Nicky's view

Twenty years of social enterprise development. It's only when you stop and look back that you realise the progress that has been made. It's important to discuss this progress before we listen to the Voices in this book describe what could and should happen in the next 20 years. What has been done hasn't been easy and it is important to ask if it had to be this difficult and to ask if we could have gone further? Looking back, there is a lot of ground to cover and perhaps the best way is to identify some key moments.

In April 1985 I started work at the Norfolk and Norwich Co-operative Development Agency (CDA), first as a researcher and then as a business adviser. It was important to me because I met Sally Kelly, with whom I would work for the next 26 years and because I became involved in the weird world of 1980s co-op development. CDAs were popular both with the Conservative government and with local authorities of all political persuasions. The Tories liked us because we promoted enterprise and would help to reduce unemployment. Labour councils liked us because of the traditional party links with the co-op sector. We were seen as an alternative to capitalism, red in tooth and claw. The movement attracted a lot of fellow travellers, people who wanted to advise or run co-ops because they were non-hierarchical alternatives to the mainstream, rather more than they wanted to run a business that needed to make a profit. However, a lot of people who worked in CDAs went on to form the bedrock of community development, social enterprise, micro-finance and a whole load of other ways of creating sustainable economic development in the following 20 years.

In spite of odd training sessions that involved us all linking arms and taking our shoes off and constantly moving furniture out of hierarchical lines into co-operative circles, we developed a robust methodology of how to set up and run businesses that traded for social and environmental purpose as well as making money.