The social economy is ordinary, says Stir to Action, in the best possible way. Meaning viable, vibrant and already here

Stir To Action’s Playground For A New Economy festival has been taking place this week - we love the range of speakers and topics. Their latest magazine - purchaseable here, paper and digital edition - has some powerful pieces in it.

But the most startling passage comes from a piece titled “The Social Economy Is Ordinary”, by Dan Gregory, who has worked both for the Treasury and the Cabinet Office, and is now the head of Common Capital. He’s riffing on the Raymond Williams essay, “Culture Is Ordinary”, but at point decides to list exactly what’s going on, quantitatively, in the social economy.

We’d love Dan to find references for each stat quoted (we’ve filled a few orgs in). In any case it’s an extraordinary statement of localist and community power:

[The social economy] can be unremarkable, quiet, and almost invisible. In fact, co-operatives, social enterprises, community businesses, mutuals, associations, and trading charities are everywhere around us.

These include:

An estimated 5,000 allotments, often managed as co-operative societies or associations, with over 300,000 allotment holders in the UK.
Over 6,000 Women's Institutes in England and Wales, largely run as individual charitable organisations by and for their own members. There are over 220.000 members with powers to undertake social activities, education, and develop co-operative enterprises, among other activities.
As many as 150,000 sports clubs, 7,000 village halls, 6,000 scout groups and youth clubs, 6,000 playgroups and nurseries.
There are around 1,800 Working Men's Clubs in the UK with 825,000 members, commonly managed as co-operative societies.
Over 400 farming co-ops owned by 150,000 farmers, turning over billions of pounds each year, such as Openfield Co-operative with income over half a billion pounds, and Channel Islands Co-operative with turnover of £180M per year
Longstanding friendly societies, like Oddfellows founded in 1810 and with a national network of 113 branches, over £750M of funds under management, and around 400,000 UK members [see our blog]
NFU Mutual underwriting around £1.5BN in annual premiums, LV mutual with over one million members, and Nuffield Health, a charity with over 16,000 staff and £1BN turnover.
Housing Associations providing for six million people per year, universities worth £100BN to the UK economy, over 100 leisure trusts turning over £2BN per year,
the National Trust and other perhaps lesser known organisations like LifeArc, a self-financing medical non-profit with annual expenditure of £50M per year.
Wood, bike, furniture, IT, waste and clothes recycling businesses and charity shops worth around £1BN a year.

Dan concludes the piece with an interesting caution - that we don’t forget to connect our often vaulting conceptual language and jargon to this enormous sector of ground-level, everyday activity:

If we want to build and grow a social economy, maybe this is where to get to work. We should be hustling, shifting behaviour, setting examples, co-operating, building, replicating, and investing. Of course, millions of us are. But too often it seems forgotten, quiet, all too very ordinary.

Michael Young declared that "everybody has the capacity to be remarkable". But this emphasis on the remarkable or extraordinary is dangerous, encouraging the adoption of fashionable terminology with a magnetic power to suck in time, people, and money.

For a decade or so after 2010, attention and funding flowed in the direction of anything that called itself a lab, hub, catapult, accelerator or incubator. I was never quite sure whether my dad's old joinery workshop qualified as a makerspace.

Today, this tattered phrasebook of social innovation seems to have been replaced with a new trick of hacking together two seemingly unrelated words - participatory foresight, relational intelligence or civic imagineering, for instance. Regenerative matter, collective innovation, and transdisciplinary agility. These extraordinary collisions seem to somehow magically usher in the future.

Yet Raymond Williams warned us that trying to "jump the future, to pretend in some way you are the future, is strictly insane". Such terminology can also alienate and marginalise non-professionals, the ordinary working class, and the less gullible who can't, don't, or won't speak the language.

In his 1958 essay 'Culture is Ordinary', Williams also warned us about people in "offices with contemporary décor, using scraps of linguistics, psychology and sociology" to unduly impress and influence others. He urged us not to be informed by this argot and focus instead on what is best and what is good - "not to be scared from these things by noises".

The social economy is ordinary and much bigger than the noise. It is the best basis for any future society.