<sigh>

the cybermonster just ate what I wanted to write here. Will try to regain my thoughts and say it again :(

From another angle:

what is it about cooperative ownership that's supposed to be empowering for this group? we seem to have lost sight of that. I could use some help re-examining that if anyone has thoughts to share.

Perhaps we need to step back and stop looking at this whole coop issue from our own point of view and really try to put ourselves in the place of the members. You are in the best position, of course, to do that since you are there meeting them face to face.

My questions are these:

1. What do the members WANT from the community
2. What are they willing to do to make those wants happen
3. What does the community need to help make those wants a reality.

I think if we get a clearer idea of these then we can see if a coop is actually what they need or if a different type of organization is what is needed.

Perhaps our idea of a coop is different from the way they are seeing it. We see it as empowering and strengthening them to be self sufficient and self sustaining. But is this really how they see it? There has to be a reason they are not excited about owning it themselves. What are their fears, their objections, their reservations? Is it just because they do not understand the coop theory or is it something else?

As Peter pointed out earlier somewhere, cooperatives in Uganda were typically agricultural marketing coops back after independence. Those pretty much all failed. Nowadays there is a new push for cooperative savings and credit societies to form across the country (under a very specific kind of new cooperatives law). Those with "viable" microfinance programs are receiving lending capital from the government, and quite a feeding frenzy has apparently begun to get that money. So when we talk about a cooperative in this particular cultural context, it is absolutely not clear that everyone is on the same page about what a coop is, should or could actually be.

And the point is - that I learned today Grace also feels very strongly about - that getting bogged down in this cooperative ownership stuff is completely distracting us from doing anything at all to make people's lives better. This is creating the kind of political bureaucracy that people really do NOT need in their lives. There is so much that they do need that we can do something about, but we are not doing it because we are forcing this ownership thing on people who do not value it at all.

I started Life in Africa to make a lasting impact. I really, really thought that community ownership was the way to go - I have pushed hard toward it for years. But what I am understanding is that people don't need to own it financially and administratively speaking in order to identify with it, which is actually a much deeper form of ownership. People will identify with whatever we are as long as we're making their lives better. We're not doing that right now, and with this coop plan it's not clear to them that we ever are going to.

We have learned a tremendous amount from the community about what they need, what they like, what they want, what they are willing to participate in for free, what they expect to earn for labor, and what they are willing to pay for. If nothing else, we have a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge about our target market that I really think we can use to serve them well with excellent sustainable services... but only if we are allowed to let that expertise dominate the planning process instead of the spending so much time trying to force a cooperative organizational ownership plan.

I think what I see in the cooperative ownership is a couple of things that are valuable to me.

The first thing that comes to mind for me with the term cooperative is community. There is formed a supportive community that works together to see that the whole works. This might be in the way of providing start-up loans or grants to members forming new businesses. It might be in terms of providing common services, including but certainly not limited to knowledge skills in communication, numeracy, yada yada yada.

The group is in a better position to stand behind a new venture as the potential loss can be spread over a large number of people. Starting a new business always involves risk. When you are on the bottom the risk can be the end.

The benefits that balance the sharing of failure or the start-up struggles include that everyone benefits when things go right. They benefit proportional to the the risk they are sharing.

The biggest thing I see coming out of it is not financial benefit but rather a strong community bond. The cooperatives I have belonged to developed bonds that lasted beyond some of the cooperatives.

It is sharing risk but also sharing benefits that include knowledge, expertise, moral support and personal growth as well as financial benefits.

I have hesitated to speak here about an issue I have but I should be fair and tell you the demon that is haunting me in all of this.

I fear that the international aid support in most of the world has created a mentality of dependency. I saw it at the conference in Gulu when people said just give us the money. Living your lives dependent on other people's generosity is addictive and dis-empowering. A cooperative says to everyone involved that we can do this ourselves. We are not dependent on the outsiders to make our lives better. We can work together to help ourselves do this. Gifts are welcome but we are not waiting until someone else sees fit to help us.

That said, I will retire back to my hole to reorient myself after spending time in a community that less than 20 years ago pooled funds to get $100, moved onto donated land with 40 people and formed a community that today is almost 300 people living in community, totally supports itself with some 200 acres of land that they own communally, and businesses that include a soap "factory" that makes dozens of personal and household cleaning products, grows mushrooms that are sold out, makes small machinery that benefits farmers in the area, and really dozens of other things that generate financial support for the community and benefit to the members of the community, the larger community and society around them.

Edit for clarity - like whole instead of hole???

This is the question I keep asking over the past few years. Is a coop the best approach to the development of a sense of community bond. As was pointed out to me several years ago, there is both a strength and weakness in mutual organisations and that is that they exist primarily for the benefit of their members, not the community at large.

I've always been supportive of coops but recognise that since their inception among the mill workers of Lancashire, they have been a collective defense against capitalism. I even tried (and failed) to create one, an informal coop based on the guarantee company model in the UK, got a wrong steer from the funding arm of the cooperative movement and found myself excluded from their funding with a company form that nobody could invest in or wanted to fund.

A couple of years later, the UK cooperative movement seems to have acknowledged the deficiency of mutuality with the introduction of a new model, the Cooperative CIC or Community Interest Company. Essentially this is the same model pitched at Clinton in the P-CED whitepaper as a business delivering to the community regardless of membership. Revenue gains through social business against revenue drains of charitable dependency.

That this document remains filed away in the Presidential library and "under the control of the President" as I've learned, indicates this is a message still too radical for US consumption.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make here is that a business for community purpose could be delivered in many forms, from a conventional share company as is mine, the new cooperative CIC model and even Chris Cook's asset sharing LLP.

If the objective is to eliminate poverty through self-empowerment and sustainability in the soonest possible time, the successful model used will be the easiest to understand by those that participate and roll it our fastest, leaving room for the ideal organisation to be evolved along the way.

I'm just so confused.............

Im glad you started this thread. To be honest, we have had some similar change of thoughts about coops at TEN. Because we work in a lot of different countries we though coop would be a well understood model. It will work for us in some places, but we are finding the vast majority of the survivors just want a job and don’t really have the interest or capacity to be entrepreneurs. Plus, they are often very distrustful of their own community as there often have been many betrayals leading to, and part of their slavery.

One of our most successful partners was spending a lot of time struggling with this, and the eventually decided to spin of the business into a separate for profit company that is owned by a UK fair trade company (we are also thinking of investing in them). The feedback we are getting is that this is working much better than the old way as the survivors feel a real prestige to be working for a foreign company.

I don’t post that as a solution to your problems, just one example.

One of the big problems I have had with the whole coop thread, and to be honest with the bananas program is that there is an underlying anti-capitalism, anti-establishment gestalt that keeps popping up. The only thing that should matter is what is best for your members, not some idealistic theory.

I don’t know your members. Do they want to be owners, or will they be happy with good jobs. Do they have entrepreneurial skills? Do the trust each others economic motives? What do they want with their lives? What would they want if you and LiA did not exist? Does what they want differ from other community members?

John, thank you so much for your post. It is so good to hear from someone who really understand what we are going thru. Somehow its comforting to know that it isn't just our communities who are having a problem with the concept.

And I totally agree with you. This whole thing has to be about the members and what they really want and need. We thought WE knew what that was but have found out that it is more like what you said. They just want a job, an income to support their families. They are not very interested at all in being the owners. Plus, the distrust factor you mention does play a role in the decision. Just my oppinion of course. Anyway, thanks for the support.

Evvy, I think all who've participated really understand what you've been going through because like you, we've been confronted with the same dilemma in the adaption of a model suitable for shared reward with least complexity.

Thanks so much for understanding and helping us get through this transition period. I am feeling pretty confident that we will find a way forward.

I just want to pop in to say I'm listening and care.

I very much understand the frustration. It seems like all the puzzle pieces are here, it's just how to put them together. Okay I know that's not useful, but still I get some encouragement in thinking there must be some way to put the parts together.

Something struck me last week about development models, it was the Guardian newspaper's sudden splash about an Ugandan village called Katine and their collaboration with Barclays bank. What struck me was there was no attempt to define any model or any reference to those which had achieved success elsewhere.

A cooperative model is a tried and tested approach but has it worked well elsewhere in Africa under similar conditions? Have any of the other models been examined for strengths and weakness?

Re-reading some of the comments here, it's interesting that one of the things deemed valuable about a cooperative is the sense of community is implies. I say interesting, because it has actually felt over the past few months that the sense of community we've built at Life in Africa was the thing that was most at risk through continued pushing of the cooperative idea. Reducing it down to active participation among just a few bizunit owners meant that the current community at large just wasn't seeing where they would fit in.

As someone else said, I think trust has a lot to do with it. But I am not sure if there is so much mistrust on moral grounds. I'm sensing more that there is a general lack of confidence in each other's abilities to do what they need to do to run any kind of organization well. They simply do not feel prepared for the responsibilities of self-ownership and self-designed operations.

So for the past 3 years we have worked together as a community to design community owned programs. What comes out loud and clear is "what we want & need." What does not come out clearly at all is "what we are willing to do to make it happen." That's not because they don't want to do whatever they can, but because they do not as a group feel capable of managing A-Z operations. It's worth remembering that most are illiterate or semi-literate and do not speak english. So when we say "you can do the work and own it" their answer is "I just don't have the skills to do that." If participation becomes conditional on providing skills you don't have, then that becomes something that's really hard for any individual to be excited about and identify with.

The sense of community we've built at Life in Africa has been through shared experiences, community dialogues, and Gulu and Kampala members staying in each others' homes. Our members know each other very well. They are friends. They know who they are and what they are capable of. Running a cooperative themselves and doing it according to standards that the online world will judge? No thanks. "You people (ie the current staff) just decide on everything and tell us when to come - we are with you," is the kind of feedback coming back from community meetings in Kampala.

So in other words, they don't need to own it to feel a sense of community. They already were a community. So the point now is not to establish a coop so that they can develop a sense of community, but to move forward as a community without losing the sense of belonging they already feel.

And so the latest plan (which seems to be generating quite a bit of excitement among the members) unravels over here: http://www.ned.com/group/lia-usa /news/3/

Thanks so much for the opportunity to dialogue about this.

Very interesting thoughts and observations. You verbalize much of what I have been sensing and I have had to step back and look at things differently. I think we are on the right path now because we are now looking at things as THEY see it and not as WE want to see it. I am feeling good about this and I think the flow can no come back into the organization.

Fabulous work there on the part of Christina and Grace and Peter and all the members of the community. It has been difficult, I know, to work through all this but I am quite pleased with the outcome and you all should be commended.

Community ownership is of benefit when the following features are observed: Strong leaders, flexibility needed in whatever things community does, transparency, borrowing skill and advice also from outside, mortivation of staffs i.e salary uplift, insurance, promotion, scholarship, medical care, bonus,house rent etc this makes the leader to work tielessily inorder not to miss those advantages, Working register for signing time in and out of work places thats means powerful administrator is needed for follow up of lazy workers, Not relaying on only one source of income (creativity is needed). Deciding what to do should be accepted by the Board first before implimentation not from the community dirrect to work. Any reaction should base on the contitution of that community. Inconclusion failing of following the above features its makes most cooparative get the negative result in their performance.

Okello Morris Barry said:

Community ownership is of benefit when the following features are observed: Strong leaders, flexibility needed in whatever things community does, transparency, borrowing skill and advice also from outside,

I do agree with you. These skills are needed in a leader but what about the community itself. The community should not be dependent totally on just having a leader know these things. What should the community itself contribute?

mortivation of staffs i.e salary uplift, insurance, promotion, scholarship, medical care, bonus,house rent etc this makes the leader to work tielessily inorder not to miss those advantages,

hmmmm, I think I want a job like that. Again, you are only talking about leadership and a leader who from the sound of the above description makes a pretty hefty salary and gets a lot of perks. Where does the community fit in here. It can't be about only one person getting a big salary. What about the members?

Working register for signing time in and out of work places thats means powerful administrator is needed for follow up of lazy workers, Not relaying on only one source of income (creativity is needed). Deciding what to do should be accepted by the Board first before implimentation not from the community dirrect to work. Any reaction should base on the contitution of that community.

All good thoughts. Who writes the constitution of the community. How will decisions be made? Will the members have a say in the organization and decision making process?

Inconclusion failing of following the above features its makes most cooparative get the negative result in their performance.

Sorry, I don't think I can agree with this statement. I honestly don't think the success or failure of a cooperative community is or should be based on how well the leader is paid. It should be based on what things will have a possitive impact on the MEMBERS. If the positive impact, the services they need and the opportunities are there to help them improve their lives, I think THEY will make it a success.

Out of left field as usual...

I was watching pundits on the news talking about the American presidential primaries. The point was made that more people in Iowa--an early primary election state--go to church on Sundays than Americans in most other states. But people in New Hampshire--another early primary election state--are dead last in Sunday church attendance.

I've never lived in New Hampshire, but my parents are from New Hampshire as are most of my aunts and cousins. The business about church going didn't seem right because I know village churches are important in the communities. So I said to my father, "Maybe not on Sundays but people don't miss the bean suppers."

An important part of what makes communities is "unity of will." It's a bit complicated to explain, but many of the old villages had a church which were supported by community taxes well into the 1800's. But as mixed up as Americans are, by the middle of the 1700's most Americans believed something different (maybe only a little bit) than the church they paid for by taxes.

Churches are a good example of communities in the sense of "unity of will" people feel strongly about their religious beliefs. These beliefs are very different so people argue about them.

But at least in New Hampshire nobody's going to argue too much about beans. Naturally there's controversy over how much bean liquor is just right, but that's really a minor thing. And people may like apple pie, or cherry pie, or mince pie, but most people like pie. Bean suppers, which are common in New Hampshire, and very often held in a church hardly anyone goes to on Sunday.

People generally belong to many communities.

One reason people join together in communities is to articulate generating wealth for the community.

What exactly wealth is, is a good subject people rarely talk about. We often think about wealth in terms of money. So when we're thinking this way we tend to think of price. Not only getting a good price when we sell and buy stuff, but also proving our value as more industrious, more cleaver, more better than the others. There's a lot of theory and careful thinking about money as a measure of wealth and it's often called economics.

The subject of Time Dollars has up in these threads. Edgar Cahn, the inventor of Time Dollars, talked about them in terms of "kitchen table" economics. Getting at what he means, well, I think he means something different than money economics. When I've shared Time Dollars with people in Uganda, they always seem a bit irritated and say something like "That's what we already do."

Cahn talked about when he was a little boy he'd hear the adults talk after he'd been sent to bed. Perhaps a neighbor would show up and the adults would play cards or tell stories. They would also mention subjects like the old woman up the street needs a way to church on Sunday, or the little baby of the young mother down the street looks like she needs more milk to grow strong. So some of the talk was about what they could do together to make things a little better for the people right around them.

This is the way Cahn tried to say what he meant by the "kitchen table" economy. Something that's worth pointing out is maybe the old woman goes to a church you can't stand, or somehow you disapprove of the young mother down the street. Or you can't simply give the people stuff because they're too proud to take it. The "kitchen table" economy has a different set of etiquette from the money economy.

But the basic idea for both economies is to create more wealth for the people all around.

New Hampshire bean suppers are a ritual that tries to encourage more exchange in the "kitchen table" economy. Even while people may disapprove of their neighbors for one reason or another; even though people might think themselves more industrious, and more clever than their neighbors, sitting down regularly with them is important. At least there's the beans and pie.

Love them or hate them, we're all pretty much stuck on the same boat with the people we live around. When we can find ways to work together for mutual benefit everyone in the community is better off.

I'm so long-winded, but the point has to do with the realization that Christina has come to about "a deeper meaning" of community.

Cooperatives as a business model can work. But I think there is always some tension between the logic of the money economy and the "kitchen table" economy. Both are important.

I'm snipping from another thread where Christina wrote:

"[T]he newly restructured Life in Africa in Uganda will result in the establishment of 2 semi-autonomous Community Based Organizations that deliver services to their communities on behalf of global supporters and donor organizations."

This seems a very well reasoned stance. But I contend that the same sort of tension between the two economies that we're coming to grips with in Uganda will also be part of the make up of the global supporters. In some way all of the people who come together to participate in LiA must embrace this deeper community idea.

People in Uganda will want to show that they are more industrious and more clever than the others. And some people in the global community of supporters are going to insist on "more bang for their buck." Those attitudes are good because the sorts of initiatives and innovations needed to prevent complacency and as Linda mentions "dependency" often come from the ideas of price and competition.

But that sort of completion works best within a ground of the deeper community that Christina talks about. The kitchen table economy is a good way for people outside of Uganda to understand this part. It's the economy with all the rules of etiquette, saving face, and swallowing pride; so the things that need doing for everyone get done.

when I look at the communities of the ancient time, they always wanted to contribute interms of labor.. let say we are going to build a church or borehole that would beneift them. they would come in big numbers. communities always are not good decision makers. They always want some few people to plan and say today we are giving such and such a thing to them. inmost cases they are looking for a short time benefit possible. that is why it is not easy for a big crowd to agree on one thing. they always foreget that they own it much as they know.

I remember the time of copperative societies, our grandparents were after how many kilograms of cotton the cooperative is buying from each peasant! therefore the community is good for other things but on decisions unless a small committee does.

There are two things we may need to look at, providing a product in another dimension and providing a solution in another dimension to those earmarked.These two dimensions serve different fields and extent. Perhalps it could be vital to explore further and find out exactly what your feelings tell you the communities need,and match it with what they tell you they need.In this way you will be involving them in decision making,at this point the leaders if any, can step in to comment objectively on other economic varriables involved in what the communnities want, and come up with one common goal and a strategy of how its going to be implemented,and this means active participation of the communities so that they can own the goal and feel they are part of it. In this way they will know what benefits they are getting now,tommorrow and those that will come in the long run. This still however calls for effective information disiemination to the communities and, in the process trying as much as possible to identify those with high learning capacity who then can be chosen to lead his friends. In this way i have a feeling they will indeed admit the all thing belongs to them and therefore,shall adhere to the controls instituted for the effective operations of the whole activities in the place.Otherwise,certainly these guys will always want you give them what they need there and then,the experience has shown. Gerald