March 2023

Dr Steve Walker first became involved with ICOF in the late 1990s when he was co founder of the Aston Reinvestment Trust. Now, over 25 years later, the Trust has become ART and Steve is still a member of ICOF. Here, Steve shares a particular memory with us.

Like ICOF, ART is celebrating a birthday. We’re 25 this year and back then, we were the first ‘place-based’ Community Development Finance Institution (CDFI) in the UK using social investment from individuals and companies. Like ICOF we were raising money to lend to coops and businesses, but we were mostly focusing on lending to under-served communities in inner city Birmingham, whereas ICOF as the first CDFI in the country lent nationwide.

The two organisations complemented each other and had very strong alignment. That connection became stronger because Martin Hockley, who was CEO of ICOF, became a board member of Aston Reinvestment Trust and I did a board swap and became a director at ICOF. I was on the board for three or four years. When I first joined the board, I wasn’t actually employed by ART, I was seconded from Barclays where I’d worked for 29 years as a senior corporate manager. I’d never heard of social enterprises back then and I’d had very little to do with coops so the board swap gave me a complete eye opener into a different world, and at the same time gave us the benefit of Martin’s experience at ICOF, that we were able to use developing ART into a CDFI .

My first Board meeting was quite something. I was expecting it to be something like my first ART Board Meeting. In that meeting, I had just been appointed as CEO and the Chair, and the organisation’s founder Sir Adrian Cadbury, a terrifically influential and experienced businessman, started the meeting then just handed it all over to me and said ‘off you go’, ICOF was different!  I went in my suit and tie, and my big, shiny bank car to Loughborough College. I rolled up the night before and… well, I thought it might be a bit different from that first ART Board when most of the people arrived on motorbikes! I walked in and played snooker and chatted to people I’d never met before over a beer or two and then famously introduced myself to Bruce Wood, the Chair at the time and said “Of course you do realise that financial institutions don’t make money out of lending to small business”, which, of course, was ICOF core business! What a way to make an impression!

You see, I was used to the bank model where much income is made from charging for services and was expecting to find some services to sell. Very naively, I hadn’t realised that what ICOF do, and what ART do, wasn’t about products and making sales, it was about the loans, just the loans – and the impact they made. My eyes were opened and I lost the tie pretty quickly, I can tell you!

I learned that the other Directors had a considerably better ideal of life. When I asked one colleague “Where do you do most of your work?” he told me he sat on a beach in Cornwall dealing with loan applications. I thought to myself, I’m in a run down office in inner city Birmingham – it was a real education for me. Gradually I learned the co-operative way, from Martin as CEO in particular, and from his connections. Being part of ICOF has given me so much insight into the world of cooperatives – the world of sharing and understanding, and that’s followed through in the CDFI sector, and as they’ve developed it’s all been about sharing info, knowledge and experiences too. I’m proudly still a member of ICOF today – though I’m not sure I could put my hand on the certificate.

Happy Birthday ICOF –  Wishing you many more years of success.

Alison Holland founded Brightkidz in the early 2000’s to support parents to run their own walk to school initiatives. With husband and Director Lance, and Office Manager Jacqui, Brightkidz has become Brightwayz, and between them they are promoting safe, active, sustainable everyday travel for all ages. Alison talked to us about her connection with ICOF

“We’ve had three loans from ICOF – our first was just after we incorporated as what was called a Blue Common Ownership Co-op model, on the 10th March 2004. That first loan was around £10,000 and it really unlocked things for us. It enabled us to start up and to access other social enterprise development funding. The second loan was around 2010 and was for working capital – we needed help to cover the costs of buying in stock before we could sell it.

The third loan was in around 2018 and, for a variety of reasons, it was transformative.

We’d realised that we’d started coasting a bit, we’d been trundling along. We’d done well in the past with one big client to keep us busy. And when they folded, we realised that while we’d been trying to grow the business, we weren’t really focusing on the right things. At the same time, I’d had a lot of personal stuff going on. I’d had breast cancer, my father was seriously ill and it was a challenging time for our whole family. My focus had drifted and to be honest, I’d ‘lost my mojo’ at work.

The cancer really knocked me and I lost a lot of confidence – but coming out of it (and I’m pleased to say I made a 100% recovery) I realised I didn’t want to trundle along any more. It completely changed my life and outlook and reinvigorated me. It made me think about what we wanted and needed to change in the business so it was working for us and achieving the goals it was set out to. At one point I was literally printing our high vis waistcoats myself and I thought ‘this isn’t what I want to be doing’. I wanted to be out there, helping people with their active travel campaigns, finding out what is working in other places and sharing that knowledge and information with other organisations.

So we applied to ICOF for funding and we used it to get some coaching. It really helped me change my mindset and realise that old business thing – I needed to be working on the business not in the business. It made me have more aspirations for the business and for me too – I could see how much more we could be doing to have the really big impact we wanted, which was the whole reason we started. We got help to measure the impact which was really useful as we could identify what we were doing well, and then identify the gaps that needed to be filled. It really helped us turn the business around and made it more of a socially focussed business again. We got a commercial and social impact strategy sorted and they both feed into and support each other – we regained our focus. And then lockdown happened! But the fact we had learnt how to be much more strategic in our approach meant we were able to pull through and Brightwayz is now stronger than ever.

I’d love to share one memory with you. I remember in the early days, I was invited to speak, as a recipient of a loan at an ICOF AGM, in an impressive, large hall near St Pancras in London. I took some of our hi-vis kit, umbrellas and the like. Ian Taylor was on stage and there was a bit of a pause in the tech so he made a social enterprise joke,

“What did the the slug say to the snail?”

“Big Issue?”

Nobody in the room got the joke apart from me and I thought I was hilarious and did an incredibly loud and embarrassing laugh! Everyone turned to look at me and that just that sealed our relationship – every time we saw each other after we recalled that joke.

We’ve been thrilled to be supported by ICOF over the years, through changing teams and changing times. Happy birthday ICOF – many many many many happy returns to you!”

Ashington Autospares have been have been providing quality vehicle car parts, accessories and paints to the good people of Ashington, Northumberland, since 1967 and we believe we lent to them in the early 1980s.

We’re delighted to find that they are still going!

We think that this was a drilling machine, bought by engineering co-op Adept. We think this was the 70s… Anyone remember?

Were they attempting an early channel tunnel?

 Since publishing this article, we’ve been told by Ian Taylor that Adept was an early 1990s loan.  The photo is of a Heidelberg printer.  A couple with a deaf child set-up the co-op print shop in London to employ people with hearing issues and other disabilities.