July 11th Board - verbal update:
Stephen Gill attended CICOPA’s online GA on June 23rd as workers.coop’s member rep. workers.coop’s membership application was approved and Sion co-opted as a CICOPA board member until the next election cycle in 2025.
June 13th Board
Standing Item B: International Update (Sion, Stephen)
workers.coop was accepted into membership of CECOP-CICOPA Europe, the ICA’s sectoral network for co-ops in Industry and Services, at its General Assembly in Gothenburg on 8th June. It was further agreed that Sion Whellens will continue as a board member and Vice President of CECOP, as the representative of workers.coop, until such time as he steps down or the next CECOP board election in 2025. Co-operatives UK has retained its membership of CECOP, and Cheryl Barrott, CUK’s vice chair, was accepted as a new board member. She is particularly keen to involve the UK’s social co-operatives in CECOP activity.
The Finnish member of CECOP has mooted a series of worker exchanges between Finland, Malta and UK worker co-ops, possibly to be resourced under the Erasmus programme.
[Sion PS Gothenburg was a blast]
It is expected that workers.coop will similarly be admitted to membership of CICOPA, the global ICA network, at its next GA later in June. Sion has been nominated by us for election to the board of CICOPA.
Sabi, a UK foundation connected to our member Solidarity Economy Association, has confirmed a grant to CICOPA of £60,000 over 2 years to fund a mapping exercise, working group and potentially conference on Digital Cooperation. The aim is to being together co-op producers of digital products and services (software, web development, hosting, etc) with worker-multistakeholder consumers of such products and services; ‘platform’ cooperators; and cooperators active in the fields of shared open data and open source tools - in the CICOPA organising space. For context, CICOPA’s total annual operational budget is around 60,000 Euros, so this is a major boost.
Sion has been involved in facilitating discussions among teacher members and workers at MyCoolClass, an international teaching platform coop registered in the UK, and a workers.coop member. MCC is presently in ‘reboot’ mode after the resignation of its operations lead and looming cashflow problems.
Sion does not intend to continue as workers.coop’s main international rep beyond the end of April 2024. He hopes someone from the workers.coop network will be motivated to take up this important, interesting and enjoyable work on our behalf.
- Round: clarification questions
- Round: reactions/suggestions
- Next steps
The ICA’s identity review needs to be complete by the end of the year. Stephen to prepare an agenda item on this for our next meeting. Cooperative Identity Consultation