Published 23rd September 2024

How can Community Organising be Beneficial to Co-ops

Nick Gardham talks to Alice Toomer-McAlpine about how community organising practices could be central to the work of coops and whilst the two are “fundamentally mutually connected” more could be done to bring these worlds together.

At the core of community organising is the principle of bringing people together around a shared issue or place, building collective power to take action and overcome social injustice.

This is why it fits so well and could be central to the work of co-ops who also respond to community issues (either in terms of a community of place or community of interest). They do this through their seventh co-operative principle, “concern for the community”.

“a co-operative is a group of people working together who’ve already identified the issue, and organising is the process which gets people curious about where their community is, hearing their issues and working collectively to address them. And for me these fundamental things of co-operation and community organising are all part of one and the same thing. Because it’s about how we collectively work together to build something which has got shared ownership and accountability, so that we can achieve things together. Because what we do know is that when people come together, they’re far more powerful, and far more effective at getting things done, than they are on their own.”

Community Organisers have worked with a number of co-ops over the years, including Social Action Hub Marsh Farm Outreach, which is a grassroots community co-op operating in Luton since 2005, using organising principles to uncover issues of community importance, mobilise volunteers and develop creative projects, events and spaces.

Another co-operative belonging to the CO network is SEASALT (South-East Students Autonomously Living Together), Brighton’s first student housing co-op. Established in 2018, Seasalt received training and support from CO in its early stages, with activities such as door knocking the area to find out what local residents wanted to see from them as neighbours.

But to ensure co-ops have longevity they need to be able to constantly reach out and listen, which are at the heart of the Community Organising Framework, to connect and develop relationships with their community and build their collective power.

Salford Involved, a community co-operative that runs a community gym is doing this by encouraging local people to participate in the work of the co-op through membership and volunteering giving people a democratic structure that they feel collective ownership and collective responsibility for.

“If your seventh principle is concern for community, who are the people who you are not reaching within your community, and how are you going to get out there and reach them, so you can hear their stories and bring them in, so they can feel a great sense of ownership and then strengthen the co-operative itself. At the heart of organising is the idea that we need to build some sense of relational power, which comes through people co-operating and working together to effect change on an issue that they care about. Co-operatives, from my perspective, are actually about how to generate some sense of shared wealth, where people are working together to achieve something … and that’s what organising is all about too. It’s about bringing people together so that they feel this sense of collective ownership.”

Read the full article HERE

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