 All right, I think we can start this webinar. So hi everyone, welcome to this webinar on co-ops and climate action. My name is Eva and I work for Rebarring London. I will tell you a bit more about that later, but today I'm also hosting and facilitating this webinar. This webinar is brought to you by The Hive and The Hive is a business support program for co-ops and it's delivered in collaboration between Cooperatives UK and the Cooperative Bank. And the idea of this series of webinars is to show you how you can use co-ops to do great things and what kind of support you can get to start a co-op or if you're an existing co-op as well through a business development program like The Hive. So this is the first of a series of webinars and yeah, we're testing this out and I hope you'll find it interesting. Don't hesitate to post questions in the chat and yeah, I think we can get started. Okay, so in today's webinar, the idea is to cover a few things. So first, explaining a bit to you what is a cooperative and how it works and what are the benefits and the advantages of forming cooperatives. And then we will show you some practical examples of cooperatives that exist today and work in the climate sector. And we basically want to show you how cooperatives can be a really effective and powerful way to take action on climate change. So we'll have different examples. I'm going to talk about the work that I do at Repowering London, which is a community energy cooperative. Jonathan from Carbon Co-op in Manchester is going to talk about his work with Carbon Co-op, also in the energy sector and the decarbonisation sector. And Ben from the Bristol Wood Recycling Project is going to talk about his co-op. And yeah, we hope you're going to find this inspiring and it's going to give you ideas. And then I'm going to talk a bit about the support that's available from The Hive to start your co-op or to support your existing co-op because this is supposed to be practical and we want to give you some advice and like steps that you can take if you want to set up something similar. So that is what we're going to talk about today. And obviously there'll be some time for questions at the end. So yeah, but you can also put them in the chat as we go or wait until the end. Now I'm going to stop sharing because we want to start by a short video explaining to you what is a co-op. Ownership matters. It gives people a say in the things they care about. Did you know if you were a member of a co-op you are also one of its owners? Originally founded by a group of working class people who were fed up of having to buy poor quality food co-ops are just as relevant today. They are found in every sector from high street retailers to farmer controlled businesses cooperative pumps and credit unions. Their tech platforms, they deliver social care and they're making a huge difference to people, workers and communities across the UK and the world, every single day. From the outside co-ops look like any other business but inside they are very different. They are owned and controlled together by the people that are closest to the business. Employees, customers, residents, suppliers not distant shareholders. These people, the members have an equal say in how the business is run and they even decide what to do with the profits and co-operatives work. There are thousands of different co-ops in the UK and over 3 million worldwide. Some of our most famous brands come from co-operatives from Champagne and Parmesan to Lerpat Butter and Verdes IPs. There are even fan owned football clubs. Co-ops contribute billions of pounds each year to the UK economy and boost UK productivity, innovation and entrepreneurship. And they work for the millions of members who together own the UK's co-ops. Co-operatives give people, in fact, all of us more control over the things that matter because ownership matters. Like in a nutshell, a co-op it's a business or an organization that's owned and controlled by its members. And the idea is that the members of a co-op will have a shared need and they come together to fulfill this need and to make decisions together. Co-ops can take loads of different forms. Cooperatives can be pubs or energy suppliers or taxi firms or sports clubs, farms, book shops, food shops. And the members of a co-op, depending on what the co-op is, the members can be its customers. They can be the employees of taxi firms, for instance. So workers co-op, they can be the residents of the co-op. So if it's a housing co-op, yes, so they, depending on what the co-op does, the members can have a different relationship to the co-op. But yes, the core idea is that co-op are owned by the members who are using its services and the members take decisions on how the co-op is run. And this means that the co-ops work, tend to have the potential to work for people better because they're not, like it's not owned by distant shareholders who have no idea of what people need and do on the ground. It thinks happen much closer because often actually the people who use this service are part of the co-op. So they know what they need, if that makes sense. So it's the idea of having things much more integrated rather than sometimes this relationship that we have with businesses where businesses are owned by shareholders that actually don't really know how people's experience on the ground is and who the users are. And yes, so it means that co-ops also just don't focus on making a profit because actually it's members of a co-op who decide how the co-op is run and members have their interests at heart. So they want to have a good service. They want the things to work well and they're not just interested in profit. And this means that co-ops very often have the potential to deliver high quality stuff and to work on things that are important and of value for local communities. You can, if you want to have a look at like all the types of co-ops that exist, you can have a look at Cooperatives UK's website and they have a directory of cooperatives with loads of cooperatives across the UK. And you can see like the diversity of what co-ops can do is huge and the size can vary a lot as well. You have very small co-ops, you have big co-ops like everyone knows the co-op supermarket that's a really big members co-op but you can have also much smaller ones. And yes, in the UK, there are more than 7,000 co-ops. As we saw in the video, the co-ops contribute a lot to the UK economy for 40 billion pounds. And what's interesting is also the co-ops are very resilient. So for instance, during the lockdowns in 2021, there were five times less likely to close down than other UK businesses. And also, I think that's a bit our focus for today is showing you that co-ops are really a great vehicle for collective action, which is particularly important when we talk about climate change because climate change is really about people getting together to realize their power to do things and to change the system. And co-operatives are really good way and vehicle to do that. And it's really about bringing people together and getting them to achieve more together than what they would do on their own. And also to take back control of things that have very often been, the control has been taken away from by big companies. And you can see that with the examples about pubs. We've got pub chains or taxi firms, Uber or a sports club owned by a big conglomerates. Co-ops is really about taking back these things that really are very important to us. And yeah, having this control. Yeah, so about like co-op members. So as we explained, members can have a different relationship to the co-op. It can be customers, employees, residents or suppliers. But really what matters is that members of a cooperative put something in, in terms of their time, their involvement. And then they also get something out of being involved. This something out can take different forms. It can take, if you're a member of a food co-op, a food shop co-op, you can maybe get a discount on what you're buying. If you're a member of an energy co-op, maybe you can get a dividend, like a return on investment if you're invested. If you're in a workers co-op, it can take loads of different forms. But yes, a cooperative benefits its members. So as a member, you get a benefit from being in a cooperative. And they also, cooperatives function in a democratic way. The idea is that members have an equal say. So for instance, the energy co-ops I work with, people invest together to purchase like solar panels. For instance, and once we create a co-op, everyone has the same say on what we do with the cooperative. Whether people have invested 100 or 10,000 pounds, it doesn't matter. We operate on a one vote, one member basis. And this is also something very important in a cooperative because it's this idea of collective power rather than shareholders who have a bigger say if they've invested a lot of money. That's not what co-ops are about. So that's about members. And yes, so the core of what we want to talk about today is cooperatives and climate action and how cooperatives are really a great vehicle to do stuff for the climate. Two thirds of the cooperatives in the UK are currently taking action to reduce carbon emissions. And this compares to just 30% of the UK's top 100 companies who currently pledged to eliminate their carbon emissions by 2050, knowing that we don't really know what that means and if that's gonna happen because there's a big difference between pledging and actually doing things. And it does make sense that this is the case because cooperatives are not like the main point of cooperatives is not to make profit but to benefit people. So there is going to be like a bigger tendency on trying to do stuff for the climate and the local communities then big companies would be incentivized to do. So co-ops can address climate action in loads of different ways. And the idea of today is also to show you like a few practical ways to do that. But some co-ops maybe don't necessarily have anything to do directly with climate change but can make commitments in the running of their business to protect the environment. Some co-ops can be directly like involved in climate action. And for instance, cooperatives are rates like vehicle to deliver community energy projects and we're gonna talk about that a bit today. And I think what is interesting as well is just I do feel like cooperatives because of the way they function because this idea of democracy of like empowerment of citizens of like community ownership they do encourage action on climate change anyway because it just shows people how we can get together to do things that we thought we wouldn't be able to do. And climate action is really about bringing people together and people to realize the power that they have to change the system. And cooperatives are a really good way to show that. So just by existing, just by being involved in a co-op I do believe that it can also show people that they have more power than what they think. And that's really important when we talk about climate action. So I am, I'm just checking if I'm okay with time because I'm not so used to doing these things. So yes, we get into the like case study section sort of. So myself, Jonathan and Ben, we're gonna tell you a bit about the co-ops we work for and what we do and hopefully this is gonna be inspiring and interesting for you. So I work for Repairing London and Repairing London, we are a community energy organization. We are a community benefit society, which is a form of cooperative. And what we do is that, yeah, our thing is community energy. So basically we create local energy. We give London communities the power to create control and benefit from renewable energy. Our main goal is to make sure that all Londoners play an active part in the transition to a fair and inclusive low carbon society. And we do this in like different ways. So this is what we call our toolkit. We have like different, different type of work that we do. One of the big things we do is we basically, we help people set up community energy cooperatives. So we ourselves are a community benefit society and we help people around London to create their own community benefit societies to set up renewable energy projects. So far, these projects have mostly been installing solar panels on housing estates and community buildings. But in the future, we will be looking at different technologies and doing more stuff. But so far, we basically help people setting up community energy cooperatives. We have eight energy cooperatives across London and they all have solar panels on different roofs in different neighborhoods and they do some cool stuff with the money that they make. But I'll tell you a bit more about the model after. We also have innovation pilots. So we're looking at how basically we want our community energy projects to be at the forefront of the energy transition. And we know that our energy systems are going to change, they're going to be more smart and more flexible and more efficient. And we are doing some innovation pilots to see how this could look like in the community energy world. So how can our community energy cooperatives be at the forefront of the changes that are happening to make sure that these changes benefit the people? We also work on what we call our community support services. So the idea is that we, obviously with the community energy cooperatives and the innovation pilots, we're sort of trying to build the energy system of the future. But we also know that the energy system of today is broken and people are having big problems with their energy today. So the community support services is all about helping people like right now in the present as much as we can. And this takes the form of giving people some energy tips and helping people who are struggling with their bills as much as we can, but also advocating for a better energy policy that protects more vulnerable households. And really trying to bring, our thing is a lot about lived experiences and trying to bring people, for instance, people who have experienced fuel poverty into policy making. And then a last part of our work is around education and training because we want to use all these things, these community energy co-ops, these innovation stuff. We want to use these also as opportunity to upskill people and bring in more people into the green sector and boost people's employment and give people opportunities. So we have like education and training programs, but this is also integrated within what we do. So when we set up community energy cooperatives, we recruit local champions. We want to give people like upskilling and mentoring. So it's all about building people's skills so that they can play a part in the low government transition and really empower citizens so that they can have a voice in what's going on in the energy system and can help deliver a meaningful change to it. So that's what we do. And yes, I was thinking, I'll just tell you a little bit more about the community energy model that we use and how it works. So maybe some of you are familiar with how these projects work, but just in case, yes, that's just a high-level overview. Basically, the way the community energy projects work, so we set up a community benefit society, which as I explained is a form of cooperative, and we get people together to invest in the community benefit society. And once we've got enough money, before that we try and identify a project that we want to do, obviously. So often in our case, it's finding a roof to install solar panels. Once we raise enough money, we install the solar panels on the site that we identified and the solar panels belong to the cooperative. So everyone who invested in the cooperative is a member. And then once we've got the solar panels up on a roof, we sell the electricity to the site and with the income that we get, we do different things. We pay the investors back with a small return. We cover the administration cost of the cooperative because it's like a business, it needs to be run and managed. But also, any surplus profit after that is being put in a community benefit fund. And the idea is that this community fund benefits the community as a whole, which is why, and I'm not gonna go into much detail for that, but which is why we are community benefit societies and not cooperatives, because the idea is that community benefit societies not only benefit the members, so in this case, not only the investors in the project, but also every, like the whole community. Yes, I'm not gonna get to like, I could talk about this for hours, but I would say just in case of, yeah, just about the committee energy model and these cooperatives, I think what's interesting talking about cooperatives because that's what this webinar is about. I think what's interesting and challenging for me as a, because I'm the committee engagement manager that we're bearing is how do we get a diverse, like a diverse membership basically? How do we get young people involved in these cooperatives? How do we get like, loads of people who never heard about cooperatives before to get involved in these things because these are the people that we also want to bring on board. And cooperatives are not necessarily that well known among loads of people. So yeah, a big part of my role is trying to make these projects like very grassroots and bottom up, but that also means trying to like, get new people on board and make these things more, yeah, more like easy to understand and appealing for everyone. I can see that someone raised the hand I think, but yeah, I don't know if you wanna put your question in the chat and maybe we can come to it after when we do the Q&A. Yes, so next slide. I just wanted to finish about the power of community energy because why do I think that this is really great? And yeah, I think community energy really has the power to make our energy system green and more efficient. And the reason for that, as we touched on it a bit before, because cooperatives and community energy groups are like powered by people. It's more likely that they will take action on things that matter to us because it's not working, it's not for profits, it's for people. So yeah, I think that's like the main reason why I think that community energy and energy cooperatives will help us tackle the climate and the energy crisis. And community energy can also make energy more affordable and fair. And that's really important today in the context of the energy crisis because we're in an energy system that's dominated by big companies rather than by community energy groups run by the people. But if we had more community energy groups, we would be able to have better energy prices, make energy more affordable for people. And also because people would be more involved in their energy system, it would be like democratically owned and run. And I think that's obviously really important in today's context. And yes, like community energy, obviously it's a different type of energy system than what we know today because the energy system of today is dominated by six big companies. It's big gas power plants, it's quite centralized. Community energy is all about, again, the idea of taking this power and distributing it among people. So this means that it's going to be much more decentralized, much more small scale renewable energy and stations, much closer to people, which means that people have more of an incentive and an interest in also getting involved in them. And yeah, I read, I had some interesting stats about the fact that community energy co-ops, for instance, I think these are stats from community energy England, but community energy co-ops, they are four to five times better than corporates at engaging people on energy efficiency. And that's probably simply because cooperatives are much closer to people, so they tend to be more trusted among local committees. And community projects also deliver 12 to 13 times the community benefit of commercial energy installations. And I think the last thing I wanted to finish on is also about the social energy because corporatives are also just a really good way to bring people together. Does really matter if it's on energy or food or housing. It's just an amazing way to get people to talk to each other because these are all services that we need to survive, whether it's energy, food or housing. And it's just a really good way to bring lots of people in the same room that wouldn't necessarily talk otherwise and generate really the social energy that's necessary if we want to create change in our society. And I will end on that and I will pass on to Jonathan from Carbon Co-op so that he can tell us more about what he does with community energy in Manchester. Hi there, hopefully you can hear me. Is that all right Ava? Yes, tell you well. Yeah, so my name is Jonathan. I'm one of the co-founders at Carbon Co-op. And yeah, I'm here today to talk about corporatives and climate action. And what I'm gonna do is talk a bit about my background and how I got involved in cooperatives in the first place. I'll talk a bit about why co-op's important around climate change and echoing some of the points I would have made by Ava. I'll try not to duplicate it. I'll talk about the work that Carbon Co-op is doing as well and how that kind of works into that and why we're a cooperative and why that makes a difference. So just a little bit about myself. So yeah, I come from an environmental background. I was really allowed to hear about climate change and the coming current climate crisis when I was growing up in the early 90s. I particularly was concerned about things like peat and the natural environment and what have you. And I went to university and I studied climate science and it's actually quite a frustrating thing to do actually because as a scientist, you were taught that your job was to document not to intervene and not to make change. And obviously in an area like climate change, you're really alarmed by what's happening. You wanna make a difference. And one of my professors, he'd seen his expertise in peat. He'd seen it destroyed, you know, some of the key kind of prime peat areas in the UK. And I felt really disempowered by that. I became involved in environmental direct action and protest movements like reclamation streets. But actually, one of the things that really changed my life was when I left university, I got a job at Ethical Consumer Magazine and he was taught about the different types of cooperatives. Ethical Consumer Magazine, which is like an ethical witch guide where you look at different products and different household things and look at them on their environmental performance and also the ethical performance that companies involved. And Ethical Consumers were run as a work co-op. And for me at the age of 21, coming out of university, feeling quite disempowered and disenchanted, it was fantastic because I felt immediately like I was involved in something that was creating change. I was trusted and became a director at the age of 22. I learned all kinds of different skills and competencies as well. And it taught me how to run a company and how to run a cooperative as well. And those things, they're the same things, but they're also different. And so for me, it was a great education and a fantastic co-op to be part of. So a bit later on in my life, I've worked at all sorts of different cooperatives, some of the ones that Eva's talking about, consumer cooperatives, householder co-ops, work with them anyway, and all sorts of things and work with organizations to set up co-ops. But yeah, carbon co-op came about in the mid-2000s. And the kind of motivation was two-fold really. Firstly, my co-conspirator, Nick Dodd, who was at a worker co-op called Earthbed, he was concerned about government action and how governments could create change. And he was frustrated that governments always think about top-down big kind of levers that they can pull that will create large-scale change. And often what happens is they want to do something large-scale and it doesn't work, often because they're kind of imposing a solution upon people, householders or citizens, I might have you. And he felt that a bottom-up solution to climate change, a modular solution that worked at a street level and then worked upwards through federation and growth cooperative federation would be more effective than a top-down approach. For myself, like Eva was talking about, I was a community activist at the time and I was concerned about the energy transition that was happening and concerned that communities were both not involved in that transition in terms of dictating where it would go and having a say but also being able to benefit from it and to generate resources and economic activity. And the cooperative brought together both our concerns, a bottom-up approach to tackling climate change, scaling through replication, not through some big top-down kind of approach and community empowerment that was both around decision-making but also resource. And I think that's one thing to highlight about corporatives. They are what some people frame as a social enterprise. They have social environmental and people-centered outcomes and motivations but they also have a trading element to them, you know, a trading organization. That's one of the things that makes a corporative different from a charity or purely voluntary sector organization. So that was some of the footing around carbon co-op and we started engaging people, built a critical mass of people, members and launched a co-op back in 2011 now. The benefits of cooperative action, kind of why is carbon co-op a cooperative? For a number of reasons really. And I think looking back on cooperative action, co-ops have always come together, have always been around people coming together for mutual benefit and they've often been come about as a result of where governments can't or won't act and the original co-op founder that's back in Rochdale because they didn't have access to good quality food and drink and other staples and they built their own. And I think this is a similar thing where there is a lack of concrete action that people can take around climate change. So we created a cooperative for people to come together to access technical resources, expertise, finance, funding, projects and all that sort of thing so that people can access more than they can alone just working alone. And secondly really to come together as a group of people really, people taking action and sharing expertise, experience, we call it peer learning or peer support. And that's, we're a community benefit society similar to what I was talking about and that's how we operate. We enable people to come together to take collective action and it's concrete actual action but they're doing it collectively. And there's some really interesting work around climate change. The fact that people when they work on their own they feel atomized and alone and they don't feel empowered to take action against climate change, it's so big. When people come as part of a collective endeavor, a cooperative, they feel empowered and they feel they can do stuff. That's why we're a cooperative. And what we do, we do a number of lots of different things. We've got lots of different projects for now. We have 20 members of staff and we have nearly 500 members mostly in Greater Manchester and Northwest and we do a number of things. Historically we've always worked around retrofit, retrofitting homes and efficiency in part because we know that this is an area that's not being tackled and we wanna demonstrate what's possible and the ambition and how by working together people can do more around retrofit. And recently last year we established a one-stop shop for retrofit a new community benefit society, people-powered retrofit. We also work very much around innovation and research and development similar to repowering and we're developing demand side response technologies in the hub. Basically the ability to shift how and when we use energy to match how and when we generate its energy through renewable sources as well which is a new and emerging area in the energy system. And one that's ever more relevant this winter. And thirdly and finally we do a lot around advocacy and helping people and communities to talk to and to influence policy makers. For example, we ran a citizen jury this summer around the governance of a local energy market with the combined authority the Greater Manchester Combined Authority and we're in here in Greater Manchester. So yeah, we do all those different types of things but fundamentally it's all about taking action on climate change, doing it collectively and thirdly and finally we have like a fundamental commitment to energy justice to rebalancing some of the injustices that we see in our society. So that's carbon co-op, thanks for listening and I'm around if there's any questions after. Thanks, Jonathan. And now we're going to hear about the third example and yes, I'm introducing you to Ben who's the founder of Bristol Wood Recycling Project. Hi, thanks. And then I'll let you share your slides. Thanks Eva and thank you Jonathan. So Bristol Wood Recycling Project was founded in 2004 and it was in an attempt to address the vast amount of waste that goes on within the construction sector. Every day thousands of tons of wood is being thrown into skips and effectively being made unusable in terms of how as a community asset and Bristol Wood Recycling Project was created to address some of that waste and to create community value from that waste as well. So here I am, look, I'm an age match, I was 18 years ago, 18 and a half years ago and that's me with my co-director, Nicola Padden and we were lucky enough to have access to a council-owned building that was expected to be demolished at any time soon and we were able to move in there on a peppercorn rent and the first thing that we did was buy a van, you can't quite tell how rusty and old this one was but yeah, on its first voyage, the actual engine blew up on the motorway that was in additional costs, it was unexpected but this vehicle enabled us to go to construction sites, to house builders, to people who were throwing wood out of their gardens, to go to the universities, to go to industrial units where wood was going to waste and collect that wood and the Bristol Wood Recycling Project model is based around trying to reuse as much of the wood as possible. Currently we reuse about a third of what we collect and every day we're collecting about two tons of wood so we're looking at hundreds of tons a year that we are collecting and we're able to reuse and that wood that we reuse brings massive value to the local community but also it brings value to the environment it's a bit of a perverse way of describing it but that wood that if we weren't collecting it it would be going into a mixed skip and it would be pulverised and it would probably be either turned into chipboard or it would be incinerated and that incineration is called combined is called energy from waste and when you think about the fact that a quarter of what we collect is reusable if we weren't there to collect that and reuse that that that would just be lost and all of the embodied carbon in that woods the lives of those trees have gone into growing that the habitats that they come from also go up in smoke so our endeavor to try and reuse as much as possible really brings value to that environmental the cost of wasting this wood this is an old photo as well these are the kind of customers that we have because we're based in central Bristol we actually have an awful lot of footfall and a lot of people who are coming either on foot or they're coming on bikes or more recently they're coming on little scooters and they're able to buy wood and take it away in that way which is a great sort of low carbon way of affecting change as well in 2012 we were faced after having occupied our site for eight years and this was bearing in mind that we were expecting to be there for just a few months and these months were going on because the whole area was due to be developed there was to be an arena in the area in the Bristol arena the whole of the area was termed an enterprise zone which I'm sure you're all familiar with here is a photo of me meeting the Prime Minister at the time David Cameron you can see I'm dressed as my best for the occasion and having a good conversation with him and we knew that our time at Cattle Market Road was limited but this kind of the tenure that we had on this site rolled on and on and then eventually we sort of got our marching orders we heard that the writing was on the wall that we would have to vacate the area we'd have to leave our then home it was we were heading towards 13 years actually by the time we actually had to move out there but this really created a shift for us and we had to gear up at this stage we'd also change into a cooperative now Jonathan mentioned earlier social enterprise and that's what we are we are a social enterprise we have a triple bottom line at school we have we are a business so we have to make money to pay our wages we've got 13 employees to pay the rent and to pay for our services but we also really value the social and environmental impact that we create how many tons of wood are we reusing how many volunteers are we working with we have volunteers from all sorts of backgrounds coming to help us out from retired university lecturers to people in recovery from substance abuse issues so we really measure our impact by who gets involved and we had also by 2012 turned into a cooperative which we thought after having been a kind of a traditional hierarchical organization with a management committee of directors and recruiting different people and them coming again we actually turned into a cooperative which was close to a workers co-op is we're actually a multi-stakeholder co-op so that we have workers having once they pass their probation they turn into co-op members but we also have volunteers who understand the culture and business of the organization they can become members as well and then we come together in general meetings and annual general meetings to decide on the direction of the business and choose where we're going back in 2012 and then onwards until we actually moved out in 2017 it was a very slow process but we geared up to the challenge of finding our new location and we actually managed to find a place just 800 meters away from our old site and this photo is a picture of some of our employees and some of our volunteers the members of the cooperative and this is after we raised 430,000 pounds through Treados Bank to purchase our site now Treados Bank it's great for us to be working with them because they as a lender and this isn't a plug for them it's just like who do we choose to go with it could be we have a current account with the co-op bank we also bank with Treados Bank and they invest solely in environmental and social projects so for us to raise money through them and we raise this as something called a bond issue so we pay back all of the investors at 4% a year over the space of six years and with that money we're able to buy this property and working with Treados we know that we have the money that we've also we've invested in the share and the profit that's generated also goes to support that organization which is part of a low carbon future so here is all of us celebrating having moved into our new home this is a picture of it from the front I think whatever I was saying earlier was about like climate action is about people getting about bringing people together in cooperatives and I think that having community owned buildings and buildings and places that are beautiful and places where people participate engenders this citizenship that allows us to believe that we're actually part of change and part of being able to make a difference and us being able to own this building and transform it externally and internally has had a huge impact on everyone who comes and gets involved here volunteers, employees, customers the people that we collect wood from and that I believe really furthers an agenda of a positive vision of change and a low carbon future also as a cooperative okay so we've got a big financial commitment for us £430,000 which we're slowly paying interest on and we've got a six year term and then we're gonna have to raise money again to extend that so we can effectively get a mortgage on this building but as we deal every quarter and every year with these kind of financial implications I'm part of me if you can hear noises of work behind them busy yard wood getting chopped up as we work towards the completion of our loan we also start to talk about okay what more can we do to further our social environmental objectives so this big roof which unfortunately is covered in a spacer so that's gonna be a tricky one for us to put solar panels on but behind we have further roof space which we can start putting solar panels on here we go here's a photo of this extension that we made from lovely Douglas fur that's locally sourced and here's some of the wood that we have powered up and this roof with its LED lights we hope to be getting solar panels on those soon here's a final photos of what we get up to this is the size of the yard this is all the wood you see here all of this is saved from waste by having volunteers involved by having employees who have that sense of ownership and direction and permanence within a really uncertain world this is our home this isn't going anywhere and everyone is participating in ensuring that our business is self financing and generating its own future means that people have that sense of ownership and agency within where we are going and that trickles down to every single person who comes and visits from the cost wood from to the customers who buy wood from us and we've been a part of Bristol social history for the last 18 years and I imagine that we're gonna be part of it for however long we can which at least now they're 18 years and I think many more times than that so yeah that's Bristol Wood recycling project and our participation in this carbon neutral future thank you thank you Ben yeah it's super inspiring it's really great to see like very practical examples from yourself in wood recycling and from Jonathan in Red Refit on how cooperatives like can do stuff for the climate and how well it works now before we get on to questions from attendees I will just share my screen again and tell you a little bit more about The Hive which is okay let me which is the business development program that is supporting the series of webinars so yeah maybe you're thinking this is really inspiring and you want to set up your own cooperative or maybe you've got a business and you want to transform them into a cooperative or maybe you know someone who is interested in maybe creating a cooperative and in any case cooperatives UK is a great place to start I personally all the cooperatives the community cooperatives that I work with around London are all registered with cooperatives UK and it's a big network of cooperatives across the UK and their role is really to support you in creating and developing and running your cooperative so you can go on their website and they've got this cool program which is delivered in collaboration with the cooperative bank and it's called The Hive and I'll just show you a bit what The Hive is about and how you can use it it's basically a support for any new or existing co-op and it's they've got like loads of free online resources and they've got some business support that you can apply for so if you go on the website you've got this like step by step co-op creation tool so you can just go through the steps you don't even have to have a co-op to create right now you can just go through the steps and look at the different resources that co-ops UK has and it gives you a bit of an idea of the things you need to think about if you were to set up a cooperative and then register it and yeah I just strongly if this is something you're interested in I strongly recommend you to just have a look and see the different steps and different resources available for each and you can get like the really cool thing about The Hive program is that you can get some business support and so you've got access to up to 10 days of tailored business support and that includes getting one-to-one advice from a co-op development expert and also maybe some peer mentoring from an experienced cooperative and you can also access training from Corporatives UK they have a lot of training on like basically the running of a cooperative what it is to be a cooperative director how do you put together financial accounts for a cooperative what the kind of legal stuff that you have to think about the admin how do you engage with your members and stuff like that and I think the business development tool is really useful because to start a co-op it does require a bit of work and a bit of knowledge and it can go from deciding the most appropriate tip of co-op that you're going to use as we mentioned like you can use a cooperative community-benefit societies community interest companies like there are different structures and it's very useful to think early on about what structure serves your purpose best and then you can also get support at how you set up the governance of your co-op what are your rules going to look like how you're going to run it how you're going to make decisions how you're going to incorporate so how you're going to register your co-op what type of members are you going to try and get how you're going to involve your members so like designing an engagement plan to engage with your membership and also how you're going to run your business because Ben and Jonathan said well but like it's about business co-ops are about also trading actually doing things it's not charities so you need a business plan and you can use some of this business support to do that testing out your ID and how you're going to raise finance and how you're going to make this like financially viable and yes from with co-ops UK you're going to get also some skills training and peer mentoring with other cooperatives which can also enable you to network and then like I think what's great with cooperatives UK it's a big network of co-ops and it's just also really good to share learnings with other cooperatives and yeah learn from each other really so I think that's it in terms of the hive all the links are in the chat if you want to have a look and yeah we've got eight yes we've got eight minutes left for questions I think I'll just stop sharing and I can see there are already two questions in the chat there's one question for you Sam from Petra thank you Petra for your question you chose more of a multi-stakeholder rather than a community benefit society would you consider changing to a model that would allow community share offer wide investors and members yeah Petra yeah great juicy question and it's Ben and yeah I mean at that stage where we were out of having to find a new location actually restructuring the organization in terms of its company structure didn't feel like an appropriate thing we had enough of amounts of decline to try and deal with that but in terms of evolution to a community benefit society I personally would be open to that but this would have to be led by the members within the cooperative I like that idea and you know you put that little seed in my mind to start discussing it with some of my other co-op members but it's kind of framed within the capacity of everything else that goes on here because we're a social enterprise and generating the income through going out into building sites and collecting wood or having a big yard where we sell timber or having a big busy workshop making stuff sometimes it's more sort of heady stuff gets relegated a little bit that's not to say it's not important but it kind of falls after the operational stuff but I think that's a really cool question I'll take it to some of my colleagues and chat about it because I think it's a nice idea and certainly has room for exploration so yeah thank you Petra great it's like a two-way webinar two-way workshop and learning that's cool a question for you Jonathan also from Petra what has been the scale and some examples of the retrofitting you have done across Greater Manchester yeah so yeah so we focus on deep retrofit which is multiple kind of improvements applied to a property together and the reason to do that is to have a holistic plan for a property so that you don't do stuff now and have to take it out again you can do it in stages you can do it in one big plan we've specialized in like in those deep retrofit products as well because they're not not things that other people are doing and not to this what they're doing but to say we're trying to show our ambition and what co-ops can achieve so in terms of the properties we did a big we did a big program where the average cost of the property of the upgrade was 40 000 pounds the we cut the gas use and the space heat demand in half carbon emissions by 60 people on average reduced energy bills by a thousand pounds a year and that's in kind of old money and we're left with bills after the retrofit of a few hundred pounds no more than that so yeah that's the kind of scale of retrofit we're aiming for there are other approaches as well that are to be encouraged as well because we need multi-pronged approaches kind of challenge thanks Trinidadan for your examples another question for you Ben are you quite unique in what you do in this sector as a co-op and would you support new ones? Yeah something my computer's telling me my internet state my internet connection is unstable so we're gonna hear you sorry if I get a bit glitchy yeah we are quite unique in terms of wood recycling run as a cooperative we are part of an umbrella a national umbrella called community wood recycling and there are different wood recycling projects throughout the country so in Oxford and Cambridge and Glasgow Edinburgh Manchester even you know so we've got there it's there are different social enterprises doing this we are the only one that is run as a cooperative so yeah we are unique in that way and and trying to figure out this governance model of participation of the different membership groups is you know it's a terrain to be traversed and sometimes it's best taken on by people who are familiar with the cooperative model so you know I've spoke leads wood recycling for instance have talked about turning into a co-op so you know it's got to be led by the by the employees and cells I think but it's definitely a place for growth and there's interest in it thank you Ben another question from Christopher co-ops often struggle with funding and getting capital are plans to expand or is it more just to be sustainable and to keep going without seeking growth with question just a general question so what have you wants to I think I mean Ben I'll talk I'm sure because it was interesting to hear he'd used bonds like debt to to raise capital there are lots of different ways that co-ops can do can raise capital you know we're it's similar to a company we can take on debt and and and borrowing and that sort of thing we can also through community benefit societies raise money to equity investment so called community shares you know so actually there's lots of different ways that we can do that I think one of the ways we can't raise capital is through venture capital investment where like a venture capitalist puts loads of money into us and then hopes to kind of exit with a profit to me that's actually an advantage because that kind of quick kind of you know fire sale capitalism doesn't help the long-term challenges we have in tackling climate change yeah I think that's also a perfect example is why co-operatives are very well suited to do stuff in the climate sector Ben do you want to come in about that as well? Yeah I think it's great what Jonathan just said there I think that we had to propose moderate growth in order to pay for our debt and then to accrue more capital so that we could purchase the building in the long run we will have this interesting place where actually our outgoings in terms of the rent mortgage whatever becomes less and less and then we're left with a very nice position of like okay we don't we now what do we start doing with our surplus so as long as we keep on growing or as long as we keep on doing our thing and creating a moderate surplus then actually that puts us in a really extraordinary position of what do we invest in in the future Yeah thanks Ben and I was just going to add that from my point of view the stuff we do at rebarring because we're all about community energy and trying to make community energy very inclusive and we do a lot of engagement our cooperatives are not financially sustainable in the sense that their revenues don't cover the cost like the engagement work that we do and so we cover a lot of this engagement work through rebarring with some grant funding and I think that's fine because it's you know it's also sometimes different work and yeah any question Christopher how many investors does each organization have I can just tell you for the co-ops that I work with I would say each community energy cooperative so we have around eight each of them has between 60 to 150 investors something like that who are all members but not everyone is necessarily like engaged in the day-to-day running of the cooperative so each of our cooperatives maybe has like 15 20 people who are like highly engaged and it's day-to-day running and I don't I don't if you're not coming on that Ben Ben and Jonathan of the the members you've got to give an idea of the scale so we've got 450 members of carbon co-op and they pay 35 pounds a year so they pay a little bit to kind of be part of something bigger tackling climate change and then we've got 350 investor members of people power retrofit and that's been part of community share issues to establish now I don't know the figures I'll touch up on my head of how many investors we've got within 430,000 but the investment range is from 50 quid to 20,000 pounds and we managed to raise that 430 grand in in two weeks Wow that's cool hold on I know there was another question in the chat but I'm conscious it's one past two when the webinar I was supposed to finish had two so thank you so much to all the participants for listening in hope you found it inspiring and useful you've got loads of links in the chat but also you can look at co-op 2k's website and yes looking forward to hear from some of you and yeah hope you find this session interesting and you're going to take some stuff away to do things in your area bye everyone