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Elder Action Programme – the role of Social Co-operatives: Member Controlled Enterprises (MCEs)

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5 March 2013

Dear Colleague

Elder Action Programme – the role of Social Co-operatives: Member Controlled Enterprises (MCEs)

We welcome the proposed duty to promote and support the development of co-operative and social enterprises in the draft Social Services and Well-Being (Wales) Bill. In moving this forward, it would be very helpful to get a better understanding of your views

To be clear, we view Social Co-operatives as MCEs  - http://www.M-cEnterprise.org - operating according to internationally accepted standards, which provide social and related services, run for, and by, local members.

We have been very busy over the past 18 months, engaged in successfully stimulating interest in social co-operatives in Wales, with support from international experts. This has included meetings with Ministers, Assembly Members, senior officials and 14 public events involving over 750 people across Wales during 2012 UN Year of Co-operatives, with support from a wide range of organisations.  

Welsh Governments Co-operative and Mutuals Commission is a good indication of serious intent, underpinned by the proposed new duties to promote co-operatives and user-led services in the draft Social Services and Well-Being (Wales) Bill. http://senedd.assemblywales.org/ieIssueDetails.aspx?IId=5664&Opt=3  

In particular, our concern has been with achieving the availability of new, and improved quality services, and how we get ideas into action in creating member controlled enterprises, providing services required by their members, where citizens, as service users, workers, carers, families and friends as volunteers, are at the heart of representing a ‘community of interests’.

In preparing our evidence for the Commission, we are very interested in understanding how you and your organisation might be able to work with this internationally well-established organisational method of providing services.

  1. Could you suggest any way in which MCEs could usefully work alongside your organisation?
  2. Could you suggest any particular services in which MCEs could support other areas of service you are involved with?

Currently, we are also working with a local authority in preparing a joint report, which will go to their Executive in April 2013. We would be happy to share this with you, alongside evidence we shall present to the above Commission. We look forward to hearing from you on (01633) 266781, or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Thank you for your assistance.

Yours sincerely

David Smith

Organiser

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Hilda Smith: a tribute by the Chair of the S Wales Area Committee, the Co-operative, 9 April 2013

As I’m sure you are all aware - with the death of Hilda Smith last month at the great age of 94 - Co-operation has lost a great advocate and worker. Hilda was a former member of this Committee and in such circumstances members would normally take the opportunity of a Committee meeting to pay tributes.

Our circumstances on this occasion are rather different as we have Hilda’s son David as one of our current members.

David has intimated to me that he has been very touched and moved by all the letters and cards of sympathy he has received from Co-operative colleagues expressing sadness at Hilda’s passing and for the wonderful contributions she has made.

He does not feel that he could emotionally cope with a series of tributes this evening and in these circumstances what I propose to do, as Chair, is to make a SINGLE tribute on behalf of us all, followed by a period of silence during which we can all privately reflect on Hilda as a person and a co-operator.

I have known Hilda for getting on for 20 years –not as long as some on this Committee have known her – but still a long time. When she joined the South Wales Committee of the Co-operative Group, I think in 2009, she must have been by a long stretch, its oldest “new” member, although she had been a member of many co-op committees before.

She was very active in what can now be seen as a golden age of Co-operation in the 1930’s and was particularly engaged in the campaigning illustrated in the wonderful films of the London Co-operative Society, with themes of Internationalism, Education Pacifism and Feminism. We have to remember, Hilda was not all that far behind the Pankhurst’s and she was born just after the ending of the First World War.

As many of us know, Hilda was completely passionate about what she believed in and was always a strong advocate for the same.  She was always a master of her brief and fastidious in studying her papers and making reasoned and detailed contributions.

She had a powerful intellect but was still very interested in making practical observations about what a store should stock, what services it should give to the customers/ members and how they could be engaged at shop level.

I remember her observing back in the early days of Recession, that the support work of the Co-operative Group, through such things as the Community Divided Fund would become far more vital, as Public Expenditure Cuts bite and she is being proven right.

To think when she arrived in South Wales in 1986, she did not come for a rest, because at the age of 76, she set about with vigour in a whole new co-operative and mutual scene.

 She was instrumental in establishing the Newport University of the Third Age, The Wales Food Alliance- together with David – which had a number of collaborations with the Group. She was a member of the WG Older Persons Advisory Committee and made a considerable contribution to policy formulation. Of late she has been engaged in modelling social enterprises to deliver home care.

I last saw Hilda at the Members meeting last year at St Fagan’s, when the meeting was somewhat hijacked by Disability Rights Protesters.  I will remember her contribution for a very long time. She was not prepared to sit idly by but rose to make an impassioned speech about how Co-operatives had been at the forefront of protecting and promoting the rights of the disabled for getting on for 100 years.

David, Hilda was highly principled, creative, dynamic not just a thinker and dreamer about the Co-operative Commonwealth but who has actually contributed to help make it happen over 60 or 70 years.

We are all the better for knowing her and she has left you with much to live up to!

Brian Rees

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