An example of us working with Co-operatives UK on advocacy work as we planned. But also highlights the need for us to start thinking about how we want to go about advocacy, policy and campaigning activities.
Both reactive, responding to actions from others whether Govt, or social and political movements we wish to support. Or pro-active, stuff that we want to instigate.
I’d be really interested in people’s thoughts about how we approach this area of the federation. At the moment by necessity a lot of our working groups are internal. Focused on building the federation and its capability to meet members’ needs and act. But act on what?
If you’re interested in getting involved in our advocacy, policy and campaigning activities or got thoughts on how we should go about it. Start the conversation here.
Not trying to put my name forward for the group, but this specific idea, where Coops UK are asking for the same tax relief as employee ownership is maybe somewhere we could show we can work with coops UK, but also work to develop something more from us. In my eyes its not the tax relief we should be campaigning for, but finding a model that make the change from a business to a worker coop more simple, assuming we dont have the tax relief part. I realise there are complexities to this, but if we could work to develop that further, then we can campaign on it.
This was a recommended outcome to the Worker Co-op Council from the Employee Buyout Trusts study circle that some worker cooperators took part in, with Gareth Wright from CUK gathering input for his policy work. Might it be possible to run similar one off groups/processes for other policy issues?
Absolutely, it’s just a case of who organises them! I think we should have a general campaigns and policy group, that holds the mandate and that groups has the power to spin up and invite people onto these task groups.
We’re (Stir to Action) just writing up a condensed brief of the policy paper.
Just been in Manchester with James DV, who ‘converted’ to the EOA
His position was the paper was a bit tactless and should not have set up co-operatives in relation to EO, but promoted on its own merit.
Unsurprising, but I think the general gist of the paper is that if EO has secured these tax advantages, co-operatives are an even lower tax risk and 99.2% of the business population in the UK is small businesses with the 1-50 members of staff, who are not currently being served by the EO sector.
I’ll share the ‘short read’ soon.
On a policy group / task force, Stir to Action would like to be involved in convening the group. I’ll follow up with more info after Easter break.
Great, when your back lets think about spining up our work around policy. It could get very meeting heavy and complex quickly given the sheer breadth of policy areas we may want to get involved in so interested in flexible/agile ways we can bring the right people together and short notice to respond to act on policy activity.
