Lending

Communities own business of all shapes and sizes. Community owned pubs and shops are perhaps the most common nowadays, but community owned libraries are in there too.

In 2013, hundreds of people from Greater Manchester got together to save their local library, and we were part of the story, providing finance to realise the dream.

Today, Denton West End Library offers regular library services such as book borrowing, computer access, printing and photocopying and also hosts activities such as a choir, knit and natter group, yoga, community cinema, rhyme time, regular arts and craft activities and other events throughout the year.

As the end of our fiftieth year comes into sight, we’re speaking to our current partners and those we work closely with. Today we meet Dave Thornett, Business Development Manager at Key Fund investments, the social investor in the North of England.

“My personal connection with ICOF really began in the mid 1990s. I was working for a social enterprise support organisation in Sheffield and ICOF and ICOM were the long standing players in the game, a source of expertise around that early resurgence of Industrial and Provident Society (IPS) models that were taking place in Sheffield at that point in time. We worked quite closely with Sheffield co-op development group who had some strong links with ICOF.  I’ve also had an involvement with Key Fund in one way or another since 1998, and I formally started working here in June 2014.

The relationship with ICOF has been one of casual questioning, and ad hoc partnership and support. We became involved as a partner in the More Than A Pub (MTAP) fund, and our working relationship became very close. I had known Tim Coomer a bit before then, but for a few years, we spent quite a lot of time in regular conversation. It was partly project management but also comparing notes on some of the proposals coming forward, and that turned into Tim becoming a real point of reference. We were then involved in a few Connect fund projects, one of which was particularly around trying to turn investment documentation into a more user friendly set of documents, and Tim was one of the people that I spoke to about what that might look like and whether he would have some interest in taking those on. He’s a good person to check your thinking with so it’s been nice to have that kind of relationship as well.

When the More Than A Pub programme came along, it would have been easy for ICOF – with their particular specialism around cooperatives and their national profile – to say, ‘We can deliver MTAP,  it doesn’t need another social investor’. But they were open to a collaboration on a north south split, and that relationship was characterised by really good levels of open communication, and sensible discussions around who was best placed to deliver which part.  There was a real kind of mutuality about that and ensuring  division of labour as well as division of business. It was a really simple relationship. There was a lot of stuff within that, that, in theory, could have could have been the source of an argument but it was an open, focused and really straightforward relationship. That has an immense value to it when you find that culture in an organisation but also a group of individuals that make up the organisation. It made it a pleasure and that to me is the hallmark of the relationship with the ICOF

One of the things that runs through my experience of ICOF is the growth of the IPS model that became the Community Benefit Society. There’s been increasing recognition of that as a really good way of running a social business, but also creating that engagement between a member and function. And the contribution that ICOF have made to that with their contribution to community shares, their work with Cooperatives UK, and so on – it’s huge. They are really living those co-operative principles of developing the sector and contributing to that wider good. That stands out, I think has stood out. You’ll always see parts of the ICOF team involved in those discussions and that’s a real demonstration of an organisation truly living its values.

Happy birthday, to all at ICOF!. You’re an absolute pleasure to work with!”

Village shops have been a big part of our work in the last fifteen or twenty years.

As with so many, OurSHOP in Hinton St George , Somerset, is a community hub as well as a place to stock up on essentials and treats.

The only shop in the village – with supermarkets a six mile round trip away – stocks daily essentials including newspapers, tea, coffee, eggs and jam, as well as biscuits, cakes, cheese and ice cream – keeping you going from breakfast until after dinner. Fresh meat is delivered twice weekly, there’s fresh fish on a Friday, and they’ll even chill your wine and hire glasses if you’re having a party. On top of this, they also provide Post Office services and online ordering for delivery or collection, and sell a few antiques, as well as local arts, cards and books too.

We were proud to support them through the Village CORE programme in 2011 are are delighted to see it going so strong today.

As we look towards the end of our fiftieth year celebrations, we’re talking to people from partner organisations across the four nations of the UK. Here we say ‘’schwmae’ (how’re you doing?) to Glenn Bowen, Director for enterprise at Cwmpas, previously The Wales Co-operative Centre. 

“We have a long and historic connection with ICOF. Even though individual staff members and organisational direction have changed, that connection continues. Ian Taylor was a long standing link because he was on our board for many years kind of representing the worker owned, or employee owned, sector within Wales. More recently, a colleague, Carly McCreesh, has been on the ICOF board.

We did more deals in the past, because we used to work on buyouts and worker coops more than we do now. We tend to work more now on employee ownership and the employee ownership trust model. It is a way to have a planned succession plan with the exiting owner and we talk then about transferring ownership to the employees. A lot of the time it’s through the trust model. So the equity we might have worked with ICOF around in the past isn’t needed in all of these deals. Back in the day, a lot of the deals were working with companies that got into financial difficulties with the old owners and there was a push for us to go in and try to salvage something – a kind of phoenix situation – using the worker coop model. People like Ian and my ex colleague Norman Watson used to lead on it for us. They would work really closely together as they progressed the buyout in the form of a worker co-op.

PrimePac was probably one of the last ones in in that old mould, where there was an issue and we went into salvage with a phoenix deal. There had been a fire in the factory which meant that the old owners were leaving the market – the business still had an order book which meant there was a market to be picked up. Norman worked with the team there to set them up, to take over that market, helped them look for smaller factory premises. The team had to work really hard on developing the skill set from being shop floor to getting the sales through the door. And they’re still going today.

In more recent times, community ownership has come to the fore. We’ve done all sorts – we’ve done the community ownership, stuff on assets and community pubs, we’ve done broadband, we’ve done wetlands, we’ve done lots of things in that community ownership space. We’ve done a lot of work in the sector to reinvigorate community shares. It’s a historic model going back to the 19th century, it was lost for a long time until people like Jim Brown tried to get people to fall back in love with the Community Benefit Society model, or BenCom model, and to raise equity from the community in the form of shares. That’s been a real opportunity for ICOF to broaden its remit to look at new cooperative opportunities beyond just the worker co-op model. I think that’s going to continue with and hopefully expand into new areas of work – in terms of the societal needs and the huge problems regarding social care, for example, I can imagine we and ICOF might find ourselves trying to support community benefit societies around social care. It will be interesting to see what the UK political parties do in the care space – with the election on the horizon, there’s definitely change coming one way or another. Here in Wales, there’s been talk of a national care service for Wales – I’m not sure where that is right now but it’s been discussed.

In terms of ICOF’s future, I think there’s more to do around supporting cooperation within communities and getting equity and debt in there to leverage equity in the future. It’s useful for ICOF to think of the difference in the devolved nations. So in England, you’ve got Power to Change doing a lot of heavy lifting in terms of underwriting and encouraging equity.  We haven’t got Power to Change in Wales so there might be opportunities to work more closely in that space, in terms of leveraging and helping communities to raise the equity and look at gap funding. We have got different finance products within Wales, being run by Wales Council for Voluntary Action/Social Investment Cymru – there could be good connections for ICOF to make there as we move forward.

Happy Birthday – penblwydd hapus – to all the team at ICOF and thank you very much – diolch yn fawr iawn – for all the help in supporting the co-op movement within Wales over the last 50 years, but particularly the last 40 years because we’ve been around as an organisation for 40 years!”

Many villages have a community shop, many have a community pub. Slaley, a few miles outside Hexham, in rural Northumberland, has one of each, with many shared members, and we’re proud to have been involved in both business.

We supported Slaley Community Shop as it was saved by and for the community twice

We also spoke to them during Covid where the ingenuity of the team came to the fore again when, during Covid, they ran Zoom wine tastings and created a Pyramid of Care to support local residents.

The shop sits a few steps away from The Rose and Crown, also owned by the community. What will the community take on next?

In 2014, we helped a group of jazz lovers to buy a pub and make history as they set up the UK’s first co-operatively owned music venue.

In April 2014 Pink Lane Jazz Co-op bought The Globe following a successful community share issue. For our part, we put together a finance package that included a mortgage from Co-operative & Community Finance, a short-term loan from the Co-operative Loan Fund and investment shares from the Community Shares ICOF fund. Pink Lane Jazz Co-op also received assistance from the then Co-operative Enterprise Hub and Co-operatives UK. The new venture raised over £230,000 in total, all from co-operative sources.

The Globe is approaching it’s tenth anniversary, an incredible milestone for a venue in these trickier trading times. We’re looking forward to celebrating with them in 2024!

As we head towards the end of our fiftieth year, our retrospective series is taking a turn towards tech.

Back in 2016, we supported Small Axe, an innovative international creative agency, to expand and strengthen its co-operative structure.

The finance we provided was used to implement an action plan of co-operative training and development, with the remainder covering the costs of office space, equipment and administrative staff.

Today Small Axe partners with courageous causes to build a better future for everyone. Together, they create movements that are progressive, hopeful and powerful, inspiring people to act on the most pressing issues of our time.