Celebrating Cooperatives
When it comes to cooperatives or coops, many people just associate them with their local food store or funeral home. What most people don’t realise is that coops contribute over £160 billion to the economy and employ over a million people. In fact, there are over 9000 coops in the UK and over 68 million memberships of coops or mutuals. Apart from food and funerals, coops cover a wide variety of different business areas including agriculture, childcare, finance, social care, telecoms and travel.
So why do coops have such a low profile?
One reason is that when it comes to higher education coops just don’t feature. They are virtually absent from Business GCSE and A level courses and rarely feature in Business Degrees offered by universities. The lack of coops in higher education means that when many graduates look for jobs or to set up their own business they don’t think about coops.
What makes coops different is that they don’t have shareholders and are owned instead by their members. So, all the money they make is put back into the business, distributed to their members in the form of dividends or given back to the community. A good example of a values led business doing this is Midcounties Coop whose Doing Good fund is helping local communities throughout its trading area in the heart of England.
Those values should make coops a very attractive model for a lot of undergraduates and graduates who want to set up a socially responsible business which genuinely benefits its employees, customers and the local community. The major challenge faced by the sector is to ensure that coops feature in the national curriculum and in the courses offered by universities. The Cooperative Party which includes many Labour MPs is leading calls on the government to start by teaching children about cooperatives at school.
International Year of Cooperatives
This year is the International Year of Cooperatives designated by the United Nations and cooperators from around the world have just met in Manchester and Rochdale where the movement was born in 1844. The event in Rochdale was organised by Coops UK and was heavily promoted in the media thanks to the actor Steve Coogan who is a member of his local coop in Middleton. At the event he was interviewed by the economist and commentator Grace Blakeley and spoke passionately about why coops are such an important business model.
To encourage more coops to be set up the government have given a commitment to double the size of the cooperative economy but have not given a timetable for when this will happen by. The higher education sector needs to play its part by including coops in their business courses and by working more closely with local coops to help raise their profile. At BCU we are proud to be highlighting the role of coops in our Business Services blog, so more students and graduates are made aware of them.
Discover more about BCU's range of Business Services and its expanded business support offer. This includes the Help to Grow: Management Course which looks at different business models.
