Hi, as any other business we track the treasury information, the income previsions, the liquidity previsions etc. Since these are very much standard overall I wanted to mention some alternative social metrics that we use in Catalonia. (This might be a theme I might repeat in the future, sorry for the future)
The cooperatives here voluntarily fill up a diagnostic tool which is call Balanç Social, the social balance sheet. It evaluates six major themes: economic function and profit distribution policy; the gender perspective; equity and internal democracy; environmental sustainability; social commitment and cooperation; and the quality of labor relations. Afterwards the evaluations are published online for transparency. It has started here but now the methodology is being applied also in other parts of Spain.
Although it is voluntary, the interesting thing is that some local governments have adopted it as an indicator in their funding evaluations. For example the social economy subsidies of the progressive Barcelona municipality, also considers whether a cooperative has done the social balance sheet or any other equivalent tool in their evaluation of the funding.
Thanks for the contribution Chris. These will be very useful when we grow a little more and have to account more carefully for mission drift.
I guess I’m interested that no one thus far as volunteered financial metrics. What do people use concretely to make sure their cooperatives are sustainable?
Throughout the year, we carry out actions from our organization and assign them to one or more principles. Then, at the end of the year we carry out a balance, known as “social balance”. In this way we measure the impact of our actions, guided by cooperative principles, to give them as much importance as economic metrics.
The tool we are working on will be free software and will allow us to monitor our cooperative actions in order to measure their impact. As soon as we launch it we will share it.
I’m on the board of https://development.coop and one of the potential offering we’re exploring is offering co-ops a sort of “holistic audit” that would cover stuff like this.
Webarchitects has a requirement in our rules (pdf) to produce annual social accounts (see section 7, the last page) however we have never had enough resources to actually do this — we have always been too busy trying to stay afloat… one day we might hopefully have the capacity to start doing this…
Last call for this! We are going to probably start pulling these together into a dashboard.
As I said above, still very interested in financial stability metrics that people pay attention to. But will take the other things people have said on board.
Guys, anyone of you track ecological metrics in your coop? (Like carbon footprint, energy use, waste production, rate of recycled materials used, air quality, etc.)
I was wondering if any coop has been implementing ecological accounting.