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

[Martin Meteyard]

Sean,

I broadly agree with your approach as you know, but unfortunately the last 
train back to Edinburgh on Saturday is at 1803. Not sure I necessarily need 
to be there though.

Martin

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sean Farmelo" <sean at students.coop>
To: "'Mike Shaw'" <mike.james.shaw at gmail.com>; "Carl Taylor" 
<carltaylor at bchs.coop>
Cc: "Vivian Woodell" <vivian at thephone.coop>; "Cornerstone Cath" 
<leedscath at fastmail.co.uk>; "Rosie Evered" <rsevered at googlemail.com>; "Anna 
Key" <mycocktaildress at aktivix.org>; "Ian Rothwell" 
<ian.rothwell at co-opandcommunityfinance.coop>; "Corrigan Nadon-Nichols" 
<corrigan at nasco.coop>; <sfcevents at email-lists.org>; "Martin Meteyard" 
<martin.m at pop3.poptel.org.uk>
Sent: Monday, May 26, 2014 2:20 PM
Subject: SfC fringe event at Co-operative congress on capital for student 
housing co-ops.


> 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.
>
>
>
>