Co-op News October 2019: Sustainable Development

SERVING UP CO-OP IDEAS
ON A BRIGHTON ESTATE
Lessons from the Bevy on reaching communities
Co-op ideas are moving towards the forefront
of discussion around social and economic
inequality in the UK, with widespread discussion
of the Preston model and co-op councils – and the
Co-op Party continuing to push its agenda.
On the ground, there are many examples
of co-operation in working class communities –
from pioneering housing mutuals like Rochdale
Boroughwide Housing to community businesses
such as Kitty’s Launderette in Liverpool.
This is only natural, says worker co-op advocate
Siôn Whellens, of Principle Six and Calverts:
“Co-operatives are one of the two main historical
products of working class inter co-operation – the
other being unions.”
He argues that the strategy of the movement
should be to “identify when and where working
class groups are organising to further their interests,
get involved on a solidarity basis, learn what the
problems and potentials are, and when appropriate
offering co-operative organising technology and the
co-op system as useful additions to the ‘toolbox’.
This is the opposite of proposing co-ops
as the ‘solution’ to poverty and inequality,
which is the ideology of social enterprise,
charity, David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ and
state-sponsored co-ops, says Mr Whellens.
Instead, he believes co-operatives should be
projected as a means of working class mutual aid
and independence.
He gives the example of Kitty’s Launderette:
"This is shaping up to be a success because the
group did careful market research on the working
class demographic of its potential customer base,
and carefully aligned the project with the traditions
of working class self-organising in the city.”
One success story of grassroots co-operation is
the Bevy, a community pub on the Moulsecoomb
and Bevendean estates in Brighton.
General manager Iain Chambers said the
community was engaged using the message that
an important local resource – the sole pub in the
neighbourhood – would be otherwise be lost.
He says it’s important to use this sort of
campaign to win people over – “that sense of peril,
of something that will be lost forever. Talking to
the community, it was a sense of, if we don’t have a
pub, we have nowhere to go.”
The best way to organise, he adds, is to put
everyone in a room together to source their
knowledge and make the project inclusive – in the
Bevy’s case, this also meant the minimum buy-in
for community shares was set at £10.
“If you want to raise a large amount, that can be a
disadvantage but on that estate, which has pockets
of extreme low income but also people with decent
jobs, it’s important to bring everyone in,” he says.
The large number of members also helped
change the narrative, he adds, “from one of an
antisocial, abandoned, estate pub to one that says,
these people are pitching and joining together,
even the skint ones are sticking a tenner in.
“It was a dream. The premises had no bar, no
cellar, no nothing, it had been gutted – these
people had to buy into a dream.”
Bringing in large numbers of people meant “a lot
of door knocking”, he adds. “People were totally
new to idea of community ownership. It took a
lot of meetings to really get that message through
that you can come along and contribute – even if
it’s stuffing envelopes, sweeping up, painting some
walls, there’s so much you can do because there’s
so much to be done.
“I say it to any group – to take a community
space, knock on as many doors as possible, meet
as many people as possible. There’s a humility
WRITTEN BY:
Miles Hadfield
32 | OCTOBER 2019