The End of the Beginning

Rural community-owned enterprise is on a roll. A banner headline in the Sunday Telegraph proclaims "The Rise of the Archers Co-operative". The best part of a million people tune in to hear the residents of Ambridge discuss how to save their village shop through community ownership. In the real world, store openings are at record levels with many more in the pipeline. It's a great time to be at Plunkett, but let's not get carried away.

The boom in community-owned village stores is fantastic news, but we still have a long way to go in rural community-ownership. The shop is just one way a rural community can tackle its needs. There are many others: pubs, church space, transport, energy, broadband, housing, healthcare...the list is huge. But most of these are still only just emerging with a few brave pioneers developing models which have yet to catch on in the way that shops have done.

This week sees the formal launch of our project with the Community Transport Association on rural community transport supported by the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation, so there are steps being taken to broaden the range of enterprises. But it is still an uphill struggle to secure support for these emerging forms of community-owned enterprise.

So while we rightly celebrate the success of village shops, let's also redouble our efforts to support the next wave of rural community-owned enterprises ...and the next..and the next.

Finally, a solution to a social dilemma you face. You'll want to celebrate Social Enterprise Day on November 19th, but you also want to celebrate the fact that it is World Toilet Day as well. Problem solved: raise a glass to the incredible people of Lanreath in Cornwall who created their community-owned village shop from their local toilet (see the older blog "Convenience Retailing").

The Transition to co-operation

Every so often, you get to speak at an event where the energy coming off the audience makes you feel like you're standing in front of an open fire. I had that last week when I spoke at the Transition North event in Slaithwaite. The event was an ambitious one, bringing together not only transition supporters from across the North, but also a broad range of people from the co-operative movement. Sponsored by The Co-operative Group, it was a real chance to explore links between the two movements.

Following on from leading light in the Transition Towns movement Rob Hopkins and Christine Tacon, head of The Co-operative Farms, my role was to show the links between the two movements. To do so, I went back into co-operative history to show the similarities between the two. I cited Robert Owen's vision of Villages of Co-operation which would tackle social injustice at a community level and focus local production. I shared how Dr William King had taken this vision and turned it into something practical where the only way to achieve this was for small groups to come together and create these communities step by step - selling food to each other and using the profits to buy a shop, then using that profit to buy land to grow, then using that profit to create housing etc. All of this came to a head with the Rochdale Pioneers whose vision was not to create a shop, but a 'self-supporting home colony.'

Naturally, Sir Horace Plunkett's role also appeared, both with his vision for how to tackle change in society but also his warning to the US Government that its economic system would be undermined due to 'peak coal'.

But the presentation wasn't all history as I showed how co-operative models were helping to shape the local food movement through such diverse forms as community-supported agriculture, food co-ops, farmers' markets, Country Markets and village shops. Our next challenge was to bind these together into local food systems.

The points that seemed to hit home were:

1) The scale of the modern co-operative movement - a number of transitioners were struck by the statistic that co-operatives employ 10% more people in the world than all the multinationals and their subsidiaries put together (100 million against 90 million).

2) The image that transition and co-operation were not two different movement but simply two waves on the same ocean as generation after generation sought to create societal change through collective action.

3) My final point was to see co-operatives as a way of securing long-term solutions for the individual parts of a Transition community. Voluntary action alone could not create models which would last for generations, which is what we need. But the Transition approach could bind these together. The enterprises were the bricks and transition was the mortar.

I was delighted to trigger ideas from so many people from both the co-operative and the transition movement. I'm sure that the event will help build links that are so vital for everyone.

Mutual friends

I was delighted that Plunkett's work has been recognised in this year's Mutuals Yearbook, which case studied one of the village stores. The yearbook is produced by Mutuo, the impressive think-tank which promotes the role of mutuals.

This recognition was extended to an invite to speak on membership at the annual Mutuals Forum alongside the Eaga Partnership and Luton & Dunstable Hospital Foundation Trust. What could our shops teach such a gathering of major mutual organisations? Quite a lot was my argument.

The freshness and vitality of our recently formed mutual enterprises meant that their members were doing many things that some older mutuals may have forgotten that members could do. Things such as:

Belief - The members had to believe that creating and sustaining the enterprise was possible, often against impossible odds, because they believed that there was no alternative.

Enterprise - Village shop members were directly involved in shaping the fundamentals of their enterprise and often had to find innovative solutions to problems themselves.

Skills - Many of them shared their own personal skills with the enterprise as it was run on a volunteer basis.

Team work - They knew that they either supported each other or their mutual would fail.

Customer service - This was their main focus as they would stand or fall on it.

In the discussions afterwards, I responded to a query of whether this only applied to smaller mutual. No, was my response, because we had seen similar passion in campaigns on international issues, such as Jubilee 2000. We live in a world where more and more people expect to be able to shape the services they receive. People who saw such work as a campaign not a membership. The challenge to all mutuals was to find what it was that they did that could unlock such a passion in their own organisation.

So we are delighted to be recognised as part of the mutual sector and look forward to sharing our knowledge and learning from others within it.

Going Back Home

Plunkett went back to its roots with a visit to Ireland last week. Minister Tony Killeen made the invitation when he spoke at our AGM. It was a wonderful opportunity to use our standard tool of analysis of "What would Horace have done"?

First call was Cork where Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Agency, was holding a conference on Ireland in Uncertain Times. The event provided an excellent insight into the challenges of Ireland's rural communities. The economic briefings made it clear that the impact of global recession was happening harder and faster in Ireland than in the UK by every measure.

Teagasc director Gerry Boyle gave an inspirational and challenging speech. He spelt out the opportunities, but set the challenge as being the lack of organisational capital. Communities needed to be enabled. Farmers had to move from producers to retailers. "The worst deficit is that people are unable to contemplate change." This was followed up by Gerry Scully, Teagasc Programme Manager, who called on agencies to "co-create solutions with people."

My other Cork highlight was the inspiration of meeting Brian Phelan, who created Glenfinn Freerange Duckeggs, a wonderful example of what can be achieved in uncertain times.

Then it was on to Dublin for my first ever visit to the Plunkett House, the first ever home of the Plunkett Foundation and still home to the Irish Co-operative Organisation Society. Its Director General (and Plunkett fellow) John Tyrell gave me a marvellous tour of where it had all began.

Then it was on to meet Minister Killeen to share first impressions. Using Sir Horace's mantra of Better Farming, Better Business and Better Living, I said that I was hugely impressed by how much Teagasc was still providing research based knowledge to farmers in exactly the way that Horace had called for in Ireland over 100 years ago. The real opportunity seemed to me to be a strong desire to connect the economic challenges with Ireland's strong community base. However, I wasn't hearing any reference to community-owned models such as co-operatives and other social enterprises.

The scale of the challenges are such that, to quote Gerry Scully, "more of the same will not be good enough." What was striking was that the chance to do things differently was already waiting to be used from the approach used by Sir Horace and the incredible team of people who worked with him to tackle issues of equal weight in Ireland all those years ago.

Making Local Food Work Conference

The second Making Local Food Work conference was held in Bristol last week and what an event it turned out to be. The first had sold out its 150 places in just a few days, so we took the bold step of booking a 250 place venue for the second. This sold out too with a waiting list.

The main thing that I loved about the day was the wonderful variety of people there. They must have come from every aspect of the local food movement and the learning between them made the event worthwhile.

The speakers didn't disappoint with Tim Crabtree as inspiring as ever on Bridport, but now complete with animated slides. Barny Haughton of Bordeaux Quay came straight from Keith Floyd's wake to wander through why local food mattered to him. My quote of the day came from Professor Kevin Morgan. In an impassioned speech asking why food wasn't part of modern city planning, he heaped praise on projects such as ours. But, he added, how to we prevent them from being "islands of excellence in a sea of mediocrity."

It is a point well made. The desire to connect seemed to be the undercurrent of the day and it is something that we'll need to put our minds to.

Green care and community ownership

Fascinating trip this week to speak at a Green Care conference of academics looking at Green Care and agriculture. Green Care is a very broad church but can be defined as "to use nature

to produce health, social or educational benefits" In the UK, this is best shown by care farms, that provide a wide range of experiences on farms to benefit people faced with such issues as addiction, learning difficulties and many more areas. You can find far more out at the National Care Farming Initiative, a really inspiring organisation.

Plunkett was asked to out this work in a wider social enterprise perspective. To do so, I suggested that there were three main categories of enterprises involved. The first was those, such as care farms, based on existing agricultural businesses. The second was enterprises established to deliver green care, such as Walton Lea. The third was existing social enterprises who could add green care, but weren't set up to do so. I suggested, for instance, that Fordhall Farm was, in essence, providing green care for all. My main argument was that this third category, if rooted in community ownership, could offer not only a route from social exclusion, but also a route back into social inclusion.

Another plea was to recognise that many of the development needs of green care enterprises were close to community enterprises and it was important not to reinvent the wheel.

What inspired me most was the group's determination to provide evidence of the impact of giving an individual a green care experience. This could be a powerful tool to help convince policy formers and I wish them every success.

Right to Try gets manifesto endorsement

Congratulations to the Co-operative Party for becoming the first political party to adopt Plunkett's Right to Try idea in its manifesto. Whilst the Foundation is politically neutral and seeks to influence all mainstream parties, we are delighted to recognise this endorsement.

Right to Try is a simple idea. All too often communities hear of the closure of a shop just as it is about to close its doors. This then creates an almost impossible task of deciding that the shop could be saved, rallying the community, setting up a new organisation, raising the funds to save the shop etc. All this has to be done before the failed enterprise can be bid for. All too often this results either in having to restart the enterprise or, in some cases, the shop being lost to private housing.

Right to Try calls for the a community to be able to express its interest in trying to save a shop and being given a period of time to put its proposal together. This simple breathing space could save an enormous amount of stress for many communities. It would also encourage shop owners to discuss plans in advance.

We'll be raising this idea with all parties, but congratulations to the Co-operative Party for getting in first.