Community organising is the work of bringing together people who share a common place, interest or identity to take action around their collective concerns and create the change they wish to see. The practice has been used by figures throughout history including Emmeline Pankhurst, Martin Luther King Jr, Ella Baker, Mahatma Gandhi and Barack Obama, as well as countless others around the world working to build collective power and overcome social injustice.
Similarly, co-ops respond to issues facing communities and are a way of building power to effect change. The seventh co-operative principle, concern for the community, also solidifies the concept of co-ops understanding and working with those affected by their work, whether that’s people living in a co-op’s geographical area, or communities of interest or identity related to a co-op’s work.
For many co-ops and community benefit societies, including those running a public building, community organising will be central to their strategy and operations, whereas for others, such as a small worker co-op, it might be a less obvious, though still key, consideration.
Community Organisers (CO) is a national charity with a mission “to ignite social action in communities, embed community organising locally and in different sectors, and develop a strong network and sustainable future for neighbourhood community organising”.
CO pursues this mission through three pillars of activity: delivering training through its National Academy of Community Organising (Naco); providing support to individuals and organisations working in communities; and taking collective action on issues affecting members of its network and allies.
CO was originally set up to continue the work of a government-funded national programme that trained and supported 500 community organisers across England between 2011 and 2015. Since then, CO has supported local organising including community-led housing projects, listing assets of community value and neighbourhood planning. In 2017, CO established Naco, and a network of Social Action Hubs, to deliver training and support action across the UK.
There are currently 20 Social Action Hubs in the network, including charities, community interest companies and a co-operative, with a plan to expand this number to 50 by 2026.
In 2020, CO led a campaign called #OperationWiFi which saw over 100 organisations calling for an end to data poverty. This led to VirginMedia O2 launching the UK’s first National Databank the following year, with over £12.5m of mobile phone data being made available for those that need it in times of crisis.
Related: What do the ICA Guidance Notes tell us about principle 7?
CO has worked with a number of co-ops over the years, including Social Action Hub and organisational member of the CO board of trustees, , Marsh Farm Outreach (MFO). MFO is a grassroots community co-op which has been operating in Luton since 2005, using organising principles to uncover issues of community importance, mobilise local 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.
The CEO of Community Organisers, Nick Gardham, sees a lot of crossover between the world of community organising and co-operativism, describing the two as “fundamentally mutually connected”.
For Gardham, “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 the issues that people have got and working collectively to try to address them.”
“And for me, it seems absolutely normal that these fundamental things of co-operation and community organising are all part of one and the same thing. Because, actually, 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.”
Related: ‘Crazily ambitious’ plan to make Middleton a co-op town
Elements of community organising such as reaching out and listening are also key when it comes to the longevity of co-operatives, says Gardham.
“While an organisation remains static, it’s got the risk of attrition, people falling off and it losing its power. By constantly reaching out and engaging with people, the co-operative is building its own power by connecting and developing relationships with people. So there’s a constant thoroughfare of people joining and coming into it that keeps that organisation alive, and at the same time, it’s embodying the principles of organising and mutuality by allowing people to have a say over decisions that are affecting them.”
Gardham shares an example of Salford Involved, a community co-operative that runs a community gym and encourages local people to participate in the work of the co-op through membership and volunteering.
“It’s about first of all creating a democratic structure where people feel they’ve got collective ownership and a collective responsibility. Then, at the same time, using an organising process to build that co-operative structure, because it needs to keep reaching out.
“That’s what Salford Involved are doing. They’re giving people who feel a long, long way away from democratic processes and structures that sense of ownership and collective power.”
Despite the existing overlap between the community organising and co-op movements, there is more that could be done to bring the two worlds closer together. One of the possible barriers to making this connection is the perception of co-ops outside the co-op movement, says Gardham.
“I don’t think people really understand what a co-operative is. If you said, ‘list the seven principles’, I don’t think they could. I think we need to look at how to align those seven principles for an organising framework. Because then they’d recognise it, and they’d go, ‘Oh, we do that, we do that.’”
For co-ops looking to embody the seventh co-operative principle (concern for community) through organising, Gardham suggests first considering who their community actually is, and then, who from the community is missing.
“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?”
“Because,” he adds, “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.”
Alongside her role at Co-op News, Alice is a freelance associate trainer and consultant with Community Organisers