By Dr Sidsel Grimstad Senior Lecturer and Ann Apps, Lecturer, College of Human and Social Futures, University of Newcastle, Australia

Most cooperatives in Australia do a good job of ensuring that their members have the training and information they need to help their cooperative business to develop and grow. However, they are not always as good at the second part of the 5th principle: “.. inform the general public – particularly young people and opinion leaders about the nature and benefits of cooperation.” The coop sector has also found it difficult to find business advisers and lawyers having enough knowledge about cooperatives to provide sound commercial advice to cooperative enterprises. In 2016 the Senate Economic Reference Committee handed down the report of its inquiry into cooperative mutual and member-owned business in Australia. The report was prepared after the committee heard evidence from business leaders, academics, community groups and individuals on how cooperatives had contributed to the social, economic and cultural development of Australia. It also identified the barriers faced by cooperatives and other member-owned businesses when trying to compete against ‘mainstream’ for-profit businesses. The committee heard that “The co-operative sector is largely ignored in both secondary and tertiary education which limits knowledge about the co-operative business model.”  

Against this background, we were excited when in 2017, our Faculty (Business and Law, at that time) at the University of Newcastle decided to commence a Masters in Cooperative Management and Organisation. As academicians with an interest in the cooperative business model, we were tasked with developing a curriculum for the new programme from scratch. To make things even more challenging, only a few business or law textbooks even mention cooperatives. We sought advice from the cooperative and mutual sector, and fortunately, we received strong support from the BCCM, Australia’s peak body for cooperatives and mutuals, and its CEO, Melina Morrison. Melina helped us recruiting members for an Industry Advisory Board (IAB), who represented a broad cross-section of cooperative and mutual businesses including mutual banks, a fishermen’s cooperative, a large retail cooperative, housing cooperative peak organisation and disability support services cooperative.  The IAB provided us with constructive advice, including that we should reduce the programme to a one-year Graduate Certificate with three specialised coop courses. These could also be selected as electives in an MBA with a specialisation in cooperative and social enterprise management. Industry representatives were positive about the online format of the courses, as this would provide opportunities for participation in coop education in rural and regional areas in our vast continent. They also advised that the courses needed to focus on coop governance skills and member engagement. The first course in the trio of specialised courses was a foundation course, providing students with a broad overview of the cooperative business model and its intersection with other disciplines including history, law, economics, and management. The second course focused on cooperative law and governance and compared the regulation of the cooperative model with the investor-owned company. The third course introduced students to innovation and entrepreneurship and considered different ways of organising to achieve social change, with reference to design thinking, ‘co’ processes, social procurement, and platform cooperativism.

Between 2017 and 2021, more than 150 postgraduate students completed one or more of the specialised cooperative courses. Sadly, the Graduate Certificate was disestablished, and the three specialised courses were discontinued from the beginning of this academic year, along with many other smaller programmes. This was partly due to lower enrolment numbers and partly influenced by the impacts of the pandemic on the University’s economic position. In the four years of running the courses, we were rewarded with wonderful students, who participated enthusiastically in the programme. 2018 was a special year when we delivered two courses to participants in a government-funded Farming Together programme aimed at promoting collaborative business models for the agricultural sector. Our students were involved in establishing or strengthening their agricultural cooperative businesses. We adopted a tailored and practical approach to our assessment design, so that our participants had opportunities to network and exchange ideas, while at the same time developing practical skills, such as chairing and holding meetings, participatory decision-making, networking and collaboration, and research skills.

While our farmer/ participants/ students were busy setting up and reorganising their coops, we were also keen to learn from their experiences, therefore, we designed and implemented a research project. Our objective was to find out how their tertiary education experience impacted their work with their new coops. Based on our student reflections and follow up focus groups, we were able to make recommendations to the BCCM about developing a sound pedagogy for cooperative education at the tertiary level.  Our recommendations are available in two reports that included:

• Encouraging students to map their skills and experience with cooperatives to enable them to contribute effectively to cooperative governance
• Provide them with the opportunity to explore different types of participative governance processes
• Help them to better understand the legal requirements for board governance
• Provide opportunities to practice board organization, meeting skills, and reflect upon the importance of board diversity
• Encourage the use of web conference technology to enhance connectivity within and among cooperatives
• Consider the benefits to students of the longer (semester or trimester) courses which provide enough time for students to reflect and develop a deeper understanding of cooperatives.

Some of our former students have recently participated in the BCCM's Cooperative Farming project and podcasts of their conversations about cooperative businesses are available here and here. We are also very proud of our alumnus, Deb Bogenhuber, and her team, for their work in establishing and developing a social enterprise, Food Next Door. In this Video developed by Sidsel, Deb explains the importance of coop education and their unique multi-stakeholder cooperative design.

The most important lesson learnt from our experience is that most of the education and training provided in the cooperative sector involves ‘short form’ courses and training, over a few hours, or days. But there are incomparable advantages in delivering a tertiary level programme of cooperative education over a longer period (a year or multiple years for part-time students). It takes time to learn about and understand the practical and philosophical underpinnings of the cooperative principles and values and how they shape a unique cooperative governance and management system. If our future lawyers, accountants, and corporate managers are not given the opportunity to engage with cooperatives at this deeper level, they will not understand the potential of the cooperative business model contributing to the resolution of contemporary social and economic problems. The challenge is to attract adequate student enrolments in the early stages and to convince the University that the investment is worthwhile.