In 1998, a few people dreamed up the idea of a collective of community development consultants and identified shared needs for insurance, finance and IT support. They reflected on why six or seven consultants/facilitators would each want to do this when they could do it together. Through cooperating, they could save a lot of money, plus enjoy the solidarity and support of working together.
A further conversation with half a dozen others who shared the idea and concerns led to the formation of Community Praxis Co-op. This co-operative, now 27+ years old, continues to work as it originally intended.
The co-operative, as a shared services worker organisation, does a heap of work on behalf of the members. It manages insurance, contracts, IT, web/media and quality assurances. Teams of workers (who are members) form to do the work on behalf of the workers’ co-operative, with the co-op now taking 15% to cover costs (of which 3% is given away as an ethical dividend). The worker teams then use the other 85% of a budget for their salaries and project costs.
Some of the co-operative’s services in community and organisations include training, such as:
- The Building Better Communities course, for residents in communities to learn community development skills (and over 150 of these have been run).
- ‘Help I’ve got CD in my job description’, which is a favourite for professional community development workers in all sorts of organisations.
The co-operative also provides consulting, facilitation, project development and management, supervision, coaching and more.
Its mission is to support “just, peaceful and sustainable communities,” working with many local governments, neighbourhood centres and other non-profits. These three pillars – justice, peace and ecological sustainability, link the co-operative to community development, co-operative and sustainable development movements.
Some of the big lessons learned in this journey of 26+ years include:
- Take time to find members who want to cooperate and demonstrate cooperative attitudes and skills.
- Face-to-face gatherings of members are important and facilitate ongoing trust.
- All Board meetings start with time for everyone to “check-in” about how they are going personally. This builds a context or container for care and empathy, which enables more effective work.
- Quality matters. Like social enterprises, work cannot trade based on ethics alone – being a co-operative does not matter to customers/clients. The work must be exceptional.
- As a worker co-operative delivering community development training, facilitation and more, Community Praxis Co-op tries to mirror community development principles and practices in how members work together – ownership, participation, collective decision-making, investing time in relationships as well as tasks and mentoring new members to build their confidence and capacities to be a consultant.
- Members must benefit from the co-operative. It cannot just be an idea that is idealistic.
- Co-ops are good at co-operating with co-ops, and in its 27+ years the organisation has used its ethical dividend to support the formation of a number of other small-scale co-ops.
