that as possible we're working with our friends at mid counties at co-op group and of course with co-ops UK to create a really exciting event that allows us to hear people's thoughts I think to to Rose's point at the beginning we need to make some noise but actually you know it's important that we don't think we've got the answers to that you know there's many people here who can say they've banked decades and decades in the cooperative movement and we love to be part of it but actually we need to know how to engage and respond and be relevant to the next generation of co-operators so I can't wait to get involved please let me know if you need any more information on that one of the things that came through really strongly in the values and ethics poll was how much our customers care about the environment it's no secret there's a pretty fundamental link between high street banks and financing of fossil fuels so while the other banks continue to do this the cooperative bank is living proof that there is another way and I'm really proud of that you know we realise back in the 90s that fossil fuels are unsustainable and we decided then in cooperation with customers that we wouldn't fund in any way any projects that work in that sector we also looked at our own operations so we've minimised our environmental impact and led to the cooperative bank being beyond carbon neutral over a decade ago and we've not stopped so in 2020 we sent zero waste to landfill and we're constantly looking at ways to reduce our waste and recycle more and that's because our customers demand us to take that leadership on the environment and we've proven that you can take a stand on what you believe in you can challenge the status quo this is what cooperation is all about and it leads to the question you know if we've proven there's another way why can't we take the entire banking sector with us we want um we desperately want to see the UK leading the way on initiatives to tackle some of the devastating impacts our actions are having on the planet we want our voice and the voice of cooperative bank customers to have a positive impact we want to use our voices to help drive action and the need that the action we need from the other banks but also from the government we're very very proud to be a signatory of the climate and ecology bill and we've joined the zero hour campaign we're a big supporter of it um I hope you'll join us and tv's Dr George McAvid from zero hour um at the session tomorrow on how co-ops can get involved in securing the legislation we need to protect the planet it's at one o'clock here in the main room um and if you've not met Dr George he is an inspiration and something that we should all really get involved in so shameless plugs out of the way um I hope you all have an absolutely fantastic congress it's brilliant to be here and um we're delighted to be part of the movements um I'm handing over now to Andy streets who is the mayor of the west midlands so we're very much in Andy's turf today and we're delighted to have him here online so over to you Andy hi there Andy street mayor of the west midlands here and it's my pleasure to welcome you to Birmingham for your conference and what a great place to be having your conference there at the east side rooms close to the old heart of the industrial city and very much a place thinking about the relaunch the sort of rebirth of the city in that particular region so great that you're here and being able to experience a little bit yourself have a great conference and the theme for the conference empowering co-operation what a great theme it's one which I can relate to given my 10 years of course as the managing director of Johnnos which remains Britain's biggest workers co-operative very simple idea that we were all in it together for a common good and of course we were sharing the success of the business with one another and taking on the more traditionally structured businesses so as we think about how we rebuild from the pandemic here in the west midlands we want to make sure there are more jobs in the social economy sector more jobs in co-operatives have given ourselves that goal we've got a great foundation to build on of course companies like the glue collective birmingham bike foundry central england co-operative of course and slightly less well-known birmingham student housing co-operative to name just but a few there are great foundations in this region to build much much more but we want to think about what we can do to stimulate that so we'll be looking out for the answers from your conference today so enjoy the time here enjoy the preparation for the commonwealth games that's coming up in less than two months now it's going to be a wonderful festival of sport it's the time for birmingham and the west midlands to show itself to the world and hopefully you'll be able to get a sense of the sort of values welcome camaraderie teamwork that's behind the west midlands at the moment enjoy your time here right okay for those of you that are in the room uh let's say today and tomorrow as much as anything is about networking doing deals that principle number six and there's a prize for the by the end of tomorrow the person who can come up to me and tell me exactly what deal they've done with another cooperative i'm going to be putting them all in a hat and i will be talking about them all next week and and going on but i'm going to organise a prize don't know what it is yet but it'll be great so let's let's see that principle number six in action so for those of you in the room let's say you've got time to network now and talk to people get yourselves organised the main session starts in here at 11 40 for making membership meaningful um then across in the ash dead one room we've got joining the dots and how can tech enable a stronger cooperative economy um this is going to be a workshop so this one isn't filmed but you know we are on the cusp of the um you know industry 4.0 you know when the cooperative movement started it wasn't dissimilar to what's going on now lots of change in technology lots of challenges to workers rights it does feel like we just need a little bit of a reset but certainly what we haven't got right now is a second digital infrastructure for the cooperative movement that can harness the power of cooperation in the way that we really could whereas technology that lends itself beautifully you've got things like daos um decentralise autonomous organisations which will embed for example through the use of blockchain decision making you know we've got organisations throughout the world that could be joining up open source global data with us i go from being so excited one minute to so overwhelmed about the task in hand but we've got to start somewhere so we're going to start looking at and this is going to inform um we'll be doing a hackathon later um in the year um to actually to start to build that network and to really work together on that we also have in ash dead room two at 11 40 we have the worker co-op federal discussion so that's been invited all our worker co-op members you should have had your invites there and we're talking about one of the themes that we'll be talking about later on at the age m is this idea of new era and working more effectively with our federals because that again is the world that we are in and again in ash dead three we've got working across nations and regions on co-op development so it's something again that um rightly so i get a hard time particularly from scott mid i think if they're in the room um about us always talking about what's going on in in in englidaw talking in more general terms so we really want to start to understand the differences in the nations and regions so that session is in there and then all of that will be finished by 12 40 where you can get your lunch so let's say if you're at home now it's time to make yourself a cup of tea do some of that cash tag congress tweeting we'll be posting stories on our instagram channels as well and for everybody else lots of breakout rooms for those that are joining the membership panel we'll see you back in here for 11 40 thank you everybody um back if you do want to move forward please do there's a lot lots of empty space everybody everybody here and also everybody online because i know this is one of the sessions that that is streaming on on youtube so good morning and welcome to birmingham some of you may know me i'm rebecca harvey i'm the editor of co-op news and co-op news is a magazine and news website about and for the global co-op movement and i love my job i i have the best job in the world and the reason for that is the conversations we get to have with co-ops and co-operators around the world you know whether that's fishermen in japan whether it's coffee producers across africa whether it's health workers in brazil or whether it's shoppers in the uk and across europe you know that's before you take in to account the different types of cars where it's the you know the housing cops the credit unions the student co-ops so two things really come to light in these conversations that we have first of all members are people and of course they are because people are members but people are also gloriously messy and complicated and individuals and so i think sometimes this can be forgotten when cops talk about members or the membership and sometimes they lump together as something to appease or to be looked after rather than seen as a really inherent part of the symbiosis between an enterprise and its owners they're seen as other there's kind of almost like an us and them mentality you know people leading cops working cops we are stewards of our enterprises and the second thing that really comes out of these conversations is that membership of co-ops is a very personal thing and it can become meaningful by these individuals being involved with or engaged in something that really matters to them and again this is going to be a very very individual thing members are at the heart of cooperatives and we look at the the ica cooperative values and principles the first three principles put members in there by name voluntary and open membership democratic member control and member economic participation so today hopefully we're going to be able to unpick some of this look at what meaningful membership is as a co-op or as a member and it isn't easy especially when there are so many subscriptions and organizations and digital interactions competing for our time and our attention and our mental load so what do we do about it how can cooperative organizations and cooperative members work together so that the members receive the goods and the services that they want and they need and organizations can benefit from and use the collective knowledge and power of its members and what can that look like in modern society so with me on the panel I'm delighted to introduce three three people who some of you may know obviously we've got Rose Marley who introduced this morning we also have Denise Scott McDonald that Scott McDonald apologies who's the president of the national members council of the co-op group and is also the deputy leader of Greenwich city council and we also have Joe Fortune joining us who is the general secretary of the co-op party and I know that in the audience we have plenty of people who I hope will join the discussion and share their own experience of this and I really want to make sure there's time at the end for questions from the audience both in the room and also online on YouTube as well we have someone monitoring YouTube chats so please do ask any questions on there as well before we launch into the conversation I'm just going to show you a very very short two minute video and apologies for those who may have already seen this so last year co-op news worked with the international co-op alliance to help deliver some of the communication side of the world co-op congress and as part of that we spoke to 25 young people under the age of 25 about what being in a co-op meant to them I'm just going to play this short video from Sarah who's based up in Canada in his heart of a cow's and carp and she's got some great words and just shares her experience of what that means The Green Housing Cooperative here in beautiful Thunder Bay Ontario Canada located on the traditional lands of Fort William First Nation signatory to the Robinson Superior Treaty of 1850. Castle Green was first founded in 1973 by a group of people looking to address the housing accessibility crisis in our city and now nearly 50 years later we're still answering that call like so many other housing cooperatives across Canada and around the world my personal co-op story began 15 years ago when my mother and I moved into Castle Green from the time I was just seven years old it was so important to my mom that I understand the importance of being an active member of our vibrant community and her foresight coupled with a welcoming neighborhood that became a family full of mentors to me is what shaped my deep sense of commitment to community from the time I was very young it wasn't until I was in my teen years that I realized that our co-op had also served another very important purpose it protected me and my mother who was newly re-entering the workforce from the precarious question of homelessness and it provided us with the space to grow with the support of our newfound co-op family growing up in a co-op provided me with so many opportunities and so much support as a young person from encouraging my leadership skills when I became community garden coordinator at just 14 to encouraging me to run for the board of directors at 18 to sending me to a cooperative leadership camp when I was a teenager that I'm now so lucky to be employed by as the youth engagement coordinator and perhaps most importantly by kindling my passion for the cooperative sector that has shaped my career aspirations and my dedication to the cooperative values and everything that I do cooperative identity is at the heart of who we are as human beings we search for that connection to community and everything that we do and through fostering that strength and diverse communities we can come together and make the world a better more supportive more cooperative community for all I hope that our stories will inspire you to look for those opportunities and what you do to make the cooperative difference too thank you very much for playing that at the back there um what I love about that video is she's so embedded in her community and you know being an active part of her community is what gives her meaning as a member of her housing co-op so this session is titled meaningful membership but what does it actually mean what does it look like and actually even these the right words so Denise can I come to see you first of all what does meaningful membership mean to you oh wow um I thought it was interesting in your discussion where you talked about how sometimes it's messy and I think that's a really good thing I don't I think if it was absolutely pretty and perfect it would be it would be just very very predictable but I think some of the beauty of membership is that messiness and then us coming together and us working it all out um now I am president of national members council there's 100 members there and if you asked each and every one of them they would all have a different version of what meaningful membership means and you know what that's a good thing I think it's really important um one thing which also she touched on in the video and one thing that's in my important in my life is it's got to be something about community it's got to be something very personal it's got to be something that I can point to so whether historically I point at it so remembering as a little girl going to the shop with my mum and then coming back with the book stamp or my grandmother and stamp putting things in the book um or even further back looking at something like Abraham Lincoln and what happened there and how the cooperative movement was really instrumental for me that's very personal as a black woman you know knowing that the cooperative movement was really instrumental in the civil war or going all the way up today whether you talk about black lives matter and having the chief exec being one of the first chief exec in the country to actually say something really anti-racism which meant a lot to me but the fact that it was a cooperative those things tied together or I could go on and on and on I mean everything from voting to having a voice to all the community work um one thing I remember once listening to um one of our cooperative and labour MPs speaking I think it was Jim McMahon and talk and he provided a brilliant definition so as um I'm a councillor I'm a labour councillor and sometimes in the labour movement it's all about government doing stuff which is great which is fine I'm on for that but in the cooperative movement sometimes it's more about the community and that community voice coming up through the middle and and coming and looking for solutions with the community so um and that's one thing what makes me really proud about being a cooperator is that it's finding those voices in the community and you know and they can come from almost anywhere and even if you look at from the Rockstar pioneers or I have a group of friends who are a black women artist who formed a cooperative but it was so that they could actually share the load share the burden but also share the profits so I don't know I do want to go on I can go on and on go on this is the beauty of this conversation is that everyone has got such an interesting opinion on it which is why I do want to take it out to the audience later on um but Rose Cops UK has a lot of members and those members had a lot of members as well so from your perspective what does meaningful membership look like in your organisation yeah it's a really um interesting one isn't it and this is why we wanted to talk about it because when I joined Cooperatives UK in fact um before I even started we used the language we a lot and rightly so in in cooperatives because it's about people coming together and in fact I don't know if this is true our chairs here you can confirm it but the feedback um I got on my final interview was one of the positives as to why I got the role was because I kept saying we um which is really critically important but like you say there's so many means you know that we is made up by the means and I have to have a confession here but I've confessed this to Denise before um you know I am one of those members of co-op group that had a card lived in between two co-ops kind of yeah I mean I grew up in Greater Manchester I grew up by Jumbo farm I know about the cooperative movement wasn't meaningful to me that card in the person you know it was as meaningful to me as maybe me other form of loyalty card I want to say all the form of loyalty card you know group membership is not a loyalty card and it wasn't really until I started getting into it and understand um I'm the perfect candidate you know I always was to be you know attending the AGMs to getting involved you know to be on social media with all those things and I wasn't so to me when I say meaningful I want to understand the I bit of it um we are going to as you know working with yourselves Rebecca we're going to be launching a census this year um and as Rebecca said co-ops UK our members are other businesses that are other co-ops but they have members that are people um and we want to understand we're going to do the first census of the people you know how many people in the UK are members of a co-op we don't actually know we know we've got 40 million memberships but I encountered at least three times um I do this we won't do it now but I do often ask if anyone's got more than this how many co-ops you remember of one of my board members is a board member is a member of 18 co-ops so that's that's the figure we're looking to beat today um but what is it and is that a vertical is that across the board once people are sold on being in a co-op because they want to join more co-ops and actually do some people join a co-ops because it was the best service and the best price and you know nationwide are working with us on on this census as well and often you know I actually said um to the head of marketing at nationwide I'm a member of nationwide but the reason I was a member is because you've got the best products and services for my needs that was why I joined and she said yes but the reason we've got the best products and services is because they're informed by our members so there's something going on where if we could understand why those eyes are in co-ops and actually can relax into the fact that some people are in a co-op for a different reason and that's okay as well I don't know if um Ross is still in the room from at suma one of the worker co-ops in our membership you know Ross is really significant at suma he joined suma because he wanted a job but now he's really prevalent within the organisation so I truly believe that if we can understand it ourselves then we can really grow and harness the power of the people to transform society because that is what we're all here today I really like what you're talking about the different reasons that people join co-ops we did a little very very casual survey on on facebook a few months ago asking people why they joined the co-ops that they did and actually it was really interesting the split between those who wanted to join because of the product or the service or you know the energy provider or anything else and those who joined out of solidarity is that I want to support this community share I want to support my local co-op because of x yn z so be very interesting to see if that that comes out in the census and Joe so what's meaningful membership to you thanks very much and first and foremost thanks very much for the invite to be here and talk to yourselves today about meaningful membership I'm Joe Fortune I'm the general secretary of the co-ops of party and that's my confession today I'm willing to say it wherever I go no listen I'm what I'm going to talk about in terms of our membership and what it means to ourselves isn't the final say about how the co-op party feels about it it's not the final say about we've cracked it it's not the final say about we've we've got all the answers but it is a journey that we are on a journey which is central to our vision because we've got a a twin track challenge in some ways with becker than that we need people to join our cooperative we're a cooperative as well as understand why people want to join a political party which has got its own challenge and connotation as well but for me meaningful membership or what what I would see as important aspects of membership of our cooperative of our of our organisation is active membership I want them to be involved I want them to understand their their empowerment within our cooperative I want them to be engaged with our cooperative I want them to be finding routes to express themselves in their own communities or in their own membership within our cooperative so those routes need to exist for them to be able to express themselves within our organisation as I say I want them to be empowered I want them to feel that that membership means something to them it's something which they are able to achieve what they wish to achieve within our organisation I think also responsiveness I think the our organisation needs to be responsive to our members for that to be meaningful to them they need to understand that that's a a a a a a a road which goes both ways it's not something which comes down from us it's something which goes the other way as well I think that our meaningful membership is the centre of our legitimacy as well as an organisation I think that meaningful membership for me means adding to the legitimacy of what we're trying to do and I think that that's a really important sort of thread that we put through our through our work now that's individual membership and also our organisational membership because we've got both both types of membership within our cooperative and we've got to give voice to our organisational members our organisational cooperative society members as much as our individuals as well so and I'll talk just for there's a range of pieces that hopefully I'm able to get back to as the conversation goes on but I just wanted to also say that meaningful membership within our cooperative maybe just being a member and that's okay as well whichever way you want to express yourself within our cooperative in whichever way that you feel is that's important our cooperative needs to make sure that that availability is there for you that's a really good point Joe um I really like that where you're talking about actually being a member it can be of and of itself actually part part of that I mean especially when it's something that people care about and people care about the politics that people care about you know the local area so if I just like pick up a little bit more on that so you know what what does meaningful membership look like in your organisation and but also how do you know how do you know that actually being a member is is what enough for people it's two really good questions you've got out in one Rebecca no one dear editor of God news um but no no but seriously I suppose how do we know that our our members have feeling that sort of meaningfulness and that those roots to activism we can see that through the amount of take up that we have within the different activities of the party we can see that through the different types of things like retention you know our people do people want to stay as members if they want to stay as members presume and we presume or we feel that that's an indicator of their receiving the membership experience that they they want and they deserve um also things about are they joining our campaigns are they getting involved in our democracy are they getting involved in our local branches are they coming on to our training are they coming on to the types of local experiences from our local parties as well are we able to demonstrably say that those indicators are increasing if those indicators are increasing and that's something we can absolutely track through the capture of data and other other aspects um as well as you know more informal and democratic feedback that we have as well I think that we have to say that we are improving that type of meaningful membership I think the the other aspect for us in terms of like that experience is also in terms of where they go to in that journey so it's not just that the availability and then they take them on but what we want to be able to see is people going through and expressing their membership in the way in which they they want are they becoming representatives are they getting uh becoming new officers are they are they taking on local campaigns can I see that can I feel that and then we amplify in it so there's the there's the availability but also then the take-up of it and the successful application of that journey as well which is really important and I think there's just one last thing I'd say about that is before membership as well because we're talking about when you've joined the co- whichever cooperative it is but there's a job of work for any cooperative ourselves and all parts of the cooperative movement to be able to capture people's enthusiasm and experience before they join the cooperative we need to bring them forward from where they are into membership this we're talking about what you do when they're in but it's also important about where they've come from what issues they've been involved in which takes you into the party as well so that's why I'll work with our supporter base which is growing is so important because that is then that part of that springboard into meaningful membership when they decide to take the plunge well thanks joe that's the interesting point um Denise i'm going to come back to you um human and the the co-group and meaningful membership there because obviously membership has changed hugely from you know when the watchdale pioneers they're tough and when the watchdale pioneers were founded that someone probably correct me but membership didn't cost a pound it cost 90 pounds you know you know 150 years ago that's what more than that it's a lot lot of money um and you know so people were really financially invested in that organisation so for the co-group and national members council you know how do you know what do you do to engage your members in that conversation around meaningful membership okay there's a number of things that go on um in the co-group um so we have our joining events which are which have been growing um especially during COVID they actually grew online so last year I think it was about half a million now it's about 600 000 people engaged and um in our joining events and those are ways that they can um you know when they're consulting about products or getting people's points of view I saw um during lockdown one where they had the wine growers engaging with members which I missed but yeah or things to do with our pizzas and things like that so that's one area where people engage people can engage by um deciding where they want to put the money so they got the two plus two so where they want to put their contribution to charity people can also engage democratically um like there I think we need to do a bit more work there that's about 54 000 engage um whether that's at HM or whether they're voting in the elections so I let's just all watched all over the place in in different areas and I do think on the dem me personally and I know other council members feel that that's one area where we need to do a lot more but like Joe talked about that journey and so different people go on that different journeys within the co-op one thing I think it's really exciting is our member pioneers we have a thousand of them and they do amazing work across the country you know obviously spreading the word also obviously try and engage people but they also do a lot of work with our community with our communities and our charities and that's one thing I think it's really exciting about what we're doing there um and then we also have another thing this is like lots and lots of things we have going on my job actually I have to make it very clear as president and as a member of the council our job is to make sure we have on the board to account and making sure that we are seeing these journeys continue and people are engaging and that's our job whether we're talking about sustainability whether we're talking about safer communities whether we're talking about all those other things that's my that's my number one job is to make sure those things are going on um but um it's it we're on as an organisation and as a business we're on a journey we also realise that people are changing and circumstances are changing I know there's a lot of stuff going online so with your app you can actually engage a lot and a lot of that has been very very successful um it's really funny because on the app they monitor you know what you buy and um one week it was pouring of rain and my umbrella broke and then I went into the car from bought an umbrella and for the next two weeks I got all these discounts on umbrellas which I thought was really silly because I just like I only bought one umbrella and now I got all these discounts so obviously it works so so um other than milk and bread and all that sort of stuff I got the umbrella discount for the next two or three weeks um but yes I think we're on a journey um and and it's about um trying to make sure we engage with young people trying to engage with involve the next generation um but those are some of the the smorgasbord of things that we are all the cult group I'm working on fantastic um I'm really glad that both of you and Joe brought up like local events and data and because I'll bring that to you in a second oh because we share one of the one of my favourite member pioneer stories recently I am of which region is Russell might know it was a it was a local co-op store and they engaged with a local Ukrainian community and they held a like an event for local Ukrainian families who had recently arrived in their area um they had food they had music and they also had kind of a like a job shop and they also said what do you need okay someone needs English lessons someone needs a job someone needs something else someone needs housing and it was this local community that came together for these newly arrived people from Ukraine and actually you know cooperated to find solutions to to real absolutely brilliant and that's the amazing thing about cooperatives and you find out about those stories about and I know the member pioneers do that and I know there are many council members in this room they may not have the group hat on their heads but they do amazing work across the movement but they also have those amazing stories too about they do yeah I'm sure like other people in the room will be able to share um other different types of kind of like experiences of data in like member events but like rose I know you're you're you're quite a big um celebrant of data and digital so you know how what does meaningful membership look like to Cops UK and how do you know how do you use data to find that information out yeah I think um like I said earlier in the evening because there's a session happening right now which um I've just been told is packed out it's uh standing room only which I'm over the moon about in in second digital about building this this infrastructure because um what when I came into post last year I did a lot of listening and what a lot of members told me was that they were very engaged with their co-op but they didn't know how to speak to the movement you know and particularly if you remember if something as large as co-op group you know Russell and the team did very well but they can't answer every query about the heritage trust latest tour or what's going on with co-op press um and like say all co-ops that are really different and in our rule book you have to be a co-op uh you know a co-operative business to be a fully voting member of of our co-operative but we are working um not least with uh Denise and the member council um about do we create some sort of individual you know support so that organisation members individual members can kind of support the movement as well and the whole point of all of this as you say when it comes to the tech and the data um it's really poor what's out there we haven't joined ourselves up um but the opportunity is huge if you look up something the ownership economy now um you know out of um silicon ballot you know this this this is we've seen it look Elon Musk taking over Twitter people are getting increasingly frustrated with wealth the individuals owning that data um and what is happening with that data and when we did a U gov poll at the beginning of the year I was really surprised to see that you know things that are concerning young people with data ownership I don't know how many have you got young people in your lives but mine seemed to give away their data for some sort of snapchat filter at any given moment I was really surprised and pleased to see that young people are starting to question the data piece so let's say so for me this is about joining that meaningful membership and starting to build that out whether that's that say whether that's open source whether that's collecting and monitoring but I have to be honest it's not that strong now I mean we're working with you and uh with um heritage and with the college because actually we've all got data that isn't joined up and again what we could you know obviously is the GDPRS police now that we have to be mindful of so it's quite complex navigating around data but that's something we're really keen to do and the other thing again sort of understanding the meaningfulness of co-ops for co-op fortnight which is something that you have all you know promoted every year starts on Monday we're asking people to unwrap their co-ops and tell us what their ingredients are and I do think we've got um a slight there you go uh a slight hashtag unwrap co-ops but the reason we're doing this and is that I think you can see it on there if you if you go on to that link you can say what you're why you're in a co-op and and what it means to you it's this eyepiece again but again we're building that out so that we can collect all this and and join up that knowledge and understanding and start being more effective don't get me wrong I have got my head of IT and digital play we do do a great job um I just always think we can be doing better and certainly as a world vibe me isn't and I'm sure and the elethor at doc co-op is singing the same song in the room at school I'm sure she is and I know one of the things you've obviously changed recently is your logo and you've got the uh using the co-op mark as a kind of a badge so why did you change that and you know is that something that has worked but what has worked what hasn't for you yeah it's been really interesting that process for the minute I got appointed I got lots of wow that's amazing congratulations and then lots of uh things like can you ask them to put Guinness in the fridge please I was like no it's not that um and my whole team you know like no it's not that and it's like actually it's something huge you know obviously like you say you do a lot of international and we've got our international supper this evening and the UK's revered worldwide and you know it's I'll jump on a screen and talk to Japan and France and Canada and you know it's not about me it's about the role but people like it's Rosemary from co-op UK and in the UK everyone's like what do you do you know like it's just no connection there so actually when we started to unpick that we started to realise that that confusion between you know particularly co-op group and the other co-ops um you know which is something that we wanted to make be very clear about but also the the mark as well how to use the mark effectively so previously and rightly so we worked with um Calvert's the co-op design the mark um dot co-op who managed the mark um and you know obviously before my time we'd adopted the mark into our logo to really get it out there but now it's the time to show people how to use it as a mark of standardisation um and that standard is that actually you know you can be you can be constitutionally and technically a co-op without necessarily embedding the values and principles effectively into your business and so what we couldn't do before is when somebody would give me an example and say are they are they a proper co-op you know um and they might be doing uh something that uh is is challenging with the values you know what I couldn't say before but we can now is yes they are constitutionally and technically a co-op but we don't recognise them at co-op UK as in the movement doesn't recognise them and actually like I said I don't want congress to get to that point where because actually what if we all you know where do those decisions get made as a movement you know I'd love to see that at our AGM we are voting on some of those things in the future so actually the brand refresh was very much about again resetting the tone and making our making ourselves modern and relevant and you know it's no um I don't take this on this lightly you know I want us to be here in another 150 years you know um and actually growing and and taking all that opportunity so the refresh was about making ourselves relevant to people who aren't already sold on co-ops because those are the people that we need to engage. Brill um coming on to you Jo I mean like one thing I've noticed with the co-op party I get a lot of emails from the co-op party which is a good thing we do a lot of emails do a lot of emails um so is that something you've changed recently because obviously you know digital connection and trying to get that meaningful membership between people is part of the conversation um so what kind of strategies have you been using as an organisation what's worked what hasn't and what have you changed? People may get an awful lot of emails from us and I'm not I'm not sorry about that is the truth because I want ourselves and our co-op to be as vocal and active as we possibly can and there's an awful lot for us to to communicate about I think that it goes towards our different types of purposes so if you look at our communication with members and supporters it's always to a point it's always to take you somewhere in that piece of the of the journey or the campaign that we are embarking upon um so it is central to that communication between ourselves members and supporters but there are other ways as well I think that if we changed our pace within that space yeah we probably have um over the last sort of two or three years we've decided that in order to grow and with mercifully our co-operative is a growing co-operative we've added nearly 15 in 20 percent membership in the last two years um we've decided that you have to bust through that sort of um uh sometimes reticence about what you communicate how you're doing it how regularly you're doing it I mean I remember when I first started at the co-operative party I think we changed the law in 2011 for community energy and I attend my then colleague who was in charge of communications and said hello we should tell someone about this and he said oh sure yeah but who and I remember thinking we just changed the law like we just changed the law we've got to tell someone and through that you know from those sort of early experiences of where I think the party was at and I've been part of that for the years it's not a subjective piece about what our co-op was doing previous um I think we've decided that we have to be able to amplify the movement we have to be able to identify relevant uh campaigns relevant topics because ultimately the co-operative movement for me I think is at its best when it's at its most basic and it's most relevant it's the things which you hit and you see when you leave your house the things where the co-operative solution is the strongest and we've got to make sure that we're identifying those issues and bringing people to us through through that type of communication uh what hasn't worked well we've done lots uh which don't work and we're not we're not scared of that we're not scared of doing things which don't work you know I think you know if I really listed how I have many campaigns that we've run in the last sort of two years I'd be struggling uh to get uh onto onto the wrapper of this of this great logo for for Co-op's fortnight um but for so for us yeah there are times where we don't get it right there are times where even though we feel it's an important issue it's not resonating and you know what we've got to do other things we've got to do things which are important to us and central to the movement but we've also got to do things which bring people into those journeys and that and that voice um that we've been talking about the last thing I just wanted to say about that sort of potential power within our movement and within uh all ourselves within this room and within this conference is it's that purpose it's it for me I think that if we communicate solely about values and principles I'll be honest if we solely communicate about the benefits of a co-operative we won't have grown in the way in which we have we have to mix that we have to ensure that people are coming into our organisation coming into our way of thinking and once they're there then then is the opportunity to further educate further embed further move them into into the co-operative movement so it goes back to that purpose it goes you know whether it's food justice whether it's some of the great campaigns that all of us together have run over the period that's the way in which we'll grow that purpose is sure the infrastructure is a bit hugely important but the infrastructure can be sorted you can do the infrastructure it's not you know we've got good infrastructure at the minute such would everything will be offline now when I can't but our infrastructure is okay like you can always do more with it you can always improve it you can always join it up but you'll only improve it and join it up if there's a purpose for that to happen the purpose is the bit which will make everyone in this room decide you know what we will do that we will get involved we will shift we will find routes around GDPR we will amplify that message so the campaign the issue the conviction in our values and principles has applied to basic aspects of our friends and our families experiences as the way in which we'll grow this movement I'm really glad you brought purpose up actually because I was at a like listening to the conference in Dublin with the dub the Irish credit unions with the Swaboda research centre and there's a brilliant person there which I'm trying to find his name I can't remember his name who is the chief executive of Dundalk credit union and they've just recently done a huge strategy change and it's all about purpose and he said putting purpose members and mutuality at the heart of the organisation and strategy process is a step change on our current model we need to reposition ourselves to put members at the centre of an organisation in a tangible way to facilitate them and the community to do things for themselves and so yeah purpose is a huge thing for coops as well so Denise so you've been at the conference no no no I was listening to Joe because I remember you were talking about those campaigns and having those right campaigns and I remember when I started on the national members council and some of the first meetings I sat in they were colleagues and they were complaining about violence in the shops and how they wanted to protect the goods and they wanted to jump in between them and someone stealing because they felt so passionate about their jobs and being in the part of the cult and then I heard that voice say but no one's listening to us we're getting hurt we're getting hurt no one cares and gradually over time I just saw this build up and build up and these conversations getting louder and louder and louder first people were saying the board doesn't care and then it got more and more louder and then you know I'm going to behave the Blair took it on and some other council members and it grew and it went all the way up into Parliament and I thought it wasn't absolutely amazing now for me personally it was really important because it meant to me it sort of reaffirmed I'm glad I'm in the co-op but it made my membership really really meaningful but I think for all those colleagues out in the shops and none of that it wasn't just colleagues in co-op shops it affects every single person that works in every store across the country which is absolutely brilliant and I think someone like that we should celebrate a lot more way way more and more and I know the co-op does get some recognition for it but to me that's like shows how valuable we are you know not just to the people part of the movement but to like the whole country and just on that and look the cults of movement was great and common together on that issue great in working with the trade union movement or the social progressive movements which exist in community and society more generally but also it for me in the line I kept going back to and the statistics are awful and the number is huge but what movement would walk down the other side of the road and not do something about something which was affecting tens of thousands of people working in our movement and it's that purpose it might have been something which was adjunct to other co-operatives it may be something was adjunct to some of the other daily experiences of people in membership of co-operatives but if we can bring it back to friends and family in the community in which you see when you leave your door on that pit on that purposeful piece that's how I think together we're so much stronger. Sorry I didn't mean to go on a bit of a wrap there. It's exactly what this is for all I mean the you know the in the description of this session it asked the question how do we harness the power of members so I'd like to all come come back to me on that so how do we harness the power of members and actually is it is it a power that should be harnessed because you know I work in a co-op I work at co-operatives and that's great but I'm also a member of several different co-ops for lots of different reasons and when I think about myself being heartless as a power am I being objectified am I being part of a kind of a transactional thing that I want to be a part of so I'd like really like to hear your thoughts on you so first of all is it a power to be harnessed absolutely and then how how how do we do it Denise? I totally think it's something to be harnessed and that's and we shouldn't be embarrassed about it. I mean clearly we saw the colleague safety issue you can whether we look at climate change whether we look at diversity and discrimination it absolutely should be a power that should be harnessed and we should be out there and none of that we have a good story to tell but we should be we should be identifying and this comes actually from the voice up what members are saying because a lot of times members know exactly what's going on and and getting a hold of those campaigns and then and then running with them that's what I that's what I think. I think if we're just going to sit there and say I'm being in the co-op and and we're going to sing kumbaya actually I love the song kumbaya but I mean if we're going to sit around and just do that and just and also stop talking to ourselves which means that we may have to change our language and that is something which actually is is is kind of culturally challenging but um but I think that's what's really important that we we turn outwards and we actually push but we need to think about our language as well. See I do agree with that but I also slightly disagree only because I think it's really important that we do go outwards I think we need to speak but we do talk far too much to ourselves but also it's my view that we don't talk enough to ourselves actually we don't learn enough from different between sectors and from different countries as well so I think if we talk more outside but also talk more amongst ourselves cooperate amongst cooperatives so no that's a really really good point. I mean Rose same question to you because I think a lot of people would say that actually you know the power of members is the democratic ownership part of it so for you what what how do we punish that that power? Yeah and I completely agree with Denise it's absolutely for for Harnes and I am a middle child so nothing is fair quite frankly. I'm a middle child too. Yeah exactly. A lot of middle children. I'll put that on the centre. What birth order are you? So but if you take it back to the pioneers what were they trying to do they were just outraged about how unfair it was that they couldn't get access to food it's really you know food that was good food at the right price and the right availability it's frustrating that we're pretty much there again now but similarly you know the amount of food co-ops that are springing up you know what all the co-ops are doing around access to food and poverty right now so yeah if you take it right back of course we need to harness that because we need to make things fairer you know we've got people are quite angry at the moment for a lot of reasons and a lot of it is to do with that imbalance of power you know the pandemic really did shine that light on the UK and demonstrate the inequalities across the UK and like I keep saying we've got solutions to that we've got ways that we can address that and I don't say this lightly when I say that actually getting that coverage in in whether it's the media or whether it's on you know various agendas it's hard you know it's like you say you know there's an image of that kind of um you know cooperative kind of idea it's gonna be stuck in my head now for the next two days but actually we're not fluffy and we're not this is real issues here that need addressing and we've got ways to do it and we've got organisations and I believe that I believe let's see what the census says but I believe that we've got a small army across the UK and we should be harnessing it and we should be addressing all of the issues and that's why it's brilliant what what co-op party do because they'll they'll they'll tap into those issues um with the many emails which I also get um they'll tap into that and that and that was why you know it says to Rebecca I really want Joe on there because you know co-op party are doing exactly that it's like what matters to you and and how can we help and how can we join that together um so yeah I absolutely believe we need to harness that we need to do more more to kind of get that engagement um and again and I know I'm back to me tech and digital infrastructure because the same the same is huge yeah we've we've got a structure our own but my point is if we joined it all up how powerful could that be uh for the movement and to making some noise Joe the I suppose for me in terms of that harness and the power there's that like in the way when I look at some of our work and when I look at some of the work of the uh the issues that we talk about in some ways I am looking at through it like a matrix of like sort of all I'm really seeing is clicks joins actions uh who does what for our open rate who does what for all of those sorts of things and why that sort of swung toward that why the the way in which I see it now is so different to how I saw our world of politics um some years ago is because of the power of numbers the power of that data the power of harnessing those numbers in order to achieve what we wanted to do when I started um um as a young person in British politics it was all a very different discussion it was a very different type of uh of way of getting your message across um if I would start you know long lunches and other things like that you know and now all I'm really seeing is is that data is those numbers going through so and in order to some of these numbers which uh the movement talks about 40 and 50 million memberships uh most of which on your board but there is amazing like in my head all all I could think of is what the we or I could do with that not I I can't send an email uh but what we could do uh with that amount of uh unharness power is like as we're trying to do what we're doing on a tiny fraction of that number a tiny fraction of that number we're trying to grow it but it's a tiny fraction so is there further unharnessing of power out of that sort of number and that sort of membership yeah definitely is the definitely is but it's got to be done with the purpose of why you you go on towards these people why you're inspiring how are you inspiring them it's not just uh email bombing it's uh there's a bit of thought in behind it I know I do joke and I do enjoy the email it's fine so we've got about 10 minutes left um so I'm going to open it up to questions I know I'm sure lots of people have questions and also if there are any questions on YouTube give us a shout and that'd be that'd be great um but I think what's really come out of this conversation so far is the fact that you know members are as I said at the beginning members are people and you know the cult movement it's passionate it's messy and that's okay but it's the question of what are we going to do about it how can we harness the power of members so if there are any questions we do have a couple of roving mics and I know that Elaine did it hand straight up at the back there I don't know that Central England do some wonderful things for their members and with their members so Elaine thanks very much what I would say is that perhaps a little less talking and a lot more doing might be the answer to getting members involved and certainly at Central England we put members at the absolute heart of everything and we work on the basis that it's a basic human need to belong to a group even if you are a season ticket holder or a churchgoer or anything that you belong to a club or a group everybody wants to belong to something and people who belong to co-ops have a different need and it's making them feel that they are part of it that they are part of the ownership of it it's not all about community that comes later it's about making the members feel that they have a stake in their co-operative and it's really important to get members actually doing things together all sorts of different activities we have classes I see them on Twitter somebody yesterday learned how to make a beautiful flower arrangement somebody else was at jewelry making Joanna over here runs a tatting class a lot of people don't know what tatting is but we we have lots and lots of groups of people I'm along with Natalie over here we are taking a group of members on a heritage visit to Whitby on Tuesday our members do things together co-operators should do it together it should be one of those slogans and I think that's so important that you get the members feeling this involvement doing things together and then you can get them working for the benefit of the community so I think that is probably you know the biggest take out message and something that I would say to take back to societies and particularly the co-op group where it all seems to be all about community and nothing about for individual members that seems to have gone and I think it's time that the National Members Council and Denise I'm speaking to you as the president hi Elaine I know very well she's amazing and I think it's time that we we got this sorted and got something a sub-national structure together for the members to participate I'll let somebody else answer that. Thanks Elaine and it's really interesting actually you brought up the idea of kind of belonging and especially church as well so when I was googling you know meaningful membership I was doing a bit of practice thinking okay where does meaningful membership come from if you google meaningful membership the thing that comes up most is the Methodist church actually it's a real big part it's a big part of their ministry saying what is meaningful membership for our congregation so that was a that was a really interesting link thanks Elaine and you want to come back on that well I know we've got a question over here I just I mean I think that's really I love the idea of of membership and I love the way that Elaine describes it because I do think that's really important because that sense of belonging actually is very good for your well-being and also again it makes you want to do do do more and it's and it's lovely I like the trip to well be and all of that stuff and I know those other council members who are also here and all this stuff too and and we can take the conversation back to Manchester when we when we go but but it's important I do think membership is important and I do feel that people you know they get involved because they feel valued and I think that's and but not only feel valued but also it's a transformative experience too so it transforms you and change you and it makes you I think a better person but also a better co-operator so I do think that's really important um Joey did you want to come back on this just one bit there Elaine do talk less and do more I think absolutely like they we we talk it in in our team about well it's if only us in our little organisation have heard about something happening or it's coming or the the amount of time that sometimes things take to percolate uh literally no one else has heard of it literally no one else has benefited from it literally no one else is inspired by it so that is like a watch word of how we try and operate is by doing more and talking about it much less uh because I think it is uh you you always find routes for people to find the meaning find the involvement find the the co-operation that you discuss as long as there was uh events tatting uh is a new one on me uh Joey to be perfectly honest um but whatever that expression is uh if it's happening it's better than it's not something it's better than nothing thank you just that that that point uh that uh we talked about earlier about a thing trying to create a way to engage members you know across the board with all that opportunity and stuff but yeah great point Elaine as always thank you thanks Elaine and it's a question over here could you say who you are as well hi yeah I'm Evelyn Godfrey I'm one of the directors of the mid counties cooperative society and also two small community cooperatives um so your video really resonated with me because I I grew up in Canada and um in uh New Brunswick that's in the the region of the migmar uh First Nations and um the big difference between uh the public perception of cooperation in in in Canada and and here is that there it's mainstream so to be a member of a cooperative and to be a member of a credit union is an absolutely mainstream thing it's it's meaningful in the same way membership is meaningful in the same way as as here so uh housing cooperatives for example very very common in in Canada whereas here I get the impression that people are still thinking it's something like a hippie commune if you're a member of a housing cooperative it's normal in Canada to be a member of a credit union for example um and in in the migmar region in New Brunswick um there's a um there's one energy um provider and supplier and generator for the whole province of of New Brunswick and Be Power and it's a cooperative so everybody gets their energy um from a cooperative and everybody could be on the board of that energy um supplier and and provider so my question is what is a co-op movement doing to to make cooperative membership mainstream in British society that's what has happened in Canada and the United States indeed but in the last hundred and fifty years it seems to have failed to have happened um here in in britain thanks very yes do you want to say this one yeah 100 percent agree with you and and Denise touched on it earlier as well what about the next generation of cooperatives young people um one of the reasons was inspired to do that um sensors is because I don't know the answer to this but in in Finland 80 percent of individuals are members of a cooperative and it's completely and utterly culturally embedded like I say in Canada it's embedded that you're part of a credit union we're not embedded here when we talk about young people you can't just go oh you're 18 now can you pay attention to us you know they should be growing up understanding about when they work together you know we need this in our our schools as as we know in the education system right through you know from GCSEs to you know A levels and degrees you know you look at business farms that the co-op model isn't even there but even if it was you know who's in a co-op what are they doing you know so you'll have um a charity sale in a school well what about actually you are coming together to address the situation that we start off in the dining room and everyone's hungry at once how we're going to deal with that and if you start giving young people ways to show how you know cooperating together can achieve results I strongly believe that we've got to be doing that with our young people again in terms of you know embedded into the mainstream this is you know Rebecca touched on it why are we rebranding why we're looking at it because we need to do that we need to get that why do I keep saying make some noise you know this is the start of that new era where you know there is a moment in time we are very reflective of the early start of the pioneers in terms of what's happening in the world right now and why it's needed if we don't grasp it now I don't know when we will um so it's going to take I mean the good bit is um I'll know if I've done my job well in about um 20 years um but you know that's my point you know when's the best time to plant a tree you know 20 years ago when's the next best time to plant a tree today so we need to be seeding that across the board in everything we do we need to join up and create this new era of cooperating I'm really glad you brought up education actually so I was had a conversation it's part of these conversations again with Ross Henry who heads up cooperative business in New Zealand and she was saying exactly the same thing so in New Zealand cobs account for 18% 18% of GDP and there's no legislation for co-ops and it is not taught in the mainstream and the reason it's so high is because most of them are dairy cobs agricultural coops is a huge part of the New Zealand economy but one of her aims as well is to bring that education PCM you know they need economists they need lawyers they need business people who know what co-op is to support that infrastructure and grow even further I know we've got a question over here was there a question of the back as well or just just Nick and are there any questions online or are we okay for now no okay thank you you could have gone halfway in there thanks John Nick Matthews heart of England Carpiture Society the oldest Carpiture Society in the United Kingdom 1832 it's a 190th anniversary so we're pleased to be here with you youngsters just a couple of quick comments I think that the thing that I think that we miss in this conversation is the fact that people join a co-op because they get a member benefit the carp has got to deliver value for that member and that value could be in the form of you know having a shop where there isn't one or it could be a form of having a warm glow feeling about the community which also quite nice if there's something returned to them in terms of the economics the finish example is a very good example to be a member of an S group affiliated cooperative in Finland costs 100 euros you when you join your your dividend accumulates in your share account until you get to 100 euros and then you become a four member and you get five percent return on what you spent the amount of money that was returned by the finished card to their members on average they're 2,476,000 members that they've got in a population of just over four million so you know that's overall almost 40% of the adult population are in the co-op was 176 euros on average they got returned to them as members so all the woolly nice things that they'd like to do are damn easy when you've got 247 million pounds of working capital from your members for nothing so i think that one of the problems we've got in British co-operatives is essentially we're under capitalised and we haven't tapped into membership in I would say to use a cliche in a meaningful way of getting them to put capital into co-ops I think the point you made earlier about the fact that you know if you joined the Rothschild pioneers today the equivalent amount you would have to put into a share account would be 90 pounds 90 pounds you can't give anybody anything for a pound as a return I would best get any of the big co-ops Russell probably knows the actual number it probably costs more than a pound to maintain the share register and your dividend card just as a as an overhead of a structure over it so recruiting a member for a most big co-op is a net loss from the first day to only ask them for a pound over the lifetime of their membership to me is such a sad situation especially when we've now got the technology to link up the share ledger with the membership card so that people could go back to keeping more than a pound in their account and they could we could have a serious discussion about how we get members to contribute more than a pound or in sharing some of the worker co-ops or the other co-ops in the room they expect a lot more from their members than a pound to be a member and I think that we've got we've really got to think about that quite seriously because I think that if we think if we look forward interest rates are back on the rise we've had a bit of a golden period with debt where it's been stable but if we have to go into the market for capital we we're going to struggle to raise the capital and I think most of the big co-ops in Britain you know I would say this wouldn't I but I think we're broadly under capitalised and I think without meaningful capital you can't give meaningful benefits to your members and I think that that if we could launch that boil we would have solved the economic problem the parallel problem of the reallocations problem where I'm absolutely with all the four of you are is if you could explain in a sentence or less in a sentence even just a three word slogan which seems to be the way we work these days what it means to be a member in a store or in a you know in a quick turnbines that would be fantastic because normally the problem when we're recruiting members or you're trying to get somebody to join if there's not a clear transparent benefit then you have to explain what the membership means and then three weeks later when you're finished that kind of way to somebody else and the other problem is many of our commercial competitors you know the investor owned businesses that we compete with they've pinched the idea of membership but it's not real membership but it looks like membership so it's a fuzzy thing what means to be a member so I think that that arena has been fuzzed up so that when we talk about membership they think we're talking about a loyalty card or some you know gym membership or something like that which is fine but it means that it's not clear to the potential member which is Joe's point about how you get people who are not members to become members Joe do you want to come back at all yes please the not in a good way not in such powerful comments and contributions have made me sit up in my chair because now I'm thinking the other was obviously before as well but these these two these two pieces in particular so it's not necessarily a direct response to what were valuable and important contributions but it's some reflection about where this discussion is being is going towards the first for myself and I've worked in this this party but also the movement for a number of years now is don't get in don't get incumbent by history don't get wound up about how long we've been around don't get wound up about that amount of time it's a source of pride it's a source of strength it's a source of longevity and legitimacy but it doesn't sustain it's you know hardly any organisation hardly any system hardly any company trades on being around a long time like they trade on what they do today and I think that that's something we've got to get our heads into I mean I never rarely talk about history when I'm trying to communicate about what we're up to because I think for for my own mind it's not how others do and it goes to that bit about being mainstream I think that in terms of mainstream you've got to be relevant you've got to earn it you can't expect it to turn up you can't expect it to arrive at our doorstep that we become mainstream we've got to earn that right we've got to earn it in this country as much as anyone else does in terms of international example and I think that all we should take from international example is best practice I don't think we should compare ourselves to other systems I don't think we should compare ourselves to what others do in some ways because that that you know the Egyptian housing cooperative statistic the Swedish statistic the the billion member statistic these are these are things which hang around our necks these are things which we worry about and we think why why aren't we like that why can't we be like that and it frustrates me because I think that it's a bit like the trains people say all the trains work ever so well in place x an international example is just like it's not comparable it doesn't speak to the history it doesn't speak to the socialisation of what what our country's been doing so you take the best practice you apply it to the system we have we earn our mainstream stripes by being relevant and in terms of how do we grow we know the answer to this it's not we're not we we don't have to discover it next just talks about capitalisation investment legislation regulation development and education that's how our movement grows and being relevant they're the six bits we don't have to rediscover those bits because we know it we've been around long enough to know it next just a fantastic articulation of what's required in terms of capitalisation but we could go through each one of those six and do the same so I think for ourselves as as part of this most remarkable group of people and this remarkable legacy that we we we've inherited that let's be comfortable and confident about what we're doing let's be comfortable and confident within our own skin about how we're doing it and take the best of the tools we have available rather than worrying about the tools we don't have and by the way campaign legislate haras and and change those five principles of how we've grown I think that's a pretty good summary sorry for lunch thank you very much for everybody please put your hands together of our panel thank you it is now lunch it is now lunch time it's lunch in the bell month sweet and then we're back here at 140 for a very fair unfair industry music as well as breakouts with worker and multi-stakehold of the co-op funding the co-op difference in hair what would an ideal social persons business and the regional impact in cooperative working enjoy your lunch everyone thank you well done thank you all the rooms and we've got to stand more people log online for this session unsurprisingly uh today so socials we're going to be addressing something now that the cooperative movement isn't very fairness and equality and this is an industry that sadly doesn't represent those values so I'm going to hand over now to our esteemed panel to talk about music it's not fair thank you can hear me yeah music music exists in most of what we all do it literally soundtracks our lives on the way to work while we're shopping watching films going out music defines some people's lives it gives pleasure and it eases pain music is the most shared art form in the world is how we communicate across borders how we build relationships it's democratic it's immediate and thanks to the internet music now lives forever and is accessible to over 80 percent of the world we can all agree that the legacy and cultural value music brings to this country is priceless but in real terms it also contributes considerable capital to the uk economy 5.8 billion in 2019 with the total export revenue at 2.9 billion up from 2.7 billion the year before in addition to the industry's direct economic contribution music tourism alone contributed 4.7 billion in terms of spending to the uk economy in 2019 these figures are predicted to rise with music sales almost doubling in the u.s. by 2030 and yesterday gogman sacks issued their influential music in the air report forecasting a global revenue growth of 24 percent in 2022 across all sectors followed by 8 percent growth in 2023 all in all the value of music is increasing so taking all this into account why has the value of music historically been so undervalued and why doesn't the business of music reflect these increases and these democratic values i've been lucky enough to have worked in the music industry for over 25 years i've run a management and pr company called wasted youth music the industry is more often than not an inspiring place to be but as a manager and a publicist that represents artists i've unfortunately seen too many unjust precedents that seem impossible to reform and a lack of a lack of accountability isn't it incumbent on all of us to be fairer and to be better this has inspired me to start a new type of music label supported by the co-op a co-op with artist at its heart with ethics fairness and sustainability built in details will be available later in the year but if you're interested in becoming a member then please get in touch andy bernham has a few words to say on this many of us try to source our food and our energy ethically and i think we need to apply the same considerations to how we source our music and our creative products music is such an important part of the city region that i leave it creates jobs and fuels passions but access to the industry is increasingly becoming the opportunity of the privilege which locks out many great artists and talents that's why i'm delighted that co-ops uk is working on addressing the balance and supporting the development of a fair and just music label co-op and endeavouring to change the lives of the people who make and work in music and make our lives so much better so i've gathered together these wise minds to talk about fairness in the music industry from the ongoing streaming debate to transparency equality duty of care and social inclusion and how the industry can work in collaboration and co-operation to solve these fundamental issues okay let me just quickly introduce everyone so you know who's speaking sarah on the end you've just met and you know uh paul next to her is from is the CEO of aim we've victor who's on the co-op board so a bit of a hometown here i presume and he's also um the chair of the urban development foundation we've got tom gray who is the chair of the ivis academy he's the founder of the broken record campaign and known to me and a lot of you first i imagine as a member of gomez um with terry tilsley who is a music tech consultant and also an artist in her own right i've collin young from the chartered accountant and uh from cc young and uh david martin CEO of the featured artist coalition so um obviously and i'm paul that i will but um obviously a lot of what we've been discussing has made headlines not just within our industry but beyond that into national press and a lot of the reason for that has been i think tom's broken record campaign uh which has seen you know the inside of pop star's houses broadcast via zoom into the houses of parliament and select committees tom um i thought i'd start with you um how open do you think the music industry is to change and where are the areas where you think there is an opportunity to increase the fairness for the people within it um that's a very difficult question um i think most people in the music industry love music and want to help musicians and um but unfortunately a lot of the old structures that we have in place um are the same ones with that we've had since the 20th century and and the relationship between labels and artists are broadly similar to you know if you go back to 1958 and the drifters doing a deal for two percent of the money and we've you know we've improved that significantly since then for the most part but still artists are contracted contracted parties who have you know we don't we're not protected as employees we don't have worker protection um there's a bit of a sink or swim um shall we say culture and uh an exploitation is the name of the game and always has been um uh there isn't much of a duty of care unfortunately you know the point is there's always and we shouldn't overstate it there's always good actors in any industry and and we shouldn't and there's some amazing people working in music business but unfortunately you know there are multinational corporations who are still exploiting the work of artists based on contracts that they signed with them in the 1950s 1960s 1970s and you know but these companies don't have any of the costs that they had in the 20th century they're no longer manufacturing companies they're no longer distribution companies for the most part um the digital platforms have become their distribution companies for them and yet they're still keeping 85 percent of the cash um because that's what these contracts say um now for me that's so obviously fundamentally wrong and uh and probably shocking to you when you let you know listen to some great old record you you turn it on and you stream it you might expect the the person you're listening to to get paid that money but there's every likelihood that they're not going to see a single penny of that um unfortunately and that's just the brutal truth um so you know I suppose a big question is is the music industry ready to change I really bloody hope so because it's really bloody needed and um and I think a lot of people do want to change and you've seen you know I mean Paul can speak to this he has members um big companies who have done really progressive things over the years to try and be at the forefront of progress um but I think you'd be hard pressed to find an artist in the country who thinks that we've progressed far enough and fast enough to really reflect where we are in the 21st century and that these companies have a true duty of care to account clearly to their artists to explain what their position is it's a hugely asymmetric power relationship some kid is good at playing the guitar or great at writing tracks on a laptop and they are effectively brought into a system where they're contracted to a multinational corporation now if anyone can't see the asymmetry in that um they're not really sort of looking um and you know there's there's a whole structures that around that that can then lead to sort of bad outcomes because music lawyers often are getting paid mostly because they're writing new contracts for music companies so are they really working for the clients or are they working for the companies things can get a little confusing in that relationship and so this for me it's just a very very pragmatic even though I can be quite shouty about it and it's really just asking for a pragmatic realistic 21st century ethical sustainable growing up industry because I think there's just a little bit too much of the wild west about the music industry still and maybe that might seem fun but I think for most artists it ends up just feeling a bit criminal and so I think I've answered your question yeah can I contribute indeed please yeah um one thing I would have observed is is when I look at um the relationship between um a creative so a songwriter in one part and a recording artist those are the what I would are the creatives and then you have entrepreneurs which are record companies and publishing companies are quite distinct when we look at songwriting as the music is written the words are written that is when the copyright originates and it starts there with the songwriter so the copyright vests with the songwriter and it will always come back to them so they'll assign it to a publishing company 15 years it comes back to them so then with regard to publishing with regard to songwriting there is a strong element of equity for the songwriter that's completely different for records the copyright legislation provides that he that arranges it he that finances owns the copyright or she well I was quoting the legislation that or she so the person who finances it arranges it owns the copyright and that is where the imbalance is so we talk on records about a royalty it's not a royalty it's a profit participation and the rights always vest with the record label and that's the disparity and those rights vest in perpetuity and that's the difficulty in the current structure we have you can't break that and that's where you need wisdom you need grey hairs to look at it and challenge it and say is the balance correct but it does need legislative change it ain't gonna happen by itself it can't because of that fundamental where the rights are vested in college just as you're speaking can the music industry as someone who sits in the middle looking at flows of money and that kind of thing within music industry can the music industry is an industry that can afford to be fair or it can now um that there's um the record companies publishing companies are making a lot of money that's for sure um so things can change particularly with regards to streaming which is what government is um looking at so we've had a department culture media and sport examine it make recommendations that we um absorb a different model of how the money be divided between the record company recording artist songwriter um so they have that those recommendations were um denied by government and said let's put them on hold we want to collect more evidence it's been elevated further we now have the competitions market authority so that is profound and it's interesting to observe how government is pursuing this and record companies response record companies are responding um we now have unrecu balances um anything that was um prior so predominantly heritage artists prior to 2000 is going to be paid through now so you can see the record companies are responding they are seeing they need to do something um the reason it was 2000 was because that was before iTunes digital so that was the reason for 2000 Sony have but but but if you did that obviously it'd be a limited population because there's only so many artists that are pre 2000 they'll never grow Sony have shifted and said we will do it on a rolling basis 20 years why 20 years that I don't get you can drive at 18 you can drink beer in America at 21 I would say let's look to divine wisdom let's look to the scriptures there it says debt be forgiven after seven years that's my suggestion probably cool Terry did you I think it's been very interesting hearing about Sarah's new project which sounds amazing and I think let's just have a little rewind to to principles um and first of all there are a lot of new ways of releasing music people are self-releasing there are new kinds of contracts that are um less fair we have to find new ways and structures to accommodate things and create a a fairer industry and with regard to your question about you know do people want change yes a lot of people want change and the work that Tom and other people have been doing has been amazing and completely changed the agenda and getting uh sort of rights and payments on people's minds um but there are a lot of people who don't want change they fear it I've spent a few years as chair and a board member of Resonate which is a music streaming cooperative and uh it means it's set up so that artists listeners and workers and volunteers get a share in future profits and it's what I would call radically transparent and through my voyages through the industry um you do see that some big organisations that have been going a long time are worried that they uh they may cease to exist if there's change and also there can be fear from artists about reprisals if they embrace new ways of working and that was referred to um during the streaming inquiry um and also let's talk about branding briefly very briefly and sponsorship so all these things that are supposed to be the saviours of the music industry and of artists are also a very convenient way of kind of stopping too much discussion because some people organisations are fearful of embracing new ways of working because they think that um you know if they uh try to find a non swear word here if they annoy large streaming organisations their their careers their projects will be decimated but sorry I was excuse me I was going to rewind even further a little bit back to principles um we exist the FAC exists to provide a collective voice for artists and I think if you look at I agree with lots of what's been said already but if you look at the exploitation of of music that's often been done to to Collins point that's been done by intermediaries not the creators and and I think that's largely been done without the involvement of those those creators whether that's record labels whether that's venues whether that's promoters the artists or the songwriters largely not been involved there's there's been an intermediary and I think in this conversation I think if we're going to talk about fairness I think that actually that there are there are principles to fairness they need to be considered but they need to be considered with the involvement of those creatives and I think there are things like fairness and legality are not the same thing I think that fairness is about context and fairness is ever evolving and so I think it's about bringing us into a sort of centralised conversation bringing creators and all parties into a centralised conversation and I think that that's actually where I would start on on the sort of principles of this and do you get a sense from the members of the FAC the artist members of what their priorities are in that conversation what are the issues that they really are seeking fairness around at the moment all of the things that we'll probably end up speaking about certainly about record contracts certainly about live performances certainly about the use of their image rights or their all of those things their merchandise sales and so all of those things are important to artists Paul I'm sure we'll speak to the new models that are out there and they'll have lots of members who who have different new ways of doing things and I think that change is happening possibly not happening at the speed that any of us would like to see but it is happening and I think if we were having this conversation 20 years ago it'd have been a different conversation but but I think all of the things that you talk about all of the things that we'll talk about are relevant and are of interest to to our members certainly I also think that one other thing is I think that sort of resetting the conversation is really important to our industry because whilst we're worth 5.8 billion in 2019 that's far below what we should we should be able to generate that's far below our actual worth I think we're really going to maximise that by coming together as an industry I think outwardly the perception of us can be can be problematic for us making progress and I think these sorts of conversations and there's sorts of things that are beginning to happen are really important in terms of in terms of driving that change and maximising our potential. Paul you've been referred to a lot already. I'm really enjoying actually listening to the discussion I think a lot of really good and important points have been made. Tom I think your description of wanting a you said pragmatic grown-up sustainable 21st century industry I would only add to that diverse and inclusive and I'm in. I think you know we're so aligned on so many things I think you know when you get into a conversation about what does fair mean we did this in the government thing what does fair mean everybody's different perspective depending on where they're coming from is going to have a slightly different interpretation of fair and that's okay because hopefully at some point we'll figure out how to all compromise and meet meet somewhere in the middle. I think one of the dangers of these conversations is that it's very easy to talk about the music industry as a sort of monolithic entity the music industry and talk about labels and particularly we think immediately of the major labels and that's natural you know many respects so my job is kind of advocating for supporting and and and representing the independent music community which is a whole kind of plethora of SMEs a very diverse community from self-releasing artists through to established long-standing independent labels it's great thing Paul Burt here one of our one of our A members here for co-op coffee fair trade coffee which is delicious I tried it quick plug for a member of course but look I think the other thing is we think that it's easy to think of the music industry as monolithic it's also interesting to think of deals in a one-size-fits-all way this kind of old world big advanced royalty deal that was an assignment of copyright this way you're selling your copyright as an artist not all deals are like that there's a whole plethora of deal types and I think I think the exciting thing for me in the industry is that so many different people are doing it in different ways and I think that means that the solutions are difficult to find because one solution will benefit one group but not necessarily another group who are doing things in a different way it's exciting to hear about the co-op that you're setting up there might be some solutions that are being tabled that would benefit people on an old-fashioned advanced royalty deals but that may be prejudice people who are in a cooperative structure who are working differently the other thing I was going to touch on actually is the introductory remarks today I felt I could have been at an aim conference everything that was said about working together being stronger together cooperating knowledge exchange exchange of information mutual reinforcement mutual support aligned interests doing business with each other networking that you know literally it was kind of like my speech from the aim conference um there's a huge amount of alignment there and I think resonance with the with the cooperative movement which is why I was so excited to come today and I think the final thing so I don't want to hold this because there's a lot of us the final thing I'd say is my like most people in the music industry I've had a meandering walk through it it hasn't been a straight line and I've kind of had a taste of it from lots of different sides so I've worked as an artist been signed to an independent label I've worked I continue to work as a session musician so kind of gun for hire playing my instrument I've been an entrepreneur grown my own business in music in fact founded a cooperative in music in 2005 for which we learned some very painful lessons from and threw up all the complexities and the issues and the questions that you have to iron out to figure out how you can make a sustainable cooperative um that lasts and now I have an academic job with Berkeley which is about learning from the next generation coming in hearing what their hopes dreams fears and concerns are and trying to help them navigate those first steps on their journey and make that a positive experience for them given the confidence to find their own way so I think what I love is that this panel has so many different perspectives on where we are right now but the message is change is happening would like to see it happen a bit more quickly I think there's generational shift going on I think there's also many more voices at the table than there have been in the past in some of these conversations which is helping the conversation but I think because of that diversity it breeds complexity ours is a complex technical industry anyway I mean Colin just hearing you scratch the surface of copyright and copyright law I mean it's a complex technical industry so we've got this thing we've got a complex technical industry with multiple pathways and increasing diversity and somehow we've got to be we have to be all of us better at having non-defensive conversations about what good looks like I'm saying okay good for one might not be good for everyone but let's take it one step at a time and we'll get there something yeah I totally agree and you say that we're not a monolithic industry necessarily but to the outside world and to government and people who can help change we are and I think there's a question about how we present ourselves to the wider world and to government etc we should do that better and it's all about being more cooperative and collaborative and having a centralized discussion in place for all the information to come together in order to do that yeah exactly and not being defensive and being more collaborative yeah and we have to find a better way to do that being an accountant my emphasis is on on the cash where's the money I would say that you know we're talking about you know change and it's you know things are happening positive from a financial perspective that's not happening there is fundamental resistance from major record companies fundamental resistance is not changing it's not I agree on a creative level creatively it's beautiful because it's based on merit and that cuts through so we do have diversity at a creative level not necessarily at an executive level when you look at the large organisations on the sewer there but at a creative level the bit that I work at that happens but I would emphasize with regard to the finances with the relationship between a record label and artist it is master servant that's it a major major a major record label that's it victor as a man who sort of has a foot both in the music world and outside of intrigue to get your perspective on this and from other industries and okay so um I'm not speaking for the co-op group I want to see some college on the car group looking really nervous you're all right you're all right okay chill I'm just I'm here because I chair somebody called urban united and we changed our name and there's a reasons for that I won't go into it but it's run by Pamela McCormack so I'm channeling Pamela I'm the chair and we're about to open the talent house in London and I'm just gonna so three things I love music you will those of you that know me not many people do in this room but I've got headphones in my pocket I just love it my kids going to doing performing arts my brother's a musician my observations of the music industry are as follows it's a pint of Guinness right I'm a six foot black guy um I tend to say yes to Rose all the time but I noticed that the people with the power don't look like me they just don't right the people that represent the music industry often don't look me don't look like me it is fundamentally exploitative on every level so um I don't know the demographics of of creatives probably at the younger end the people who reap the money probably at the older end the reason why I got involved in UD is because yes the music industry is complex it's complex but fundamentally it's a pipeline isn't it artists usually young right get discovered right if the if they they become small businesses but often don't have the skills to be small businesses and then they get taken on by somebody you may have the skills but not the not the villains to be honest or even decent which is exploitative in itself so when people talk about safety um I mean it from a child protection point of view literally because urban development works with 16 to 25 year olds I've observed some pretty pretty terrible things so it is exploitative and it's quite worryingly so and then and then if they're unlucky they have a career that lasts well as long as that sentence and they might they might make some money but that lasts as long as the sentence but someone else makes yeah so I think it does I think it cries out for radical reform and I am sceptical not cynical I'm skeptical of the notion that the music industry in and of itself will change because it's the right thing to do so I'm with you and it's going to require legislation um but it goes beyond the music industry so music in schools is weighted towards classical music the arts council fund what they call infrastructure I had to point out to them that Figaro would have been his 14th century rap it was played in pubs it was the equivalent of I don't know the worst kind of social disease you know music that people um and if you go to italy's so the problem is music education is really difficult to get hold of it's biased towards classical music as opposed to what people call popular music which rules out certain types of young people because they can't afford access to it which is the other reason we set up um we set up urban development the pipeline for um for black music it's fragmented so black kids you know talents everywhere opportunity isn't that's the other reason we set up UD and the workforce in the music industry I have to tell you is just so under representative of diversity in all its form but particularly race and I just think that um we need to be honest about it now the cooperative response I'm going to say something that I'm going to probably say again this afternoon is the co-op movement is pretty white so when you set up a music co-op there's a there's a real risk that's going to actually repeat exactly the same issues that are present in the mainstream music system so I think we have to do some radical some pretty radical things but fundamentally because of the age spread the thing that I would focus on is it we can talk about fairness it is fundamentally unfair probably illegal and all kinds of wrong to exploit young people full-stop period therefore the music industry should be agreeing to a set of standards and ways of working contractually legally financially and certainly operationally that protecting people and I'll be working with Geraint because I think that's the thing that needs to be done first everything else is second David if you right um yeah I would I would agree with almost all of that I think I think um just just to I suppose set out our position so look on from a safety perspective and um I'm from a um uh a child protection perspective 100% fully agree in terms of um I suppose legislative intervention in other parts of the way that the industry operates um to to to bring fairness our position is that um we would welcome that if if the industry can't get his house in order and we're beginning to get to the point we're getting close we're getting close to the point where we we've tried and we've tried and we think we may not get our house in order now there is it comes with its own risks and we've seen other countries implement legislation that hasn't worked very well however the FAC's position is if we cannot achieve what we want to achieve or what we need we think we need to achieve that legislative back backstop will be necessary I think the other point I just wanted to to pick up on David can I just ask why do you think that is that the music industry can't get its house in order I think I think there's a great deal of entrenched um there's a great deal of entrenched I've entrenched operation within the music industry promoters venues yeah a bit of that as well quite a lot of that promoters venues and the traditional label structures are decades old I think it's I think this conversation has only been happening in the last couple of decades really it feels like to me so yeah I think that's part of the reason um something else that victor said which I 100% agree with is that talent is everywhere and opportunity is not um and this as well as this sort of neatly I'm sorry to do this to you Tom this sort of neatly ties things up into into one conversation but a couple of weeks ago PRS for music which is the collecting society in the UK for songwriters and publishers um elected its new council uh new council members that was eight new council members I think to say there was a lack of diversity in that election would be not even an understatement it was it was it was very very poor after many years of the industry trying to push PRS into into the position that it would do something around this now PRS also funds or partially funds the PRS foundation which is the UK's leading talent talent development organization the the diversity of projects that PRS foundation has funded is is incredible and whether that's social class whether that's gender whether that's sexuality whether that's disability or any other protected characteristics PRS foundation has been an absolute success in what is done over the last 20 years during that same meeting of the of the council members being being announced it was announced that the decision was taken to cut the funding from PRS to the PRS foundation by 60% in 2024 so I think that that's an area where when I you know I'm sort of um I'm cautious in in when I'm talking about progress and and optimism for the future because you see these sorts of things happening and I think that's an area which which talks to to to Victor's point and to Colin's point that well are we really making progress so I suppose that that's the point I wanted to make with regards to these are these are the sorts of elements that make us think we're making no progress Terry and then I'll pull yeah um on the PRS on the big problems it's not all about the PRS they don't have one member one vote I'm a member I can't vote I don't earn enough in royalty so there's there's a lot of kind of democratic historical deficits if you like and that's one of the reasons why it's so important that we build new structures and with things like cooperative structures you can hardwire in fairness you can you know make stipulations from the very beginning if you want to play with algorithms you could say well shall we have an algorithm that make sure that playlists are you know more diverse more representative the one thing we do benefit from at the moment and people who don't know so much about the industry might not be aware of all this is there's been a raft of amazing research from organisations like the F list from women in control which is taking a very detailed look at the the pitiful figures when it comes to representation both in terms of people's background and and also the pitiful amount of women in music who are registered songwriters and a tiny example but I'm a member of 2 rising it's a group for female and non-binary producers and engineers why is it called 2 rising I'll leave you to guess Paul I think I mean look I think what we're seeing as we get into the detail of this is how fragmented the industry is I think absolutely I agree with pretty much everything Victor said I'm pleased to say Terry in our organisation we our board is 65 female 40% diverse by ethnicity and you know Nadia Khan our chair who founded women in control and we're hopefully positive actors in the fight to make our industry more equitable diverse and inclusive I think one of the things I was going to point to of course is the independent community I think to challenge the idea that the industry might not change under its own steam I think there is generational change happening and I think there is shift I think it's way too late my hope is it's not too little too late my hope is that we can do enough I think the government pressure from the stream inquiry is very helpful in that regard I think Tom the work you've been doing is a phenomenal campaign and I think is bringing better conversation to the table the deals that I see have evolved significantly you know talk about the drifters in the 50s and 2% royalties and we're now in a very different place in terms of contemporary deals and there are issues we know with legacy contracts and those are being addressed whether it's they're being addressed sufficiently as an ongoing debate we're all having and that's that's really healthy but the thing I would point to is is an initiative from the independent community which was a worldwide initiative called the fair digital deals declaration and this was a unilateral move by the independence who wanted to kind of draw a line in the sand and said actually we want to play fair and the fair digital deals declaration is just a series of commitments that the independent labels can sign up to and and a lot of them attach it to record deals when they're doing them with artists to say look we abide by these principles and that comes to like if there are a big chunky one-off payments that come in from a streaming platform they share those fairly with the artists if if there are other stipulations in the deal but it's basically um I'll recommend Victor I don't know if you've seen it but I'll share it with you after this but the fair digital deals declaration is the sort of thing that actually if we can coalesce around as as as an industry could be really good and one thing that one thing that gives me hope is that in December last year we came up with an idea called the the global music climate pact and it was an idea that actually you know one of the most significant challenges facing all of us right now is is the climate crisis and that we collectively can't address the climate crisis unless we come together and and in a fragmented sector like music if we're all running off doing our own thing we're never going to have holistic solutions that actually move the needle on climate so it started slightly as a thought experiment just to say can we actually get everybody around the table and can we actually get everybody to say yes to something and I'm not saying it was easy but we did it we did it at a global level we got the majors in the room we got the bigger indies in the room and now it's being rolled out we partnered with UNEP so the United Nations Environmental Protection we've got other stakeholders in the room we've got the big streamers in the room YouTube and Spotify and the others to say come on we need to share data we need to work together this is a pre competitive issue all of us can agree this is not about competition this is about actual the competition for survival I would suggest so that gives me hope I think there is change it's not everywhere and it's not at the same pace and yes greed is a huge factor and or the human condition pursues us all right but I think the work's being done and I think I think more conversations like this more groups coming together like this will take us forward what I say is we just got to keep the pressure up to make enough of a difference quickly enough for it to really count Paul can I just ask because obviously we legislation has been mentioned and I knew and there might not be any sort of sense in the independent community but it does seem to be like we the legislation that's been mentioned has possibly not aimed at a lot of your members do you any get any sense from them whether they would welcome or be against well listen the biggest fear we have is that the aim of the legislation will be to clobber the majors right I think that's pretty clear um the majors may have the margin to absorb it the smaller businesses may not have the scale to have the luxury of being able to afford those kind of things and if it's a one size fits all we are really concerned that small businesses will be collateral damage and that will be most damaging to like the grassroots and most diverse area of new investment in new artists new voices coming up through UK music and so yeah we are we're really worried about it and we feel slightly disempowered I mean we're at the table it's great to be at the table but at the same time it's not like we have the power to like just push a button and make it go away but we have to encourage engagement Tom I'm noticing yeah I just want to say I think the simple facts is is is if you give any group of workers or employees um right um as a rule um historically their employers haven't liked it and there's a reason for that um because they'll have to pay them more be more transparent with them um give them better terms um it will be more equitable um but this is the point right um if you can't run a business where you're being equitable and have a duty of care to the people you're working with if you can't do all of those things maybe you shouldn't be in business and that as far as I'm concerned is where we ought to be in the 21st century um so and in regards to all these other questions within the industry it's all about problems of transparency why do these decisions get made at PRS and people don't know and I can't even tell you why because there's a lack of transparency sorry I should just point out the reason I apologised to Tom earlier is Tom was one of the members that was reelected to the council so it wasn't clear I am a Jew from Merseyside but and the yeah so not totally without diversity but the uh the the the the the the kind of I don't know I find a lot of the problems that we have are so structural and hidden and entrenched that it just engenders anger in the community and understandably because people need to feel protected they need to feel like they've got rights um and at the moment they don't most of the European countries have been taking on the um copyright directive which has been giving progressively in different countries um writers and performers um transparency regulations um it's giving them um remuneration protections and because the UK dropped out of uh Europe as I'm sure you're all only too aware we haven't got them so in fact we're actually playing catch up at the moment we're falling behind our European counterparts in terms of providing blanket protections for everybody in music be they a black kid from Birmingham or an 80 year old white guy who's still in the business um and that's it's those protections that I think are just fundamental I don't I don't understand any argument where there's a there might be a good commercial reason for not doing it but uh certainly from a mathematical or human level it's like not if but when I mean can I wholeheartedly agree as the father of a kid that wants to go into the music industry you know beautiful young black woman I wholeheartedly agree with you I think it's unacceptable to argue that um uh it's coming I've got a bit I'm an impatient person it should have come like you know years ago really I think the music industry is probably one of the last bastions of avoiding avoiding change um I think there's some things you know as I said you know let's start with the with the demographic let's start with the fact we're dealing with children in by and large um how about legislation that said that any contract or any relationship with an artist under the age of 25 where the where the agent accountant whatever has has no track record or no record of providing proper safeguarding is null and void literally null and void you would soon get people really interested in the psychological emotional welfare of young people both entering the music industry in the music industry leaving the music industry where there is very little at the moment um united development I don't know why I said urban development united development has a safeguarding officer we have um the means by which young people can be safe in developing their talent the thing that the one of the things I don't understand given the amount of wealth in the music industry and there is a lot of wealth it's just really really poorly distributed and I you know it's probably is why they're not doing some the things that other industries do which is collectively fund the bottom even in football now there's talk of you know the sorts of all right the sorts of hang on hang on let me let me finish because I know I'm displaying ignorance but I'll just let me have a go at it so the the the idea that the industry might actually put together funds to develop more talent houses with structures the problem one of the problems is that it is so people at the top keep it and the people at the bottom lose it and you know there are some things that should just be really basic safeguarding is the one the notion I'll just say something about diversity because the word diversity is pretty meaningless and it usually means to high it usually leads to hierarchy of oppression so you know I'm a woman I'm disabled I believe in an evidence-based approach right so I'm going to say something now that people will almost certainly tell me I'm saying because I'm a black kid a black guy I wish I was a black kid but a black guy which is that all the evidence all the evidence on interventions in diversity in organisations and industries says this you start with race and the reason why you start with race is really obvious when you think about it the last time I looked black people were women disabled lgbtq plus you get married and the music industry often avoids the central issue which is race actually by having a conversation about diversity and frankly they know they're doing it which is why nothing's changed so I just think I just think we need to what's the word get real and be a little more impatient and start with the basics you are exploiting children that should stop right you should have another an approach to diversity which is evidence based do that we should support the upcoming industry not least because the more talent you have at the bottom the more money you make full stop period most industries do that they have they have proper schemes to support it so you know it might be exciting to live in the wild west but people get killed and it's really stupid I yes just to come back in on that um conscious that not everybody in the room is from a music industry background so so to reiterate victor's point and to and to clarify what I was saying earlier about the PRS PRS for music and PRS foundation so PRS for music collects money some of that money quite a lot of money 700 million pounds this year or close to some of that money cannot be attributed to who it belongs to for data issues that money we believe should be used to fund exactly those types of programs however that money is actually distributed in a in a fashion that is pro rata which says I won't name artist names but the very biggest artist you take the biggest amount of that money despite the fact that it's clearly not belonging to you so I completely agree with victor with regards to funding talent that's exactly what the PRS foundation is for and it's and in terms of its diversity it's exactly what it's been very very successful at doing so 8000 8000 initiatives funded in 20 years as I say you should really you should really check out what the work that they've done but see it cut their funding cut by 60% just to be just sorry I'm not having to go with it because we you know our development gets money from PRS foundation so please don't stop and I'm not having a pop at you right so my my comments were about the industry as a whole so if this requires some leadership 700 million quid is a lot but it's not enough you should be looking at 7 billion there should be a talent house in every city every town there should be standards for the for the operation of those talent houses there should be standard contract do you know what I mean so I agree with you you know yeah don't disagree just come to Paul he looks like he wants to agree quite physiastically I want to agree really enthusiastically and I want to say two things one everything you're saying victor I agree with except I have to be really honest the music industry I work in and the music industry I see is more advanced than that it is happening you say you're impatient for change I see the change happening I see the the serious investment being made in these programs at all levels actually the other thing I was going to say the other point I was going to make I agree with David that I think I think the cut to PRS foundation is really regrettable and I think we you know there's been a lot of pressure within the industry to try and help reverse it um Tom I see you nodding I love seeing you nod because you're you're you're in a position where you can help so tell us what we can do to help you change that I love it when Paul asks me how he can help me to change things Tom I'm always trying to help um just because we are conscious we're about to run out of time yeah just to finish on a positive I know Tara you've done work with Resonate in terms of looking at doing something different and making what have you found that has changed possible based on your absolutely I think um it's not only possible I think there's a huge hunger for change people are so aware of issues the fact that their favorite artists aren't getting paid properly they want to do something and they just don't know what to do so if you're offering them something positive they can do whether it's join an ethical music streaming cooperative like Resonate 10 pounds join pay as you go easy um or all the wonderful new things that we're going to be seeing they want to do this stuff you know and um so I'd love to see things like a sort of co-ops cultural fund that will fund new music especially co-ops um and just a lot more kind of joining together of forces big picture thinking to use some like slightly hackney terms but yeah definitely lots of potential out there and and lots of people wanting to do things I'm conscious unfortunately run out of our slot but at least obviously been a music panel we do have an encore um gherindavis mp is going to speak to us now about something we've discussed the possibility of legislation and that kind of thing yeah and thanks so much and can I thank you so warmly for such a fantastic array of insights and information about the music industry and what I'm here to do is to say I want to commit to take this conversation with you forward to a cooperative music bill and I've spoken before with Sarah and Rose and that's why I'm here now clear there's major problems what why we're here together in this conference incidentally is because of the Rochsel pine ears and adulterated food and they got together and they decided they wanted the right you know conditions for the consumer for the producer of the retailer and that's what we need in the in the music industry because the reality is if you are a young artist and you get a million streams and I'd be very keen to get a thousand streams frankly you get a hundred quid and what are you going to do with a hundred quid you buy lunch and get your travel and hire a studio you're lucky to get that aren't you and so we've got the pandemic so again it's been a big problem for artists we've got the cost of living crisis now we're hoping that you know artists would go out and do live gigs people can't afford it and we've had brexit so um clearly people can't do touring and we we aren't getting these protections and in terms of streaming it's just not fair so we we know that there are all these problems that are being described that eight out of ten people get less than 102 and less than 200 pound a year in income whilst the CEO of universal of course gets 153 million pounds in a year which is more than all the artists combined and all the songwriters combined in the UK and if you wanted to get that from streaming I worked out you'd have to stream 1.5 a million million streams and it works out actually that everybody in the world would have to stream nearly 200 of your of your of your ret at times your record so clearly there's something fundamentally wrong obviously as it's been mentioned the competitive markets authority looking at some of that issue but what we're talking about is the whole environment the whole ecosystem a sort of atomised enthusiastic and very vulnerable people who want to develop their talents and it's not done in an equal way it's siphoned out often it's untaxed it goes off the exchequer doesn't get hold of it let alone the artists it is providing for the economy and jobs that's been said it is critical to our Britain's identity from the beetle stones that you know Adele all the rest of it and it is intrinsic to the happiness of all of us here and abroad and we need clearly to deliver fairness and diversity and what I want to say to say is to bring people together to provide the information and the guidance in a round table and move forward to present a simple cooperative music bill in the first instance as a framework with a view then to have something more detailed coming forward in the autumn obviously we've got to be aware of best interests because these huge multinationals aren't going to don't as it's already been pointed out they're not going to want to give more money or give more protection but we want protection we want to avoid exploitation we want inclusion we want diversity we want the stopping abuse whether it's racial sexual abuse we want to nurture growth um and basically um you know there are opportunities that all of us are involved in co-ops or the people in this room and beyond in co-ops we need your support we need your blessing we need your involvement if you run a retail store and we had a cooperative uh brands that were just playing cooperative uh if you join the cooperative as an artist you get more money and that was supported in a retail store so we know on a local basis a region so south Wales you know Emma Jones or wherever it happens to be you know that if you go in your cooperative they'll be playing that music more local people will go in that shop and buy more of our products uh local government should be supporting this I wanted to put forward a and I am putting forward a proposition in in Swansea to have a sort of platform to compete with Amazon where people can buy anything get it delivered the next day by the Royal Mail and the and the profits would go to local schools and social services local government we need to think about cooperative models to take on these huge multinational organizations to a certain extent that are basically sucking out the lifeblood and the money out of the industry so what I'm getting at is we do need to map out all these ideas that are just their organizations like the cultural freelancers Wales which my daughter happens to be involved in is about creating communities of people who are in in the industry working together helping each other so in other words we need an environment a whole environment and Victor and others and we've all talked about this we're creativity and diversity can flourish and after all if the whole industry as has been said can actually be more powerful through a sort of more cooperative as opposed to a sort of a more Darwinist approach where we've got a sort of more fertile ground more more varieties of flowers can grow and you know more oaks from small you know acorns can grow then we can again be the the best in the world and the best to grow and the fairest for the music for the future so I'm committing to take that forward with your great knowledge and expertise to try and make a real difference in the regulatory area alongside what's been happening on the competition market society so thank you so much for everything you're doing and for your time today thank you wow wow wow you you you heard yeah no time has run out but that's why we've got loads of networking and I mean wow you've heard it here first cooperative music bill what could that look like um so thank you so much we've got we've already run over 10 minutes on this session and we've got uh Jess Phillips with Paul McMony from Big Issue and several of our young cooperators as well going forward so I'd like to thank our fantastic moderator Paul Stokes and then also Tom, Paul Pacifico, Victor, Terry, Sarah, David Martin and Colin Young for an insightful panel thank you so so much really well done. The timings of our AGM so we're going to make a start if I can get your attention everybody please it's mainly the panellists to be fair the session of the first day of cooperative congress um we've had some really exciting debate I'm still waiting for all those principle number six people to come and tell me what deals they've been doing but we've just if you weren't in this this the session in here before it was just an announcement that there's going to be a cooperative music bill going through parliament at some point soon so as I expected lots going on and this is my whole point in case I'm not clear there are solutions in the cooperative movement there is a lot going on in the cooperative movement but the visibility of it is really poor um so it's why we invite people like Jess to come and talk to us today to really understand what our opportunity is but it was um at the beginning of last year we did a UGUFF poll at coops UK with young people and we just asked what was on the minds of young people and you won't be surprised to know a lot of the subject matters climate change mental health secure jobs data ownership did surprise me housing was on there um but for every single um of the items that were mentioned on the issues that were causing concern with young people there were some brilliant cooperative examples of people coming together and creating solutions but what was really really disheartening about that survey was we also asked how many young people could name a co-op and it was less than 40 percent um so there's something not connecting there and we need to fix that because we have got hope we have got solutions and people want it right now that's what you're going to be hearing about today people are angry people do want to take control they do want to have a say they do want to have a stake in where they live where they shop where they work how they're entertained um so we really need to look at getting the word out there so in an attempt to do that and we will be having some young cooperators who have engaged with the movement and are running or joined coops themselves so we can hear from them about what motivates them to join a co-op but i'd like to now introduce uh let's say our final um in conversation of the day uh and it's the wonderful Jess Phillips with the editor of The Big Issue, Paul McNameen-Felty. Well um thanks very much for that welcome i'm delighted to be in Birmingham which is just one of the best cities woo it really is i don't mean that in a in a kind of way to pat you on the head people are so great in Birmingham always like coming back here and that's my pitch for the mayor of Birmingham um this is a debate that's of particular interest from my perspective because of the big issue and the idea of involving people and involving communities and and how you can be part of your own future and you can dictate a better future for yourself and i was very excited when i knew i was going to be speaking to Jess because you're not behind in articulating what it is that people need and where you believe they should be going and i wanted to start by asking you about um post COVID and lockdown during that period there was a sense that while um people were a little more atomised and were away from their their normal lives they were perhaps a little closer in communities and that maybe led to an opportunity for small ideas to grow into something bigger do you think broadly speaking enough of that has been allowed to happen and and smaller cooperatives have been allowed to blossom out of that um i think we're probably still in the early days of that i'd just like to add to what you said that Birmingham is the best place on earth uh by quite a margin Manchester um that i don't think any of it has been properly harnessed what we saw during the pandemic and and it's not a universal experience but it's also not an it wasn't an experience that um happened only in the places where you thought it might happen so of course it in sort of middle class areas uh you're much more you know often more likely to have the sort of civic structures that people can then you know go and do good from um and uh similarly in places where there's been lots of investment um in neighborhood renewal where lots of money has gone into creating civic structures in some of the very poorest areas um those two sites i saw in the pandemic totally using the structures that had existed previously to act as a real point to pull more people in and do more stuff within communities and take collective action however there were still there were still huge blind spots certainly even just in my constituency there were parts of it where i had like too many mutual aid groups i was like that all right you need to hang out together mutual aid groups in this in this area because there's 700 of you and then other areas where we we had to really take people from other places to create them in those spaces and i think that the fundamental is is that it's volunteerism and uh a sort of spirit of the blitz and and a desire to do good together collectively is is not lacking it but it has to it it doesn't necessarily just happen by accident it has to be organized and it has to have proper civic structures in place whether that's the church whether it's uh whether it's the a local community scheme whether it's a local co-op and i have to say i don't feel that it it has been harnessed yet what came out of all those mutual aid groups and activism to have legs into the future people are time poor again of course which doesn't necessarily help but it does seem like there's been a bit of an opportunity missed i would say in that regard to then look at the places where it worked look at the places that didn't have it and had to set it up and put in place structures that would then follow up on it because the places that didn't have it before in my constituency now largely don't have it again and do you think that one of the one of the reasons that people were looking to take control of their own destinies in a particular way whether it was lots of organizations who perhaps weren't talking to each other and maybe should or should use networks to communicate do you think that part of it was because the officers that had been exposed by covid and inequality led people to lose any real faith in the mainstream political process and they thought well we're going to have to do it ourselves and do you think that people can ever go back to having faith in the mainstream political process i mean i think actually at the time there was some faith in i don't take comfort in saying this but you know there was it wasn't that it was any more a lack of faith of what was being offered to them apart from some very very specific groups i mean women seem to be largely forgotten in the early days of what was being offered in the pandemic and you know self-employed people and other groups child care providers there was some big gaps but i think by and large people felt that it was that you know it was a difficult situation but they wanted to do their bit and the reason that some of it came out of the inequalities without doubts like it was the first time ever in all of my years of political or community activism where people were checking their privilege without being told too aggressively by somebody else people would say things like i mean it's really rubbish and i really wish i could see my mum and dad but at least i've got a garden or like at least i've not been beaten up in my home at least my you know i haven't just got you know about at least we've got each other and i'm not a single parent or there was a huge amount of understanding something from somebody else's perspective but i actually don't even think that came out of inequality necessarily or a sudden awareness of inequality it came out of universality there is so few things these days that are truly universal and our welfare state was built on the back of the idea of a universal offer for everyone that has been slowly degraded over many years i mean like you know family allowance or whatever it's called now child benefit like things like that that we used to just take for granted as a universal experience of parenthood was a uniting thing that we all thought we would pay for as a country and actually i think covid created for the first time for some for some generations in our country as well and for most actually that have been born since like 1975 a first genuine experience of universality of a universal experience that made people feel united with other people and therefore want to help and do things and what that then bred was the idea of the inequality the check in the privilege the understanding the things that you have but i don't think that the people who set up the mutual aids in my constituency or were doing some of the work in my constituency were doing it because they're like while more black people are dying of covid and i mean my in the first wave my constituency have the second highest death rate but i don't think that people were particularly cognizant of that particularly when they were doing those things they were they were part of a community and we were all experiencing the same thing and that's what made them do it i think your answer is pulling me towards questions towards party gate and and how certain political leaders have reacted post covid but i'm going to leave that for now we may return in a minute because we're here to look at how we can make the economy work better using cooperative ideas as rose touched upon in introduction there's a number of different aspects in life in society that that are helped by this whether it is housing one of the ongoing problems and big issues whether it's environment whether it is health and we will get on to some of that but through today we've got a couple of young people who are at the forefront of some brilliant ideas and they're going to talk to us about them and we're going to give bring some questions to them because they've got better solutions than most of the rest of us and first of all i'd like to to welcome amru to the stage who is responsible for a a student housing co-operative and edinburgh and he'll talk to us about that now hi everyone i'm amru i'm here representing edinburgh student housing co-op where the largest student housing co-op in the country we provide the most affordable student housing in the city of ennabra and that puts us at the forefront of widening participation into education i think i think bet you were looking forward to that this is going to be some sort of slave come on now just you wait you like the crisp witty of the co-op movement is there anything that you want to discuss in the meantime while we're waiting for the slides how long you've been involved with the co-op rhythm so i joined edinburgh student housing co-op i wna say a year and a couple of months ago march 2021 um i got involved mostly because i just had friends there who i'd been invited around to their flats a few times um i went to high school just up the road from edinburgh student housing co-op and i think i must have walked past it at least 100 times and i had absolutely no idea what it was or what it was for yeah i think we've touched on that today a few times engagement of young people in co-operatives my only experience of housing co-operatives certainly when i was a kid was in american dramas when people live in new yw York they say the building's a co-op and they all have to win that leads to entertaining interviews with people who are going to move into the co-op maybe we need to like update the romcom dramas the modern edinburgh so that people know what it is how are we doing down there one minute so you're a little bit of trouble getting here is there when you said that you walked past this several times now you can tell us yeah nice yeah i can tell you i was going to show you where it was on the map but i'm still not there tell you what let's um there we go oh i put a cat on that too just for you okay so here is where we are we're right in the heart of town we're about a 10 minute walk from edinburgh university's main central campus 20 minute walk from edinburgh napier's murkeston campus we have two buildings this is the larger of the two houses 17 flats a mix of three four and five bed flats this is the smaller of the two and you can see the 34 rides houses just down the road there in 28 there's a total of seven flats in total we have 106 members this is what um the your average room looked like before we moved in very sad uninspiring this is what the rooms look like now here's a picture of your standard university accommodation kitchen and a picture of your average co-op kitchen i think people in the co-op like plants yeah that's what i'm reading here so i'm here to talk to you about the role skills and experiences you have at edinburgh student housing co-op um when a new member joins they get a preferences form um with all the different roles that we have and once they've filled that in they get put into one of our seven working groups um so places manages the buildings our utilities that sort of thing people deals with internal and external events participation with member engagement principle six is the sixth principle of cooperation cooperating with other co-ops that's the working group i'm in finance finance is welfare with member welfare and procedures is just admin okay i'm going to talk to you about four four members that currently live in our co-op um edas a tenancy manager sonny is a gm co-convener in secretary um i'm going to talk to you about one of molly's past roles and that was basement renovation project manager and i'm going to talk to you about our internal intranet system so the tenancy manager role is very much an admin based role it's making sure that members have signed their lease and the tenancy manager does that by having several lease signing sessions throughout the year they also send out notice to quit when a member's no longer a student and they keep all of this up to date on a digital database um so lots lots and lots of highly employable skills um i would have loved to have a picture of a general meeting that they've all been on zoom in the past two years of some coven um sorts of things that a general meeting co-convener will be doing would be facilitating the meetings making sure that everyone's heard miniting sending out emails um and as a secretary sonny's also responsible for signing off lots of important documents um when i was talking to sonny about his role one of the things that he really wanted me to emphasize was how his confidence was boosted by being in his role and how he feels like he belongs um in the co-op community a lot more because of his engagement and i think that represents something you can't really quantify very easily um living in a co-op increases your sense of belonging reduces loneliness huge gains in mental health i think sonny's going to be leaving the co-op with an experience that he'll be cherishing for the rest of his life and i'll be the same and that's not really something you can find outside of the co-op of housing project i think okay the 34 basement renovation project so when we first moved into the building um our basement was just this dark and sad concrete car park but after a couple of years of very hard work it is now a thriving communal space here are some pictures of the construction process so that involved laying floors insulating and fireproofing the ceiling building a kitchenette more construction pictures and here's what it looks like now a very happy project manager um here's it here's the basement in use this was a recent gathering that we had four students for cooperation which is a federation of different cooperatives from all around the country bringing together housing and other kinds of student coops finally i'd like to briefly tell you about our internet so we were talking about data ownership a lot um throughout the day and i think a lot of institutions when they get to our size they by default start using things like google drive and facebook to communicate but we do all of our communication internally um our server hosts a variety of different services such as communication services data storage um and our application and voting on applicant system was actually coded in-house by some of our internet specialists um the rest of the software is open source this is our main internal communication platform um so you can see there you have a bunch of different topics but everyone can contribute to it also lets you send private messages um and this is all done internally without relying on facebook whatsapp or anything of the sort um that's our data storage software that's me covered covered the four roles in the presentation i've also done three roles in my time at ESHC i was a maintenance responder for a bit and that involves going around to flats doing small jobs on stuff that breaks um i was then one of the budgeters i think that was my main my main experience edrym student housing coops so that was working on an annual budget for the next academic year and now i am a delegate to student co-op homes which is another federation of co-ops which aims to acquire more more housing to lease to students um yeah that's it for me thanks very much amru um i have a couple of questions for you by my end then i'm not sure if anybody in the audience has a couple also when you you mentioned that um you walked past and never noticed it for a number of years so when you went to university was it the companionship of the cooperative that appealed to you or was it a cost and basically what i'm asking is a much a cost to stay here um yeah what's the rent it was a bit of both the the rent is currently 338 pounds a month inclusive of utilities not going to find that again bab yeah inclusive of utilities and some basic essentials like washing up liquid and new roll yeah it's half the price of your average student accommodation yes is there a waiting list do you have a waiting list yeah we do he's quite a long one i can imagine that's quite a long one and have you been approached by other student bodies or just people who have heard about what you've done in different cities because student accommodation is such a racket at the minute and the students are getting hammered and are they looking for your model to say this is what this works how can we set it up in our town or city yeah absolutely there's currently a group in Glasgow um trying to find a house there's um that's them quite a few different groups um dotted around the country there's that's somebody now yeah um off the top of my head there is one in Manchester there's one at Birmingham just down the road down from us here bell fast line bell fast well done bell fast cork um Brighton so there's quite a number of cities where they're trying this and it's the biggest it's the biggest block to you starting this the uh capital to get the building so we're and i'm going to let you go in a moment where do where do you find or where can people what funders are coming up to help you get that capital um so a couple of years ago student co-op homes did a community share offer and raised i think 330k roughly from quite a wide variety of investors um we in the past have tried to get money from Edinburgh University but that that didn't ever work out um but yeah the the the opportunities aren't many for for funding that doesn't matter about can i ask what the risks are to yourselves as from the point of view of when you're talking about specifically student accommodation so i work quite a lot with students who've been in student accommodation regulated by usually i'm not surprised at the university didn't give you any money because they're probably the biggest landlord um but um what are the the sort of i suppose some of the the risks of what might happen in the accommodation so i take to task universities where things um bad things have happened to people in the accommodation so i suppose when you're managing it all and you're all responsible for it all um there's an element i suppose of risk and responsibility in that um i'm inclined to say that i don't think the risks are that much higher than other forms of accommodation both no i wouldn't have thought they were higher i probably have thought they were lower but they exist yeah yeah i would agree but i think when i first moved in i was a little bit apprehensive and skeptical about a large group of 20-year-olds managing two huge buildings but it yeah it actually works quite well but i mean and how do you manage the waiting list um is it on a basis of need or just time uh currently our waiting list is randomized so you yeah random so you could come tomorrow and you might get a like on Thursday you might get a flat but you could have been on the list for two years and then not get one um the way it's randomized is we have a window of applications between middle of febru to the middle of march um we'll have say 30 40 places open 200 people will apply um 30 40 places fill up and then everyone else gets put onto a waiting list but their position on that waiting list um is largely random there there's no there's no needs assessment for example on the basis of um well people's resource um yeah i i i think like a means test yeah it's something we're working on i think there's quite a lot of different opinion within edymor student housing cooperative on how we should be approaching that like those groups of people who are very opposed to means testing others who think there should be forms of means testing but yeah that that's something for the future yeah amory before i let you go i'm sure there's a couple of questions i see one down here after you sir jay even thank you um really good presentation really interesting my name's jim jones i live in Birmingham i actually went to your co-op about seven or eight years ago when i was a student just because i heard about it and i thought it was fantastic and i think you were just working on your basements so it's great to see it's progressed i suppose my question is um and it's linked to the kind of waiting list recruitment point but i spent how do you keep it going so for me the biggest issue with student housing coops is people are there for max three four years and this is whole turnover questions how you can have kept it going in the last seven to eight years so how do you ensure that people have the skills the knowledge the cooperative values and principles to keep it going as you go forward do you have an education program and and that kind of thing um so this this is an ongoing challenge for us but i think we manage it relatively well um a lot of this is down down to the goodwill of outgoing members like when i was interviewing sonny he told me how gratefully was that the person in the role previously just spent a lot of time showing him the ropes showing him how how he should be doing his role um we also set up a wiki a couple of years ago and the idea with that is that um when members leave they go on to the wiki and do a quick write-up of everything they've picked up and what they want to pass on to the next person in that role did you get any training in maintenance they don't get any because you said you were a maintenance i was like that do you know you good at fixing taps and things did you get any training in in that sort of thing no you know do you have some work yeah i mean i i think most of the people who've ever come out to any flat i've ever rented were in the same position as you but um but uh you know it just seems like you know that may be like a skill thing that you could get that maybe like a local college or something to give some maintenance training yeah it's quite i don't know what the right word is organic maybe how things come about in the co-op like will it be organic when you've been elected flower so yeah a lot of the time it's people learning from others with those skills other times it's people coming in with the skills applying them to the co-op so for instance when i was talking to Lorenzo about the internet um i asked him so what have you learned from setting up all of this at the co-op and then he was just like actually i'm a phd student in informatics i knew most of this already yeah i'm married to a lift engineer and there aren't that many students so i think i would trust me to fix a lift as somebody who'd been properly trained on the job and i suppose that's with student housing specifically and what you often see when you talk about co-operative and when you see co-operative housing is like it often is like there's a builder and these got a couple of neighbors and they start a thing together and you know there's this sort of organic thing it's just i we're not no offense to academia but i just feel like maybe you should move in a plumber too to co-op to do some training learning by doing yes indeed i'm aware of time and i think we can carry on with this particular subject but i'm going to let you you go now ladies and gentlemen round of applause for armory i think i was a little lazier when i was a student rather than converting a basement or building a dinet or whatever it was you were building i think it's amazing um just just before we we turn away from housing which is as i said one of the big issues of our time do you think given some of the noises coming out of central government about a sell-off of social housing and the fact that they are not necessarily going to meet the 300,000 a year well they've said they're not going to meet 300,000 a year target for new builds in any time soon do you think there is a future and value in this approach to housing beyond students and academia would you see that working in your own decisions yeah yeah i could i could see it working in my own uh i mean the single greatest problem in my constituency and the single greatest problem in the country is that of housing without question it is when you're not talking necessarily about existential threat or threat in the future and you're talking about people and the problem today housing beyond anything else and whether that is appropriate housing and or the lack thereof of housing and the solutions have you know to me the it seems like you know the sort of post-war solution of just building enormous council housing estates seems like one of the answers but the the idea of people living paying even like as low as 300 pounds a week in rent let alone a month the idea of people getting together what i think is missing in my and it's like you always need the middle classes for a revolution what i think is missing from that sort of thing springing up in my constituency is the the the the sort of well civil society the capital you quite rightly point out is always going to be the barrier but actually the idea that that is possible that such a thing would be possible now there are housing co-ops in in big in the middle of big council estates in Birmingham in fact that driven usually by in the case that i'm thinking out is a woman literally a woman called linda you know you will every street needs a linda and it's about but it's about how we make people believe that it's possible because the idea of what you have just presented to most of my constituents is terrifying would be terrifying to them but it is obviously a solution it is obviously one of a pattern of solutions but the idea as well that even that they would have responsibility for other parts of the system would feel like because when you've been failed by system after system when you ring the council and nothing gets done when you ring your landlord and nothing gets done you start to just fundamentally have a distrust in systems altogether and so the idea that they might be responsible for one would be would it it's a huge emotional thing to get over but it was it is you know that's what you need basically one woman who's like or one man who's like oh sod it let's go to hell in a handcart and just give this a world let's push it forward but it's finding those people activating them training them and giving them the resource that is missing currently i would say but it's absolutely i mean i would love it if we had co-operative big co-operative movements of housing in my constituency it would change and there are those people are there they just don't believe they're there yet from one big issue to another one that is really hammering everybody at the minute and that's energy energy cost energy production and how that is impacting cost of living and how that is impacting the environment and all of these things headers of different speeds but they're all hitting coming to us and we're all going to get we're all going to feel very unpleasant very very soon i'm already feeling a bit unpleasant i've got a 700 pound a month bill i think everyone is facing these things but organisations are doing something about it as we know whether it is some form of energy creation or retrofitting or solar power so i'd like to invite onto the stage eva go to nix i hope i've pronounced your name correctly who is from repowering london and she'll tell us all about her particular project eva thank you oh that's a lot of people okay um yes my name is eva and i work for repowering london um and we are a community energy development organisation i'm going with a slide free approach by the way so it's just going to be pictures and me talking trying something new um so committee energy it's when a group of people get together to own or to manage or generate energy systems so it can take many different forms it can be people installing solar panels on the school it can be people uh doing a retrofit project on a housing estate it can be installing LED lightning in a sports centre really what matters in community energy is that people own the system and the community gets a financial benefit from it and so at repowering what we do we help communities set up projects like that and we also think it's an amazing opportunity to create jobs to have training and give people employment opportunities and really to learn about this sector which we don't necessarily know much of although energy is essential we all need it to live but it's not necessarily something that we engage with a lot and that's one of the reasons why i think that community energy is so relevant with what we're going through at the moment because we've got this climate crisis and we've got this energy crisis and all of this obviously is sort of related and community energy can be one of the solutions to this crisis and there's like many reasons for that i think this way and one of them is that the climate crisis requires us to shift the way we produce energy so we have to go from these big centralized gas power plants to small scale much more small scale decentralized distributed energy generation so like small on showing farms heat pumps solar pve and that's just the perfect moment because it means that from something that was far away and we didn't really see and couldn't really engage with we're going to something that's much more local on our roofs in our buildings and it's the perfect moment for people to take back control of this sector so i think that's very important and and community energy is perfect for that and community energy is also like it's really good because it enables people to engage more with this topic as i was saying and think about the way we interact with energy how much we use because we're going to have to use less energy if we want to go through this crisis and community energy is really also a way to make people have more an active relationship with their energy use and understand it all better because it's such a difficult sector and it took me so long to understand just the tenth of it so i think it's just a perfect opportunity for people to get more engaged with this so we've got the climate crisis and then we also have at the moment obviously what we're talking about a lot the energy crisis and community energy what is also really great about these small scale distributed energy generation is that we're not dependent on international gas markets or geopolitical conflicts we can be much more resilient because we're at a local level people own the systems so they decide what they want to do with them they see where it's generated where it's coming from where it's utilized how the profits are distributed so it's really this idea of taking back control of something and protecting ourselves from like global conflicts and things that we have absolutely no power over and yeah so this is why i think this is great um obviously and in terms of where the sector is at the moment and what we need to like grow because you're going to say this is great people are so happy we've got solar panels how can we do more of this um there are a lot of barriers to enable community energy to reach its full potential and on that the UK is a bit behind these countries like germany or danemark or even france um the cooperatives energy cooperatives don't have the rights to sell energy to people so that's why now when i was telling you examples i was talking about installing solar panels on school or doing led projects on sports centres it's because at the moment these are the only types of projects that community energy cooperatives can do because they cannot supply electricity directly to people and the reason for that is that to be a to supply electricity to just people domestic households you have to have an energy supplies license and that is super expensive to obtain so it means that small groups like the one i support who have a turnover of um you know a thousand pounds per year there is absolutely no way that they could pay these costs and obviously that is a big barrier because it's just it doesn't enable community energy to have all these benefits because we can't supply like normal like just households and uh that is obviously a big barrier that we're trying to tackle and there is a bill that is being worked on called the local electricity bill and the idea is really that we want to start being able to create local energy markets so you've got solar panels on the roof of like a housing estate that can supply people in the housing estate and maybe there's a housing co-op and the people of the housing co-op own the solar panels and it's double co-op and it's just great um so that's like one big barrier and then another one that we talked a bit about today when we were talking about co-ops and how do we get more people engaged there's obviously a barrier but i think is we can definitely overcome the barrier of engagement and we talked about it a bit like this idea i think the whole cooperative idea is also that we have to take back responsibility for things that we haven't really engaged with for a really long time and that can be a bit scary as well um and especially the energy sector like it's been dominated by big companies we just pay our bills like switch over the phone we don't i before i studied this topic i wasn't had absolutely no clue i wasn't really interested in it so it's really a topic but it's a cool topic it's just like it's something that we haven't really engaged with and we need to engage with it more because because of the climate and the energy crisis that's something we really need to get back into our lives so i think there's so much awareness raising and and so much work to be done on making this a topic that people want to learn about and want to engage with um and obviously there is the the issue of more young people having to be engaged in this and i think on that there it's really an opportunity with the climate crisis because there's loads of young people involved in the climate movement but not not necessarily in energy cooperatives so it's really about how do we combine forces and sort of take all the young people from the climate movement into energy cooperatives and i think it's just so much about awareness raising and doing things like this but also talking at universities because i personally i studied renewable energy and during my whole in a big university in London and i never heard about cooperatives and energy like community energy we didn't speak about it once and when i found out about it i was like what no one has told me about this so i think there's so much about talking to students about what's out there because otherwise you don't even know it's an option so then you're going to go we talk so much about consultancy firms but never about cooperatives so there is really something to be done about that and i think that's all i've got to say for now very enthusiastic thank you before i open to the floor i wonder could you tell us how many groups or organisations have you helped install solar panels and generate electricity so far so we are just in London and we have helped set up eight community energy cooperatives so far and i think where community energy is maybe a bit different than housing cooperatives for instance is that it's really complicated project so you're always going to need that sort of one organisation working in hand with the local cooperative because you can't just we have a lot of amazing volunteers who know a lot about community engagement and they know a lot about energy but it's one thing to know about that and to be able to negotiate a power purchase agreement with a site or something so community energy because of the complexity of energy projects is really a sector where you need some organisations like us who can work as sort of facilitators or advisers so these eight co-ops that we've created co-created we are still very much working closely with them like a little bit like a Mormon teenagers like they're like all they're like independent but it still needs support because of the nature of energy projects but he has to answer his questions eight sorry yes thank you there's a question from the audience and they're right i'm one right in the middle just if we can go here first thanks Eva Pete Westwell from McCountess co-op we also do your co-op energy which is a largest supporter of community energy projects i think in the UK that was brilliant and i'd love to talk to you one of the things Rose said right at the start of this is about power of networking and i would absolutely love to talk to you afterwards with some retain about what we can do to work together but i think you're spot on everything you've said this has got to be a people owned industry really and we've got to take back control and everything you're doing from a young person point of view exactly what we should be doing so great job thank you thanks yes let's chat thank you i'm sure i heard that three is take back control somewhere else hello i'm davidran crystallizer which is in south london as well so i'd like to talk to you at some point yeah um i was just talking to aston university which is part of the birmium anchor network of seven institutions because they're doing community wealth building very seriously here in birmium they teach amongst other things this is aston i'm talking about diverse supply chains so they've got a training course which was funded by the eodd here and they've been working with balford bt the construction company who've helped them with the with delivering the training course and understanding how supply chains work do you see for community energy any value in working with the construction sector or the manufacturing sector around solar panels to help with this yeah that's a good question i think the more integrated the better so at the moment the way we work at repairing we buy solar panels and we've got installers so it's separate we've got a separate company doing the solar installs for us but we are keen to integrate more and to train people within our organization who can become solar installers so i think in general trying to integrate things together so to answer your question collaborating with like manufacturers or construction companies even when a building is about to get built and this is the perfect moment to start thinking about solar panels how can we make construction companies think about energy cooperatives for instance because that's a big question right because so often in london i pass by a building that's you know in development and getting built and then two weeks later and it's finished and i see solar panels on the roof and i'm like no why not they didn't come to us so there is really your right like the more we can integrate and and try and collaborate because otherwise sometimes it's a bit of a missed opportunity because like construction companies we could collaborate with community energy groups to try and make these projects more community like and so yeah we'd love to chat about it after definitely thank you can i ask a question if i've understood this right so if the street on my in my constituency or wanted to put solar panels on and own the solar panels themselves they wouldn't be able to provide it provide the electricity to their own homes so is it loads of different houses for each one would be able to provide it to their own house so you can do that for yourself but only for yourself yes and currently they wouldn't be able to to like you know if i don't know susie on the end wasn't keen on having it on her roof like they wouldn't be able to then sell susie the electricity for the rest of their houses no so but it's exactly what we're working on at the moment no not in the like mainstream regulatory framework but we're working try like doing some trials that are outside of these regulations and see how it would be to create local energy markets where people could trade with each other and when you consume you know you've got these solar panels with the example of your street you've got solar panels your neighbor as well but there may be moments you've got batteries and maybe there are some moments where you've got too much electricity you're not using it you could sell it to your neighbor or not even sell it you could just share it with them and next time they'll share theirs with you so that's called very pure to pure energy trading but it's something that we're looking at because it's going to be essential once we manage to unlock the whole potential of community solar we're gonna have to find ways to like exchange the energy between each other what is the political barrier with that at the moment is it just a regulatory thing yes the grid obviously yes it's really uh i'm not an expert in that but it's mainly this regulation to become an energy supplier so at the moment to become an energy supplier like british gasoline it's extremely expensive in terms of setup costs and so small community energy groups can't like can't cover these costs so that's why you've got only big companies or like startups who get a lot of seed funding but it's not made for cooperatives and that's there's a bill in parliament the local electricity bill i looked for it so i can tell you about that later there's a lot of bills in parliament with one of x-ray web barbecues the other day and i was like that i'm not sure it can't fall through a web barbecues maybe i'm against them no strong feelings but the idea of the local electricity bill is that the costs to become an energy supplier should be proportionate to the revenues that you make so if you're a small community energy group you should be able to supply people without having to pay these huge costs just because you don't make much profit yeah yeah that same spare if there are no oh there's one for this will have to be the final one because we're going to have to gallop through towards the end um so you are saying something about um energy in schools and in government owned land like fields and things like that so a lot of schools funding sometimes they go towards energy especially with the cost of climate crisis that will become a lot more expensive now so lots of schools will be running out of like funding for like books and things that they need and there will be staff shortages would you suggest that we should like build solar panels and things like that for schools to kind of make them easy and what are the barriers behind that political and economic yeah definitely i think we do work with schools and we've installed solar panels community on solar panels on schools and it's a really win win situation because the solar panels the schools don't have to pay for them because they're funded through community shares by the people living around the school so they don't have to pay for anything and then they get the solar panels on the roof and then the solar cooperative sells the electricity to the school at the discount and we also create a community fund with the rest of the profits that can be used to help the school with other issues for instance so we've done that with the school and with the community fund we supported them with like paying for like arts materials for the arts class so i think we should definitely do it and in terms of barriers um it's sometimes obviously schools are so busy so sometimes it's really hard to find the right people i would say for our projects sometimes it's like a bit too good to be true people don't really take it seriously like what you solar panels for free discounted electricity how um so it's sometimes hard to be taken seriously in a way because when something is free people don't take it that seriously and i think also just the lack of time is such a big barrier because people are already overwhelmed and you really need to find a champion to like carry forward the project within the the school either you're dead right there is a lack of time and we are brush off a round of applause for just before we we round up looking at the future democratic economy i have a question for you Jess but before i came along because i worked with a big issue and there's different parts of the organisation one of the big issue invest and it manages funds that goes into social enterprises cooperatives and other um essentially companies that are doing good are working towards good and they said one thing that they like doing at the moment is putting it into cooperatives because because so many people are leaving jobs and looking for a change of jobs and there is something of a jobs employment crisis that if people are feeling that they're part of a cooperative they're less likely than to decide to move pretty quickly so how can you somebody who is who is good some who's got a voice and some um power in right at the top how can you take that particular message to government and to Westminster and say this is a way to address so many of the big issues we're facing i mean i i don't i don't think it's um they could argue against the idea that when people are invested in something that they're going to make the best of it that is a fundamental fact there is um not not i mean i'm actually i don't know why i was about to say not to be too party political i'm gonna uh there is a fundamental ffisher in understanding the idea of people investing in things together it sounds like socialism to Boris Johnson um so that's problematic isn't it um and that they just don't necessarily believe it in the same way so we have a belief deficit i'd say with the current government um but what so what needs to be done it to to prove this i'd say there is an element about what you were saying around that the need for it to become a more populist issue for people to talk about it and say that that's what they want fundamentally that is what drives politicians we are scared of the electorate we want to do what they want um i mean again not Boris Johnson um but um the it's about making sure that so so when you're talking about all those young people working in the climate crisis and caring about the climate crisis well not in my constituency nobody's ever written to me about the climate crisis in my constituency because they work in the car industry and at the airport and also they just have other things get so there's got to be a way of making this movement be something that the government can't just think is niche and nice oh that's nice and niche it has to be a solution to a problem that people are clamoring for um and then people like me can argue for it all day long and and you you cross over that bridge where they just have a genuine belief problem in the idea of collectivism okay Jess thank you very much thank you very much for that there are so many what you've just said Jess it's it's perfect you know this is why we're here this is why we're trying to make some nice hashtag co-op congress as i keep saying so one of the things that around energy is just so you're aware because it's just going out to press but ripple energy of raised 30 million actually through a cooperative share offer and they've got cornish primary schools investing in a wind farm in scotland that's going through the grid so there are answers there are solutions and jess has just given us a really good advice there and a very informative and entertaining session so thank you very much to jess phyllif Paul mackamie and Eva thank you right okay you can make your way down i'm now going to invite to the stage for our final keynotes now from the chair of social enterprise uk and on the board of co-op group and as we heard in the music session the chair of ud as well it's my great pleasure to welcome to the stage lord victor adam awawer okay i'm just checking out what i'm doing um hello everybody um it's been great i've been sort of talking to a few people in depth and trying to understand more about co-ops we're about to hear a video out me from shireen um uh who is the new chief exec of the co-op group on whose board i sit i always say this i said this the session for those people from the co-op don't worry everything i say is personalised cannot be recorded and actually it's just so you worry um shireen is the new chief exec she is um she was appointed a few weeks ago um she's already got cracking on some of the key issues around co-op commerciality um i i've got to know her really well she's committed to the co-op movement i mean she is absolutely aligned with the co-op movement's values and those of the group she can't be here in person because she's got covid right so those of you wondering why she's not even there because she's got covid but she was so um keen to contribute to this debate that she arranged for a video to to um so without further ado let's hear shireen curie hack talk to you good afternoon everyone it's such a privilege to be here with you virtually today to represent co-op group i'm really sorry that i couldn't be with you uh in person uh the dreaded covid that i've avoided all this time has finally gotten to me but i really hope that i can be with you in person next time so i know that i'm in very good company amongst fellow co-operators who continue to offer tremendous support to their members and the communities they live in and we all know how vital this is particularly given what the world has experienced during the past couple of years there were two years which none of us could have contemplated and yet even today i'm sure that you're reminded by your members and through the news that our work as co-operators continues to be so vital and so relevant when i saw that the theme of this year's congress was empowering co-operation it resonated with me straight away as the new interim CEO i want to build on the work of my predecessors and clearly show that co-op group is a truly differentiated organization with purpose as co-operatives we compete with many different organizations in many sectors and how many of those can truly claim to be purpose led yet the co-operative movement started in this way from day one and it makes me so very proud to be part of this and to do what i can in the group to preserve and build on this valuable legacy i also want to harness the amazing determination and talent of my 60 000 colleagues to work toward our vision of cooperating for a fair world and to fulfill our purpose of doing business in a better way everyone here understands what cooperation can achieve and the importance of empowering it and it's great to see matters being discussed right now as part of the ica consultation on cooperative principles to ensure that our principles continue to be relevant in the modern world and i continue to admire rose marley in co-ops uk for bringing us together to exchange ideas collaborate and identify shared goals where we can combine resource and make a real difference and i'm also delighted that while there were so many locations in which to hold an esteemed conference including sunny saville we went straight for the best and chose birmingham and i hope that you all enjoy your stay in birmingham even though i can't be there this time so we've seen the power of cooperation in action especially since the pandemic and everything that it brought with it to now as we're in the midst of a cost of living crisis people came together in support of their community and of one another to me co-op group and the wider cooperative family have never felt more relevant and needed and i'm so proud of everything that we're all doing the question is how do we empower cooperation and take it to the next level we could be tempted to take a very narrow view of it and boil it down to simply increasing financial support to communities as the former cfo of the group i'm used to speaking in pounds and pants and we've seen funds generated by our members put to excellent use on issues our members told us to focus on and let me let me just share a few of those examples as well as providing direct and personal rewards for our members co-op group has generated 100 million pounds for local communities causes and charity partners chosen by our members between 2016 and the end of 2021 predominantly through our membership scheme this has seen local causes deliver over 25 000 community projects across the uk it's seen hubbub double its community of its network of community fridges from 100 to 200 locations it's put new mental well-being support services in place through work with mind samh and inspire it's played a part in the peer action collective giving 6000 young people the chance to make their community safer and fair developed in partnership with youth endowment fund and the hashtag i will fund we provided 1.6 million pounds of financial backing to the wider cooperative movement in 2021 maintaining strong relationships with co-ops uk and independent society members which remains key to the co-op group those of you who know me will know that i've had a very international background both professionally and personally and i'm therefore also very proud not only of the contribution we've made to global communities in terms of creating access to clean water protecting fair trade producers and supporting human rights but also in our ability to raise 1.2 million pounds for the dc's ukrain appeal to help people in an unimaginable crisis i'm very proud of what we've been able to share it with such worthwhile causes however just as i'm being open with you about the amounts we've distributed i should also be transparent about where we still have work to do funds can only go so far in empowering cooperation and cash on its own doesn't fix everything as an organization with purpose we see that the government cannot address inequalities in society alone especially as so many have worsened since march 2020 an independent group led by the right honourable justine greening former mp and three time cabinet minister evaluated co-op group and its missions and they've told us to do more and create more partnerships that can make a difference and we're listening so beyond cash injections and awards i want to consider two other factors with you now that i believe help empower truly meaningful and worthwhile cooperation and that must be part of our focus one is looking to build on the strength of the relationships between us and our members and the other is to recognize that the best kind of corporation might not always include us and our businesses and i'll explain more on that shortly in the meantime on staying connected with our members i was delighted to be part of the first co-op group agm to welcome our members live to a venue since 2019 it was so good to meet and speak to our members again face to face but also host those choosing to join us virtually from home again true to our principles democracy told us to make more out of our open membership a motion was passed with an outstanding majority to increase members participation and what co-op group does as voices that shape our products and services support our campaigns and have a say on how we do business now 2021 was a truly exceptional year for keeping members involved in fact it broke records members engaged with co-op group over 1.7 million times whether that was choosing a local community cause to support joining in on our campaigns and community initiatives learning more about our unique values or helping design some delicious food products however based on the vote this year we're preparing to build even more upon this momentum of the next four years but why do our members continue to keep us on course to increase participation i want to quote from the motion prepared by our members council which champions member participation and the council is led by the exceptional Denise Scott McDonald who i know was part of the panel earlier today the motion stated providing members with authentic relevant interesting and diverse ways to participate in the co-op they own is essential in delivering our vision of cooperating for a fair world our purpose is rooted in the fact that we're owned by our members and encouraging members to play an active role in their co-op helps us to achieve our cooperative ambitions i can't tell you how happy i am that our members have voted this in they recognize that cooperation within our own group between our members will improve our ability to reach our goals those who voted in favor see that an even more closely knit membership can achieve more for a fairer world whether that's through more community support and fundraising increasing awareness on key issues to those outside our co-ops and supporting those inside it there's a big world for us outside of one angel square in manchester and we absolutely depend on our members for ideas on directing the best possible support to those who most needed galvanized members make us a better co-op which in turns makes us a better partner empowered to connect with others and positively change our communities we live by stronger co-op stronger communities in our group in line with our principles we're working to deliver a new program of cooperative member education and training to attract participation and we will actively seek ways to make members even more integral to what we do this is hugely important to us but in case you think i'm forgetting this is only half the work that needs to be done to empower cooperation within as well as creating new routes to greater participation we have to ensure that we're running a co-op that feels worthy of our members time and effort like the wider cooperative movement we strive to be inclusive welcoming and modern our members must recognize these things in us and we must continue to deliver them i'm really proud of our people's centric policies including the recent menopause policy that we introduced our diversity and inclusion commitments have created more opportunities for minority colleagues made materials and tools more accessible to all and have helped foster a mutual respect across our colleagues and a celebration of our differences we still have a long way to go don't get me wrong but we have to offer but we want to offer the best possible working environment to our colleagues and demonstrate to members that co-op group is just as diverse as they are and will always work to best represent them it's part of who we are and what we do so beyond funding cooperation and ensuring members are rallied behind us as key factors for empowering cooperation as i mentioned earlier there's also an idea that we don't always have to be involved cooperatives are set apart from businesses whose relationships with their local communities begins and ends with cash at the till also we have greater depth and more sincere motives than just brand value or media coverage we see the benefits that we all share firsthand when cooperation's only goal is a community's well-being enhancing the lives of our members and stabilizing local economies across the us we know the big secret here the benefits are very real whether we're directly involved in new cooperative relationships or not we don't have to be a player in the game to see a win for everyone some of the most worthwhile and impactful cooperation that we empower is not necessarily on behalf of our own group more often than not it's the cooperation we facilitate it can be helping two businesses two local causes or even just two people come together to realize a shared goal that will yield a bigger benefit it's about creating relationships that sustain themselves strengthen our communities and improve the lives of those members and communities that we depend on that might not always include a relationship with our own cooperative also as cooperatives we respect each other's autonomy and we prioritize our members right to be heard over the voice of any kind of big private investor or shareholder we believe that we should offer that independence to others too as part of our support we shouldn't be seeking routes to creating dependencies on co-op group we should create the means for others to make positive changes happen whatever whenever and with whomever our member pioneers make these introductions as part and parcel of their role we reached 1000 member pioneers in 2021 each one of them actively supporting co-op campaigns and initiatives from the time they spend in our communities coming to 100 000 hours last year alone they bring our vision to life by connecting key contacts in their communities and bringing people together to increase cooperation that could include our members it also sometimes might not member pioneers can create independent networks between schools local businesses local causes local football teams anyone technology has also allowed us to take introductions like this these much further in recent years cooperate which is our online community center is bringing people together to make good things happen 13 500 groups and activities on the platform are connecting with people across the country as of 2021 it also offers a platform that helps to activate key projects for the benefit of our communities including hubbub pure action collective or the mental well-being support services i've already mentioned our colleagues use it too to seek out volunteering opportunities you might have also seen recent news news on the trial of caboodle developed by co-op group with microsoft bjss and itg it's a not-for-profit digital platform that enables supermarkets cafes and restaurants to communicate to connect with community groups and volunteers to redistribute surplus food the platform is currently being trialled in our food stores across northern Ireland milton keens in london and it goes live soon across a further 2500 co-op stores it's open to charities and community groups of all kinds from food banks and family support networks to youth groups schools and more its prime objective is to see other retailers and hospitality businesses get involved and start to realize the benefit of sharing surplus food with those who stand to benefit locally but what does all this translate into how can i be so certain of the value of the connections we're creating when in most cases we're not directly involved in the outcome and some like caboodle maybe are just finding their feet so let me share with you one of our amazing projects which is seeing wonderful opportunities come to be often without any direct intervention or further support from co-op group the nation's young people are at the heart of our support for communities there are future members and cooperators and we know that through the power of cooperation young people in their communities must have fairer access to education and employment we also know that the impact of the pandemic will be felt for years to come we want to be able to provide joined up sustainable solutions that will make a difference to the lives of the next generation and part of that is the co-op levy share in 2020 we gifted some of our unspent apprenticeship levy fund to create new apprentices in greater Manchester fire and rescue service and in may 2021 we launched co-op levy share dot co dot uk to connect others with unspent levy funds to businesses seeking to create apprenticeships for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds different ethnic minorities and other underrepresented groups and I want to share some facts that my colleague Paul Gerard our campaigns and public affairs director were laid as part of our AGM in May after just one year 39 businesses had joined the scheme between them they had pledged more than 10 million pounds which will create 1000 new apprentices in fact 500 apprentices have already started in small businesses across the country 71 of percent of those apprentices are women 36 percent are from ethnic minorities 38 percent have disabilities and 44 percent have caring responsibilities these are people who can frequently be overlooked are victims of prejudice or might come up from a community desperately seeking to recover from the pandemic they could have missed out on the life changing chance that apprenticeships bring simply because of who they are and where they live I'm telling you all of this today because I would love to empower further cooperation between us here today and to take the movement even further the potential of these initiatives can belong to you just as much as they can belong to any business or cause or charity I share them with you in the hope that you might reciprocate and share ideas with me and my team where we can work together to incite meaningful change and I've so enjoyed speaking with many of you recently and I look forward to us working closely in the future it's been so wonderful to be with you here today and if I could leave you with one lasting thought it would be to consider empowering cooperation within but also consider empowering cooperation without and by that I mean without our direct involvement it may be the best way to see our communities thrive the cooperative movement grow and our members flourish and our businesses stay secure thank you very much for having me here today and I'm very sorry again that I couldn't make it in person and I look forward to seeing you all in person next time goodbye okay that's um Sharon Corry Hack who's our new chief executive as you can see she's a woman who's driven by the same mission that we all have we're just going to say a couple of things so it's knocking on when you all want to get to drinks and stuff and the last thing you want is to hear from the member of the house a load of rabbit in on like there's no tomorrow so I'm just going to say a couple of things one whenever I come to cult congress and this is my second or third time I'm always really excited by the little things that I see and little things bits of things that I hear in the conversations that I had so I was really excited to hear the bits of your conversation about housing the bits of your conversation about energy I used to I used to set up housing co-ops I set up new community housing I was part of it again the biggest housing cooperative in Europe actually it's been done and it was started by people who were fed up with the housing conditions that were in and had to do it themselves hashtag that's where we started right the cooperative movement started because people were getting unadulterated food poor milk and grit in their porridge and these bunch of people got together and said we can do better in the start of the movement and the basis for that movement was the way in which we do business so I'm always excited by the little bits that I see and I think it's brilliant and when I think when I walk out of here right well when I get in the cab and I get on the train I think for God's sake nobody knows in fact I think for God's sake nobody cares now I'm the chair of social enterprise UK and we're getting to this debate about whether you're a co-op or whether you're a social enterprise you know what I don't care you know the reason why I don't care we've got we've got a cost of living crisis which is going to hammer everyone in this room and hammer twice everyone who can't afford to be in this room right we have workism what is that what is what is the work ward does anybody it's completely manufactured if you walked it out into the street and said to somebody what's the war on work they wouldn't know but I'll tell you this from me right work a wick I'd much rather be work and a wick than the opposite right but it's happening right we have and we have industrial potential industrial stress in this country and around the world we have a wall right hashtag this is where we started 1800s what do you think was going on poverty on a scale that would frankly terrify us in this room and broken markets everywhere right but we had a movement I've got to be honest with you we don't have a movement we have an interest group we have interest groups nothing wrong with it you're all as funky as hell but you're an interest group and I believe in speaking the truth because if you don't understand what the problem is you're not going to solve it and if you align to each other we're not going to get any better and we're certainly not going to get any bigger so let me tell you what I really think that the risk of offending you all but I just got to be honest you're too white you're too old you're too embedded in the rules nobody cares I've got to be honest with you when I became a I'm a very proud board director at the co-op and somebody stopped me when I got off the training weight field and said you just joined the co-op movement and I said yeah I've always been in the co-op movement I remember the co-op party I was setting up co-ops in my teens so you know but and he said well there's a problem with you know there's a problem with principles five I'd like to discuss it with you and I looked at him and I said I've got to be honest I don't know what you're talking about it's a bit like if any of you have read the seven habits of highly effective people by Stephen Covey tell me what the seven habits are and tell me whether you do them every morning you do not right nothing wrong with the cooperative principles but it's not the bible they're open to interpretation the real principles can be embedded in two words be human be fair because a lot of business and a lot of economies and neither and it seems to me that the process of being cooperative the rules the detail the minutia that we ought some of us not all of us but some of us some of us just need we love talking about we love debating it gets us all excited but it's not important not really that's process what is important is the intention and the intention is to create a movement and you know how you create movements you will ask a lot of people to do simple things really well and if you go back and I did bother last night to read the sort of founding ideas of the car movement that were expressed in 18th century language in the most modern thing available in the 18th century for people who lived then we need to do the same for people who live now and the people who are going to live are going to be running this movement in 10 years we need to find ways of expressing what it is to be co-op for my 16 year old daughter who has a notion that the world is going to hell and there are people who care about it but there's a communication gap between us and them why I've got to be honest it's just a personal view and you know don't we spend too much time talking to ourselves and that's not how you create movements so this is what I think we need to do and you know it's the privilege of going off right so I'm just going to say it I know that the people who will disagree with me and that it'll be you know people will be saying this is terrible so this is what I think we need to do we need to we need to stop talking to ourselves so much stop talking to the people who aren't members of the movement because they've all got the same feeling most people have got the same feeling something ain't right but there's some people over there that are doing something but I don't understand them ask them so the ICA when they're doing the review of what it is to be a co-op on the brand honestly spend 25% of your time talking to co-operatives and all the people that know the 60 rules 70 think lovely lovely spend the 75% of your time talking to people who know there's something fundamentally wrong and would like to do something about it and ask them what that looks like because that's what the founders did really then translate that into some simple communicable principles that can be applied right and then ask people to do something join us make it easy don't make it about remembering rules don't make it about you know how there's a there's a there's a thing in classical music you know sometimes I go to listen to classical music and there's people who will talk to you about some classical composer that you've never heard of and if you don't know it you're then not part of the club I call them Ditter to Dwarfers after a hands dirty diss of Dwarf 16th that nobody knows who he is right we can't afford to do that let's make it simple let's allow different people to interpret what it means to be a co-op so we can focus on the intention the intention is to create a movement which will change the world for the better and provide an infrastructure that enables cooperative housing to be a majority experience not a minority hobby for local energy to be the way we do things not the way some people might do something somewhere that might be an example we can't afford to do that so so Rose asked me to say a few words at the end and that's probably the end of all my words I'll ever speak to any co-op audience ever again but honestly I love the movement you can't you can't accuse me of not having any experience not knowing right I love I love what you do but you know what guys and when I say guys I mean guys you know it's modern idiom we got to do better we got to look different we've got to speak different we've got to invite people in we've got to feel uncomfortable because that's how you create movements and that's how we make change thank you very much well there you go Victor you've got the longest clap of the day so some of your words I'm sure are resonating there and that's what congress is five steep debate and some challenges to think about thanks so much first day of co-op congress has been really really successful I've got some final housekeeping at five o'clock now is the AGM for co-operatives UK so if you are joining the AGM your voting cards are at the desk outside the door and 630 in here is our international supper sponsored by central england co-operative with pre-gill if you're not booked on and you want to stay go and see the registration desk and say Rose said it'll be fine we need to solve this we need to do what Victor says we need to talk we need to find our way huge thanks to the co-operative bank for enabling everybody by the way not all the people online please don't you all turn up at the registration desk because then I will have a problem huge thanks to the co-operative bank for sponsoring it and making it accessible to all those people that have been joining us online as well today as part of my competition principle number six victor won't be happy with the title of my competition but it's about people doing deals with each other currently Pete West all from mid counties is winning so I'm just going to lay it down that gauntlet for you we do need to I am going to ask you to clear the room now for let's say so that we can get ready for our AGM at five o'clock if you do want to if you're not booked in tomorrow and you do want to come tomorrow again please do join us but can we just say huge thank you to all of you all the panelist and speakers for a really brilliant day thank you very much