What a co-op means today.

It has been a year since my trip to Bologna when a group of 15 Vancity staff studied co-operatives in this region of the world where co-ops are modern, big, profitable and also progressive and responsible. A new group of Vancity employees just wrapped up their adventure in Italy and from those I’ve spoken to, it sounds like they’ve had an equally amazing and inspiring time. Bringing back this knowledge and experience to strengthen our own financial co-operative is incredibly important as Vancity gets more in touch with its roots and focuses on our new vision of Redefining Wealth.

A couple of weeks back, Corporate Knights released a list of responsible companies in Canada and the top three are all co-ops. Vancity ranked third behind Mountain Equipment Co-op (Canada’s equivalent of REI) and The Co-operators, a large national insurance company (whom Vancity sold its Insurance division to last year).

In thinking about co-ops in a 21st Century context, it seems to me focusing on the seven co-operative principles and our system of governance is a bit of a non-starter. It is my opinion that as co-operatives, we should be adjusting our message to fit with the times. The co-operative message will still resonate with some, but I think that to many it seems outdated and esoteric. People don’t get excited about governance, or voting for a bunch of people for a Board when they don’t really understand the role of a Board or the impact of their vote.

But there is an increased consumer focus on the behavior of the companies they deal with. Social connection equals social responsibility and people can learn more about the behind-the-scenes actions of companies than ever before. Through social media, people are used to participating, and co-ops can offer ways to participate and engage that perhaps other companies cannot.

In Vancouver, where the term 100 mile diet originated, I think we have something in common with the locavore movement. Eat local, shop local, keep your money local. When Vancity talks about Redefining Wealth, to me that’s what it means. Profits can go to shareholders in another part of the country or world, or the profits from your bank accounts, mortgage, investments and credit card can stay local and be invested back into your neighbours and community.

Vancity has become a slang word for Vancouver and the idea of “keep your money in Vancity” seems like a strong value proposition.

In the art of acting there is a practice of memorizing your script and stage directions and character attributes perfectly so you can forget it all and improvise knowing you have that base to work from. I would say the same is true here. Internalize the co-operative principles, live by them, socialize them within your co-op, and then forget them and start improvising so you can increase the relevance of this movement to fit into today’s modern, connected world.

PS: I must credit Morriss and Gene for their posts that inspired me to write this.

CheckMating – 15 years later.

For some reason, a lot of people have been asking me lately about my former life as a filmmaker, so I thought I’d post one of my most successful films, CheckMating on YouTube for all to see.

About 15 years ago, I was riding a bus to work in Seattle, where I was living, and a little nugget of an idea came to me:

A woman who tests her dates by playing chess with them. CheckMating.

So simple. At the time, I was a filmmaker working at a motion picture laboratory. I had recently completed a half-hour 16mm nugget called Greenwich Meridian, which was a pretty standard first film: artsy, opaque and pretty much unwatchable. I was ready for a new challenge – to make a film people actually wanted to see.

CheckMating had a number of things going for it. It was short –  half-hour films were hard to program at film festivals because they were too long to open for a feature film and too short to stand on their own. I pictured CheckMating with no words, just images and music, which would make it perfect for the international film festival circuit. And I was pretty sure that I could shoot it on 35mm film, and have it look amazing on the big screen.

CheckMating

So I budgeted the film out at $12,000 and started looking for deals. Although I wrote, produced, directed and edited CheckMating, my biggest skill as a filmmaker was always as a producer. I found a free camera, free short ends of 35mm stock, a free editing location. My peers at the motion picture lab where I worked were willing to slide my footage through as “test” footage and not charge me. I ended up bringing in the film for 15% of my budget, a mere $1,800 all in.

It was a one day shoot at a friend’s house. The actors were awesome, especially Amy DeBourget who carried the film. The crew was a dream. The musicians on the soundtrack were brilliant.

It was a charmed little production. I was super-pleased with the final product and I started entering it into film festivals. I had entered my previous film into 18 film festivals and gotten rejections from all of them. With CheckMating, I was accepted into the 19th festival I applied to. Perseverance paid off. I found out after coming back to work from my honeymoon in July of 1996 that I got into the Boston Film Festival. More acceptances poured in, and by the time the film was done on the circuit, it had played something like 60 festivals, events and showcases, and picked up a few awards along the way.

And this little film inadvertently led me to where I am today. As a filmmaker I was an early adopter of screening my films online. I just wanted people to see the film, and wasn’t snobbish about how that happened. While many filmmakers were pontificating about the beauty of film (and not video or digital), I wanted to open source the damn thing (although I’m not sure I knew what open source was at the time).

I got a distribution deal with a little start-up in Seattle called AtomFilms. They were a great group and I was their seventh acquisition. They did extremely well as a company, defining what online film distribution could look like, and sold my film to airlines to show in-flight, to websites seeking quality content and to TV stations around the world (international sales validated my choice to make the film silent). I was written up in the NY Times and the San Francisco Chronicle as a filmmaker willing to try new things. The film was a success. CheckMating even made money, given the minuscule budget I was working with.

That early embracing of the web, as well as an eventual job at AtomFilms as a web producer in charge of their online community of 1.8 million fans steered me onto a new path of doing web stuff instead of film stuff.

And then more recently AtomFilms was bought out by MTV and the rights to CheckMating reverted back to me. And so I have put it up on YouTube where it can be seen once again.

One of the biggest lessons of filmmaking that I draw on everyday is the ability to work with people as they are. Directing actors was perhaps my favourite part of making films. The collaboration, the creativity, the connections. Every actor is different and the key to being a successful director is knowing how to connect and communicate with each actor individually to elicit their best performance. Some actors like line-readings, some like deep philosophical discussions about the character’s motivations, some meditate, some pick fights to work themselves up. Working with each actor in the way most suitable for them is a skill I still draw on daily as a team-member, as a manager and as a contributor to an organization I believe in.

I hope you enjoy this glimpse of my filmmaking side. It’s good to have this film out there again…

A new partner for Vancity.

I was fortunate enough to be on the selection committee for a new agency of record for Vancity. We have a wealth of very good agencies here in Vancouver and Vancity wanted to ensure that we have the right partner to help us move forward towards our vision of Redefining Wealth.

Vancity 2009 Annual ReportRedefining Wealth is our vision of growing wealth for our members in a way that directly benefits our communities. We have only started communicating it publicly, and the first place it shows up is in our new Annual Report. The title is obviously provocative, intended to get members questioning what we’re doing and reading on to discover what Vancity’s doing for the “wealthy”.

As we embark on this journey, we met with many agencies in Vancouver, some very large and some very small. It was a great process, helped by a consulting firm, Reynolds & Fyshe. Dan and Mike (Reynolds & Fyshe) helped us steer a transparent, fair, thorough selection process that focused mostly on fit. This was not a beauty pageant where agencies simply wowed us with some superlative work (although we did get to see lots of great work), but a process evaluating our DNA to ensure we found a real partner in our mission.

In the end, we were very excited to discover our amazing fit with local agency, Wasserman + Partners. They demonstrated amazing knowledge of our brand and alignment with our vision. Their work resonated with us, they asked profoundly good and tough questions and have demonstrated real business results with their other clients. It doesn’t hurt that they are a member of our credit union and have been since they launched. They show a deep understanding of iconic local brands, and Vancity is an important player in that field.

I know W+P from their work on the province-wide projects they do on behalf of all BC-based credit unions (see their TV ads). They have been the agency for Credit Unions of BC for over ten years, and their knowledge of this sector is a real plus. I have seen their work get stronger and stronger and the results of their work break through barriers identified as chief obstacles to increasing credit union membership. I have seen the early results of their upcoming campaign, and it is truly impressive.

So, a new chapter opens in the storied history of Vancity. I feel very fortunate to be able to play a role in all of this, and am excited to roll up my sleeves and work with our new partner, Wasserman + Partners.

PS: Here’s Vancity’s press release on the announcement, and Wasserman’s blog post.