This year’s UK Co-op Congress, in Birmingham on 12-13 June, will see poet, performer and writer Tony Walsh debut a new version of his hymn to the co-op movement, This Beautiful Idea.
The poem is the source of the the theme for this year’s Co-op Fortnight (22 June – 5 July): “Co-operate and we can change the world”.
Walsh, who worked in local government before turning professional as a poet in 2011, has performed widely around the UK and Europe, delivered workshops at schools, colleges, universities, prisons and care units, and, in 2011, was poet in residence at the Glastonbury Festival.
In 2017 he found a wider audience after delivering his poem This Is the Place at the public vigil following the bomb attack at the Manchester Arena. The poem had been commissioned in 2013, by the charity Forever Manchester, and is one of several tributes Walsh has written to his home city.
This Beautiful Idea also has a local inspiration, from the nearby town of Rochdale, where Walsh performed at the Literature & Ideas Festival in 2019.
The annual festival was partly funded from the bequest of Rochdale couple Annie and Frank Maskew, who had met in the town library – “big thinkers,” says Walsh, “who left a sum to Rochdale borough for philosophy and deep thinking.”
Walsh, who was performing at the town’s Church of St Mary in the Baum, was asked to write a poem about Rochdale, and chose his theme when he noticed the nearby Rochdale Pioneers Museum.
“I’d grown up in the culture of the Co-op stores – or ‘the Quorp’, as people called it then, with everyone talking about their divi – and I worked in the Norwest Pioneers store when I was a kid – I was 13, I lied about my age, said I was 14, and stayed till I was 18 and went to uni.
“So I wrote a celebration of those founders of the movement, its core principles – it was short, just 16 lines, and I meant it as an anthem or a battle hymn for co-operation.
“It was well received at festival. After that, I wanted it to find a proper home in the movement, and I ended up sitting on it for a few years.”
Main image: Rose Marley at last year’s Congress
At first Walsh thought the poem could be incorporated into a piece of artwork for the Toad Lane museum, but when the pandemic struck he put his ideas on hold.
“After that I was speaking to Rose [Marley, CEO of Co-operatives UK] who I knew through some of her former roles, and I got to perform it at a couple of co-op conferences.”
Now, Co-operatives UK has asked Walsh to rework the poem, to widen its focus from Rochdale to the wider global movement. The apex is making a film of the poem – now slightly longer – that will be released after the conference so co-ops can use it to promote the Fortnight.
Congress will bring together co-op leaders, practitioners and innovators to explore shared challenges and opportunities. Co-operatives UK says it will offer a space “to set direction, exchange ideas and turn ambition into action”.
Speakers will include representatives from Agile Collective, Birmingham City Council, Cartrefi Cymru Co-operative, Community Energy London, Cwmpas, Five Senses, Grimsby Community Energy, ITZATNA Arts, Kings Heath Community Centre, networks.coop, Oldham Coliseum Theatre, Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, The Arcade Group Dewsbury, the Co-operative Bank and the Developer Society.
Related: Report on last year’s Co-op Congress
A keynote speech will be delivered by economic secretary to the Treasury Richard Blake, from the department responsible for the pledge to double the UK’s co-op economy.
Simel Esim from the nternational Labour Organisation’s Office for the Co-operative, Social and Solidarity Economy will sit on a on a Future of work panel, alongside Jim Islam (OneFamily), Andrew Pakes MP and representatives from Co-operatives UK’s Youth Advisory Group.
Meanwhile, Fraser Stewart (Great British Energy), Matthew Vickers (Community Energy England), Nadia Smith (Community Energy London), Vicky Dunn (Grimsby Community Energy) and Gareth Dowling (Co-operative Party) will sit on a panel discussing the government’s Local Power Plan.
West Midlands mayor Richard Parker will be among those discussing the West Midlands Ownership Hub, a two-year programme unlocking the potential of co-operatives and employee ownership across the creative and cultural sectors, on a panel chaired by John Robb.
And Co-op News executive editor Rebecca Harvey will host a discussion of the formidable challenges facing the movement, with Co-op Bank COO Maria Cearns and Rochdale Boroughwide Housing CEO Amanda Newton.
Other panels include a look at tech – with Amy Gittins (Co-operatives UK) and Shaun Fensom (networks.coop) and Agile Collective. Mat Cornish and Beau Ingram (Longwall Security) with discuss cyber security. And Mya Badhan (Youth Advisory Group) and David Alcock (Anthony Collins Solicitors) will look at inclusive governance.
The busy programme also features a session on sports and leisure co-ops – featuring Jennifer Huygen (Community Leisure UK), Matt Perren (GLL) and Alan Russell (Supporters Direct Scotland).
Walsh will join actor Julie Hesmondhalgh to discuss effort to save the Oldham Coliseum Theatre, as part of a panel chaired by Rose Marley on the power of communities to respond to threat and shape a better future.
He spoke to Co-op News of his admiration for projects like Middleton Co-operating, which is looking for a grassroots-led regeneration of the Greater Manchester town.
“For 18 years before poetry, I worked in a variety of roles for Manchester and Salford councils,” he says. “That morphed into community roles – I was one of the country’s first social inclusion managers in the early 2000s, where I ended up coordinating community groups into combined action. I know the power of organised, empowered, funded, supported communities, recognised and supported by the powers that be.
“Knowing Middleton as I do, it’s great that it’s happening there. It’s a town with a load of potential, a real sense of itself, with people who can combine their talents to take the town to the next level.”
Related: Consultation launched on development plan for Middleton
Walsh has also written about the struggles of people trapped by poverty in difficult lives, which harks to his work council work on.
“In the 1990s there was a lot of regeneration money going into Miles Platting and Ancoats [in East Manchester]. These were really deprived wards … People asked why we planted flowers in Miles Platting – but that wasn’t just training, that was employment, it was training, it was skills.
“I always say that if the broken window theory is true – that if you get one broken window you’ll end up with another broken window next to it, more damage done – then so is the opposite; if you have some people contributing to their communities that should snowball. Every individual doing some good is one more element – you get a sense that things can change and people can change them.”
Co-ops can play a part by delivering quality employment, with good terms and conditions, staff training and retention. “Put that into play in the care sector, for instance, and that should translate into quality care for people.”
The co-op model could also help in the arts, he thinks. On one level, freelance co-ops for artists could “help with the foundations”, offering shared back office functions like invoicing and accounting. But on another level “co-operation could deliver creatively, bringing people together in different ways – you could bring a dancer, an artist and a poet together to create new kinds of work.”
Walsh also praises the work of the Music Venue Properties, a charitable community benefit society set up by the Music Venues Trust to raise capital to buy venues and act as a sympathetic landlord, “to take the pressure off these important spaces.”
Related: Can community ownership save our struggling grassroots music venues?
“The arts are important,” he adds, “They’re not just in the ‘nice to have’ column, not just the ‘life changing’ column, they are in the ‘life saving’ column.”
He points to the success of arts-led regeneration – notably in Manchester itself – as “an important building block of revitalising neighbourhoods … The arts is one of the strongest hooks we have.
“When anybody is trying to communicate anything, they turn to artists. The arts are wired within us – and the co-op movement could harness and support that power to build that momentum, to help tell its stories.
“I hope this poem can be adopted as a rallying cry, a call to action for the movement.”
Click here for the full programme of the Co-op Congress (12-13 June, the Eastside Rooms, Birmingham)
For details of how to support this year’s Co-op Fortnight (22 June – 5 July), click here.
