Will cooperatives be the „new” game changer in Poland? Why should we look for such forms of organization in the context of our needs? We talk about cooperatives, innovation and urban farms with Joanna Erbel.
Joanna Erbel — Sociologist, expert on housing and building urban resilience. Member of the board of PLZ Cooperatives. Director of Protopia at CoopTech Hub, the first cooperative technology center in Poland, which aims to create a community based on trust by digitally rebooting cooperatives and building a local cooperative ecosystem.
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Wiktor: What is the urban resilience you write about in your reports?
Joanna Erbel: Our approach is to build crisis response strategies based on local resources — human, financial and natural. As Cooptech Hub, we have published three reports that deal with urban resilience, observed from different perspectives. The first was on cooperative urban transformation and talked about transforming post-mining areas into innovation areas that guarantee stable jobs. Job stability is one of the determinants of local resilience.A foreign investor, once it becomes apparent that somewhere is cheaper or political conditions begin to be favorable after the collapse of an authoritarian system, can easily move jobs to another part of the world.
The second report of the Urban Resilience Package, a translation of the vision of rooting the economy by local capitals, centers around a simple question: what resources do we have locally, whether financial, spatial, human or natural. In the report, we show how you can identify your potentials on your own. We divide them into four areas. The first is places and spaces (both tangible and digital) where things important to the local community happen. The second is broadly defined organizations and institutions — both formal and informal — that bring together active people. The third is broadly defined potentials and resources: human, natural, capital and others. The final, fourth area, is holidays, events and moments of celebration that help build local identity around spending time together. Such celebrations can range from events related to the history of a place, street birthdays or city harvest festivals.
the three pillars of a development cooperative
© CoopTech Hub
When we have mapped local resources, that is, we know what our strengths are it is much easier to respond to current challenges shaped by global trends, such as the need to adapt to climate change, geopolitical instability (like the war that affected the energy sector), or building stable supply chains and building economic sovereignty, including food sovereignty.
In building resilience, local context is key — each region has its own assets to play on. What we're proposing is to change the approach that says global rules are the overriding rule, because capital — both private and institutional — follows, so we must pass the test of being exemplary citizens of Europe or global citizens of the capitalist world. What we are proposing is to reverse this logic and show that what is close by is our greatest resource — both our local social networks and identity. And it is only by knowing our own strength that we should reach for solutions from the world beyond the local.
Wiktor: Why is this so important?
Joanna: Awareness of one's potentials gives one a sense of empowerment, which in turn allows one to better respond to different kinds of challenges. We want to show that you can build pride in where you come from, and at the same time build collaborative models. That's why we show that the core of building resilience is local resources including local identity. We don't have to renounce who we are, and that is key. Polish women and men are a peculiar people — we have a high potential for innovation, which we activate in two situations: danger and the feeling that we can do something on our terms. Our resilience package in the background has this positive experience of taking in several million people escaping from the war in Ukraine, where it turned out that all the players, working together, created something out of nothing. We passed this test. And yet, just a few years ago, the vision of millions of refugees was a prelude to the darkest scenario of the future: a state of emergency with the military in the streets and everyone stealing everything from everyone.
This was the vision drawn by most foresight before the pandemic. It turned out that the opposite happened, we developed new methods of cooperative action, or innovation.
Wiktor: Can you give examples of such local innovations?
Joanna: An interesting example of social innovation is the Kraina Foundation in Warsaw's Mokotow district, which transformed itself from an aid center targeting pre-war refugees in Ukraine. This grassroots initiative has formalized and recently opened its own premises, which will focus on building neighborhood ties, exchanging services or expanding skills.
Sejny, which I described in my book „Leaning into the Future,"is also an extremely interesting example of building strength on one's weaknesses. It's a town of 5,000 people in the Suwałki isthmus, which lies in a strategic place when it comes to our country's security. In the words of Sejny's mayor, Arkadiusz Nowalski: "If troops from Russia are going to come this way.” Therefore, it is both in the interest of Sejny and all of us to ensure Sejny's stability. This includes both building a civil defense system and energy independence. In addition, Sejny is betting on drug independence. Last year, the municipality formed a company, MT Pharma, with a private pharmaceutical company, which will produce components for medicines, and in addition will press oils from seeds, including, among other things, the seed to be purchased from local farmers.Sejny, too, plans to establish a cooperative under European law together with neighboring municipalities from Lithuania to jointly build the strength of the region.
It turns out that a small depopulated city can create innovative solutions and what is needed to start is firstly imagination and secondly the ability to network, i.e. to look for partners both among business partners and other institutions operating at the national as well as European level.
development of a hybrid cooperative
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Another interesting example is the current transformation of Dąbrowa Górnicza, which is in the process of creating a new city center — the Full Life Factory, on the site of the former „Defum” machine tool factory. This place is to combine mining history and innovation, which is to incorporate elements of adaptation to climate change. The idea is based, as explained by Wojciech Czyzewski, president of Fabryka Pełna Życia, on doważing the second part of the city's name and betting on „dąbrowski”, or „oak” element of the city's identity.
The Full Life Factory is expected to create not only a quality public space, but also a center for post-coal transformation and transition, aimed at new professions of the future — those both high-tech and low-tech. To Dabrowa, as a CoopTech Hub, we also owe the vision to bet on urban agriculture as one of the flywheels of local transformation.
During last year's workshop on the areas of activity of the Dabrowa development cooperative, following a proposal by Piotr Drygala, who is a socially engaged andcity official, the idea of a distributed urban farm emerged, where plants are grown wherever they can, some of which are community gardens and others are mini farms in home gardens, near schools or in larger public areas.
The vision of scattered urban agriculture is nothing new, of course. I remember gardens in Mokotow from my childhood. Back in the early 1990s, it was still normal for central neighborhoods to grow not thuyas and barberries, but gooseberry bushes, apricots and vines. We are building resilience based on a vision somewhat based on solarpunk, and on the other hand retrofuturological, that is, remember that we have elements of crisis economy in our history. Our grandmothers and grandfathers knew how to make preserves, fix things, value community ties, and believe that we only achieve success by playing to ourselves.
mapping diagram of local resources
© CoopTech Hub
Wiktor: That it's not a zero-sum game?
Joanna: Yes. We are closer to the approach you see in Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare 's book „The Friendliest Survive,” which says that it is cooperation that underlies our success as a species. That's why we work with the friendliest and want to create locally tailored solutions. As there are first pioneering implementations, others will join. We don't talk to whiners. We want to develop new solutions with those who see the potential in working across sectors and between communities consistently deepening democracy, complementing it with an economic dimension.
We do this based on three pillars of resilience:
The first pillar is co-ownership — we go beyond the tension between the private and the public. We are showing that we can scionally own something together and have ownership, which is now important to Polish women and men as a guarantor of stability.
The second pillar is co-investment — we show that we like to contribute and co-invest. On the one hand it's the GOCC, on the other hand it's all the airdrops. Sometimes we laugh at all of us that Poland is such a big airdrop.The willingness to support various pro-social initiatives should also be treated as a resource on which to build new systemic solutions.
The third pillar is co-determination — that is, the democratic control that cooperatives provide. If you throw down at a drop, you have no say in what happens afterwards. If you invest as a shareholder or minority shareholder on a crowdfunding site, your vote doesn't count. In cooperatives, it's different. Where individuals are members: every vote weighs the same. Individuals can join such initiatives, as well as legal entities like companies or local governments.
Illustrating this with the example of municipal investments. Imagine a situation where a private investor wants to build a housing development, and next to it is a city plot or empty property that can serve both the future residents and residents of the development, as well as those who lived there before. The local community agrees to let the developer renovate the public premises or create a common public space, but only if it has a say in the future of the place. A development cooperative is formed by the municipality, the developer, and a local association. Individuals can also join it. Even if the developer puts the largest sum, such an example million, into the cooperative, gaining one vote. From this, you can collectively decide what to do - whether to make it a participatory budget, or what to invest in. Building solutions based on maximum transparency and the inclusion of all willing, can allow you to carry through difficult processes. The profit for the developer is a transparent way to invest in improving the environment.
illustrations by Gosia Zmysłowska
© CoopTech Hub
Wiktor: I have a controversial question. Are cooperatives really necessary for us? Isn't what the public and private system offers today, as well as traditional cooperatives, which can hardly be called developmental, enough to build resilience?
Joanna: A development cooperative from a legal perspective is simply a cooperative, the framework of which is defined by cooperative law. We use the word „developmental” to show that it has ambitious goals and is meant to serve the sustainable development of an area. I believe that cooperatives are the most efficient vehicle, because they allow you to do something that city companies don't allow you to do - for example, carry out a revitalization program including thermal upgrading of buildings or installation of panels.
An important element of our model is that people with savings are open to investment — in a development cooperative they can become an attractive investment vehicle for city residents. Instead of keeping money in an account, we can, we can place that money in such a way that it not only does not lose its value, but also improves the quality of our environment. We save, and our city grows. Moreover, this is an attractive model for municipalities that feel the consequences of crises strongly. Mobilizing this capital potential of the middle class and, on the other hand, the time and strength of those who have less money, is a chance to gain doubly — guarding savings and raising the quality of the environment.
illustrations by Gosia Zmysłowska
© CoopTech Hub
This model of participatory democracy allows you to express your voice, but then what happens to that voice we have little control over. Local initiative remains the most powerful. And a development cooperative is such a local initiative on steroids, which is also an investment vehicle. As the CoopTech Hub, we are involved in digital solutions and analog solutions, but it is crucial for us that the point of reference is our immediate environment. Because only then do we create solutions that are tailored to the local area: making optimal use of resources and taking care of what's around us.
We live in a world that is very fractured. It's not just national politics, but all geopolitics. Watching this, we might feel that if we saw it in a „Black Mirror” scenario, we would treat it as exaggerated, and since the outbreak of the pandemic, we are de facto living a life familiar from futurological films, with the difference that it is really happening. So creating such small vehicles, over which we have control and can do something, is extremely important in times of deep uncertainty.
Wiktor: How do you convince a lot of people about cooperatives? Often the term itself carries certain, not always positive associations — how do you break this problem with the word cooperative?
Joanna: We do not deal with this. We consistently talk about cooperatives and focus on implementations, not marketing. Besides, we are proud of Poland's cooperative history and we want to connect the younger generation of cooperative men and women with the older more experienced ones. Of course, one can, as some of my colleagues do, try to avoid the word „cooperative” by using the word cooperative, but in my opinion this is nonsensical. Experience shows that unconvinced people cannot be convinced verbally, but only by practice.
This is shown by an interesting diagram by Everett Rogers, the so-called innovation curve. It shows that innovators are about 2.5% of society, which, as I once counted for Warsaw, is about eight thousand people. The second group is early followers and imitators — that's 13.5% of society. About 13% are whiners and whiners, that is, people who are interested in the subject, who will not be persuaded, because they cannot be persuaded verbally. The rest, about 70% of the public, are the silent majority, who, as the experience of citizen panels shows, are usually more progressive than we would expect. Only you have to give them arguments and show them how abstract models work in practice.
Currently, as a cooperative, we are talking about the first implementations. At the end of this year we want to set up the first cooperatives based on the model we developed in the Urban Resilience Package. It has two paths.
In Poland, it takes three legal entities to establish a cooperative, or 10 members if the member is a natural person, i.e. people. The first option is to base the start-up moment on institutional entities: the municipality, a municipal cooperative, cooperatives, social organizations or companies. The second is to bet on the potential of local women and men leaders who act in support of institutions and companies.
When we talk to local governments, we set our sights on the former model, where legal entities are the leaven. As PLZ Cooperative (that is, the entity that runs the CoopTech Hub), we are open to entering such cooperatives to support their development in the initial stage. The next step is the so-called community exit, i.e. opening up to the participation of people who are interested in supporting the initiative. Breaking this launch moment into two stages allows potential applicants to see how the cooperative works before deciding whether to join.
The model thus involves building credibility by taking the first step in a smaller, institutional setting, a recipe for distrust of the new model.
The second model is a hybrid path — the founding people include both people and institutions. In this formula, we will be setting up a cooperative urban farm in Warsaw in the fall. In our case, the initiative group is a few dozen people involved in regenerative agriculture and sustainability more broadly, associated with universities, NGOs, cooperatives or companies, and these institutions themselves.
The hybrid cooperative is also our PZL Cooperative, so these solutions we are talking about are first tested on ourselves.
illustrations by Gosia Zmysłowska
© CoopTech Hub
Wiktor: We will come back to the issue of urban farms, and sticking to the cooperative issue. In business, there is such a thing as a vision for ultimate development. Do you have such a vision in the case of the cooperative?
Joanna: Our long-term goal is to return to the cooperative model as one of the popular business models, and to show that it is by creating cooperatives that you can best run a business that takes responsibility for the local community and the environment. We want to bring about a reboot of cooperativism and cooperation between the older generation of cooperative men and women, and those individuals and institutions that are just embarking on this path.
We want people not to wonder whether cooperative is a good word, but simply to establish cooperatives. So that it's obvious and natural that if you want to act nonprofit, you set up an association, and if you want to act for profit for the community, you join or form a cooperative. Understood in this way, cooperatives will build wealth and work for urban regeneration in the broadest sense. Our goal is, that we will all be more beautiful, healthier and happier and our cities will be very green. And we take this very seriously.
Setting ambitious goals is important. In order to be effective in the here and now, we need to know where we're going, that is, to think in two time horizons — tomorrow (in the near future) and the day after tomorrow (further into the future). So the day after tomorrow is a bold vision of a better world. Tomorrow is a method of small steps, which, following technology theorist Kevin Kelly, I call „protopia,” acting so that tomorrow is better than today.
We need to dream boldly so that we can go beyond the tame patterns of action. This is where the creative professions, especially male and female artists, have an important role to play. An example of such broadening of imagination is the actions of the Cracow artist Cecylia Malik and her „Sisters of the River” projects building the subjectivity of Polish rivers. Anyway, Cecylia Malik also owes part of the model of urban resilience. A dozen years ago, she proposed that we, as residents of Poland, buy a piece of Zakrzówek. This was the first vision that something could be communalized, in order to make it safe, and was a regenerative model that came from the art world, not economics.
Urban planning, although it may not be closely related to cooperatives, is a good context for talking about new models of economics, including the future of labor, housing. For what matters is not only how much we earn, but what access we have to basic services and on what terms we can use them. Here, an interesting example is the housing policy of Vienna, which is held up as a model because of its extensive stock of public housing, in which not only the poor but the middle class live. Housing there is treated as a public service. At the root of thisinnovative policy was the belief that it was worthwhile to provide workers with accessible housing to reduce wage pressures. The lower the housing fees, the lower the level of wages that allow a decent living.
This is a direction smaller cities can go — Wloclawek has a housing package aimed at people in the medical sector. In this way, it is possible to combine the activities of cooperatives with the provision of new housing. Imagine a municipality that sets up a development cooperative. This cooperative at first does thermal upgrades and renovations, and then begins to build new housing, partly for its own needs — its members and women members, and partly for others. In this way it becomes a social developer, which is involved not only in construction, but also in the maintenance of the resource or various forms of care — both for people and nature. From creating one neighborhood, you can create a place they will want to return to.
The Urban Resilience Package report is available on the CoopTech Hub website
© CoopTech Hub
Wiktor: So cooperatives can help fight depopulation in small and medium-sized cities?
Joanna: Yes, because they will answer the question: well, okay, we will build new housing, but where will these people work. Housing policy should be considered together with thinking about labor market development.
