Worker coops = community businesses?

Because they can't see beyond neoliberal individualism?

I'm not sure that PTC would take the view that a worker co-op was morally less good, it's simply that they've chosen to focus on this thing they've called community business, and having come up with the label they then have to define what that is and where the edges are. As Siôn says there is a case for worker co-ops to be considered as community businesses, and I would expect and encourage Co-operatives UK to be making that case with vigour.

Don't worry we do make the case with vigor! I wasn't trying to single out P2C, who are a good funder for what they do. It was more the thought that, all other things being equal a worker led organisations makes funders more uncomfortable than organisations lead by other stakeholders.

https://www.powertochange.org.uk/get-support/

Power To Change have no problems financing co-operatives - in fact their community pubs programme won't fund anything that isn't a co-operative.

Power to Change also don't require community businesses to be owned by the community. A charitable trust or small membership CIC is eligible so long as it has clear mechanisms to show how it consults with and engages with its local community.

So a worker co-operative which serves a local community and has clear mechanism for consulting with and engaging the community should be eligible for Power to Change Funding.

Not a real example, but a local wholefood worker co-operative shop which had, say, an advisory group of local environmental activists and kept an electronic database of its regular customers which it used for regular surveys should be eligible for Power to Change funding.

All true, and Kitty’s is another example of a worker-led coop that’s fully PtC funded. The general point however is to provide the evidence that worker coops deliver community as well as worker member benefit, which is a good exercise for us. The difficulty sometimes is the elision with the (in my view problematic) idea of ‘local’ community. I can prove it for Calverts, but the wider benefit provided by e.g. Delta-T is global.

i put that Footprint raised the public consciousness of democratic workplaces. That seems like a community benefit to me...

The big sticking point in practice is usually PtC's criterion on influence/control. While there are lots of worker co-ops that clearly deliver benefits for their communities, and/or have social missions, PtC also requires that 'the community' has a "genuine say in how the business is run". A multi-stakeholder co-op could fit this bill. Or perhaps a worker co-op that has some very meaningful community input that is outside membership and ownership.

PtC are pretty flexible within limits and when we've put forward proposals that involve multi-stakeholder co-ops with workers and 'the community' both having power in the business there has been real interest. But ultimately, PtC was created on the premise that businesses that are accountable to/controlled by/for the benefit of 'the community' can contribute to a better 'places'. Community is the agent of choice, place is the context, business is the vehicle. There is a limit to how far this can stretch if your agent of choice is workers in a business and place is more incidental.

I have a wider beef with P2C's definition of community business around the community benefit. This appears to be defined around the traditional paternalistic charitable doing of good unto others and is limited to improving individuals lives. Environmental benefits such as climate change mitigation wouldn't fit their definition, yet is critical from an existential point of view.