Author: disabledpeopleandcooperatives

This announcement is a bit delayed, because of various setbacks with the planning, but I am now happy and excited to announce that I am going to be holding a hybrid event about disabled people and co-ops at the University of Leeds on Tuesday 7th March 2023.

The event was originally going to be on 21st February, but this had to be changed due to the announcement of the UCU strike dates last week. Luckily both CERIC (the research centre I am in at the University) and the ISRF (my funders) were OK with the date being pushed back into March (and therefore technically after the end of my visiting researcher status).

The full timetable for the event is still being worked out, but it’s looking good! It will start at 12.00 (with the room being open and refreshments available from 11.30) and finish at 5, with 3 main parts to the event with breaks between:

• I will present the findings of my research. There will hopefully also be a research report available in physical and digital formats in time for the event.
• There will be panel discussions on the potential for disabled people of different types of co-ops, including housing, workers and multi-stakeholder co-ops, with speakers from those types of co-ops and space for open discussion.
• The event will end with a discussion of how to build a network of disabled co-operators and disability-focused co-ops and how to make concrete moves towards both making existing co-ops better at meeting disabled people’s needs and setting up new co-ops of or centred around disabled people.

People are welcome to come to the whole event or to as much or little of it as they like. If you want to come, please register here on Eventbrite (selecting either the online or in-person option).

It will be free to attend both in person and online (registration is just for keeping track of numbers), and will make as much use as possible of the hybrid facilities in the room so that online participants will have as full an experience of the event as possible. I struggled quite a bit with the various ethical, political and access factors to consider in putting on an event in person versus online (I may write another post about this!), but ultimately concluded that, while no option was perfect, having a hybrid event was the best possible compromise between the considerations of many different subgroups of disabled people.

The event is open to all, but I’d like to make sure that disabled people who are either already involved or interested in being involved in co-ops are prioritised – therefore, there will be a small budget for covering travel and access costs for disabled people for whom these costs would otherwise be a barrier to attending in person. If this applies to you, please contact me!

While this event is being held at the University of Leeds, I want to make clear that it is definitely not (just) an “academic” event. My presentation will probably be the most academic bit, but I’m going to do my best to make it as accessible and non-theory-heavy as possible, concentrating on practical impact and how to make things happen in reality. It will (hopefully!) be of interest to researchers and students in disability studies and co-operative studies, but also (perhaps mainly) to disabled people and allies who are in co-ops or interested in getting into, or starting, co-ops.

Please do spread the word about this event in your networks and to anyone with an interest in disability and/or co-ops! Also, if you are a member of a co-op or other relevant organisation and you’d like there to be some information about your organisation at the event, please let me know.

On the left a photo of a red and green brick building in Manchester dramatically lit against a mixed sunny and cloudy sky; on the right a close-up of the plaque on the building which reads “Beswick Co-operative Society Ltd, built A.D. 1912”

So it has been even longer since I posted anything here than it was until the last time, when I started my post with “Apologies for the longer-than-intended absence…” This has, again, largely been because I’ve had a lot going on – most of it more good than bad, but a lot of it quite unexpected.

The first big piece of news is that I have now moved from Leeds to Manchester. I’m still (until February) a Visiting Researcher at the University of Leeds, but I moved in October because I received a housing offer that I couldn’t refuse – after approximately 5 years on the waiting list, I am now a member of New Longsight Housing Co-op (not a shared house co-op, but a big one with flats and houses scattered around a local area, so I have my “own” flat within the co-op)!

The offer came at a point when I was just beginning to seriously worry about how I was going to keep paying the rent on my flat in Leeds, with the paid period of my research ended (I’m now nearly 3 months into a 6-month unpaid extension) and the cost of living crisis escalating, so also considering that I have wanted to be a member of a housing co-op for as long as I have known/understood what a housing co-op was (so probably getting on for 20 years!), it really was a move I absolutely had to make. But it still felt like a difficult decision for a number of reasons including my #actuallyautistic difficulty dealing with any life change and fear of losing the post-Covid recovery of social connections that I managed to build up in the last year in Leeds.

It has also been quite disruptive to my research – it has been a bit over a month since I moved into this flat, and I feel like I have only just started to really get back into it. This has put a bit of doubt about whether I am actually going to be able to organise the conference/networking event for and about disabled people and co-ops that I talked about in my last post, but I am still trying to make it happen – any offers of assistance are very welcome!

The other big piece of news is also going to have an effect – I am also about to start a job working in the Disabled People’s Archive project run by Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People and based at Manchester Central Library. This is going to be 21 hours a week until the end of February, while I have this research to finish, and then will become full-time from March. Accepting this job was also a difficult decision and it is going to impact on the amount of time that I have left to finish my research – but it is also going to be a much-needed regular income given that I have used up my 12 months of research funding, and the income I could get through transcription work for TypeOlogy is by definition fluctuating and uncertain (an experience of precarity shared by many, perhaps especially disabled, members of workers’ co-ops, which I will certainly write about in my research report/publications!)

The job is fixed-term until October 2024, so it definitely doesn’t mean that I will be moving away from focusing on co-ops forever. I’m still thinking of applying for further postdoctoral grant funding to pursue this research topic further eventually, and I certainly still want to work on bringing various disabled-people-centred co-op ideas into existence in the long term, during and after this job.

I’ve just submitted an abstract to the Nordic Network on Disability Research (NNDR) conference in Iceland in May 2023. I’m not sure at this point whether I will actually be able to *go* to the NNDR conference, particularly as I will no longer be affiliated with a university or have access to a conference expenses budget by then, but it at least gives me something to structure writing around. I’m also hoping to present at the rescheduled UK Society for Co-op Studies conference in Lincoln in February (which will be *just* before my university status ends).

Hopefully I’ll be posting about more research outcomes (presentations/publications/etc) soon!

I don’t know how many readers this blog has, but I know a couple of people have subscribed to new posts on WordPress.

I just thought it worth mentioning here that, if anyone is interested in hearing updates on my research, I can also add you to an email update list. Updates will be very occasional, but you will hear about any relevant “outputs” of the research (i.e. reports, journal papers/other publications, events that I present my research at, etc.)

If you want to get email updates, please contact me via the form on this site, or email me at s.graby@leeds.ac.uk.

Even if you don’t want to get email updates, I’d also in general love to hear from anyone who has anything to say about my research, or about disabled people and co-ops in more general terms!

I am also in the early stages of planning/thinking about organising a conference or workshop event about disabled people, co-ops and co-operation. I will definitely need people to collaborate with on this, so please do get in touch if you’d like to help with it or have any ideas for things that could happen in it.

The survey for co-ops that is one of the 3 strands of my research (for more detail see here) was originally open from March to May 2022. In that time, I got 50 responses, but due to lots of other stuff that I had going on, I didn’t manage to look at the responses until the end of June.

There is a lot of valuable data in there, but 50 is quite a low number compared to the number of co-ops in the UK (which is not known exactly, but estimated at over 7,000 in the 2021 Co-op Economy report). Therefore, and because I am still busy with a lot of other stuff (particularly getting the data from the interviews and case studies – the other 2 strands of this research – transcribed and analysed), I have decided to reopen the survey until the end of July, in case it’s possible to get more responses before what feels like a reasonable time for being able to focus on it.

The survey is online here.

If you are in a co-op of any kind within the UK, and your co-op hasn’t filled in the survey already, please answer it! How long it will take will vary according to how detailed answers you want to give, but it is unlikely to take much longer than 15 minutes.

Also, whether or not you are in a co-op yourself, please spread it to any networks of co-ops or people involved with co-ops that you know!

Today (Wed 25th May) I went to visit one of my case study co-ops for this research, Enabled Works in Morley near Leeds. This visit was an exciting and inspiring (genuinely, not in the cliched and insulting “oh, you’re so inspiring!” way often aimed at disabled people) experience.

Enabled Works was formed by disabled workers from former Remploy ‘sheltered workshops’ in Leeds and Pontefract (with some input also from those in Bradford and York) when Remploy changed their focus from running sheltered workshops to aiming to integrate disabled people into ‘mainstream’ employment, and the workshops were closed. After hearing about workers’ co-ops from a trade union contact who had once been a member of one, the founding members, who I got to interview, fundraised at a union conference and sought advice from others in union and co-op movements, formed the co-op, and opened a business in a new site, retaining some former Remploy packing contracts and subsequently finding other sources of work and income.

This was a really fascinating story, as the co-op members are largely disabled people who had been employed in the sheltered workshops, with a variety of impairments, and who wouldn’t necessarily have had any knowledge or background in co-ops before forming Enabled Works. (I remember at the time of the major Remploy closures, around 10 years ago, wishing that there could have been workers’ buyouts of the closed factories to form workers’ co-ops, but not at all thinking that anyone would manage to actually do that – so it was incredibly exciting to find out that someone essentially actually did!)

The co-op has since employed some other disabled people without much previous work experience and worked with further education colleges to introduce young disabled people to the co-op. It was also great to hear about how, unlike both the former Remploy set-up and most other employers, the co-op seems to have a really strong ethos of valuing everyone’s contribution regardless of how many hours they can work and adapting the work to the person rather than vice versa, without compromising efficiency and productivity.

Enabled Works have a surprisingly large space with an atmosphere that is down-to-earth and practical, yet almost entirely without the feeling of regimented discipline and intolerance of deviance that typically permeates the factory/warehouse/assembly-line type workplaces that I have seen or experienced. All the workers who I met were proud about both their work and being a co-op. I had been worried about not managing to achieve the same rapport in interviews with them as with the more university-educated, queer, ‘activisty’ and highly online (i.e. like myself) people I have mostly been interviewing as individual participants, but they made me feel incredibly welcome – taking time out to show me the whole place despite their busy work schedules – and gave me a wealth of deeply relevant material.

I can’t remember how I first heard about Enabled Works, but I was surprised at how few people in both disability activist and co-op movement ‘worlds’ seemed to have heard about them. Apart from the trade unions and a bit of contact with a few specific people involved in other co-ops (such as Footprint), they seem to have evolved, and succeeded despite austerity, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, mainly on their own and without directly doing business with many other co-ops – one exception being York Disabled Workers Co-op, which shares their origins of former Remploy workers, and which I had somehow not managed to hear about before seeing their flyer at Enabled Works today!

The members at Enabled Works all seemed to share my vision of promoting the idea of co-ops to disabled people who may not be aware that they exist, and of ‘seeding’ new local disability-focused co-ops. I’m hoping that there can be fruitful collaboration with them in the future, including potentially on a conference about disabled people and co-ops and/or a guide to setting up new co-ops for disabled people. Watch this space!

I have now done my first 3 interviews (all via Zoom) for this research project! The first was with a friend who lives in a fairly large (around 100 members) housing co-op, which has houses and flats scattered around an inner-city neighbourhood in a city in the North of England. The other two were with two people who responded to my call for participants, who both live in a similarly sized – but very differently structured – student housing co-op in Scotland.

Starting to do my interviews was delayed quite a bit from when I had originally hoped to, first because of the length of time that it took for me to get approval to do my research from the University ethics committee, and then because of some personal stuff that came up unexpectedly just as I was starting to actually contact co-ops and try to recruit participants, so it was exciting to get to start doing some, but also slightly scary. While I have done similar semi-structured research interviews before (both for my Masters dissertation in 2013, and for my PhD in 2015-16), I felt distinctly ‘rusty’ and a bit anxious and lacking in confidence about getting back into doing them!

I was quite grateful to have a friend rather than a stranger as my first interviewee, because that made it feel a lot more comfortable and “natural”, and meant that I could go into my interviews with strangers feeling more practiced. While interviewing friends has its potential pitfalls, and would perhaps be frowned upon in some more traditional takes on qualitative research (in which concepts like ‘objectivity’ and avoidance of bias are highly valued), I believe that pre-existing connection and shared knowledge and experiences between interviewer and interviewee can enhance research by giving access to dimensions of data that interviews with strangers might not be able to. (I write about this in more detail in the methodology chapter of my PhD thesis.) Conversely, however, some things may be easier to ask, or to tell, a stranger than a friend about – and of course this is likely to vary immensely from person to person. Therefore, especially given that a lot of my life and my friendships are in the intersection between disability and co-ops, my aim is to have a balance, as I did in my PhD, between interviewees who I do and don’t know already.

I can already see some themes emerging from these first few interviews, including:

– Co-ops are good for disabled people! Participants so far all said that they found fewer disabling barriers in their housing co-ops than in the other types of housing they had lived in (mainstream social housing, student halls and privately rented housing).
– Co-ops don’t necessarily know much about disability, and disabled people don’t necessarily know much about co-ops before they join them – everyone who I have interviewed so far found out about the co-ops they now live in through friends or co-workers who already lived in or had connections to the co-ops, and their motivations to join were mostly pragmatic (e.g. cheap rent, more housing security and greater willingness to meet access needs than privately rented housing) rather than idealistic (because they specifically wanted to live in a co-op or cared about co-operative values – though all did come to care about those values).
– Co-op governance processes can be frustrating and there can be barriers for disabled people to participating in them, but also disabled people can get to influence co-ops to be better at dealing with disabling barriers through being involved in co-op governance.

I have 3 more interviews scheduled for next week, and potentially a few more in later March or April. However, I am still very much looking for more interviewees! I would ideally like to get at least 20 overall – so if you are a disabled person who is or has been a member of a co-op, and you’d like to take part in this research, please do get in touch. In particular, most of the people who have responded to my call for participants so far are members of housing co-ops, so (while I am definitely up for interviewing more housing co-op members!) I would particularly like to make sure that I get some disabled people who are or were members of workers’ co-ops, or of other types of co-ops such as consumer or multi-stakeholder co-ops.

Everyone who I interview will get a £15 shopping voucher. I haven’t yet sorted out exactly which shops it will be possible to have vouchers for, but I am hoping wherever possible to get vouchers for shops which are co-ops – whether that’s “The Co-op” supermarket chain, or shops local to participants which are workers’ co-ops, such as Unicorn in Manchester.

My timeline for doing interviews is somewhat flexible, but ideally I’d like to do all or at least most of them by the end of May, which is also when I have set my survey to close – after that, I will be analysing the data and turning it into writing!

If you want to know more about who I want to interview and what I am asking people about, see my call for participants.

After a long wait to get approval from the University ethics committee, I have now been given the go-ahead to make my research public!

There are 3 parts to this research:
1) A survey of co-ops in the UK to find out how many co-ops have disabled members and to what extent co-ops have taken into account disabled people’s access needs;
2) Interviews with disabled people who are or have been members of co-ops, about their experiences in co-ops and what they think and/or how they feel about the intersections between co-ops and disability;
3) A few case studies of co-ops which were created by and/or for disabled people, and/or intended for the purpose of meeting disabled people’s specific needs. (Examples could include housing co-ops specifically providing accessible housing, workers’ co-ops consisting of disabled workers, or co-ops providing services such as personal assistance, sign language interpretation, or disability equality training.)

The survey is now online here on Leeds Online Surveys. This is meant for co-ops (rather than individual members) and should typically take no more than 15 minutes to fill in.

For more details about the interviews, please see my call for participants.

If you know of a co-op that you think it might be good for me to do a case study on, please contact me. I am already aware of some co-ops that I would like to do case studies on (most of which are relatively local to me, i.e. in the North of England, particularly West Yorkshire and Manchester/Lancashire areas), but it would be great to know about any other co-ops involving disabled people in the UK, even if it doesn’t end up possible (for time/capacity reasons) to do case studies of all of them!

As well as this website, I am now on Twitter as @DisabledCoOps, so please follow me there to keep updated! (I now need to work out how to integrate a Twitter feed into this site…)