Tag Archives: vancity

Looking on the Brightside.

Over 13 years ago, I left a permanent job to take a 3-month contract doing digital project management and marketing at Vancity. It probably wasn’t the “responsible” thing to do, especially seeing that my wife and I had an eleven-month old at home. Yet, it was the totally responsible thing to do – responsible to a higher purpose.

I had realized some time earlier that I needed to live a life that reflected my values. My work had been a major disconnect from my values. I had spent several years working in digital marketing in Seattle, Los Angeles and Vancouver, and I was feeling more and more weary of helping to sell more shoes, motorcycles or movie tickets to truly terrible movies (and a couple of really truly amazing ones too). This wasn’t how I wanted to spend my life.

I feel incredibly grateful to Vancity for giving me a job where purpose and productivity are so easily married. I have received many opportunities within the organization – I mean where else could a digital marketing manager be promoted and shift roles and shimmy around and end up in charge of business banking and community investment? Amazing!

But all good things must come to an end.

In mid-June I will start a new adventure as CEO of Brightside Community Homes Foundation, one of the province’s largest not-for-profit affordable housing providers. Brightside is dedicated to making housing accessible for those who struggle to meet the demands of market housing in Vancouver, one of the most unaffordable cities on the planet

After many years of working in community investment, I am extremely excited to move from an important enabling role, providing financial support to local businesses and organizations, to delivering services and helping tackle the affordable housing crisis in my home city.

The people at Vancity I want to thank and recognize are just too numerous to mention. Leaving the people is always the hardest part, and the people at Vancity – as well as those I’ve met in the wider Credit Union movement over the last decade – are magnificent. I wouldn’t be who I am or where I am without them.

I am thrilled to join the team at Brightside to help play a larger and direct role in ensuring our neighbours and community members have safe, stable and appropriate housing. I am excited about the work ahead and to help create meaningful impact in our community.

What I’ve learned from home-swapping.

For the last few years, when my family takes vacations we have been swapping homes with people in the cities we visit. We did our first home swap a few years ago in San Francisco, last year we swapped with a couple in Paris, and this summer we’re swapping with families in Hamburg and Bergen, Norway.

It’s an amazing way to travel. Free accommodations mean that we can stay in expensive cities for longer. Being in a home means more space for us to enjoy than a hotel room affords, and we enjoy neighborhoods in cities we would not otherwise spend time in. We feel more like locals when we’re far from home.

Home-swapping makes me think of my early enthusiasm for the Sharing Economy. I still love the idea of sharing the idle capacity of things you own with other people, and owning things collectively through a co-op-like structure. This form of sharing creates reciprocal relationships and community, and reduces the need for so much stuff to be produced and consumed.

In the early days of the Sharing Economy, I was a major proponent of what this could mean for communities, for greater equity and environmental sustainability. I was surprised by how quickly the sharing economy gave way to value-extracting businesses like Uber and AirBnB.

I spend a lot of my working hours trying to ensure that we have a more equitable and sustainable local economy. I think about the velocity of money within a local economy so money recirculates and has a multiplier effect, creating more equitable distribution. Companies like Uber do provide work, but it is contract work, lacking the benefits that allow people a higher quality of life. In addition, profits are extracted out of local economies and into maximizing shareholder of people well outside where the work takes place.

I don’t use AirBnB anymore because I see the devastating effect it has on cities like Vancouver which have a housing crunch and near zero rental vacancy rates. I see in my own neighbourhood of Strathcona in Vancouver the rental units that used to provide stable, long-term rental to individuals and families get permanently taken off the market and turned into more profitable AirBnB accommodation. This isn’t having a healthy effect on the livability and viability of our city. (Vancouver has a vacancy rate near zero and 6.2% average annual rental rate increases.) That isn’t a form of sharing I recognize as ethical or desirable.

I sit on the board of Modo Co-operative, which allows 20,000 drivers to share over 600 cars. As a co-operative, there is no private ownership, those cars are a community asset. If Modo were to dissolve, the assets would be bequeathed to another community-owned organization like a not-for-profit. I work for Vancity, where half a million member-owners pool their money for local reinvestment. It is now a $26.4 Billion pool owned by the community, not private ownership. No one profits inequitably from those community resources. That is more in line with what I originally loved about the sharing economy.

So we have discovered home-swapping as a way of truly living out the early (and unfortunately false) promise of the sharing economy. No money changes hands, trust is required and reciprocity is created. I recommend it highly if you need your faith in humanity restored.

Final reflections on Bologna – more worker co-ops.

So many great images from our walking tour. #bologna2018 #vancitybologna

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I’m back at home and making sense of all I’ve learned and experienced over the last two weeks studying the co-operative sector in Bologna, Italy.

Nine years ago, I attended this same program, and it opened my eyes to the role co-ops can play in our economy and started me down my path of greater involvement with co-ops. This trip has given me greater depth and language to describe the way co-ops act as a counter balance to some of the harmful effects of the market.

Resist!

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I have gained quite a lot of experience over the last few years working with businesses and organizations in impact sectors. I am very concerned with a few societal issues, chief amongst them income inequality, climate change, housing and rental availability and affordability in this region and making reconciliation a priority so that gaps that exist between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people finally start to disappear.

Co-ops can be part of the solution to all of these issues.

In BC, most co-ops I deal with are consumer co-ops. I came back from Bologna with a strong sense that many more worker co-ops are needed to help deal with these societal and environmental issues. We have some worker co-ops in BC, but it is a solution for many more people who want to self-organize to solve an issue or address a market failure.

What’s needed? Teaching the co-op model in our business schools, introducing policies friendly to people organizing worker co-ops, aligning partners in our incubators and business networks and creating education materials introducing the model to people thinking of starting a company. The model requires greater patience and care to work properly and won’t be right for most entrepreneurs, but someone starting a company should know all the business structures, models and options open to them and not just the one prevalent corporate model in our economy.

In parallel to promoting worker co-ops, there should be a greater focus on worker co-op succession, or Worker Buy Outs as they call them in Bologna. This model is timely as so many aging entrepreneurs will be looking to retire from their businesses over the next 10-15 years. If some of these are sold to their workers as a co-operative, it will share benefits and accountabilities in a way that should address inequality and keep established businesses in our community from failing.

I feel very privileged I was able to attend this program again and deepen my understanding of co-ops, and walk away inspired to focus on worker co-op creation and succession as a key part of a more equitable and sustainable local economy.