What does your social environment need?

Cooperatives are embedded in their social and economic environment: their creation often stems out from a need or an opportunity. The first step is to determine if the service that will be provided by your cooperative will meet people’s needs and if they will use it. Before starting a business and whatever size or type of cooperative you are planning, doing some sort of research is highly recommended. Several approaches and tools exist to carry out a needs assessment research: some may be comprehensive but also time-consuming, e.g. conducting a large-scale survey of potential users; others may allow to quickly gather information – e.g. interviewing a few partners, conducting secondary research – but without guaranteeing a perfect relevance or reliability. A careful balance between your aims, available funding and resources, may help you choosing the most relevant method. The “Territorial needs assessment guideline” offers some recommendations to help you in this process.

A need? The community (elderly people, their relatives or elderly care providers) lack certain services.
An opportunity? A change in the community creates new cooperative possibilities (a group of people is getting organised around a claim, a company goes bankrupt…).

Author (The Ontario Co-operative Association, 2015)

Keep in mind that many elderly care services are most likely already provided by the community: they can be formally or informally organised, supported by public services or self-organised, undertaken by health professional or volunteer care providers, etc. Mapping elderly care services requires you to undertake a review of the stakeholders who are already operating on the territory: meeting them and presenting your idea will allow you to test the relevance of your project, benefit from external knowledge and experience, and will give you the possibility to adapt your idea accordingly. This step is also an opportunity to identify potential future partners of your cooperative.

What kind of cooperative suits you?

Once you have identified the needs and you have made sure that your project will help meeting them, the following question arises: is the cooperative model relevant? What kind of organisation are you aiming to create?

There is no one-size-fits-all cooperative model, even in the elderly care sector. The relevant cooperative model depends on the local context, the services provided, available initial resources and final aim of the project. This flexibility is one major asset: cooperatives are open to innovation!

The type of cooperative relevant for a specific project will depend on the national rules and local contexts. Your national support contact will be able to provide you with extensive and customised guidance. Yet, the typology below can offer some first insights of the possibilities you may consider.

Membership

The primary goal of a cooperative is to meet the needs of its members: whose needs are you willing to target? At least three models may be relevant in the elderly care sector:

• Worker cooperative: owned and controlled by its employees, who hold the majority of the shares. The cooperative exists for the benefit of its workers. For example, a home-care service provider owned by the nurses who work there
• Consumer cooperative: owned and controlled by its customers (consumers). Only customers of the cooperative can become members and make decisions, and the cooperative exists for their benefit. The consumer cooperative may employ paid staff to do the work of running the business. Cooperative supermarkets are a prime example of this. Some smaller consumer cooperatives require each member to do a share of the work in return for access to the consumer goods that the cooperative is providing.
• Multi-stakeholder cooperative: members can be staff, users, neighbours, suppliers – anyone who is involved in what the cooperative does and how it does it. For example, a care home (members are residents, staff, relatives – maybe even social service officers). Be aware that the multistakeholder form is not always covered or allowed by the national regulations: these may be incompatible with some governance schemes, especially the ones envisaging a unique membership system for individuals and organisations. National contact points may be able to advice you according to your local legislation.

Economic sector

The economic sector(s) covered by your organisation should also be one of your main concerns at this stage: it will be the basis of your short-term and long-term business plan. Some examples are presented below.

• Elderly care cooperative: a generational approach is adopted. The cooperative will provide services exclusively to elderly people, and/or their caregivers. Be aware that elderly care encompasses a wide range of sectors (potentially every aspect of an older person’s life!). This model may be relevant for cooperatives gathering elderly organisations, informal caregivers, and professional caregivers from different sectors. However, it requires to set up a structure that is able to manage and coordinate very different kinds of activities, which may be challenging. At first, you may want to focus on a couple of them – and progressively extend your action. (See best practice report
• Healthcare cooperative: its activities are developed on a sectorial basis, i.e. healthcare. Its services are provided to any patient, including the elderly. It can be particularly relevant when the cooperative is operated by professionals from one sector, e.g. nurses. Compared to the previous one, this approach may be more efficient in fostering specialization and economies of scale. On the other hand, only one kind of needs is addressed – elderly people may be primarily considered in this case.
• Housing cooperative: housing services may be diverse and potentially include, among others and depending on the members, specific services for older people. In this case, elderly care may be an accessory activity of the cooperative business plan.

Although one model is not better than another, this toolkit focuses especially on elderly care multistakeholder cooperatives. Involving elderly care providers (whether formal or informal) and receivers in one same economic structure – possibly together with partner stakeholders (public bodies, businesses, non-profit organisations) – may potentially lead to the creation of innovative ways to address elderly care issues in terms of active assisted living and solidarity between generations. Most of the tools and steps presented here are however common to the creation of any elderly care cooperative, and should be easily transposable to other cooperative models.