Principles met

About the project

The co-operative council approach is one based on values. It is a case of ‘it’s not what you do, but the way that you do it’ – and the added social value that that difference can make – the co-operative difference. And there has always been recognition of the difficulty of measuring the co-op difference, in particular the ‘soft’ nature of some of the cultural and social outcomes that we aim to engender through working in this way.

Many discussions have taken place over the past couple of years to reach a conclusion as to how we can consistently measure the difference, however, to date there has been no agreed approach or framework developed against which cooperative councils can accurately evidence the difference and impact that is brought about by working co-operatively – until now…

The methodology presented in this paper should enable all co-operative councils to:

• Envisage the co-operative difference they want to make

• Understand how to multiply that impact across the place, people and public service – create a ripple

• Create a robust evaluation framework to enable them to better evidence the difference