Pledges by the new government to double the UK’s co-op economy present the movement with a huge opportunity. But if these ambitions are to be successful, there will need to be specialist advisors on hand who are trained and ready to support the set up and growth of new co-operatives.
The need to engage future generations of co-operators and ensure succession is a perennial bugbear in the co-op movement – and a shortage of skilled co-op advisors to help with start-ups and business growth remains an obstacle.
One obvious solution to this problem is co-op training – and one of the leading national initiatives for training co-op business advisors is Barefoot. Set up in 2020, the programme trains specialist co-op business advisors, who support the starting and growing of co-operatives, rather than training co-ops more generally.
Many of those who have been through the programme are now delivering support to new and existing co-ops and community businesses. Some graduates have established new business support providers, such as People Support Co-op.
But this year’s programme has been postponed due to a lack of funds, and organiser Stir To Action is appealing for support from the co-op movement.
“Without external support from the movement, the full cost of the training falls on individuals, and in practice the cohort oft en gets postponed multiple times, and people who are keen to enter the sector have to walk away,” says Stir organiser, Abby Gordon-Farleigh. “There’s not nearly enough support from a movement that says it wants to double its size.”
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There are two threads here: in the short term, Barefoot needs around £10,000 to avoid another postponement and start the 2025 programme next February.
“This is not a lot of money – say, five organisations giving £2,000 each,” she says. “But if we can’t get that, we’re going to have to postpone it again, and we risk losing interest from the people who have already applied.
But the team is also looking for longer-term security for the project, to avoid further uncertainty. “We’re trying to get the sector behind this, trying to get it to see the importance of a programme that’s trained over 100 advisors over the last few years.
“Those advisors would be able to support that aim to double the size of the movement.”
Barefoot offers useful support for that goal, says Gordon-Farleigh, in the shape of specialist support to train and upskill people who are already working within the co-operative sector, who want to become advisors and share their co-operative experiences.
“Barefoot gives them a toolkit they can use to help other organisations get started,” she adds.
Advisors drawn from the movement are important, she says, because “from being in that kind of environment, you learn a lot from working in a slightly different way.
“We need experience and skilled advice from the co op sector. Standard business advisors don’t understand the way co-ops work – whether that’s governance, decision making, ownership – and don’t really understand the nuances when it comes to the different finance available for different types of organisations.
“It is really just creating a base of advisors who are trained and experienced from within this sector.”
But there’s been no new Barefoot cohort trained since autumn 2023, she says. “There should have been at least one starting in 2024 – we had to push it back twice this year and now it’s moved into February 2025 […] We have these aspirations to grow the movement, because as people who work within co-ops, we see the benefits beyond going to work and getting paycheques. There’s a lot of added benefits to working co-operatively.”
To drive this, the co-op sector needs to invest more in training programmes like Barefoot, says Gordon-Farleigh – “and maybe not just as a one-off , but really as an ongoing or multiple-year funding”.
She would also like to see a greater “commitment to working together, to put a lot more support behind this programme – an acknowledgement and validation that it is an important goal to have trained and experienced advisors if we want to have a thriving co-operative movement.”
Another pressing issue, she adds, is the movement’s need to become more diverse in terms of race, gender, age and class. Developing the next cohort of co-op advisors is an important component of that, she says, because any talent pool needs to be refreshed.
Barefoot has made a name for itself in the co-op sector, notes Gordon-Farleigh, with mentions in strategy documents and presentations. “People know about it and use it, so why does it feel like a bit of a struggle when it comes to getting support for it, to make sure that it’s a viable programme to run?
“From the wider sectors, there’s a need for strategic cohesion and commitment, which includes putting up resources for the common use of the sector and getting aligned on what we can do as well.
“I think the Barefoot programme is an excellent opportunity to have a single thing that already exists. And there’s a lot of appetite from people wanting to be part of it.”
