Cooperativas

See the cooperativas' allocation at the 6th Forum (who's doing what?)

 What is a "cooperativa"?

A group of 4 to 7 people working together before the Forum, some ten hours at the Forum, and maybe even after the forum. This group is "multi-associational" and should be a learning experience for all participants in the group.

What’s the general aim of this method?

There are two aims we would like you to reach:  

• To explore, discuss and learn more about a certain topic linked to the Youth Program or Adult Resource area
• To go trough the steps of the quality circle and experience the value of it so as to have more impact with your material, actions or communication.

How will you work together?

We would like you to experience a small project using the PDCA steps. What does this mean, this PDCA?
It is a theory with which you can work in a qualitative way. In short, this abbreviation stands for Plan, Do, Check, Act. In general we can apply this to our work as follows:
 
Plan - phase: choose a topic, state what you as a team expect, and develop an activity
Do - phase: do the activity, let other participants experience your activity, and gather their feedback
Check - phase: evaluate the results, check if the expectations have been reached
Act - phase: decide what should be changed, how you can implement and sustain the good things of this activity.
 
An activity could be a board game, a role-play, a training module, … whatever you have in mind. Be aware that the method you use to reach your goals is a part of the solution for having impact
 

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What could this mean practically?

Before the event:

• Identify a relevant topic for your association (a field in which you want to achieve something but didn’t succeed yet).
• Select, together with other participants, (by the on-line consultations’ on 25th February,) the topic you will work on at the Forum
• Collect some ideas on how to create something practical at the Forum

 
At the event:

• Thursday afternoon: finish the planning phase
• Friday morning and afternoon: develop an activity that other participants can experience
• Saturday afternoon: do the activity
• Saturday afternoon: check the activity, get the feedback from the other participants
• Sunday morning: adapt what needs to be changed and create an implementation plan
• The result is a learning experience combined with a concrete result for a certain topic.

 
After the event:

• We would like to hear from you if the activities you prepared at the forum are successful
• But inform us also about the further obstacles that arise which can help other NSA’s to reach their goals in a better way.

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Examples

Probably this explanation is still a bit vague so therefore two examples which support our proposed idea
of working with the PDCA circle.

Example 1: fruit salad
Ana from Spain, Henk from the Netherlands, Monika from Bulgaria and Ulf from Sweden struggled with
the problem of a lack of fruit in their association. Their aim is to create more awareness of the existing
fruits and get the number of apples eaten a month to be doubled. They came together at an orchard in
the Vosges to discuss this issue.  

• The PLAN: fruit salad with every time a different piece of fruit, quiz to guess which fruits were in the salad.
• DO-ing the activity with the local neighbours in the area the people said that not every fruit salad was nice to taste, and so they wouldn’t eat more fruit. Especially the sour salad was not loved.
• During the CHECK, the group understood that they hadn’t reached their goal to double the number of apples eaten. They also found out that some of the apples were too sour for a salad, which was the main reason for disliking the fruits.
• The group therefore ACTed and selected mostly types of apples that are sweet or added some aspartame with the sour ones. They made a leaflet explaining when they have to add the sweetener and when not using pictures of the apples.

 
Example 2: environmental erosion
Katia from Denmark, Marciu from Portugal, Sean from Ireland and Piotr from Poland aim to run an
activity which will help to highlight environmental erosion in their local community in order to properly
address it.   

• The PLAN agreed to: Each explored and researched their own community in detail. Produced a scale drawing/model together to highlight danger areas, propose positive alternatives, develop an activity.
• DOing the activity with school children they found that they had lots of good feedback, info to add to their research, everyone enjoyed the challenges in the outdoor activity.
• CHECKing the activity they found that some of the info requested wasn’t supplied by anyone. A review also showed they had missed out on asking for one important piece of info.
• They ACTed on all the information, redeveloping the activity, rewriting the notes, and sending it to a variety of schools, in many different environments. They were able to use all of the research from this to produce the booklet:  ‘How you can reduce erosion in your own environment’.

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Some examples for cooperative topics

It’s important to choose a topic for which developing an activity is possible during the event. Changing the training system of the association or renew the age limits in the branches will cover too much to handle. Discussing topics such as ‘create awareness on the link between promoted training outcomes and attracted participants’, or ‘supporting members changing to the next branch’ could work better.
 
Other ideas you may like to tackle for the moment in your NSO’s are:

• Effective support to local groups
• Our impact on the local community
• Reintegrate retired Scouts
• Identify stakeholders and communicate with them
• Support local leaders to educate young people
• Create a learning environment in a local group
• Maximise the impact of the Scout Method
• Create innovative ways to "talk/use" the spiritual dimension
• Get rid of the bad traditions in a local group
• Inspire young people to be a leader (to take up leadership responsibility); make this appealing/attractive
• Make the value of progression clear
• Ensure enough quality leaders in the local group (Human Capital Plan)
• Keep a repository in the local group
• Cooperate between generations
• How do we hurt each other? (avoid abuse in a local unit)
• Coaching at the local level, what is needed?

But we encourage you to come up with other topics, which we can discuss before, and where you can look for partners from other NSO’s.