Ed Russell

Co-operatives have principles that say how they should work and one of those is Principle 6 or in English the principle is “Co-operation among Co-operatives” (to see a list of all of the principles see here). I’ve always been pretty bad with this one for a few reasons but at the recent UK Co-operative Conference 2009 I vowed to change my ways.

So when I need to source something from outside my business I’m going to look to other businesses that share my values and principles first. Sounds simple doesn’t it? A good idea for both the co-operative movement as a whole and for keeping within our ethics with all that we do… So why don’t we do it more?

I guess the reason I’ve been put off it in the past is because of two things:

• Firstly there was a bad experience of “co-operative working”: in a previous co-operative I’ve been viewed as a competitor when trying to sell services to another co-operative; the “we couldn’t possibly buy off you” type response which in turn didn’t make me want to explore working with other co-operatives and you get into a whole vicious circle.
• Secondly was more of an internal hurdle to get over. I like working with people geographically quite close to me. This is a bit silly really considering the business that I’m in, but for some reason I liked the idea that if something was going wrong with a piece of work I could turn up at the suppliers’ premises and somehow that would make things better. (I realise that actually this would probably make things worse.)

To be honest I should have got over the second reason pretty quickly. I’ve been banging on a lot about how people should use the best people to deliver a piece of work rather than picking people on some arbitrary thing like physical location, especially when there shouldn’t be such a need to meet in person with all of the communication technology that is now available. I even started thinking about setting up an organisation to put something together to help move this along (I have the domain, and the idea, just not the time….yet). But, in this case, it was more of a “do as I say, not as I do” kind of thing.

After talking to a lot of co-operatives at the conference it became clear that I’m not unique in this view.

As a movement we should be supporting each other wherever we can. Here is a map of most of the worker co-operatives in the UK that are members of Co-operatives UK which shows there are a lot of businesses out there to help with anything you might need so it’s not a lack of options (the map was put together for John Atherton to put on his blog here using our webSNAPS tool).



So, I’ve made a start. We’ve done some work recently which we’ve used Wave to do the design. It’s worked out really quite well, which is encouraging. I’m going to keep trying wherever possible to continue to use co-operatives, hopefully others will too and that can only lead to a stronger overall movement.

The next step is to make it easier for this collaboration to happen & for me that’s where someone like Co-ops UK should be directing some of their effort - something that I hope to be able to use my new Worker Co-operative Council position to effect. If not, I still have that idea under my hat. It’s just finding the time to do it!