[Sfcevents] SfC fringe event at Co-operative congress on capital for student housing co-ops.

[Sean Farmelo]

Hi all,

I'm getting in touch with you to suggest a round table discussion fringe
event at Co-operative congress next month on the subject of a more
organised approach to funding the new wave of student housing
co-operative in the U.K.

The plan is for the meeting to be held as a fringe event beginning at
around 5.15pm on Saturday after the conclusion of Congress. I am going
to provisionally booked an accessible meeting room venue in the nearby
Briar Rose Hotel. If the timing is bad and people would rather it was at
another point during the weekend then please flag it up and I can re-jig
the booking.

At present it looks like we are on track to get three co-operatives open
for September 2014 Edinburgh have managed it through good connections
with the local council and a friendly housing association.  Birmingham
and Sheffield will be managing it with support from the Phone Co-op. All
though it may well work out well in these individual cases, I think it
is obvious that we need some sort of a generic solution that will enable
student groups across the country who aren't lucky enough to have those
connections to access capital to buy their houses.

I've been having quite a few conversations with groups across the
country in the past month and there are active group in Aberdeen,
Nottingham, Bradford, Sussex and London all looking to set up housing
co-ops for September 2015. It would be a shame/a failure of the
co-operative movement for all of the momentum to fizzle out because of a
lack of access to capital.

I will be putting my ideas down before the meeting but I'm sure people
will have their own much better ideas to throw into the mix, however I'm
keen have the session as a relatively productive one in which the
discussion mainly focusses on the idea of having a single revolving loan
fund or instead something similar to NASCO Properties in the U.S
or the mega co-ops which have begun being discussed by Radical Routes.
I.E a body owned by student co-ops which in turn owns the freeholds on
the properties allowing it to in future leverage capital a lot easier
than individual co-ops could alone. Whatever it is I think it needs to
be up and running before the next set of housing co-ops get going in
order to access the capital which will be created by them in the long
term/ help them start up in the first place. It would be good if we went
into the meeting with a coherent idea of what we want and then used the
opportunity to work out how to actually make it happen - as opposed to
discussing a whole raft of ideas and not achieving anything.

Please hit reply all, rather than just sending me an email as I think it
would be good for everyone to be on the same page before the meeting.

For reference,

people in this email (I haven't included everyone it's relevant to, eg
just rosie from sheffield, just me from birmingham, so as not to confuse
matters)-

Mike  - SfC network Co-ordinator
Vivian  - Phone Co-op
Cath - SfC hub support
Carl  - Birmingham Co-operative Housing Services
Rosie - Sheffield Student Housing Co-operative
Andy - Radical Routes
SfC events - events planning group
Ian Rothwell - Co-op and Community Finance
Corrigan - NASCO (presumably only able to participate via email!)
Martin - SfC hub support

Cheers,

Sean.