International Women’s Day & One Change
Published 15 Mar 2019 by Phil Ponsonby
International Women’s Day – Co-operative Women’s Guild
Last Friday on International Women’s Day we held a very successful event celebrating the achievements of the Co-operative Women’s Guild. It was held at the Black Country Museum in Dudley and was hosted by Tarra Simmons, our General Manager for CSR, and her team. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend as I was speaking at the Co-operative Retail Conference but the event was attended by women of all ages from across the Co-operative Movement. The Guild was created in 1883 and continued meeting until 2016 when due to the age of its remaining members it was sadly wound down.
The guest of honour was Doreen Shaw who is 95 and who was one of the early pioneers of the Bloxwich Co-operative Women’s Guild, serving for over 30 years as its President. She attended wearing the rainbow scarf which was the original colours of the Guild adopted after WW1 when it also introduced the White Poppy. Also in attendance were two Midcounties graduates, Daisy Clifford and Emily Sandilands, who spoke about what it is like to be young co-operators and Olivia Birch, one of our directors, who spoke passionately about the need for gender balance on Boards. I’m proud to say Midcounties Board has an equal number of men and women on it which means it’s more representative of our membership base.
Doreen Shaw (centre) with Daisy Clifford (left) and Emily Sandilands (right)
Co-operative Retail Conference
The Co-operative Retail Conference was held in Cheshire and was organised by Co-op UK, the network for the UK’s co-ops. It was attended by leaders from across the sector and I spoke about some exciting new innovations we have been involved with including Happerley Transparent, Best of Our Counties and how we’ve introduced the “Feed Me Truth” campaign into our nurseries. Nick Thompson, the Chief Executive of the Phone Co-op, also spoke about changes happening in the telecommunications sector and the need for businesses to prepare for when BT switches off the old telephone network.
At the conference, there was much discussion about the impact of Brexit on the retail sector. The one outcome that all businesses need is certainty but at the moment it is still far from certain what will happen when and if we leave the EU. In response, the Executive Team have been meeting weekly to look at how we can mitigate risks and through the Confederation of British Industry and the Co-operative Federal Retail and Trading Service, our central buying group, we have been making representation to government on the impact on business. There is great interest in the media at present about Brexit and I would remind any colleagues that any requests to comment should be directed to our PR agency, Citypress.
On Monday, as part of the One Change campaign to reduce our own single-use plastic consumption across our Society, we are inviting Head Office based colleagues at Co-operative House to sign up to the two ecobricks workshops taking place. Ecobricks are an innovative new way to reuse plastic waste, consisting of a reusable building block created by packing clean and dry used plastic into a plastic bottle. By filling the plastic bottle, it makes it strong enough to act like a brick. In the near future, we will be running a range of events as part of the One Change campaign across the Society, providing all of our colleagues with the opportunity to get involved.
Finally, it’s Red Nose Day so I would encourage everyone to get involved in fundraising for this great cause. As a Society, we’re proud to support Comic Relief and I look forward to announcing the amount we raise in a future blog.
That's all for this week's blog, if you enjoyed reading it feel free to leave me a comment below and let me know your thoughts.