Red Root from the Philippines is one of the #coopyouth Replication Project winners! It is a youth-led cooperative pioneering in Virtual Events Platform. It consolidates youth partners, stakeholders, and event industry suppliers to cater to events, both Virtual (Phase 1) and Physical (Phase 2). It is envisioned to become the go-to events platform for organizers/managers, talents, technology and logistics provider, catering service and more!
We bring to you a brief conversation with the team.
Congratulations on being one of the winners of the ICA Youth Replication Project! Can you share how you came together as a team?
The core team had already been working together under RedRoot Artists Cooperative for more than seven years. For the larger part of those seven years, we've done an assortment of projects from branding and investor communications for build-operate-transfer projects, to Information and Education Campaigns for conservation, various profiles for tourism, how-to videos and websites, and most recently we've been modernizing museums in the Philippines. We've introduced holograms, 3D projection mapping, and animated videos with greenscreen. We're working with a very diverse and dedicated team and because we've been able to travel around the Philippines and nearby countries for our projects, we were also quite lucky to have met some like-minded individuals. The current network of young cooperators, young heritage and event enthusiasts joining the replication project was all borne from years of exposure and networking by Red Root.
How did you get to know about the ICA Youth Replication Project and how was your experience?
We got to know about the ICA Youth Replication Project at the Global Youth Forum 2020 in Kuching, Malaysia. Initially, the idea generation was difficult because we were finishing up a museum back then. When the lockdown happened in March 2020, there were major setbacks in our operations that made us think of ways to pivot our business. We temporarily closed the company for 6 months while the core team was voluntarily working from home. In June, we were invited to become the Philippine local partner for the first edition of the Platform Coops under The New School, Mondragon University and other global partners. The course enabled us to create concepts, build a team, prototype, and develop a business plan and communication strategy.
We listed down the things that excite us, skills that are easy for us but hard for others, and the common needs of our target stakeholders (eg. necessity, safety, mental health, entertainment, companionship, training/education, customer service, access to business financing, etc.). After we consolidated all the ideas, we chose to prioritize the items/ opportunities/ resources that we could utilize at the moment and had the potential to be scaled-up. We also reallocated our tangible/ intangible assets that were not utilized because of the pandemic and could be monetized by reallocating from a different perspective. We repurposed our personal projects/ programs that can be transformed, recreated or transitioned to the platform coop. We then identified our stakeholders and the benefits of our proposed project. Since the deadline became a bit tight because of lockdown mobility restrictions, our time was spent simultaneously on business planning and product development.
Were you expecting to win?
The team was quite confident with our capability, but we also recognized how challenging winning would be. We had met young cooperators from the Asia-Pacific region during the 2nd ICA-AP Cooperative Youth Summit in Cebu and we knew back then how challenging it would be to compete with other countries. We were hoping to win and were quite ecstatic to be chosen among the many competitive entries.
What is the concept of your project?
Our big idea is to transform the gig economy of events into a full-blown sustainable cooperative endeavor. We're building on our experience as a youth cooperative, both the good and bad, and identifying effective strategies that can help jumpstart this new replication project. It has been our experience that being young in business in this country is quite challenging if you do not have the right connections and the capital. Even today in the cooperative sector, being relatively younger has always been a challenge in dealing with serious cooperative projects - it seems that big cooperatives only trust younger cooperators with meagre projects rather than financially sustainable ones. Growth has been slow because of the lack of support from our local sector. As a team, Redroot has been lucky to work with some private and government institutions who did not shy away from our perceived immaturity and has helped propel and sustain our organization to new heights. Given the strides set by the international community as well as the current global challenge, the sector in the Philippines is slowly embracing the significance of innovation and technology. As forerunners of this, we are in a great vantage point to help pave the way to new cooperative models.
We'll be organizing various youth-led initiatives for young cooperators belonging to big coops as well as those who work on institutions that frequently need events. We will group them into consultancy providers, hardware/ tech providers, content development/ talent providers, and support providers. Each cluster will have core representations in identified pilot areas. For now, due to the digital events, we are fronting one of the Redroot's initiatives and technology to make virtual events more immersive. We are using a mixture of open source and commercial technologies to make events simulate face to face interactions, provide 3D and 360 previews, as well as networking activities. This will all be supported by a web platform prototype to help match event buyers with providers. The platform is also envisioned to provide mentorship and training facilities to standardize new members' competency. For the first few months, we'll be doing a mix of sponsored and commercial projects from our existing network with redroot core members taking the lead and training/ consolidating members from all over the country.
As the cooperative grows, new opportunities and specializations will be evaluated if it will be handled in the current events cooperative or if it will also become another replication project focused on niche industries.
What is your plan of action now?
We are registering the platform cooperative initially as a youth advocacy cooperative. The main reason for doing so is to help identify key interests that could be a sustainable business run by the youth. The main endeavor will still be focused largely on events and securing a good value chain from existing demands accessible to the pioneering members. Our next phase is to create an IT backbone to support reservation/ ordering forms for various event-related sub businesses. We are hoping to get clients ready from March to May 2021 and have the website started from May to June 2021 as more data comes in.
Why did you choose the cooperative enterprise model and what were the challenges that you faced in your journey so far?
The cooperative model, we think, is the best business model. It helps democratize the means of production and if the principles are followed religiously, it can be an avenue to prevent exploitation. We've seen that cooperatives can be the future for a sustainable global economic model. We need to create a supply chain and value chain that truly serves everyone's interest.
As for the challenges that we encountered, being young, we are gifted with both the energy and drive to pursue innovations but sadly we lack the resources. The "trust" factor is often associated with age, hence, we face the reluctance of older board members in other cooperatives to trust us with significant resources. But as we experienced, if you have a professional approach, are systematic, and exceptional in delivering your services, then everything falls into place. As young people, we just need to grab every opportunity that we encounter, I believe that visionary companies in the private sector like 3M, HP, Johnson and Johnson, or Mondragon in the cooperative sector have started with the passion and energy of youth-directed in the right path. Continuous innovation coupled with grit will surely pave the way for us to help inspire change in the cooperative movement.
