Co-operatives UK are in the process of creating a National Co-operative Development Strategy. The intention, is to work with co-ops to create a simple strategy that can help us, as a sector, decide where we focus our energies over the coming years in order to support and grow the UK’s co-operatives. They have an expert panel, chaired by Pauline Green overseeing the strategy; we have a range of discussion paper feeding in ideas; the 180 people at Congress produced a whole series of suggestions.
The next stage is the launch of the first ever census of the UK’s co-operatives – not just Co-ops UK members, but as many of the 7,000 co-ops that make up our sector. It aims to give us new insight into how they are working, what the challenges are, where they want to be and how we need to get there. It’s a big piece of work and we are working closely with our federal members on it so we can maximise the number of housing co-ops, credit unions, allotments etc, responding.
Take the census: http://bit.ly/coopcensus
