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.

Plunkett AGM

Annual General Meetings are often not the most inspiring events if you've helped organise them, but our AGM last week left me with a spring in my step.

It wasn't just the pleasure of sharing a platform with inspiring people from Feckenham Village Shop, Community Transport Association and Thames Valley Farmers Market Co-operative. It was the sense of connecting our past with our future. It was great fun to share some of our future plans, but it was also a privilege to celebrate our Irish roots. Ninety years ago, Sir Horace had planned that we would be based in Dublin and Oxford. Well, we managed both but not at the same time! I summed up our links to the past as being an organisation whose head is in Oxfordshire and whose heart is in Ireland.

So we were delighted that the Irish Government sent Minister Tony Killeen to join us in our 90th anniversary. He spoke warmly of the role of Sir Horace and how he hoped that Ireland could learn from the path that the Foundation has taken. Our roots were also represented by John Tyrell who, as head of the Irish Co-operative Organisations Society, represented an older brother or sister to our own as it was created in Sir Horace's middle years and we in his later ones.

It was a great pleasure to see both John and former Plunkett Chair David Button receiving their Plunkett Foundation fellowship to recognise the enormous contributions.

Some organisations forget their past, other forget that they also need a future. I don't think that we could be accused of either on that day.

Back to College

Last week saw me going back to college. Not, I hasten to add, because of the start of the new school year, but two events both held in Oxford. The International Co-operative Alliance Research Conference at Queens College, Oxford was quickly followed by the Society for Co-operative Studies Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford.

Spending several days immersed in academia had me thinking about its relation to our work. It seems to me that there is great opportunity, but the challenge is finding the right people to link with. Put simply, I'd suggest that the academics fell into three distinct groups.

The first are completely dispassionate about co-operatives and approach them with all the passion of one who is about dissect a frog in a biology class. This group rarely manages to connect with the passion of the movement, but is thankfully very small in number.

The second group cares about the sector, but produces work which has little if any application by real enterprises. This is the largest group.

The real value lies in the third group which not only cares but also produces work which could be taken and used on the ground. Few in number, the potential of these of great and Plunkett looks forward to working with them.

24/7 Service to order

My favourite shop visit of the week was the village store that gave each of its regular volunteers a front door key. They could then come down to the store at any time, day or night, to meet their retail needs and those of their neighbours. I won't mention where in case their insurance company doesn't like the idea. Volunteers shared stories of just popping in because their neighbour had run out of coffee.

I don't think that this is a model of customer service that any supermarket managers will be rushing to copy in the near future.

Margaret's message

The Plunkett Foundation has, rightly, been celebrating the legacy that Sir Horace Plunkett left us in terms of his thinking on co-operatives and rural development. His 'Three Betters", Better Farming, Better Business, Better Living, still form the basis of our thinking. This means that a community is entitled to access the best possible technical solution to the problem they wish to solve, that the best model for them to come together to tackle that problem is a co-operative one and that they must remain connected to the community that they are seeking to serve.

Our next stage in exploring our rich heritage is to recognise the role of Margaret Digby, our greatest ever employee. Margaret's involvement with Plunkett spanned nearly 50 years, the bulk of that at its head. Yet, like Sir Horace, I think that you can distill her message into three components. Time and time again, she would have to look at what a country needed to make its co-operatives a success. One of her earlier works on co-operatives in Newfoundland distills this nicely. For co-operatives to thrive, they need:

1) Co-operative legislation - legislation which eases the creation, operation and protection of co-operative forms of enterprise.

2) Co-operative education - those involved in the co-operative need to be educated in how it works and how to combine running a successful business with the principles of the co-operative.

3) Co-operative support - they need access to the best possible support at their start up and as the evolve.

It may be over 70 years since Margaret laid these ideas down, but I wager that if you mapped successful co-operative sectors against access to those three element, you'd find it as true today as it was then.

A better form of retailing

We've had quite a few discussions lately about how community-owned retailing will evolve. Thanks to a few new projects, there are some excellent opportunities coming up to help develop retail skills in the sector. What I find interesting is the question of whether they should simply follow the practices of the main retailers or is there a different way to develop.

Visiting shops shows what the challenge is. Most shops are clear that they have to capture the emergency purchase market in their village, but that this alone is not enough to sustain them. Few customers will do their full weekly shop there (although many thanks to those that do). What interests me is what the next step along the path is from emergency to full shop.

PS The next Plunkett Perspective will be on 17th August.

For mainstream retailers is is widening the convenience offer and expanding existing ranges. I think that community-owned shops are developing a different model. For many of them, the next stage is to add something different that you can't get elsewhere, often from local suppliers. They are building a retailing model  designed to give reasons not to go elsewhere. It's early days, but I think that a retailing offer which is based on the values of the store is one that will grow to challenge the mainstream.

Join the dots for social enterprise solutions

One of the exciting frustrations of my work is having to live in two worlds. The first world is with the enterprises we support; a world brimming full of people with amazing ideas and with the energy to make them real. Then there is my second world, the policy world, where all too often people just don't seem to get it.

The contrast between the two worlds was very obvious this week with the publication of "Working Together for Older People in Rural Areas" by the Social Exclusion Task Force. Here was a report full of excellent analysis of the challenges faced by the growing population of older people in rural areas. The argument was compelling and the need to change obvious. But when it came to solutions, where were the social enterprises? It was the same tired approach that Government alone can solve problems.

Rural social enterprises know that this is not the only solution. They offer a way for older people to remain active in their communities long after the days of paid employment  are over. The average village shop has a team of 70 volunteers helping to keep the shop, and the village, alive. Each of those volunteers is interacting with their community in a way that increases their health opportunities. Other enterprises will produce health outcomes, such as access to services which the mainstream has abandoned.

The SETF report is one of many that fail to show social enterprise as a valuable alternative to the options of public or mainstream business solutions. Some of the fault for this lies within the sector where we have presented ourselves as a problem on a long list of problems, rather than as a solution which can be more effective in some areas than the alternatives. As community after community is finding out, it is a solution which policy formers ignore at their peril and their cost.