Stir to Action is crowdfunding to fund the mass circulation of a special publication – ABCs of the New Economy – a new ‘primer’ and event guide to support for community-led organisations to build their own local movements.
The free publication will create access to all aspects of the new economy, featuring tools and ideas to transform a broken economic system through reversing the social care crisis, remaking our food system, and changing the unfair housing market.
Stir To Action are looking to raise at least £15,000 to print thousands of copies and distribute them across the UK.
Your support for the campaign will fund:
The publication of thousands of copies of the ABCs of the New Economy
The distribution to hundreds of community-led organisations across the country
A downloadable event guide to support UK-wide movement building events
1-to-1 support for community-led organisations to host movement building events
The ABCs of the New Economy isn’t like other editions of our magazine. It’s an accessible ‘primer’ on all aspects of the new economy, sharing straightforward tools and ideas for workplaces, communities, and movements for change.
Despite crisis after crisis, new economic ideas are still largely unknown across communities, and it’s time for a post-pandemic movement to inspire local economic change. Our event guide and 1-to-1 support will support communities to build and extend their own local movements over the next few years.
To make this happen, Stir to Action need your support!
Today in our series of interviews looking back over fifty years of friendship and finance we speak to Brian Titley. Brian joined ICOF as a Trustee in 2003, having known about the organisation previously and in fact having borrowed from it, as part of CAN – Co-operative Assistance Network. Brian remains involved in Community Shares ICOF today.
‘I remember the first Strategy Weekend I was part of vividly, as the Sunday morning session was also the Rugby World Cup final, and I remember not being *quite* sure I really wanted to be at the meeting while that was on *laughs*. That was in 2003 and I stayed as a Trustee until 2019, just before Covid.
Early on, I became the staff trustee. Alain Demontoux had been in that position, and he then became a member of ICOF staff so I took it on. I was staff trustee for about 10 years and then became Treasurer. And, obviously, when I left that left a huge hole *laughs*. Other involvements rang alongside that too. I’m still on the board of CSI – Community Shares ICOF. This started up from within ICOF, but is independent and there are some cross-overs and links.
I’m also a member, employee and Director of Co-operative Assistance Network – I’ve been an employee since 1999, and I was as a subcontractor for five years before that as well. We have had 12 or possibly even 13 loans from ICOF. When I stood for the ICOF post in 2003, I had to stand up and say a little bit about myself. At that stage, I think we’d had six or seven loans. I stood up and declared we’d had these loans, and I remember Lord Graham was there who was a Labour peer, and he blurted out, as I said, this, ‘But how many have you repaid?’ My answer was all of them!. They were all for different things – refinancing, working capital and actual capital items.
I also remember being in a meeting once when we were looking at a graph of cumulative loans. And the point was made by one Trustee that one of the positive things was this graph always went up. Which is the point of a cumulative graph! Unless you start doing negative loans *laughs* it’s always going to. And I pointed this out, not trying to be a clever clogs, but it was very difficult not to sound like one at that moment.
Well done ICOF and happy birthday. Let’s keep on lending to co-operatives and community-owned enterprises, but especially to workers co-operatives, to democratise the workplace and put the means of production into the hands of the workers. Happy birthday!
One of the key trends we’ve seen in our lending is the move towards democratic, community ownership in shops and pubs.
Community Owned shops paved the way for Community Owned pubs, both of which tend to offer far more than their core business services. We’re thrilled to be part of ensuring villages and other communities keep, and own their vital services.
In the first decade of the 2000s, we lent to Radley Village Shop to help them refit their shop.
Today, the shop stocks a wide range of everyday items, some of which are sourced locally. The team behind the shops pays close attention to wholesale and other retail pricing, to make sure they are as competitive with the large supermarkets as they can be, serving their aim to give their customers value for money in a place that is convenient to them.
Today in our series of conversations with friends of ICOF, we meet Ed Powell, Director of Community Shares ICOF limited.
‘I’ve been involved with ICOF through Community Shares ICOF Ltd for the last two years. Before that, I’d worked for the Co-operative Group for around fifteen years, who helped to fund it originally, and came onto the Board first as a co-opted member, and then the Director.
Part of my involvement in the Co-operative Group had been around looking at co-operative development in the UK, and supporting collaborative partnerships, both domestically and internationally with the Co-operative Group. So it was an obvious extension of that to look at opportunities that supported the co-operative movement and community businesses to grow. And that’s how I found out about community shares.
That background with the Group gives me a broader lens, beyond cooperatives into community businesses, beyond the legal sense of cooperative structures to culture – businesses having that sense of spirit of mutuality, and communities coming together. Being able to invest in expertise locally, to support them to make a change where they are is a fantastic thing.
I’ve joined ICOF during the pandemic and it’s brought a lot of things together that I’ve worked on. Seeing how community businesses get funding has been really interesting and it is really important. Particularly for cooperatives, access to capital is a real challenge. We can see that recently in some of the recent stories around John Lewis. For very local coops, actually having opportunities to be able to fundraise and to have the investment from people within the community means there’s not just a financial investment, it’s an emotional investment, an investment of care. Things like the Port Bannatyne Development Trust and the Stokes Croft Land Trust – they’re grounded locally, they are actually making a real difference to their communities, but also the communities are also choosing to invest both money and their emotional energy there time into them as well.
This is a wonderful celebration to wish ICOF a very happy birthday, and to see all the investments that ICOF have made, supporting communities and enabling communities to lift themselves up. The power of ownership is just as important now, as it was 50 years ago. So I look forward to the next 50 years!
London based Paperback are environmentally friendly paper merchants who have been selling recycled paper since 1983.
We supported them through the 90’s to expand their stock selection. Today, they are still going, still specialising in supplying recycled papers wholesale, and they were the first paper merchant in the country to be awarded the FSC® Chain of Custody Certification.
In the 50 years that we’ve been lending, we’ve seen changes in the sorts of things people and organisations borrow for.
In the early days, we supported industrial work like this gloveless welder in Wolverhampton. As technology and computing developed – even before smart phones changed everything for many of us – our lending kept pace, and supported developing industries.
We lent to Southampton based graphic design cooperative Total Coverage a number of times from 1989 to 1996, supporting them to start up and expand. Sadly they are no longer trading today – but their premises was very close to our friends and borrowers October Books.
“I first got involved with ICOF when I was a coop development worker. My first loan application went in back in 1990 when I was with Avon Cooperative Development Agency (CDA). Later, through time with Bolton NEDA, and then Lancashire CDA, I stayed connected and involved.
Ian Taylor asked if I’d come onto the Board 2002/3 and I stayed until 2021. I stayed a bit longer than I intended to as every 10 years, we had to do a share issue for the PLC. In 2017 I realised as we were coming up to do the 2022 share issue and that there wasn’t much continuity in terms of people. There were only a couple of Trustees left from the previous share issue, and only one staff member, and share issues are an area I specialise in – so I stayed to help.
Because I was on the board for so long, it was interesting to see how things changed. I can remember a strategy meeting at Wortley Hall in Barnsley, where a key part of our discussion was that we weren’t lending enough – we had shed loads of money in the bank and as interest rates were high then, we were making loads of interest. Fast forward to the 2010s and then the conversation was ‘we’ve got all this money in the bank and it’s earning almost £0′ as interest rates were so low!
Perspectives also changed over the years. Initially ICOF set up to support worker coops and that was the brief. Later, we expanded to include democratic owned business of all types – and of course a key lending group now for CCF is community owned pubs. I was instrumental in that, in over 40 loans and in developing the More Than A Pub programme with Plunkett, including lending as part of the package. I rang up Ian Rothwell, and said this could be a very interesting partnership – and it was! CCF came on and handled the loans in the south and Key Fund handled the loans in the north. What came up as a conversation planning the programme ended up being a major part of the business. I love community pubs and I’m Chair of my own local community pub – the Dog Inn at Belthorne, 4 miles south of Blackburn. We had a fantastic bank holiday weekend recently with over 68 dogs at our dog show, up from 20 last time!
There’s no-one left from the ‘old days’ and that’s healthy. It changes and transitions and that’s how it should be.
Well done on reaching 50 – we told you you could manage without Ian Taylor :)”
As part of our 50th birthday year, we’re speaking to people who have worked with us in a variety of ways since 1973. Today we speak to Babs Nicgriogair who is part of Greencity Wholefoods – a worker co-operative and wholesaler of fine food and drink based in Glasgow’s vibrant east end about how our support helped not just them, but the cultural community in Glasgow.
“I joined Green City in 2000. Not long after that, the business had to relocate. It had been going since 1978, and it had had a couple of locations before arriving in the east end of Glasgow. What we moved into wasn’t a bespoke food warehouse – it was an old Pickfords removals building near Hey, so it’s like a Furniture Warehouse. There were two buildings: one was an office block, and one was the actual warehouse itself, both on the same site. Our offices inhabited the bottom floor of the office building, but the other two floors were just derelict.
There was a need for artists’ spaces in Glasgow. The art school was going from strength to strength, its reputation had grown, and the city was really experiencing a cultural revival. There were a lot of artists migrating to the city but didn’t have studio spaces.
So, we thought that actually we could become a cultural landlord, and use the two floors above our office space to house various artists. The funding from ICOF helped us make this happen and it was quite a job!
We did one floor and then we had to wait to do the second one. But now we do have a thriving cultural community at Green City that kind of exists outside our business and does its own thing, but also there is an interface with us from time to time.
We provide a fair rent for cultural tenants, and we have a very low turnover of these tenants. Some are internationally recognized contemporary artists, some are educationalists. We have a stained glass studio, a recording studio – it’s an incredible place and I’m really proud to have been part of that.
Happy birthday ICOF! or Co-là breith sona ICOF !! as they say in Gaelic”
An historic village inn frequented by two of the most famous English landscape painters and now owned by its residents receives long-term finance boost.
With an inn on its site going back all the way to 1305, The Lamarsh Lion Community Pub commands a superb view over the River Stour much loved and sketched by the renowned landscape artists Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable. On the Essex/Suffolk border about 10 miles northwest of Colchester, Lamarsh is a small village of around 180 residents who since 2017 have owned their community pub after it was put up for sale the year before.
Along with a successful community share issue, a grant from the ‘More Than a Pub’ legacy scheme, a loan from Co-operative & Community Finance, and a private loan; the community were able to proceed with the purchase of the pub and begin refurbishments from July 2017. Since then, repairs and renewals to guttering, roof tiling, chimney stacks, windows and doors as well as refitting and reequipping the trade kitchen, timber frame, damp issues and drainage have all been undertaken and completed.
Co-operative & Community Finance along with Co-op Loan Fund (managed by CCF) were pleased to help secure additional finance for the pub as it continues to develop and grow as a vital community asset. Kevin Lloyd-Evans, Lending and Relationship Manager at Co-operative & Community Finance said: “We are delighted to be able to support for The Lamarsh Lion. Our long-term finance was able to support the needs of the group. This type of finance was not available through other lenders. Rising energy prices have a created tough trading conditions, however with impressive leadership in place and a debt structure which supports the business, the outlook has significantly improved for the group.”
The Lamarsh Lion Community Pub in Lamarsh, Essex.
With a committee that offers a broad range of skills and experience, The Lamarsh Lion has built up a reputation as a place to eat and drink for families in the local area and has been doing well with theme nights and community focused activities. With residents also utilising the pub regularly for family parties, The Lamarsh Lion are truly establishing themselves as a family friendly affordable venue in the region.
Ruth Allison, Treasurer at The Lamarsh Lion Community Pub Ltd said: “Getting this further investment from Co-operative & Community Finance and Co-op Loan Fund has really been a boost to our group. The challenges of running a community business in the current economic environment are complex and persistent. Having a supportive lender who knows what you are going through, understands and is willing to help is much needed and appreciated. It is a refreshing approach to accessing community finance.”
The legacy ‘More Than a Pub Fund’ scheme provides loan finance of between £75,000 to £150,000 available to Community Owned Pubs at a discounted rate of interest for members of the Plunkett Foundation, length of term ranges from five to twenty years. Co-operative & Community Finance also helps support groups to access grant funding to help them develop business plans and pay for surveys through the Reach Fund. Please contact Co-operative & Community Finance for the full terms and conditions, and to discuss how your Community Owned Pub venture can be supported.
You can find out more about The Lamarsh Lion by visiting their website.
