Science: the global endeavour of humans to understand the universe. People carrying out this endeavour – scientists – are defined by the UK Science Council as: “someone who systematically gathers and uses research and evidence, making a hypothesis and testing it, to gain and share understanding and knowledge.”

The intent to share scientific research is a crucial distinction; it defines science as a public good, as much about method as it is about values.

At a pro-science march in London, climate scientist Chris Rapley, say science is about valuing “investigation and internationalism.”

Marching in Berlin, Jurgen Kurths, a physicist and mathematician at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research says “science is international…We collaborate with China and Russia and the UK. We are all international scientists; there is only one physics and one climatology, not, say, an English one and a German one.”

Rapley and Kurths marched because they felt the values of investigation and international collaboration are under attack.

The US is eradicating environmental science, the UK is “sick of experts“, and turning to climate change deniers for leadership. Be it pulling out of the Paris agreement, or renewable energy cuts, “there is a strong move in the English-speaking world against rationalism,” says Rapley, “we must defend against it.”

This need to defend rationalism has morphed into a global ‘pro-science’ movement. Dashing the introverted stereotype, the scientific community donned lab coats, painted placards and chanted in the streets. Marches took place in 600 cities across the world, from Manilla to Amsterdam. Kurths says he couldn’t remember a time before the nuclear weapons demonstrations in the 1950s when scientists united to protest in such large numbers.

Taking place on 22 April, the marches deliberately coincided with Earth Day. Many placards and chants focused on climate change – with environmentalists marching alongside climate scientists.

The pro-science movement “speaks to the ethos” of environmental organisations like Greenpeace, says Paul Johnston, principal scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories.

Grassroots environmental group, Friends of the Earth (FoE) backs “the purpose” of the pro-science movement “100%” says Mike Childs, head of science, policy and research. This is because FoE frequently works alongside scientists, “on a case-by-case basis…to make sure we get our facts right,” says Childs.

As well as working on projects together, there are shared values between environmentalists and scientists; FoE is “aligned with the value of international collaboration” and has “always been informed by scientific research, together with the values of social justice and intergenerational justice,” says Childs. Greenpeace is also “committed as an organisation to working collaboratively with people across the world,” says Johnston.

Seeing eye to eye

But while there are good relationships and shared values, “that doesn’t mean we see eye to eye with all scientists,” says Childs, “not all scientists consider the social and economic impact of their research.”

There are disagreements on a multitude of issues between scientists and environmentalists, from fracking and pesticides, to nuclear power and GMOs.

Whether caused by hypes of ‘world-saving’ technology, corporate sponsored science or vested interests, scientific disputes should not be ignored, says Childs, “we mustn’t pretend that ‘science’ has one clear view.”

Using GMOs as an example, Childs says although GMOs are scientifically proven to be safe for human consumption, there are still important questions environmental groups ask, such as, “who has control of our food chain?”

These differences in approach seem to balloon into conflict most often when scientific work is translated into policy. Like when the UK government championed fracking on the basis of one scientific paper (which has since been discredited), or when US scientists caution themselves on researching geoengineering, in fear that their work is misused to justify delayed action on climate change. Scientists “need to inform policy, but they also need to stand up and say if a policy is not informed by the best science,” says Johnston.

Scientists need to lose the “naive”, “ivory tower” perception of not getting involved in politics, as “once you’ve informed policy, you are involved in the political process…[science] defacto becomes political, you can’t get away from it…Value-free science doesn’t exist,” says Johnston.

Rapley puts much of the confusion between environmentalists and scientists – and politicians and the public – down to communication. “The classic way science delivers its message is doomed to fail,” says Rapley.

“We need to engage people and engage emotions; generally, scientists strive to eliminate emotions, but the subject of climate change can be alarming and scary. The story of climate change has clearly raised anxiety and cognitive dissonance, which has then been [politically] exploited.”

While there is “an obligation to speak up” about scientific findings such as polar ice melting, says Rapley, scientists should also offer their opinions publicly, as “an off-duty comment.”

“The role of science in society is to offer positive answers to positive questions. Not to use scientific authority to muddle statements. If I’m asked what is dangerous climate change, for example, I can’t answer as a scientist [as danger is subjective], but I can give my own opinion, as a human,” says Rapley.

To continue raising the public’s awareness and literacy of environmental issues, both movements have a role to make their work “accessible and truthful,” says Johnston. “How does their work relate to the public? What captivates [the public]?” Environmentalists and scientists, Johnston says, should be repeatedly asking these questions to avoid some of the “nightmare” of explaining the nuances within climate science.

Scientists finding a “joint language” they can use to communicate with environmentalists would also aid climate science literacy, says Kurths.

One barrier Johnston identifies as halting this joint language is a reluctance from mainstream academics to be associated, or funded, by environmental groups such as Greenpeace. Scientists should reconsider, and “do more work” with environmentalists, says Kurths.

Both scientists and environmentalists need to “look more deeply at the interests related to environment and climate change,” to identify overlapping values, says Johnston. Collaboration, on the basis of shared interests, could lead to more scientific solutions and greater political will in the fight against climate change.

If neither the environmentalist movement, nor the pro-science movement is working to identify and communicate based on shared values, says Johnston, “people don’t realise this synergy exists, and then they don’t exploit it.”

This Author

Lucy EJ Woods is a freelance journalist specialising in energy and environment reporting. Currently based in London she has reported on environmental issues from Russia, Mongolia, Indonesia, Nepal and the Philippines and has been published in various titles, including The Guardian, Climate Home, Mongabay and many others. You can find more of her work at: lucyejwoods.com, or follow her on Twitter: @lucyejwoods

When asked by Channel 4 News whether he would give up his allotment if he became prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn said no, because it gives him ‘time to think’. For Allen Jenkins, author of the newly published Plot 29, it gave him that and a whole lot more.

The current leader of the Labour party has had an allotment in North London for years, where he grows maize, beans and pumpkins and also fruit with which he makes jam. He went on to tell Channel 4 News that, ‘It’s possible to do both because if you grow plants and look after your garden, it gives you time to think, it gives you a connection with the natural world and it makes you stronger in everything else you do.’

As a young boy growing up in Plymouth in the 1960s, Allan Jenkins and his brother were rescued from their care home by elderly foster parents and it was here, in the garden, that he first learnt the solace that comes from sowing seeds, tending the ground, nurturing life and reaping the fruits of those labours. For Jenkins, though, alongside those pastoral memories of childhood lay other, darker ones, more difficult to excavate or lay to rest. And it is these with which he is engaged as he works the soil of Plot 29.

There is ample research-based and scientific evidence of the restorative power of our interaction with the natural world, whether it’s the mood-enhancing effect of daylight, to the sight of trees, plants and open space, the mental engagement and concentration that takes our minds off troubled thoughts, to the stress-relieving benefits of physical activity, it’s all there to be accessed. Its efficacy is embodied in the work of the charity Thrive, which promotes gardening activities to bring about positive changes in the lives of those living with mental or physical ill health, or those who are isolated, disadvantage or emotionally vulnerable in some way. Horticultural, green or eco-therapy is now a recognised contributor to positive mental health, and in 2007 the mental health charity Mind published Ecotherapy, a green agenda for mental health and between 2009 and 2013 funded 130 Ecomind projects across England.

‘When I am disturbed, even angry, gardening is a therapy,’ writes Jenkins. ‘When I don’t want to talk, I turn to Plot 29… There among seeds and trees my breathing slows, my heart rate too. My anxieties slip away.’

His moving memoir, entitled Plot 29, documents the months from June to the following December, fuelled by the quotidian minutiae of gardening life; the dawn-breaking pleasures of tending plants as the sun rises and the heavy earth is dug to the accompaniment of an urban fox or gentle rain and the back-breaking wrestling with bindweed or mulching manure. Here, the attachment is both sentimental and pragmatic, thoughts and feelings processed along with the tender shoots and bullying snails.

It’s testament to Jenkins’ sometimes sparse but always emotionally specific writing, whether it’s about his love for nasturtiums, the Proustian effect of the taste of newly podded peas or his adolescent pining for a pair of Levis, that the heart-piercing reflections ring so true. ‘I have stupidly forgotten the lesson about always earning conditional love’ he writes and, in that one bleak statement, we glimpse a particular cross to be borne by ‘cared for’ children: they can never, ever, take unconditional love for granted as children should. They can always be ‘sent back’ and this knowledge becomes ingrained like the dirt on a gardener’s hand.

Jenkins’ personal story is a complicated one, at odds with his professional, successful adult life as happily married father and editor of a national newspaper food supplement. A childhood full of purse-lipped love, withheld information and mysterious unknowns to which the body reacts in fear while the mind is amnesic: a story of abandonment, rejection, neglect and abuse and all those words made hard to swallow by association. But running alongside his exploration of truths and half-truths and the curious space that lies between – the stories we tell ourselves in order to live and those we are compelled to revisit – is the life-affirming continuum of an allotment he has tended for 10 years, with its constancy and demands and relationships successfully forged.

There is much that is beautiful, elegiac even, in his gardening descriptions and always this sense of forging connections between past and present. ‘I fork up a few potatoes, blushing Red Duke of York. As a child, I loved to dig the potatoes for weekend lunch, lifting them in the hour before eating. They were always King Edward’s, boiled with apple mint when new, diligently scraped and served with salty butter. We grew peas, runner beans, strawberries… but it was from the potatoes that I learned the joy of growing food for the table, taking as much as you need for the meal and now more.’

Similar to those visceral griefs explored in memoirs like Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk and Katherine Norbury’s The Fish Ladder, the former for the loss of her father and the latter for a second rejection by her birth mother, is the realisation that forgiveness – for self and others – also means giving up the hope of a different past. Among those heritage seeds and the solace of gardening are universal truths and the urgent requirement to understand who we are now through what we were then.

It is with this same hope for redemption that we choose to take our literal or metaphorical ‘magic beans’ from our pocket and sow the seeds that enable us to confront, integrate and transcend past experience. Jenkins gardens not only Plot 29 but also his own, difficult past to affect some internal reconciliation, but there’s nothing facile about his story: it’s a beautiful, difficult but ultimately reassuring read.

Plot 29: A Memoir by Allan Jenkins is published by 4^th Estate, price £14.99

This Author

Harriet Griffey is Cultural Editor at the Ecologist and also editorial consultant to One Hand Clapping magazine.

There is one surefire way to keep your life as an activist: give up.

Those who don’t, often pay the price – persistence kills in the high stakes world of environmental defense. And more often than not, those at the frontlines protecting our forests, waterways and ancestral lands are Indigenous people. They have the most to lose from the deforestation, mining, agribusiness, send dredging and poaching devastating Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia without parallel.

In 2015, at least 185 environmental activists were murdered for speaking out, protesting or threatening to expose the often corrupt and exploitative development threatening their livelihoods. Of those, nearly half were Indigenous people, mostly from Central and South America.

It’s hard to imagine the murder of 185 people in one year all around the world. You don’t see people, you see a number. But I saw a face, a body, a bloody leg. I saw a defender die. It was five years ago and I was a reporter in Cambodia. Chut Wutty was a well-known illegal logging activist who’d asked me to join him on a trip to the country’s Cardamom mountains, a 14,354-square-kilometer range containing at least 450 species of birds and 50 species of endangered animals, including the clouded leopard and the Siamese crocodile. We went, and the beauty was bewildering. Three days later, Wutty would be murdered by military police angry at our intrusion into their logging site.

Wutty ran his own environmental organization, had Western financial backers, the support of high ranking Cambodian military officials, hundreds of local supporters who watched out for him and tools – multiple cell phones, a GPS tracker, a Cannon camera and access to aerial surveillance. He was still murdered. Much less organized and prepared defenders, people who might be forced unexpectedly into protecting their lands due to evictions or enormous infrastructure developments, are up against the same violence.

Coming from the most rural, isolated and underdeveloped places in the world, untouched by 5G, drones and GoPros, defenders are often teenagers, mothers and grandfathers who lack cell phones, email access and powerful friends on which to call. They even lack basic necessities like water canisters and reliable footwear. Still, they set out peacefully for the forest, the elephant sanctuary or mining site and make their voices heard. Their demands are varied – an end to the hydro dam whose construction requires the clearcutting of trees, to the mine polluting their waterways, to the encroachments of the wealthy and powerful on their hunting lands. The response to their demands is also varied – they are told to stop, they are threatened, they are kidnapped, they are killed.

Understanding defenders’ daily realities and finding strategies to address these risks is the task for a group of environmental activists, investigators, human rights leaders, researchers and lawyers gathering at the Forest Defenders Conference in Oxford, UK, June 21-22.

The conference is being organized by Not1More (N1M), a group founded in 2016 in direct response to the violence facing environmental defenders. The group, backed by global support networks, builds upon decades of experience working with environmental defenders in Asia and West Africa and seeks local solutions to violent repression.

Over these two upcoming days in Oxford, panelists, speakers and those passionate about environmental protection will hear from foresters, activists and community leaders about the risks they face, the intimidation they experience and the high-level, state-sanctioned criminals they refuse to give up fighting. The room will hear what these activists lack and where there are barriers to support, how powerful networks are skirting existing laws protecting Indigenous people and what needs to be done to prosecute those responsible for the murders.

The conference will bring together analysts and frontline activists from around the world, including: Laura Zúñiga Cáceres, daughter of murdered Honduran activist Berta Cáceres; John Knox, UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment; John Vidal, former environment editor at The Guardian; Ouch Leng, a Cambodian forest defender and winner of the 2016 Goldman Prize; and Sir Ian Redmond, a renowned conservationist known for his work with elephants and great apes.

Almost one year after Berta Cáceres’ murder in 2016, in an open letter to her mother, her daughter Laura wrote, “I remember her strong, powerful, immense, infinite fighting against the mega-projects that were taking over Lenca indigenous territories, fighting against abusers and aggressors of women, fighting against corrupt governments, against coups d’état, in solidarity with those who needed it.”

The murders of those who protect lands, forests, rivers – who protect their ancestor’s graves and their annual ceremonies – is the brutal, violent expression of a more pernicious, underlying violence. Ways of life, places, animals and people are destroyed, transformed from free, living beings into throwaways. As Berta understood, oppression as a whole must be fought to be free.

And the first step is defending the defenders – because giving up is simply not an option.

Conference Details

The Forest Defenders Conference, organized by environmental activist support group Not1More, will take place June 21-22 at St. Hugh’s College in Oxford, UK. The conference aims to highlight risks and develop safety strategies for frontline defenders who face increasing violence for their work. Tickets are being sold on a donation basis, and will go toward funding the cost of the event and funding for activists to attend. To register to attend, click here.  For a conference agenda, click here.  For more information on Not1More, visit us online at not1more.org or email info@not1more.org.

Register/tickets

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/forest-defenders-conference-tickets-32841853869

Website

www.not1more.org

Conference agenda

https://not1more.org/forest-defenders-oxford-2017/

Facebook page, which will livestream the conference 

https://www.facebook.com/N1Mnot1more

The Speakers

Prof. John Knox, UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights and the Environment

George Monbiot, The Guardian, columnist and author

Ouch Leng, Cambodian Human Rights Task Forces, Goldman Prizewinner for Asia 2016

Laura Zúñiga Cáceres, COPINH, daughter of indigenous leader, Berta Cáceres, murdered in 2016

Claudelice Silva dos Santos, forest defender, Pará, Brazil

Justino Sá, founder of Our Resources, and Chief Legal Advisor to the National Assembly of Guinea-Bissau

Sir Ian Redmond, The Ape Alliance, eminent primatologist and conservationist

And with speakers from: Human Rights Watch, Universal Rights Group, Global Witness, Civil Rights Defenders, Global Diligence, Epsilar Group, and Oxford University

This Author

Olesia Plokhii is a writer and journalist in New York City. She has reported from the US, Canada, South Africa and Cambodia and in April 2012 witnessed the death of Cambodian illegal logging activist Chut Wutty during a reporting assignment deep into the Cardamom Mountain range. She recounts her experience that day in the feature film documentary I am Chut Wutty, and serves as the Media Director for N1M, a global support and protection network for environmental defenders. She can be reached at oplokhii@gmail.com.

Forests are essential for life on Earth. They provide shelter and a livelihood for hundreds of millions of people, are home to a vast diversity of plants, animals and insects, and help us avoid the worst effects of climate change by absorbing and storing massive amounts of carbon dioxide. In 2015, world leaders recognised the crucial role of forests in climate change mitigation and sustainable development, and pledged to halt deforestation by 2020.

Two years on, European policymakers have yet to take action and global deforestation continues at an alarming rate. This month, the European Commission will host a high-level conference on illegal logging and deforestation. But time is running out for the EU to act, and so we call on EU Commission President Juncker and Environment Commissioner Vella to come forward now with proposals to tackle the EU’s forest footprint and bring global deforestation to an end.

Up to now, the EU’s action on deforestation has focussed primarily on combatting illegal logging and the related trade in timber, with the adoption in 2003 of the EU Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade action plan. But even here, as two recent evaluations pointed out, progress is slow and much remains to be done.

Illegal timber

According to a recent UNEP-INTERPOL report, illegal logging tops the ranking of environmental crimes, with an estimated annual value of USD 50-152 billion. The situation remains alarming in many parts of the world, including the Congo Basin and the Brazilian Amazon, where the ever-increasing demand for timber, particularly from the EU and China, is fuelling illegal logging and forest degradation. In these two regions the timber trade and bad governance – weak institutions, corruption, and illegal activities – are intertwined and exacerbate the damage caused to forests, biodiversity and the lives of communities living in and around the forests. Many unique tree species such as Mukula and Ipe are being plundered. Even the last remaining ancient European forests in Romania and Poland are threatened by logging, despite EU laws that should protect them. 

So, it goes without saying: the EU must respond urgently and shut its market to illegal timber once and for all and deliver a fatal blow to the forces driving illegal logging everywhere. Greenpeace and others recently called on the EU to take specific action.

Agriculture

But it is not just the EU’s hunger for timber that is driving forest destruction. Today, 80 per cent of global deforestation is caused by agriculture, with palm oil, soy and beef the three most damaging commodities driving forest clearance. Europe’s growing demand for food and biofuels has been fuelling deforestation in recent decades. In Brazil, one of the big exporters of soy and beef to the EU, deforestation is on the rise again. Meanwhile the cultivation of oil palm continues to devastate Indonesia, and now threatens African forests too.

In 2013, the Commission recognised the need for an EU action plan on deforestation. A feasibility study, long delayed, has been promised this summer. Hardly swift or decisive action.

Without EU action to cut deforestation out of supply chains, consumers and NGOs have put pressure directly on companies to act. While a number of companies globally have made commitments to stop deforestation and shift to sustainable sources, these commitments are too few and progress in implementation is slow. Self-regulation simply isn’t effective enough to protect the Earth’s remaining standing forests from agricultural expansion, avoiding the worst of climate change.

As a major consumer, trade power and a hub of international finance, the EU has a special responsibility to become a deforestation-free economy – to protect our climate, biodiversity and forest peoples. It is high time the EU adopts laws to remove deforestation from its supply chains and to stop financial institutions funding deforestation. It is also crucial that the EU stops using land-based biofuels, which compete with food for agricultural land and are no fix to climate change. Moreover, the EU and its member states must substantially increase their support to developing countries as they take steps to protect forests, implement farming practices based on agro-ecology and work towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Protecting forests is not a choice, it is an absolute necessity. International commitments to reverse deforestation have been made, now they must be implemented. As a matter of priority, President Juncker and Commissioner Vella must now set out how the Commission intends to fill the EU legislative gaps in an action plan on deforestation and forest degradation.

This Author

Sébastien Risso is Greenpeace’s expert on the EU’s role in deforestation. He has over 15 years of experience in European public affairs and joined Greenpeace in 2004, working EU action on illegal logging and related trade, the EU biofuels policy and the impact of EU consumption on deforestation. Follow news and comment from Greenpeace @GreenpeaceEU

Like so many of us, Vivian Woodell found his mission in life by accident. At the age of 16 he joined his local retail Co-op. “I just liked the idea of it,” he explains.

The year was 1979, around the time Margaret Thatcher came to power. “The whole idea of a shop owned by its customers appealed to me at a time when mainstream thinking was all about privatisation. So that’s where I did my shopping.”

Five years later, just after finishing university, Woodell took a friend who was visiting from Ghana to his local Co-op in Oxford. The friend immediately noticed it was selling Outspan oranges – a prominent South African brand – in defiance of the UN anti-apartheid boycott. After a fruitless correspondence with management, Woodell recalls, “I thought, ‘I’m a member of this Co-op and I’ve got as much right to be heard as anyone else!’ So I put in my motion for the next members’ meeting.

Reviving a radical agenda
“We didn’t win, but out of that meeting a ginger group of local members came together. We all wanted to push for change, and reinvigorate the Co-op in line with its founding principles. At the time we were widely viewed as a bunch of radicals – but the whole cooperative movement was set up by people with a radical agenda for economic change, the Rochdale Pioneers – and we thought the organisation we were dealing with was not reflecting that spirit.

“So three of us stood for election for various positions and in 1985 we swept the board, all getting elected. That’s how I found myself, at the age of 23, the youngest director anyone could remember. It’s hardly surprising that the management regarded me as naive and green behind the ears and would say things like, ‘This kind of idealistic stuff is all very well, but what do you know about running a business?’ I didn’t understand at first that you don’t change an organisation just by passing resolutions! But we made an impact. In the end we recruited a new chief executive who shared our vision, and we helped to start a broader movement to bring the Co-op’s founding values back to life and make it more commercially successful.”

Surviving and thriving as a business with values
Still, those jibes about his lack of business experience rankled. “This is what impelled me to start up The Phone Co-op – a new mass market business in a former state-owned industry with a lot of sharp practice, dogged by debt and financial failures – and show there was a better way of doing it as a consumer cooperative owned by its members. In our early years every single one of our suppliers went through insolvency! But we survived by connecting the business with our values, meeting customers’ needs, and avoiding financial risk.”

Launched in 1998 in a spare bedroom in Woodell’s home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, with a handful of members and capital of £36,000, The Phone Co-op now has a £12.5 million turnover and 30,000 customers, among them charities, other co-ops, businesses and individuals. It has never gone into debt, and its growth is financed entirely from retained profits and members’ capital, which now stands at £7 million. It employs more than 70 staff, who share 11% of profits each year based on the number of hours worked, and has just bought a large new office building in the town centre, where renovations are about to begin.

Investing in new co-operative ventures
But what excites Woodell most is that The Phone Co-op has the financial muscle to help establish and support new cooperative ventures, and has so far invested in over 30, many of them in the renewable energy sector. A timely £300,000 it invested in Southill Community Energy enabled this 4.8MW solar co-op to get off the ground a few years ago, and it has made similar investments in projects from Northern Ireland to Cornwall. It also has its own 50kW solar farm in Gloucestershire, and is a founder member of Co-operative Renewables, a wind and solar power co-op that has installed hundreds of kilowatts of solar capacity on buildings owned by other cooperative societies. Other investments include student housing co-ops in Birmingham and Sheffield, a Fairtrade football manufacturing co-op, and local pubs owned and run by the communities they serve.

One thing that’s clear is that Woodell could have been a very successful businessman in his own right – and could have made a huge pile of cash for himself. Does he ever regret his decision to commit so firmly to the cooperative movement rather than concentrate on number one? “That was not my aspiration. I did not set out to make myself rich. I wanted to prove that a cooperative approach could do it better. We all make choices in life. Is it more important to get rich, or to do something that matters to you?

“In any case, The Phone Co-op is not just me – it’s all the people who have contributed to it with their energy and enthusiasm and shared values. And it owes its success precisely to the fact that it is a cooperative and not just another company. Most people don’t enjoy dealing with their telecoms company, but here the staff people talk to know that their customers are the owners, and it’s a completely different relationship.

Creating a resilient economy
“The beauty of co-ops is that the customers and workers are the stakeholders, and that’s why it works so well. Under a purely capitalist system, human relationships are commodified and become a means to an end – which is to make money. Here people are at the centre and capital is just a means to an end. We exist to provide a service to our members and other customers that meets their needs, in a way that reflects their values.”

A more cooperative economy is also much more stable and resilient than all-out capitalism, Woodell insists. “Just look at the privatised building societies: every single one has either failed like Northern Rock or been taken over. Not one survives. But with a few exceptions, those that remained as mutuals are still in business and are among the strongest financial institutions in the country.

“Look more widely, and you can see that cooperatives form a real backbone of the global economy – bigger than all the multinationals put together! A single farmers’ co-op in India, IFFCO, has 55 million members, the International Co-operative Alliance represents well over a billion co-op members at the UN, and co-ops employ more than 250 million people worldwide, who contribute over US$2 trillion to the global economy. And it has all grown from that one original co-op in Rochdale.

Taking back control
“Let’s just think about this idea of ‘taking back control’ that we heard so much about before the [Brexit] referendum. It has been hijacked by the nationalist right and now it needs to be reclaimed by ordinary people who want more control over their lives – and this is what the cooperative movement can offer. It’s all about people being in control and helping each other.”

The cooperative economy, Woodell insists, offers an increasingly attractive alternative to mainstream capitalism. The Co-op he joined in 1979 – now merged with others to become The Midcounties Co-operative – has just started up a successful new childcare division, and its Co-operative Energy subsidiary, founded in 2010, is presenting a growing nationwide challenge to the ‘Big Six’ energy companies with its customer base of 400,000.

The ‘sharing economy’ is a co-operative economy
As a Midcounties director Woodell can take his share of the credit for all that, but his ambitions go much higher. “Think of the new global hegemons of the capitalist world: Google, Facebook, eBay. Their business model is to capture a dominant position in an online marketplace that becomes unassailable. But they all work by providing a platform for people to transact with each other, making themselves the indispensable intermediary. They like to call it the ‘sharing economy’, but it’s not – it’s all about monopoly and extraction. This kind of thing should be done by co-ops! Uber should be owned by taxi drivers, and Airbnb by accommodation providers and travellers.

“One obstacle to success is that these huge, dominating businesses have emerged through the venture capital route – where many companies are funded in the hope that just one will be massively successful. That is not how the cooperative movement works. We need new models to allow co-ops to develop at scale. And people are working on it – look at the ‘open.coop’ website, which is brimming with new ideas and initiatives on ‘platform co-ops’, owned and run by their members, building a collaborative, sustainable alternative to the standard internet model.”

A speaker at the open.coop 2017 meeting in London this February, Woodell is looking boldly to the future of co-ops and cooperation. But his feet remain firmly on the ground. The latest venture he has joined is West Oxfordshire Community Transport, set up by local people to keep bus services going across the area in the face of shrinking county council budgets. After buying the bus from the previous operator, it began to run its first local service in Witney just two days before we met.

Former local MP David Cameron might like to claim the venture for his long-forgotten ‘Big Society’. But really it’s much simpler than that: ordinary people coming together to take control of the things that matter to them in their everyday lives. And that, surely, is what cooperation is all about.

For more information: OpenCoop

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, May/June 2017.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor to Resurgence & Ecologist.

Like so many of us, Vivian Woodell found his mission in life by accident. At the age of 16 he joined his local retail Co-op. “I just liked the idea of it,” he explains.

The year was 1979, around the time Margaret Thatcher came to power. “The whole idea of a shop owned by its customers appealed to me at a time when mainstream thinking was all about privatisation. So that’s where I did my shopping.”

Five years later, just after finishing university, Woodell took a friend who was visiting from Ghana to his local Co-op in Oxford. The friend immediately noticed it was selling Outspan oranges – a prominent South African brand – in defiance of the UN anti-apartheid boycott. After a fruitless correspondence with management, Woodell recalls, “I thought, ‘I’m a member of this Co-op and I’ve got as much right to be heard as anyone else!’ So I put in my motion for the next members’ meeting.

Reviving a radical agenda
“We didn’t win, but out of that meeting a ginger group of local members came together. We all wanted to push for change, and reinvigorate the Co-op in line with its founding principles. At the time we were widely viewed as a bunch of radicals – but the whole cooperative movement was set up by people with a radical agenda for economic change, the Rochdale Pioneers – and we thought the organisation we were dealing with was not reflecting that spirit.

“So three of us stood for election for various positions and in 1985 we swept the board, all getting elected. That’s how I found myself, at the age of 23, the youngest director anyone could remember. It’s hardly surprising that the management regarded me as naive and green behind the ears and would say things like, ‘This kind of idealistic stuff is all very well, but what do you know about running a business?’ I didn’t understand at first that you don’t change an organisation just by passing resolutions! But we made an impact. In the end we recruited a new chief executive who shared our vision, and we helped to start a broader movement to bring the Co-op’s founding values back to life and make it more commercially successful.”

Surviving and thriving as a business with values
Still, those jibes about his lack of business experience rankled. “This is what impelled me to start up The Phone Co-op – a new mass market business in a former state-owned industry with a lot of sharp practice, dogged by debt and financial failures – and show there was a better way of doing it as a consumer cooperative owned by its members. In our early years every single one of our suppliers went through insolvency! But we survived by connecting the business with our values, meeting customers’ needs, and avoiding financial risk.”

Launched in 1998 in a spare bedroom in Woodell’s home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, with a handful of members and capital of £36,000, The Phone Co-op now has a £12.5 million turnover and 30,000 customers, among them charities, other co-ops, businesses and individuals. It has never gone into debt, and its growth is financed entirely from retained profits and members’ capital, which now stands at £7 million. It employs more than 70 staff, who share 11% of profits each year based on the number of hours worked, and has just bought a large new office building in the town centre, where renovations are about to begin.

Investing in new co-operative ventures
But what excites Woodell most is that The Phone Co-op has the financial muscle to help establish and support new cooperative ventures, and has so far invested in over 30, many of them in the renewable energy sector. A timely £300,000 it invested in Southill Community Energy enabled this 4.8MW solar co-op to get off the ground a few years ago, and it has made similar investments in projects from Northern Ireland to Cornwall. It also has its own 50kW solar farm in Gloucestershire, and is a founder member of Co-operative Renewables, a wind and solar power co-op that has installed hundreds of kilowatts of solar capacity on buildings owned by other cooperative societies. Other investments include student housing co-ops in Birmingham and Sheffield, a Fairtrade football manufacturing co-op, and local pubs owned and run by the communities they serve.

One thing that’s clear is that Woodell could have been a very successful businessman in his own right – and could have made a huge pile of cash for himself. Does he ever regret his decision to commit so firmly to the cooperative movement rather than concentrate on number one? “That was not my aspiration. I did not set out to make myself rich. I wanted to prove that a cooperative approach could do it better. We all make choices in life. Is it more important to get rich, or to do something that matters to you?

“In any case, The Phone Co-op is not just me – it’s all the people who have contributed to it with their energy and enthusiasm and shared values. And it owes its success precisely to the fact that it is a cooperative and not just another company. Most people don’t enjoy dealing with their telecoms company, but here the staff people talk to know that their customers are the owners, and it’s a completely different relationship.

Creating a resilient economy
“The beauty of co-ops is that the customers and workers are the stakeholders, and that’s why it works so well. Under a purely capitalist system, human relationships are commodified and become a means to an end – which is to make money. Here people are at the centre and capital is just a means to an end. We exist to provide a service to our members and other customers that meets their needs, in a way that reflects their values.”

A more cooperative economy is also much more stable and resilient than all-out capitalism, Woodell insists. “Just look at the privatised building societies: every single one has either failed like Northern Rock or been taken over. Not one survives. But with a few exceptions, those that remained as mutuals are still in business and are among the strongest financial institutions in the country.

“Look more widely, and you can see that cooperatives form a real backbone of the global economy – bigger than all the multinationals put together! A single farmers’ co-op in India, IFFCO, has 55 million members, the International Co-operative Alliance represents well over a billion co-op members at the UN, and co-ops employ more than 250 million people worldwide, who contribute over US$2 trillion to the global economy. And it has all grown from that one original co-op in Rochdale.

Taking back control
“Let’s just think about this idea of ‘taking back control’ that we heard so much about before the [Brexit] referendum. It has been hijacked by the nationalist right and now it needs to be reclaimed by ordinary people who want more control over their lives – and this is what the cooperative movement can offer. It’s all about people being in control and helping each other.”

The cooperative economy, Woodell insists, offers an increasingly attractive alternative to mainstream capitalism. The Co-op he joined in 1979 – now merged with others to become The Midcounties Co-operative – has just started up a successful new childcare division, and its Co-operative Energy subsidiary, founded in 2010, is presenting a growing nationwide challenge to the ‘Big Six’ energy companies with its customer base of 400,000.

The ‘sharing economy’ is a co-operative economy
As a Midcounties director Woodell can take his share of the credit for all that, but his ambitions go much higher. “Think of the new global hegemons of the capitalist world: Google, Facebook, eBay. Their business model is to capture a dominant position in an online marketplace that becomes unassailable. But they all work by providing a platform for people to transact with each other, making themselves the indispensable intermediary. They like to call it the ‘sharing economy’, but it’s not – it’s all about monopoly and extraction. This kind of thing should be done by co-ops! Uber should be owned by taxi drivers, and Airbnb by accommodation providers and travellers.

“One obstacle to success is that these huge, dominating businesses have emerged through the venture capital route – where many companies are funded in the hope that just one will be massively successful. That is not how the cooperative movement works. We need new models to allow co-ops to develop at scale. And people are working on it – look at the ‘open.coop’ website, which is brimming with new ideas and initiatives on ‘platform co-ops’, owned and run by their members, building a collaborative, sustainable alternative to the standard internet model.”

A speaker at the open.coop 2017 meeting in London this February, Woodell is looking boldly to the future of co-ops and cooperation. But his feet remain firmly on the ground. The latest venture he has joined is West Oxfordshire Community Transport, set up by local people to keep bus services going across the area in the face of shrinking county council budgets. After buying the bus from the previous operator, it began to run its first local service in Witney just two days before we met.

Former local MP David Cameron might like to claim the venture for his long-forgotten ‘Big Society’. But really it’s much simpler than that: ordinary people coming together to take control of the things that matter to them in their everyday lives. And that, surely, is what cooperation is all about.

For more information: OpenCoop

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, May/June 2017.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor to Resurgence & Ecologist.

Like so many of us, Vivian Woodell found his mission in life by accident. At the age of 16 he joined his local retail Co-op. “I just liked the idea of it,” he explains.

The year was 1979, around the time Margaret Thatcher came to power. “The whole idea of a shop owned by its customers appealed to me at a time when mainstream thinking was all about privatisation. So that’s where I did my shopping.”

Five years later, just after finishing university, Woodell took a friend who was visiting from Ghana to his local Co-op in Oxford. The friend immediately noticed it was selling Outspan oranges – a prominent South African brand – in defiance of the UN anti-apartheid boycott. After a fruitless correspondence with management, Woodell recalls, “I thought, ‘I’m a member of this Co-op and I’ve got as much right to be heard as anyone else!’ So I put in my motion for the next members’ meeting.

Reviving a radical agenda
“We didn’t win, but out of that meeting a ginger group of local members came together. We all wanted to push for change, and reinvigorate the Co-op in line with its founding principles. At the time we were widely viewed as a bunch of radicals – but the whole cooperative movement was set up by people with a radical agenda for economic change, the Rochdale Pioneers – and we thought the organisation we were dealing with was not reflecting that spirit.

“So three of us stood for election for various positions and in 1985 we swept the board, all getting elected. That’s how I found myself, at the age of 23, the youngest director anyone could remember. It’s hardly surprising that the management regarded me as naive and green behind the ears and would say things like, ‘This kind of idealistic stuff is all very well, but what do you know about running a business?’ I didn’t understand at first that you don’t change an organisation just by passing resolutions! But we made an impact. In the end we recruited a new chief executive who shared our vision, and we helped to start a broader movement to bring the Co-op’s founding values back to life and make it more commercially successful.”

Surviving and thriving as a business with values
Still, those jibes about his lack of business experience rankled. “This is what impelled me to start up The Phone Co-op – a new mass market business in a former state-owned industry with a lot of sharp practice, dogged by debt and financial failures – and show there was a better way of doing it as a consumer cooperative owned by its members. In our early years every single one of our suppliers went through insolvency! But we survived by connecting the business with our values, meeting customers’ needs, and avoiding financial risk.”

Launched in 1998 in a spare bedroom in Woodell’s home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, with a handful of members and capital of £36,000, The Phone Co-op now has a £12.5 million turnover and 30,000 customers, among them charities, other co-ops, businesses and individuals. It has never gone into debt, and its growth is financed entirely from retained profits and members’ capital, which now stands at £7 million. It employs more than 70 staff, who share 11% of profits each year based on the number of hours worked, and has just bought a large new office building in the town centre, where renovations are about to begin.

Investing in new co-operative ventures
But what excites Woodell most is that The Phone Co-op has the financial muscle to help establish and support new cooperative ventures, and has so far invested in over 30, many of them in the renewable energy sector. A timely £300,000 it invested in Southill Community Energy enabled this 4.8MW solar co-op to get off the ground a few years ago, and it has made similar investments in projects from Northern Ireland to Cornwall. It also has its own 50kW solar farm in Gloucestershire, and is a founder member of Co-operative Renewables, a wind and solar power co-op that has installed hundreds of kilowatts of solar capacity on buildings owned by other cooperative societies. Other investments include student housing co-ops in Birmingham and Sheffield, a Fairtrade football manufacturing co-op, and local pubs owned and run by the communities they serve.

One thing that’s clear is that Woodell could have been a very successful businessman in his own right – and could have made a huge pile of cash for himself. Does he ever regret his decision to commit so firmly to the cooperative movement rather than concentrate on number one? “That was not my aspiration. I did not set out to make myself rich. I wanted to prove that a cooperative approach could do it better. We all make choices in life. Is it more important to get rich, or to do something that matters to you?

“In any case, The Phone Co-op is not just me – it’s all the people who have contributed to it with their energy and enthusiasm and shared values. And it owes its success precisely to the fact that it is a cooperative and not just another company. Most people don’t enjoy dealing with their telecoms company, but here the staff people talk to know that their customers are the owners, and it’s a completely different relationship.

Creating a resilient economy
“The beauty of co-ops is that the customers and workers are the stakeholders, and that’s why it works so well. Under a purely capitalist system, human relationships are commodified and become a means to an end – which is to make money. Here people are at the centre and capital is just a means to an end. We exist to provide a service to our members and other customers that meets their needs, in a way that reflects their values.”

A more cooperative economy is also much more stable and resilient than all-out capitalism, Woodell insists. “Just look at the privatised building societies: every single one has either failed like Northern Rock or been taken over. Not one survives. But with a few exceptions, those that remained as mutuals are still in business and are among the strongest financial institutions in the country.

“Look more widely, and you can see that cooperatives form a real backbone of the global economy – bigger than all the multinationals put together! A single farmers’ co-op in India, IFFCO, has 55 million members, the International Co-operative Alliance represents well over a billion co-op members at the UN, and co-ops employ more than 250 million people worldwide, who contribute over US$2 trillion to the global economy. And it has all grown from that one original co-op in Rochdale.

Taking back control
“Let’s just think about this idea of ‘taking back control’ that we heard so much about before the [Brexit] referendum. It has been hijacked by the nationalist right and now it needs to be reclaimed by ordinary people who want more control over their lives – and this is what the cooperative movement can offer. It’s all about people being in control and helping each other.”

The cooperative economy, Woodell insists, offers an increasingly attractive alternative to mainstream capitalism. The Co-op he joined in 1979 – now merged with others to become The Midcounties Co-operative – has just started up a successful new childcare division, and its Co-operative Energy subsidiary, founded in 2010, is presenting a growing nationwide challenge to the ‘Big Six’ energy companies with its customer base of 400,000.

The ‘sharing economy’ is a co-operative economy
As a Midcounties director Woodell can take his share of the credit for all that, but his ambitions go much higher. “Think of the new global hegemons of the capitalist world: Google, Facebook, eBay. Their business model is to capture a dominant position in an online marketplace that becomes unassailable. But they all work by providing a platform for people to transact with each other, making themselves the indispensable intermediary. They like to call it the ‘sharing economy’, but it’s not – it’s all about monopoly and extraction. This kind of thing should be done by co-ops! Uber should be owned by taxi drivers, and Airbnb by accommodation providers and travellers.

“One obstacle to success is that these huge, dominating businesses have emerged through the venture capital route – where many companies are funded in the hope that just one will be massively successful. That is not how the cooperative movement works. We need new models to allow co-ops to develop at scale. And people are working on it – look at the ‘open.coop’ website, which is brimming with new ideas and initiatives on ‘platform co-ops’, owned and run by their members, building a collaborative, sustainable alternative to the standard internet model.”

A speaker at the open.coop 2017 meeting in London this February, Woodell is looking boldly to the future of co-ops and cooperation. But his feet remain firmly on the ground. The latest venture he has joined is West Oxfordshire Community Transport, set up by local people to keep bus services going across the area in the face of shrinking county council budgets. After buying the bus from the previous operator, it began to run its first local service in Witney just two days before we met.

Former local MP David Cameron might like to claim the venture for his long-forgotten ‘Big Society’. But really it’s much simpler than that: ordinary people coming together to take control of the things that matter to them in their everyday lives. And that, surely, is what cooperation is all about.

For more information: OpenCoop

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, May/June 2017.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor to Resurgence & Ecologist.

Like so many of us, Vivian Woodell found his mission in life by accident. At the age of 16 he joined his local retail Co-op. “I just liked the idea of it,” he explains.

The year was 1979, around the time Margaret Thatcher came to power. “The whole idea of a shop owned by its customers appealed to me at a time when mainstream thinking was all about privatisation. So that’s where I did my shopping.”

Five years later, just after finishing university, Woodell took a friend who was visiting from Ghana to his local Co-op in Oxford. The friend immediately noticed it was selling Outspan oranges – a prominent South African brand – in defiance of the UN anti-apartheid boycott. After a fruitless correspondence with management, Woodell recalls, “I thought, ‘I’m a member of this Co-op and I’ve got as much right to be heard as anyone else!’ So I put in my motion for the next members’ meeting.

Reviving a radical agenda
“We didn’t win, but out of that meeting a ginger group of local members came together. We all wanted to push for change, and reinvigorate the Co-op in line with its founding principles. At the time we were widely viewed as a bunch of radicals – but the whole cooperative movement was set up by people with a radical agenda for economic change, the Rochdale Pioneers – and we thought the organisation we were dealing with was not reflecting that spirit.

“So three of us stood for election for various positions and in 1985 we swept the board, all getting elected. That’s how I found myself, at the age of 23, the youngest director anyone could remember. It’s hardly surprising that the management regarded me as naive and green behind the ears and would say things like, ‘This kind of idealistic stuff is all very well, but what do you know about running a business?’ I didn’t understand at first that you don’t change an organisation just by passing resolutions! But we made an impact. In the end we recruited a new chief executive who shared our vision, and we helped to start a broader movement to bring the Co-op’s founding values back to life and make it more commercially successful.”

Surviving and thriving as a business with values
Still, those jibes about his lack of business experience rankled. “This is what impelled me to start up The Phone Co-op – a new mass market business in a former state-owned industry with a lot of sharp practice, dogged by debt and financial failures – and show there was a better way of doing it as a consumer cooperative owned by its members. In our early years every single one of our suppliers went through insolvency! But we survived by connecting the business with our values, meeting customers’ needs, and avoiding financial risk.”

Launched in 1998 in a spare bedroom in Woodell’s home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, with a handful of members and capital of £36,000, The Phone Co-op now has a £12.5 million turnover and 30,000 customers, among them charities, other co-ops, businesses and individuals. It has never gone into debt, and its growth is financed entirely from retained profits and members’ capital, which now stands at £7 million. It employs more than 70 staff, who share 11% of profits each year based on the number of hours worked, and has just bought a large new office building in the town centre, where renovations are about to begin.

Investing in new co-operative ventures
But what excites Woodell most is that The Phone Co-op has the financial muscle to help establish and support new cooperative ventures, and has so far invested in over 30, many of them in the renewable energy sector. A timely £300,000 it invested in Southill Community Energy enabled this 4.8MW solar co-op to get off the ground a few years ago, and it has made similar investments in projects from Northern Ireland to Cornwall. It also has its own 50kW solar farm in Gloucestershire, and is a founder member of Co-operative Renewables, a wind and solar power co-op that has installed hundreds of kilowatts of solar capacity on buildings owned by other cooperative societies. Other investments include student housing co-ops in Birmingham and Sheffield, a Fairtrade football manufacturing co-op, and local pubs owned and run by the communities they serve.

One thing that’s clear is that Woodell could have been a very successful businessman in his own right – and could have made a huge pile of cash for himself. Does he ever regret his decision to commit so firmly to the cooperative movement rather than concentrate on number one? “That was not my aspiration. I did not set out to make myself rich. I wanted to prove that a cooperative approach could do it better. We all make choices in life. Is it more important to get rich, or to do something that matters to you?

“In any case, The Phone Co-op is not just me – it’s all the people who have contributed to it with their energy and enthusiasm and shared values. And it owes its success precisely to the fact that it is a cooperative and not just another company. Most people don’t enjoy dealing with their telecoms company, but here the staff people talk to know that their customers are the owners, and it’s a completely different relationship.

Creating a resilient economy
“The beauty of co-ops is that the customers and workers are the stakeholders, and that’s why it works so well. Under a purely capitalist system, human relationships are commodified and become a means to an end – which is to make money. Here people are at the centre and capital is just a means to an end. We exist to provide a service to our members and other customers that meets their needs, in a way that reflects their values.”

A more cooperative economy is also much more stable and resilient than all-out capitalism, Woodell insists. “Just look at the privatised building societies: every single one has either failed like Northern Rock or been taken over. Not one survives. But with a few exceptions, those that remained as mutuals are still in business and are among the strongest financial institutions in the country.

“Look more widely, and you can see that cooperatives form a real backbone of the global economy – bigger than all the multinationals put together! A single farmers’ co-op in India, IFFCO, has 55 million members, the International Co-operative Alliance represents well over a billion co-op members at the UN, and co-ops employ more than 250 million people worldwide, who contribute over US$2 trillion to the global economy. And it has all grown from that one original co-op in Rochdale.

Taking back control
“Let’s just think about this idea of ‘taking back control’ that we heard so much about before the [Brexit] referendum. It has been hijacked by the nationalist right and now it needs to be reclaimed by ordinary people who want more control over their lives – and this is what the cooperative movement can offer. It’s all about people being in control and helping each other.”

The cooperative economy, Woodell insists, offers an increasingly attractive alternative to mainstream capitalism. The Co-op he joined in 1979 – now merged with others to become The Midcounties Co-operative – has just started up a successful new childcare division, and its Co-operative Energy subsidiary, founded in 2010, is presenting a growing nationwide challenge to the ‘Big Six’ energy companies with its customer base of 400,000.

The ‘sharing economy’ is a co-operative economy
As a Midcounties director Woodell can take his share of the credit for all that, but his ambitions go much higher. “Think of the new global hegemons of the capitalist world: Google, Facebook, eBay. Their business model is to capture a dominant position in an online marketplace that becomes unassailable. But they all work by providing a platform for people to transact with each other, making themselves the indispensable intermediary. They like to call it the ‘sharing economy’, but it’s not – it’s all about monopoly and extraction. This kind of thing should be done by co-ops! Uber should be owned by taxi drivers, and Airbnb by accommodation providers and travellers.

“One obstacle to success is that these huge, dominating businesses have emerged through the venture capital route – where many companies are funded in the hope that just one will be massively successful. That is not how the cooperative movement works. We need new models to allow co-ops to develop at scale. And people are working on it – look at the ‘open.coop’ website, which is brimming with new ideas and initiatives on ‘platform co-ops’, owned and run by their members, building a collaborative, sustainable alternative to the standard internet model.”

A speaker at the open.coop 2017 meeting in London this February, Woodell is looking boldly to the future of co-ops and cooperation. But his feet remain firmly on the ground. The latest venture he has joined is West Oxfordshire Community Transport, set up by local people to keep bus services going across the area in the face of shrinking county council budgets. After buying the bus from the previous operator, it began to run its first local service in Witney just two days before we met.

Former local MP David Cameron might like to claim the venture for his long-forgotten ‘Big Society’. But really it’s much simpler than that: ordinary people coming together to take control of the things that matter to them in their everyday lives. And that, surely, is what cooperation is all about.

For more information: OpenCoop

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, May/June 2017.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor to Resurgence & Ecologist.

Like so many of us, Vivian Woodell found his mission in life by accident. At the age of 16 he joined his local retail Co-op. “I just liked the idea of it,” he explains.

The year was 1979, around the time Margaret Thatcher came to power. “The whole idea of a shop owned by its customers appealed to me at a time when mainstream thinking was all about privatisation. So that’s where I did my shopping.”

Five years later, just after finishing university, Woodell took a friend who was visiting from Ghana to his local Co-op in Oxford. The friend immediately noticed it was selling Outspan oranges – a prominent South African brand – in defiance of the UN anti-apartheid boycott. After a fruitless correspondence with management, Woodell recalls, “I thought, ‘I’m a member of this Co-op and I’ve got as much right to be heard as anyone else!’ So I put in my motion for the next members’ meeting.

Reviving a radical agenda
“We didn’t win, but out of that meeting a ginger group of local members came together. We all wanted to push for change, and reinvigorate the Co-op in line with its founding principles. At the time we were widely viewed as a bunch of radicals – but the whole cooperative movement was set up by people with a radical agenda for economic change, the Rochdale Pioneers – and we thought the organisation we were dealing with was not reflecting that spirit.

“So three of us stood for election for various positions and in 1985 we swept the board, all getting elected. That’s how I found myself, at the age of 23, the youngest director anyone could remember. It’s hardly surprising that the management regarded me as naive and green behind the ears and would say things like, ‘This kind of idealistic stuff is all very well, but what do you know about running a business?’ I didn’t understand at first that you don’t change an organisation just by passing resolutions! But we made an impact. In the end we recruited a new chief executive who shared our vision, and we helped to start a broader movement to bring the Co-op’s founding values back to life and make it more commercially successful.”

Surviving and thriving as a business with values
Still, those jibes about his lack of business experience rankled. “This is what impelled me to start up The Phone Co-op – a new mass market business in a former state-owned industry with a lot of sharp practice, dogged by debt and financial failures – and show there was a better way of doing it as a consumer cooperative owned by its members. In our early years every single one of our suppliers went through insolvency! But we survived by connecting the business with our values, meeting customers’ needs, and avoiding financial risk.”

Launched in 1998 in a spare bedroom in Woodell’s home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, with a handful of members and capital of £36,000, The Phone Co-op now has a £12.5 million turnover and 30,000 customers, among them charities, other co-ops, businesses and individuals. It has never gone into debt, and its growth is financed entirely from retained profits and members’ capital, which now stands at £7 million. It employs more than 70 staff, who share 11% of profits each year based on the number of hours worked, and has just bought a large new office building in the town centre, where renovations are about to begin.

Investing in new co-operative ventures
But what excites Woodell most is that The Phone Co-op has the financial muscle to help establish and support new cooperative ventures, and has so far invested in over 30, many of them in the renewable energy sector. A timely £300,000 it invested in Southill Community Energy enabled this 4.8MW solar co-op to get off the ground a few years ago, and it has made similar investments in projects from Northern Ireland to Cornwall. It also has its own 50kW solar farm in Gloucestershire, and is a founder member of Co-operative Renewables, a wind and solar power co-op that has installed hundreds of kilowatts of solar capacity on buildings owned by other cooperative societies. Other investments include student housing co-ops in Birmingham and Sheffield, a Fairtrade football manufacturing co-op, and local pubs owned and run by the communities they serve.

One thing that’s clear is that Woodell could have been a very successful businessman in his own right – and could have made a huge pile of cash for himself. Does he ever regret his decision to commit so firmly to the cooperative movement rather than concentrate on number one? “That was not my aspiration. I did not set out to make myself rich. I wanted to prove that a cooperative approach could do it better. We all make choices in life. Is it more important to get rich, or to do something that matters to you?

“In any case, The Phone Co-op is not just me – it’s all the people who have contributed to it with their energy and enthusiasm and shared values. And it owes its success precisely to the fact that it is a cooperative and not just another company. Most people don’t enjoy dealing with their telecoms company, but here the staff people talk to know that their customers are the owners, and it’s a completely different relationship.

Creating a resilient economy
“The beauty of co-ops is that the customers and workers are the stakeholders, and that’s why it works so well. Under a purely capitalist system, human relationships are commodified and become a means to an end – which is to make money. Here people are at the centre and capital is just a means to an end. We exist to provide a service to our members and other customers that meets their needs, in a way that reflects their values.”

A more cooperative economy is also much more stable and resilient than all-out capitalism, Woodell insists. “Just look at the privatised building societies: every single one has either failed like Northern Rock or been taken over. Not one survives. But with a few exceptions, those that remained as mutuals are still in business and are among the strongest financial institutions in the country.

“Look more widely, and you can see that cooperatives form a real backbone of the global economy – bigger than all the multinationals put together! A single farmers’ co-op in India, IFFCO, has 55 million members, the International Co-operative Alliance represents well over a billion co-op members at the UN, and co-ops employ more than 250 million people worldwide, who contribute over US$2 trillion to the global economy. And it has all grown from that one original co-op in Rochdale.

Taking back control
“Let’s just think about this idea of ‘taking back control’ that we heard so much about before the [Brexit] referendum. It has been hijacked by the nationalist right and now it needs to be reclaimed by ordinary people who want more control over their lives – and this is what the cooperative movement can offer. It’s all about people being in control and helping each other.”

The cooperative economy, Woodell insists, offers an increasingly attractive alternative to mainstream capitalism. The Co-op he joined in 1979 – now merged with others to become The Midcounties Co-operative – has just started up a successful new childcare division, and its Co-operative Energy subsidiary, founded in 2010, is presenting a growing nationwide challenge to the ‘Big Six’ energy companies with its customer base of 400,000.

The ‘sharing economy’ is a co-operative economy
As a Midcounties director Woodell can take his share of the credit for all that, but his ambitions go much higher. “Think of the new global hegemons of the capitalist world: Google, Facebook, eBay. Their business model is to capture a dominant position in an online marketplace that becomes unassailable. But they all work by providing a platform for people to transact with each other, making themselves the indispensable intermediary. They like to call it the ‘sharing economy’, but it’s not – it’s all about monopoly and extraction. This kind of thing should be done by co-ops! Uber should be owned by taxi drivers, and Airbnb by accommodation providers and travellers.

“One obstacle to success is that these huge, dominating businesses have emerged through the venture capital route – where many companies are funded in the hope that just one will be massively successful. That is not how the cooperative movement works. We need new models to allow co-ops to develop at scale. And people are working on it – look at the ‘open.coop’ website, which is brimming with new ideas and initiatives on ‘platform co-ops’, owned and run by their members, building a collaborative, sustainable alternative to the standard internet model.”

A speaker at the open.coop 2017 meeting in London this February, Woodell is looking boldly to the future of co-ops and cooperation. But his feet remain firmly on the ground. The latest venture he has joined is West Oxfordshire Community Transport, set up by local people to keep bus services going across the area in the face of shrinking county council budgets. After buying the bus from the previous operator, it began to run its first local service in Witney just two days before we met.

Former local MP David Cameron might like to claim the venture for his long-forgotten ‘Big Society’. But really it’s much simpler than that: ordinary people coming together to take control of the things that matter to them in their everyday lives. And that, surely, is what cooperation is all about.

For more information: OpenCoop

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, May/June 2017.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor to Resurgence & Ecologist.

Like so many of us, Vivian Woodell found his mission in life by accident. At the age of 16 he joined his local retail Co-op. “I just liked the idea of it,” he explains.

The year was 1979, around the time Margaret Thatcher came to power. “The whole idea of a shop owned by its customers appealed to me at a time when mainstream thinking was all about privatisation. So that’s where I did my shopping.”

Five years later, just after finishing university, Woodell took a friend who was visiting from Ghana to his local Co-op in Oxford. The friend immediately noticed it was selling Outspan oranges – a prominent South African brand – in defiance of the UN anti-apartheid boycott. After a fruitless correspondence with management, Woodell recalls, “I thought, ‘I’m a member of this Co-op and I’ve got as much right to be heard as anyone else!’ So I put in my motion for the next members’ meeting.

Reviving a radical agenda
“We didn’t win, but out of that meeting a ginger group of local members came together. We all wanted to push for change, and reinvigorate the Co-op in line with its founding principles. At the time we were widely viewed as a bunch of radicals – but the whole cooperative movement was set up by people with a radical agenda for economic change, the Rochdale Pioneers – and we thought the organisation we were dealing with was not reflecting that spirit.

“So three of us stood for election for various positions and in 1985 we swept the board, all getting elected. That’s how I found myself, at the age of 23, the youngest director anyone could remember. It’s hardly surprising that the management regarded me as naive and green behind the ears and would say things like, ‘This kind of idealistic stuff is all very well, but what do you know about running a business?’ I didn’t understand at first that you don’t change an organisation just by passing resolutions! But we made an impact. In the end we recruited a new chief executive who shared our vision, and we helped to start a broader movement to bring the Co-op’s founding values back to life and make it more commercially successful.”

Surviving and thriving as a business with values
Still, those jibes about his lack of business experience rankled. “This is what impelled me to start up The Phone Co-op – a new mass market business in a former state-owned industry with a lot of sharp practice, dogged by debt and financial failures – and show there was a better way of doing it as a consumer cooperative owned by its members. In our early years every single one of our suppliers went through insolvency! But we survived by connecting the business with our values, meeting customers’ needs, and avoiding financial risk.”

Launched in 1998 in a spare bedroom in Woodell’s home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, with a handful of members and capital of £36,000, The Phone Co-op now has a £12.5 million turnover and 30,000 customers, among them charities, other co-ops, businesses and individuals. It has never gone into debt, and its growth is financed entirely from retained profits and members’ capital, which now stands at £7 million. It employs more than 70 staff, who share 11% of profits each year based on the number of hours worked, and has just bought a large new office building in the town centre, where renovations are about to begin.

Investing in new co-operative ventures
But what excites Woodell most is that The Phone Co-op has the financial muscle to help establish and support new cooperative ventures, and has so far invested in over 30, many of them in the renewable energy sector. A timely £300,000 it invested in Southill Community Energy enabled this 4.8MW solar co-op to get off the ground a few years ago, and it has made similar investments in projects from Northern Ireland to Cornwall. It also has its own 50kW solar farm in Gloucestershire, and is a founder member of Co-operative Renewables, a wind and solar power co-op that has installed hundreds of kilowatts of solar capacity on buildings owned by other cooperative societies. Other investments include student housing co-ops in Birmingham and Sheffield, a Fairtrade football manufacturing co-op, and local pubs owned and run by the communities they serve.

One thing that’s clear is that Woodell could have been a very successful businessman in his own right – and could have made a huge pile of cash for himself. Does he ever regret his decision to commit so firmly to the cooperative movement rather than concentrate on number one? “That was not my aspiration. I did not set out to make myself rich. I wanted to prove that a cooperative approach could do it better. We all make choices in life. Is it more important to get rich, or to do something that matters to you?

“In any case, The Phone Co-op is not just me – it’s all the people who have contributed to it with their energy and enthusiasm and shared values. And it owes its success precisely to the fact that it is a cooperative and not just another company. Most people don’t enjoy dealing with their telecoms company, but here the staff people talk to know that their customers are the owners, and it’s a completely different relationship.

Creating a resilient economy
“The beauty of co-ops is that the customers and workers are the stakeholders, and that’s why it works so well. Under a purely capitalist system, human relationships are commodified and become a means to an end – which is to make money. Here people are at the centre and capital is just a means to an end. We exist to provide a service to our members and other customers that meets their needs, in a way that reflects their values.”

A more cooperative economy is also much more stable and resilient than all-out capitalism, Woodell insists. “Just look at the privatised building societies: every single one has either failed like Northern Rock or been taken over. Not one survives. But with a few exceptions, those that remained as mutuals are still in business and are among the strongest financial institutions in the country.

“Look more widely, and you can see that cooperatives form a real backbone of the global economy – bigger than all the multinationals put together! A single farmers’ co-op in India, IFFCO, has 55 million members, the International Co-operative Alliance represents well over a billion co-op members at the UN, and co-ops employ more than 250 million people worldwide, who contribute over US$2 trillion to the global economy. And it has all grown from that one original co-op in Rochdale.

Taking back control
“Let’s just think about this idea of ‘taking back control’ that we heard so much about before the [Brexit] referendum. It has been hijacked by the nationalist right and now it needs to be reclaimed by ordinary people who want more control over their lives – and this is what the cooperative movement can offer. It’s all about people being in control and helping each other.”

The cooperative economy, Woodell insists, offers an increasingly attractive alternative to mainstream capitalism. The Co-op he joined in 1979 – now merged with others to become The Midcounties Co-operative – has just started up a successful new childcare division, and its Co-operative Energy subsidiary, founded in 2010, is presenting a growing nationwide challenge to the ‘Big Six’ energy companies with its customer base of 400,000.

The ‘sharing economy’ is a co-operative economy
As a Midcounties director Woodell can take his share of the credit for all that, but his ambitions go much higher. “Think of the new global hegemons of the capitalist world: Google, Facebook, eBay. Their business model is to capture a dominant position in an online marketplace that becomes unassailable. But they all work by providing a platform for people to transact with each other, making themselves the indispensable intermediary. They like to call it the ‘sharing economy’, but it’s not – it’s all about monopoly and extraction. This kind of thing should be done by co-ops! Uber should be owned by taxi drivers, and Airbnb by accommodation providers and travellers.

“One obstacle to success is that these huge, dominating businesses have emerged through the venture capital route – where many companies are funded in the hope that just one will be massively successful. That is not how the cooperative movement works. We need new models to allow co-ops to develop at scale. And people are working on it – look at the ‘open.coop’ website, which is brimming with new ideas and initiatives on ‘platform co-ops’, owned and run by their members, building a collaborative, sustainable alternative to the standard internet model.”

A speaker at the open.coop 2017 meeting in London this February, Woodell is looking boldly to the future of co-ops and cooperation. But his feet remain firmly on the ground. The latest venture he has joined is West Oxfordshire Community Transport, set up by local people to keep bus services going across the area in the face of shrinking county council budgets. After buying the bus from the previous operator, it began to run its first local service in Witney just two days before we met.

Former local MP David Cameron might like to claim the venture for his long-forgotten ‘Big Society’. But really it’s much simpler than that: ordinary people coming together to take control of the things that matter to them in their everyday lives. And that, surely, is what cooperation is all about.

For more information: OpenCoop

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, May/June 2017.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor to Resurgence & Ecologist.