Alphonso Street, Dowlais. Please excuse the obscure post title. Alphonso Street is a place in Dowlais, Merthyr Tydfil. Remarkable and exciting (for me anyway) because it’s where a Spanish Community that traveled from the Basque Country settled in South Wales in the 1900’s. I’ll explain more in a minute. Mutual Benefits – cooperation between Wales […]
I’m still in Bilbao. Fizzing with enthusiasm after 3 days of the Global Social Economy Forum conference. Apologies if I’ve been spamming you with Tweets. There’s a mountain of information I need to digest and share, which I will try and do through a variety of routes. Just to set the scene, here are a […]
This might be my daftest idea yet. If it’s as obvious as I think, why isn’t it already happening in Wales? Here’s the idea. An intensive University Degree Course, aimed at the over 50’s. On the course the participants will; create real businesses, with a strong social purpose (cooperatives if possible), and get a degree out […]
“Panelfisa Coop, The important thing was not the screws” This post is about the transformation (a deliberately chosen word) of Panelfisa, a worker owned industrial manufacturing cooperative in the Basque Country. It’s not a ‘recipe book’ case study claiming… “follow these 5 easy steps and you too will transform your organisation”; life just isn’t like […]
Context is everything. Thanks to Beth Smith (@bethansmith93) for ‘what is normal to the spider is chaos to the fly’, which inspired the illustration above. The quote neatly describes how different experiences of a situation (the context), can massively influence your feelings and also the decisions you make about the situation. For the spider it’s […]
I should more beware of seeking simple answers to complex problems. One of my KLOE’s (Key Lines of Enquiry – yes, I confess to an audit background) on my trip to the Basque Country was to get a sense of: ‘how you develop a society where there is a widespread understanding of cooperatives, and the […]
Yesterday I had a “I wish I was 18 again” experience… I was wishing I was 18 again so I could go to Bilbao and spend four years doing a degree in Entrepreneurial Leadership and Innovation at Mondragon University. I’m not kidding. This was all slightly unexpected, and I’ll cover that in the next post […]
I’ve got my Coop card, purchased for a pound. It entices me away from Aldi and into the local Coop; 5% rewards for me and 1% for my local community. But having the card, and being a ‘Member’ doesn’t mean I actually understand what’s going on. Sadly I haven’t developed a deeper insight into the […]
Fulfilling the promise I made in my initial blog post (link here), I’m starting to share some learning from my Churchill Travelling Fellowship. This post summarises the whirlwind since the 2018 Fellowships were formally announced on the 9th March and today, the 25th. It’s been as interesting and exciting as people promised. Thanks… and Don’t […]
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