Cooperation seems to be an idea whose time has come for grassroots movements in the UK. Drawing on the Fearless Cities summit session: ‘Building autonomy through a cooperative economy’, we share two interviews with people doing cooperation beyond the traditional worker/housing cooperative form. Cooperation Town and Co-operation Manchester. What does cooperation mean to people right now? What are the relationships between the theory and practice of cooperatives and other tools for organising, like citizens’ assemblies and mutual aid groups?
First, we invite you to listen to an interview with Shiri Shalmy, who helped set up Cooperation Town, a movement of over 60 community food co-ops, self organising on streets and estates across the UK. In this conversation we explore cooperation as a tool for solidarity and relationship-building in working class communities, as well as a means to getting cheaper healthy food! We think it’s a really uplifting conversation – Shiri expresses the ways we can organise powerfully where we live in such practical terms.
Following on from this below, there’s an interview with Co-Operation Manchester, established only last year as a way of bringing together grassroots organisers to change the power dynamics of one of the UK’s largest cities. This moves from a conversation about the assembly form and mutual aid and some of the things that have come about in Manchester, to a deeper conversation about staying in struggle through this very challenging period of human history.
Active Hope, Positive Nihilism – an interview with Co-Operation Manchester
Co-Operation Manchester is a grassroots project in the powerhouse of Northern England – the city, like New York, of five boroughs. The project exists to ‘encourage greater co-operation and solidarity between neighbours and various progressive and pro-active local grassroots initiatives across Greater Manchester with a “think global, build local” DIY approach’.
The ‘Cooperation City’ model of citizens’ assemblies, community organising and mutual aid comes partly from experiments in the USA, where initiatives like Cooperation Jackson have set a path for city-level radical grassroots democratic structures that help people meet their basic needs and develop capacity and organising skills. A very young group, Co-Operation Manchester launched in the summer of 2024 held their first community assembly shortly after Fearless Cities, in December that same year. They say: ‘We focus on building deeper relationships and actively embodying collectivism in the places we co-exist, challenging exploitative and extractive practices by actively providing local examples of alternatives, and amplifying/supporting projects internationally.’ You can read more of their statement of intent here.
In this interview, Gloria from Research for Action talked to Jo and Shaun from the group. We started with some nuts and bolts organising questions and a bit of background, which then developed into a reflective and deep conversation about what kind of crises – both personal and societal – bring people into deep organising work. The interview was conducted via video chat and phone in November 2025.
Gloria: Cooperation Manchester; where did it come from? What did you and other people do to make it begin?
Shaun: I started by reading, watching videos and listening to podcasts about Cooperation Jackson, in Mississippi, USA. It struck me as something real that was happening, and that we could try to replicate in Manchester as a tool to build hyperlocal place-based community power. That was essentially where the name started: this is cooperation, this is what it says on the tin.
We met up as a group of about 12. About half of us had been involved in related climate justice groups; other people were less involved in climate justice, but very much on the left already. There were also a few people who actually hadn’t done any kind of political work. However there was a shared aim to focus on Manchester and what we could do here, in our city, in our ward, on our streets. That was something that we found quite easy to get a hold of as the starting point, and the two mechanisms for going about that are, firstly, neighbourhood assemblies, and secondly, solidarity economies. We started by working on both of these and how they relate to one another. That was over two years ago, and we’ve been grappling with a lot of big questions about how to go about it. How to strategize, how to structure, what to prioritize, what we’ve put on the shelf for now, who we talk to, and who we don’t. We’ve been thinking quite a lot about how much we’re still in echo chambers. It might be comfortable to stay in these chambers, but we’re not going to get very far doing so. So we spent quite a lot of time talking about things. We initially decided that we really didn’t want to be another small group of activists that comes up with a grand plan and talks it up like it’s the best thing in the world and just recruits people into it. Most of us weren’t from a community organizing background. Because of this, we really do actively honor a lot of the existing community work that’s been going on in Manchester for a long time. This is often driven by elders in our communities who have been doing this all their lives and have developed a lot of wisdom that is really valuable and that we are tapping into. We’ve reached out amongst existing community organizers, and we’ve been doing that for the last couple of years. First and foremost we’ve been trying to establish more meaningful, collaborative, cooperative relationships between existing actors. It’s often the case that we don’t even know of each others’ existence; we’re so busy keeping our little thing alive. These are organisations and groups that are volunteers, or have shoestring budgets. We made an active WhatsApp community with over 100 people in there who are already doing some form of grassroots community work, or at least interested in doing so. It’s important just to have made that space to connect people. They can request things, offer them, do a shoutout about things that are going on. So that that’s been the first kind of thing that we’ve been focusing on that’s continued to build. After that we did a couple of assemblies where we invited existing community organizers from across Greater Manchester. We asked them: what should Cooperation Manchester be? We already had some principles and values. But we wanted to know; how should it be structured? What should we prioritise?
Gloria: With the assemblies, you were going to people who had been organizing already. Would you say you began by deepening a network, or deepening a community that already exists, but hasn’t been named or defined, rather than going to people in general?
Jo: I think it was both. I don’t think either is mutually exclusive. I think that’s part of the problem; everyone’s in little silos. There’s a lot of gatekeeping going on in certain communities; Manchester is no different. We really need to open that out. I think the assembly mechanism is a great way to connect to both people who are already organising and people who are not. And it’s not just Cooperation Manchester taking this approach: There’s the Humanity Project and Sortition Foundation both doing assemblies in Manchester too, with different approaches, and we’re co-ordinating with them also.
Shaun: To go back to the balance between un-organised and already-organised people, you’ve got to do both. We have done both somewhat separately. But also in reality people are often a bit of both! For example, we did two assemblies for existing community activists and organisers. And then we did our first neighborhood assembly this summer that was in Hulme [an inner-city neighbourhood of Manchester], and that was more for anyone that lives and/or works there. In that one, at least 90% of people in the room were already involved at some level of community action. So now we’re asking the question: how do we go about drawing more people in from outside of that bubble, but on an equal footing? And ultimately it’s gonna take a lot of deep work and a lot of door-knocking. It’s gonna take us really showing up, being out there, getting out and about in our little places. We’re looking at this ‘neighbourhood pod’ model at the minute; we’re taking the term from Corporation Denton in Texas. Essentially, it’s street level mutual aid. In some ways, it’s just something that people just do organically anyway! These groups can have specific functions to meet specific needs and aspirations, or be really wide open in their remit – just whatever neighbours want to do to support each other. We’re currently considering encouraging mutual aid groups that do have specific ‘headline’ functions, but also do a lot more to build social fabric.
Jo: Most streets have some kind of mutual aid group since Covid, where I live, anyway.
Shaun: It is central to our politics that we collaborate with people. A lot of people don’t want to join organizations, because organizations come with a lot of baggage. They can come in with very strong and also quite narrow identities. Even with something like a tenants’ union, most people join because they are having problems with their landlord. Why would you join one if you weren’t having problems with your landlord? Or if you hadn’t yet developed the confidence to resist, even in collective solidarity? Not to knock tenants’ unions – we love them, belong to them, and encourage people to join them!
Gloria: So when you do door-knocking, for example, or when you’re doing outreach as a collective, what are you asking people for? Or what are you asking them to do? I’m thinking about the Cooperation Town model where the starting point is, ‘we’re going to set up a food co-op’. Of course, you’re doing more than just that; implicitly, you’re bringing people into an organising relationship. But what’s the ask and what’s the offer in those first conversations?
Shaun: Here’s a recent example. We held an assembly in July, and something that came out of that as a shared desire was to tidy up a little local space. There’s a neglected street and little green area that is between four or five key community institutions – a social centre, a primary school, the African-Caribbean care group there. And loads of social housing that surrounds it, and some purpose-built student accommodation. This space could be something that connects all those communities, but because it’s just kind of like this shady area away from cars, the Council has just done nothing about it. They’ve also been breaking up Hulme into smaller “social containers” for decades in an attempt to quash working-class resistance to gentrification. So anyway, this space; It’s become a flytipping hot spot and it’s used for drug dealing. It’s right next to a school too. So there was this shared feeling amongst local residents in the assembly that this was a really bad use of this land. So maybe that would be a good starting point. It’s not going to change the world, but it’s a small, achievable project. It’s something that we can apply different knowledge to, like local permaculture projects. There’s a lot of crossover with Corporation Manchester and a permaculture anti-gentrification group called Gaskell Garden Project – do check that out.
A permaculture approach lets us get people thinking about our position in the natural order of things, and it pushes back against that separation that we’ve had for so long. We don’t want it to just be like, ‘Let’s just grow wild flowers!’ We want to see a frequent site of connection, learning and transformation. And when we went around doing the door-knocking, we went in with that as an idea, and people were like ‘Yeah, right on. The council isn’t going to do it, so I’ll turn up. And I’ve got these tools!’’ Someone was like: ‘Alright, I’ll make an apple crumble and serve it out of the boot of my car!’ And someone else was like, ‘Oh, I’m a permaculture design course teacher.’
Gloria: That’s amazing, because I also think that’s quite an important distinction: Supporting and generating action amongst yourselves is quite a different dynamic to collecting a list of grievances, which is also what happens in my experience when you doorknock, right? If you do that, people often say, ‘Oh, that place is a shit tip. The council needs to sort it out, or somebody else needs to sort it out’. How do you do it differently? Do you lead by saying ‘we’re going to do something about this’? What is it that changes that kind of conversation?
Jo: For me, the thing is that the outreach process shouldn’t be going around getting a list of grievances. But when you have the vehicle of the assemblies to offer a way for people to get together to discuss things, then something more substantial comes out of it. The idea of the Permablitz came out of an assembly. What we’re trying to show is that to address a lot of the problems, the alienation people feel, the social isolation people feel, the mistrust a lot of people have, just in politics or in society or amongst generations, then I think you have to do outreach and ask questions first. And you might just get a barrage of negative awfulness. But if you are then offering an assembly as a way for people to get together (with food usually involved), you can keep going with that process of – okay, so we think this is all shit, but what do we think we could do about it? It’s that process that’s really powerful. We’re not parachuting in and going ‘We think this is a problem, do you all agree?’ But we are going in and saying, ‘Hey, there’s this process; the neighborhood assembly’. It’s a really interesting way for us to tackle multiple things, and we’re showing that as an example. And then other people can take that tool themselves and run with it where they live, work and hang out.
Gloria: We talked before about feeling of feeling burnt out and hurt and alienated by doing social change work. How do you care for each other in this work? And how do you keep nurturing cooperation in practical ways, day to day?
Shaun: I think it’s just embodiment. I know it sounds wishy-washy, but by far my favorite part of the Fearless Cities event in November 2024 was Citizen Network’s ‘Neighbourhoods of Care’ strand. It was very beautiful, because it stripped things back to basic human stuff. I really felt a connection with one of the women leading the session. I knew that she had a background of being a working class person in an industrial town in Sheffield. She was speaking from lived experience and talking about how there was more collective care on the estates, even just one generation ago. People would look out for each other more; we felt safer amongst each other. If your neighbor’s curtains were closed for more than a day you would go and check on them. That’s organizing. And I feel that with most political work, that’s just often not there, really. It’s like we’ve kind of created this separation. We’ve really got to turn up for each other and learn how to look after ourselves and normalize that. Essentially it’s anti-patriarchal and it’s anti-capitalist to do this. There’s some political spaces that are really hostile to emotion. If it’s not anger, if it’s not jubilation, or rage, then it’s just like, well, there’s no place for that here. We’ve got to do things differently, and feminise our spaces.
Gloria: What are the other emotions that you’ve been able to bring in, in this period of organizing?
Jo: Well, I think we are trying to respond with the levels of compassion and empathy which our fast-paced, consumerist society doesn’t allow time for because everyone’s rushing around doing things. These days we’ve all got to do something to show how successful we are or how committed we are in radical spaces or expert spaces. I think you have to almost burn out a couple of times, go through any big kind of emotional crisis, to learn the hard lessons from direct experience, adapt and then try something different. My mum died a couple of years ago. Sometimes we have to allow one another to not be this activist machine. Organizing is giving one another permission and understanding. It’s all right love – don’t worry if you’re not okay!
Shaun: This question makes me consider necessity as well. One of the cornerstones of modernity is an emphasis more on intellect as the highest form of intelligence, and we seem to believe that we could just think our way out, find the right words, the perfect analysis, then it’ll all be okay. But actually we’re still mammals with complex bodies, and there is a really intricate mind-body connection and a connection with our environment outside of our bodies. Our Western colonised minds are only just starting to get our heads around it. We are also far more experiential in the way that we learn, like, in an embodied way, than learning from reading a book. And I think that’s why we really have to have stories as well.
Gloria: How do you make it so that cooperation isn’t just an alternative alongside capitalism, but actually fundamentally changes the power dynamics of society?
Shaun: I see it as two sides of the same coin. In our personal lives, when we’re in crisis, and we’ve come to a crossroads, there’s a strong voice within us, saying something needs to change. But we tend to find it really difficult to just take an invisible leap of faith. And you don’t know if you can trust it enough to go there. Even if the current path you’re on might not be driving us in a good direction, there’s comfort and security in it, because it’s familiar. There’s so much convenience in it. Losing that is really scary, but that’s liberation essentially – taking on that scary stuff inside is how we grow.
Gloria: That’s interesting that you touched on this Shaun, like where Jo was talking about a deep personal grief as a deep rupture, where a person goes ‘right, I can’t be like this any more’ or ‘things can’t be like this anymore’. Both you are talking about where these moments intersect – this can’t be like this anymore, I can’t be like this any more, these intersect and have something to do with – what is the next bit? What should I do next?
Shaun: Then we have to rebuild ourselves. We can’t go back. When we have a crisis in our lives, there’s a tendency to say ‘If only it was as easy as how it was then!’ I’ve had chronic illness for over a decade and there’s a tendency to say ‘if only my body was like how it was’ – but you have to reinvent yourself. In society, the task is ginormous. We need to make new structures, new systems, new cultures, and we’re only going to get enough buy-in if we’re providing real-life examples right now, in the present, that we can feel with all our senses.
Jo; Also our society, our economy, our planetary systems are in crisis. We all feel it – some unfortunately more than others – and that crisis is the process we are discussing here. Things have to become acute for those alternatives and cooperations to manifest. It could be a mutual aid project on a street, citizen’s assemblies, multiple things. It’s only when things start to fall apart a bit more that we come to see that scaffolding we’re trying to build and say ‘Oh yeah, that’s it’. You do have to build an alternative to the system. They work hand in hand currently. There’s some interesting research on collapsing systems, if you want to go down that road; I have been doing this for a year or so. That’s where we all are – whether it’s a personal thing, political crisis, our defended egos collapsing – we are all getting there.
Gloria: There’s a lot of very interesting and profound stuff there. Thank you. I wanted to wrap up with a slightly cheesy question. What is giving you hope? Or if not hope then energy, inspiration, sustenance, this week? Where is it for you?
Jo: Hope is such an interesting concept to me, having spent the last year researching systemic collapse! Joanna Macy started talking about this concept called ‘active hope’. It’s not a wafty thing floating around, we have to create it, practice it, everyday. And we create it by doing stuff that’s the alternative. Whether that’s for ourselves, our families, communities; we have to be constantly doing it; It’s a hope-creation! I have a very problematic relationship with hope in general – but I like active hope. Someone called it positive nihilism. I like it! Something between active hope and positive nihilism.
Shaun: I also have a tricky relationship with the word ‘hope’. I’ve been watching this documentary about the Cuban Special Period – ‘Cuba’s Life Task’. [Note: this was after the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba stopped getting resources from those countries]. It was a significant crisis – GDP falling about 35% over night (relatively), for example. But through re-embracing a lot of the traditional ways, things they and previous generations had been doing before, through collaborating with indigenous people, Cubans were able to find a way that was more natural. And now people all over the world come to Cuba to learn from these ways that are not centred on profit. There’s one particular moment where a Cuban minister says something like ‘Well, it might all go to shit because it’s likely the rest of the world won’t copy us, but all we can do day by day is do what we think is the right thing, and accept that is enough in itself.’ It is easy to get attached to certain outcomes; that way lies burnout, depression, chronic illness, and so on. We need to not put ourselves in a situation that nothing good comes from. I won’t use the word hopeful, but I feel really good when I see so many people doing brilliant things all over the world, whether they do that from hope or nihilism, or ‘this is just the right thing to do’ or whatever. People start where they live, relationships, connections. I love checking in with the various cooperation movements in the US – Denton, Tulsa etc, and also the guys in the UK, [Cooperation] Sheffield and [Cooperation] Hull. It feels like some of the old ways are coming back – the good ones that have actually served us well for so long, not just bullshit nostalgia. People are wanting to get back to living on the land, or at least connection with the land, their places, their ancestries, their belonging. There’s a lot of chaos, but chaos creates potential! It might get worse before it gets better. I see it as one of those things – it’s a period of great uncertainty, a massive challenge to us who want to control what’s happening.
Jo: It was inevitable, and it’s necessary, this collapse – it was unsustainable and here we are. Indigenous peoples have seen it coming for ages. Now we have to navigate our way through it, with hope. My children are in their 20s and they just inspire me so much. They have an interest in much more traditional ways of being in the world, because of the glut of technology and the isolation it creates. Repair culture, different ways of being. It does inspire me enormously. So there’s hope!
Shaun: Another thing is that finding that when you do present an alternative vehicle or proposal that can flip the mindset of ‘there’s no point’, to ‘oh yeah let’s do it!’ I find people are really up for doing stuff! And the buzz that people get from even the smallest successful endeavours – it’s contagious!
Further information and paths to explore:
Cooperation Manchester (Instagram)
Solidarity Economy Association
Organisations in the UK using similar organising forms:
Cooperation Hull
Cooperation Sheffield
Cooperation Dundee
Transition New Mills
Fearless Cities: Building Our Power as a multitude
This piece explores more around Cooperation Manchester and others’ use of citizens’ assemblies
