College staff have volunteered to be on a new, dedicated blogging team. Our bloggers are drawn from different teams to ensure the blog represents the diversity of the College’s work, although they will be joined by guest bloggers from other parts of the College from time to time.

The core blogging team comprises Jess Wilson, Schools Trust Co-ordinator from the Schools team, Archivist Sophie Stewart from the Heritage team, Michelle Sansby, Customer Services Manager – Information & Systems from the Co-operative Learning & Development Team, Emma Willder, Vice Principal – Finance & Resources, Ceri Smith, Contracts & Compliance Manager in the Finance & Recources team, and Funding Development Manager Sue Hennessey. They are also joined by Simon Sheppard, who is currently Project Archivist on the Robert Owen Correspondence Collection, and Heather Roberts, Archive Assistant, who is working to catalogue the records of the Co-operative Group as buildings are vacated ahead of the Group’s move into its new premises. Heather is sharing unique insights about what it’s like to be an archivist, and revealing treasures unearthed in the dark, dusty world of the basements under the co-operative complex.

Follow the Co-operative College’s blog at www.co-op.ac.uk/blog.

Dr T Paranjothi, from the National Institute of Co-operative Management in Pune, found the visit very informative and was impressed at the range of activities the College undertakes.

In February, Wilson and his colleague Dr Jerry Lieberman, co-director of the Evolution Institute, met staff from the Co-operative College in Manchester to find out about the Co-operative College’s work and discuss the possibilities for collaborating in future to build an evidence base that co-operation works.

Wilson has been putting theory into practice by working with community groups in Binghampton, a depressed city in New York State which has seen a dramatic reduction in population in recent years. He takes a whole-city based approach to neighbourhood research. As outlined in his new book The Neighbourhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time, Wilson engages groups in community projects such as building new parks, aiming to “increase the quality of life in neighbourhoods and improve city governance” and “change cultural practices for the better”. Speaking during a lecture in Manchester, he described this as a bottom-up process: “We work with all sectors of the population and truly engage all neighbourhoods to turn them into effective groups capable of managing their own affairs. Part of what works is groups who make their own decisions by consensus.”

Wilson believes that “co-operation can succeed as a strategy, but only under certain circumstances”, and is looking at the characteristics groups need to be able to co-operate effectively. He explains the reasoning behind his community-based research methods: “Why not study actual groups and coach them at the same time to improve the science of co-operation? If you find likeminded groups who are doing the same, you can build an infrastructure/framework and groups can learn from each other. You need to build in the mechanism for variation, selection and replication.”

One of the reasons co-operation is not yet mainstream could be because of a communication problem in the past. Wilson identifies a need to “change the dominant paradigm in the media” – that individuals are inherently selfish and self-interested – by making sure co-operation, along with evolution, is understandable and relevant. He explained: “Evolution also has a relevance problem. The key is to present these ideas as useful in a positive sense. It needs to be tied to community.”

This means making evolution relevant to a wider audience than scientists: “We want to embrace interdisciplinarity and expand evolution beyond biology to include all things human. We want to include the humanities, art and religion – the non-sciences which give meaning to life. There is a common language of evolution and it can be applied to education, health, you name it.”

Of particular interest to Wilson and Lieberman was the College’s model for co-operative schools in England – democratically accountable schools which are owned and run by their local community via a multi-stakeholder forum.

Wilson and Lieberman have worked in high schools in the United States, aiming to create “an environment where it was easy to co-operate and easy to learn”. Wilson notes: “All practices were totally familiar. All were in the repertoire of what schools and teachers already did, for example learning by seeing.”

There are similarities and differences between co-operative education in the United States and the United Kingdom, but what the College and Wilson share is a desire to find a way of assessing what works for communities, and build a successful co-operative model which can be learned from and replicated.

Julie Thorpe, Head of School and Youth Programmes at the Co-operative College, has written about her perpective of Wilson’s visit here.

Midlands Co-operative Society was formed in April 1995 following the merger of Central Midlands Co-operative Society and Leicestershire Co-operative Society. Central Midlands Co-operative Society had been formed in 1985 as a result of the merger of Greater Midlands Co-operative Society and East Midlands Co-operative Society. These societies themselves were formed as a result of mergers and transfer of engagements of other societies.

The records, which date from 1854-2011, include minute books of committees and sub-committees, reports and balance sheets and photographs.

View the collection listing online at http://archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb1499mid.

The Society ran from 1892 to 1943. Printing orders were taken from the beginning of 1893. In 1901, a purpose built property was built which included a room specifically designed for education and social uses. In 1901, the business included letter printing, lithographic printing, bookbinding, packing, a stereotyping foundry and a composing room. In 1909 the adjoining premises was taken over by the Society and a new department of box making was introduced. The department was outputting over 30,000 boxes a week by 1913 and moved to larger premises in the centre of the town.

The collection comprises financial records, legal agreements, property and premises records and photographs.

View the collection listing online at http://archiveshub.ac.uk/data/gb1499lps.

Rebecca, who is leaving to take up a new post in the Social Goals team at the Co-operative Group, first joined the College as a Schools associate in Fairtrade Fortnight 2009. She came across the Co-operative College after being sponsored by Midlands Co-operative Society to take part in a youth conference in Manchester while studying African Studies and Geography at the University of Birmingham in 2006.

Rebecca’s career at the College has been diverse, from visiting co-operatives internationally to undertaking research in the National Co-operative Archive. She said: “Working at the College has been a fantastic and varied experience, from finding out about member campaigns of the 1800s to researching gender and co-operative leadership in Kenya.”

Rebecca has met co-operators from across the world, both at the College in the UK and abroad. She said: “Through organising international visits I have learned so much about both the UK co-operative movement and the movements in the countries the visitors come from. It’s been amazing taking visitors to Rochdale and seeing how much it means to them; it’s almost like a pilgrimage to them!

“My knowledge of the co-operative movement both in the UK and internationally has continued to grow and inspire me. I have delved into old coffee sacks in search of archives relating to the history of the Tanzanian co-operative movement, stayed with a family who were members of their village dairy co-operative in Kenya and contributed to several publications which explore the often overlooked roles that co-operatives play in fighting poverty.”

She continued: “There have been so many highlights it is hard to know what to choose! I have really enjoyed working with other teams across the college to find creative ways to communicate the important messages of the College’s research – via publications, activities like the timeline produced about the co-operative movement’s campaigning history, and training events. I have also enjoyed being a TV presenter for schools videoconferences!

“I will be sorry to leave the many friends I have made in the College but I am looking forward to joining The Co-operative Group at an exciting time, as it launches the next stage of the Ethical Operating Plan.”

Using the National Co-operative Archive

Rachael can often be found in the National Co-operative Archive “reading old newspapers over and over again”, including pamphlet collections, periodicals and archive copies of the Co-operative News (which she describes as “brilliant because they reported verbatim on quarterly meetings of the CWS, so you get not just the official policy but people’s response to that”). She also pores over the minutes of local societies which were members of the CWS; these show the contrasting views of what societies wanted from the CWS and what the CWS thought it was able to offer members. Photographic records help her visualise what life would have been like, and there will be lots of images in the finished book.

She says: “It’s exciting what great resources we have. There’s such a wealth of printed material I always joke that co-operatives were in love with the printing press!”

She continues: “It’s an interesting challenge to look at such a broad period. The co-operative movement declined in the post-war period and after the 1950s people stopped writing about the movement so much. Reporting standards changed.”

New material is being uncovered all the time as the Co-operative Group gets ready to move into its new premises, and archivists from the National Co-operative Archive are currently in the middle of a huge project cataloguing the organisation’s records. Rachael explains: “The amount of information coming out of office moves is brilliant. It’s a great time to figure out what needs to go into the archive. Almost every week we find a new stash of paper or set of minute books. One of the first things we found was a set of grocery committee minute books from the nineteenth century. Minute books are always funny – you have to go through a process of trying to fill in between the lines because of the difference between what’s said at the meetings and what’s actually recorded.”

Co-operative business history

Rachael describes the business history project as “a dream opportunity”, and she brings her interest in social history to the project. She explains: “I never imagined myself as a business historian. It sounds so dry and dull, but we’re looking at how organisations develop and interact with society and society interacts with them. As we’ve dealt with the aftermath of the economic crisis we’ve all seen that business activity doesn’t happen outside of society.”

Rachael is also working with Dr Tony Webster, Head of History at Liverpool John Moores University, and Professor John Wilson of Liverpool University, where Rachael is also employed, on the project. Both John and Tony bring their own expertise. She explains: “John is an expert on the history of business management in Britain, which give a broad sweep on what’s going on. Tony has a background in business and economic history and had done a lot on the empire in the past, which helped us look at the international spread of co-operation. This is important as the CWS developed internationally earlier on than most businesses, especially food businesses, in Britain.”

Rachael thinks it’s about time there was an accessible, up-to-date history of the CWS, and believes there is a wide audience. She explains: “There hasn’t been a new history of the CWS since the 1970s. We hope to bring the history of the business into a wider understanding both for academics and a wider audience in the co-operative movement.”

She continues:  “In the twentieth century, especially after the war, co-operatives really fell out of the textbooks. We’re dependent on chance encounters for people to see co-operatives as something to explore. Most business schools don’t mention co-operatives as a viable alternative, and one with a long track history.

“It’s in the past ten years that academics have found the co-operative movement again as a subject matter. It is interesting to look at it as a business and a social movement. Academics had tended to look at those two separately.

The publication is timely: “We hope the business history can make people aware of co-operatives, both historically and what they are doing today. We have been very fortunate with the timing. Nobody would have dreamed when we started this project that there would be an International Year of Co-operatives the year before the publication of the book.”

To bring the book up to date, Rachael has been conducting oral history interviews with members and senior managers in the co-operative movement. A heritage course was also developed for elected members of the Co-operative Group and delivered at winter school.

Co-operative contradictions: PhD

In her spare hours, Rachael is writing up her PhD, which she is undertaking at Oxford University, but she says the two projects “help each other”. Her PhD focuses on business, labour and gender history in the co-operative movement from 1880-1920 and looks at co-operative contradictions, for example the fact that the movement was led by men but depended largely on women as household shoppers.

Rachael who was already interested in community builders such as Robert Owen, first became interested in co-operation when she read the 1915 book Maternity, which comprises letters from women co-operators about their experience of child bearing and rearing, and a later book by pioneering co-operator Margaret Llewelyn Davies entitled Life as We Have known It. After majoring in European history at the University of Puget Sound, Washington State, she wrote about the Women’s Co-operative Guild for her masters at Portland State University although she had only three weeks in the UK to research it, relying on interlibrary loans to access records.

She explains why she decided to focus on the 40 year window of 1880-1920 for her PhD: “I’ve always loved that period. There are similarities with a lot of things we deal with today. There was so much social and economic change. Women’s public presence was less then, but by the 1880s you can see the Women’s Guild as one of the first working class women’s movements and one of the first places women could be accepted in a public role. People were talking about questions like ‘What does it mean to be a democracy?’ and ‘what does it mean to have a voice?’.

“I became more and more interested in the broader movement. It is easy to think of the Women’s Co-operative Guild as a women’s movement and forget the co-operative part. It is a really interesting organisation. I was asking questions like ‘What about the women who weren’t in the Guild but were involved in co-operation?’.”

Rachael is discovering interest in her PhD topic from all sorts of angles. She delivered a workshop at the National ‘Missing Women’ Conference in Leeds in 2011, which is part of the 2020 Women’s Challenge to make co-operatives more representative by 2020, and will give a paper on the Women’s Guild’s attitude towards rationing at a conference on world war one.

Rachael has also spoken to current Women’s Guild members about the historical legacy of the Guild and their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences. She explains: “The Women’s Co-operative Guild has lasted a lot longer than people could have expected. There is continued relevance.”

Yeo emphasises how the book collects stories of successful co-operative businesses all over the world and looks into how co-operatives are making a difference. The full article can be read online at www.thenews.coop/article/vital-stories-bring-together-world-co-operation.

Andy Goodwin, Facilities Operations Manager for the Co-operative Group, looks after the co-operative buildings of all different architectural styles and periods that are clustered near Victoria Station in Manchester. Most of the buildings will soon be vacated as the Co-operative Group gets ready to move into its shiny new headquarters across the road later this year.

As well as taking us around the underground tunnels that connect the various co-operative buildings, Andy is full of interesting facts. Who would have known, for instance, that there’s a huge glacial boulder beneath the 1960s-built CIS tower that was too big to be moved, or that the space where the Sports & Social Club is now was once a nuclear shelter?

In an impressive vanishing trick, we started underneath the CIS building, among the fiery boilers and thick pipes (coated in what we now know is hazardous asbestos) that transport water around the building and, after a short walk, ended up in a more familiar place; next to the escalators in New Century House across the road. Like a Turkish bath, as you move from room to room the temperature changes rapidly, from balmy, almost tropical heat to rooms with a distinct chill in the air and rooms where you’re suddenly swept by gusts of wind. In another disorientating adventure, we started in the gloomy depths of the ornate old bank building and emerged into daylight from the art deco Dantzic Building.

It would be easy to get lost in this warren of rooms and tunnels and, if you did, you could be there a long time. Once, a team of carpenters, electricians and even an in-house French polisher (think of all shiny that mahogany in the plush offices above!) worked in the windowless bowels of the CIS tower, but now these services are contracted out, employing far fewer people, and there aren’t many people around.

Two people who do spend a lot of time in the basements of the co-operative complex are archivists Adam Shaw and Heather Roberts from the National Co-operative Archive at the College, as they are in the middle of a mammoth project to catalogue the (often long-forgotten about) records of the Co-operative Group. These records, which date back decades, languish in the underground spaces alongside a strange assortment of co-operative memorabilia that ranges from masonry taken down from the facade of a building when it became unsafe to a collection of old-fashioned office calculators.

As you walk from room into room piled high with records, you realise the extent of the task they have before them. Many of these spaces resemble graveyards for office furniture. In one case, Andy tells us, a whole building was abandoned in the 1970s and is boarded up but, since he started work at the Co-operative Group less than a year ago, he has come across vintage tins of cat food and even (empty) cans of beer!

Some tunnels are wide enough for carts to pass through, and others are decorated with the beautiful glazed bricks fashionable in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Others tunnels were bulldozed in as the buildings they once connected to were demolished, and lead nowhere save for a pile of rubble or a bricked-up dead end. One tunnel leads, via a ladder, into the old bank building. Fittingly, under this building we see the heavy metal doors guarding old bank vaults.

The tour wasn’t just about the past. Andy was keen to point out that these co-operative buildings, while they are being emptied by the Group, have a future as part of the NOMA development that will establish a new ‘co-operative quarter’ around the area, and could be reinvented as retail, dining and residential space. Though the sixties buildings are now hugely inefficient, they were well built and have aged well, and the CIS building will be reinstalled with double glazing (this will also mean it is, once again, see-through as the architect originally intended).

Staff, students and other professionals connected with 

The current issue, which came out in December, focuses on co-operation in education and looks at how education can be transformed through co-operation. It includes contributions based on both practice and theory, and perspectives ranging from formal to informal learning and early years to higher education.

Sarah Jones, Vice Principal of Lipson Community College in Plymouth, Devon, discusses ‘Leading Learning in a Co-operative Academy’. Lee Taylor, Deputy Head of Sutherland school, writes ‘A Personal Reflection on the Transformative Power of Co-operative Approaches’. Ashley Simpson, a former student and active member of Reddish Vale Technology College near Stockport, has written an article entitled ‘Co-operation Provides Opportunities for All – A View from a Learner’. The Co-operative College’s Julie Thorpe and Linda Shaw have written articles about ‘Co-operative Schools in the UK’ and ‘Making Co-operators: Co-operative Education for the 21^st Century’.

The journal also covers a contextual framework for co-operative learning, putting co-operative values into practice, making co-operative learning work in the classroom, co-operative leadership, co-operative strategies and inclusion, the Workers Educational Association and the co-operative movement, e-learning, teaching about co-operatives in a UK business school, personalised education, co-operative drama teaching methods, using co-operation to reengage NEETs, community arts, Woodcraft Folk and learning co-operatively through networks.

To subscribe to the magazine visit www.co-opstudies.org/Subscription.htm.