Cooperatives Europe Annual MeetingOpening SpeechDame Pauline Green Co-President

Colleagues and friendsIt is my pleasure to welcome you to the third Annual Meeting of Cooperatives Europe. It was in Manchester in 2005 that we met and brought together the national members of the ICA’s Europe region, andthe Brussels based representative bodies of the co-operative businesssectors.2006 and 2007 were the years in which we established CooperativesEurope and put in place the detailed processes that are necessary for anynew business. During 2008, the Executive and the Board moved beyondthe initial set-up phase, and began to drive the work in the direction thatwe believe will pay dividends for our members.On the administrative front, we now have a stable core staff team of six.We have our own premises – Cooperatives House Europe – which now ishome not just to Cooperatives Europe, but to CECOP, and a newinitiative supported by our Swedish, Danish(?) and Norwegian colleaguesto bring together the European co-operative housing sector, with greater focus on their shared ‘co-operative’ heritage.On the financial front, after two years of small deficits as the organisationestablished itself, in 2008 we made a Euro 15,000 surplus, allowing us to begin the process of replacing the funds that we had to take from our reserves to support the deficits in 2006 and 2007. We were grateful for the support of the global Board of the ICA in allowing us to use thereserves which, whilst technically those of Cooperatives Europe, wereactually built up by ICA Europe prior to 2005, and are subject to anagreement that requires the consent of the global Board before use.So, you can be confident that we are using your resources well, building ayoung, but stable, developing and growing co-operative organisation.But, what is most exciting is just what Cooperatives Europe is doing!

A lot has happened since 2005, but 2008 was, I believe, the year in whichCooperatives Europe began to show that it has the potential to fulfil thehopes and aspirations that we all had when we jointly created it in November 2005.A key element of our role is, of course, to influence decision-makers inBrussels, and that work is ably led by my fellow Co-President EtiennePflimlin, who will speak next.The Executive and the Board of Cooperatives Europe identified severalkey areas of work that they believed we should pursue. However, we hada major constraint on taking this work forward, and that was of course,that our funding, overwhelmingly derived from the redistribution of a percentage of your subscriptions to the global ICA, was not sufficient.Let me be clear, the ICA central office in Geneva has been engaged in amajor reform of its structures and its subscription formula to create anorganisation fit for purpose in the 21

century. Cooperatives Europe wasvery supportive of the need for reform, and has played a major part insupporting a radical change of direction for the ICA, to give moreresponsibility, and greater funding to its four regions in Europe, theAmericas, Asia/Pacific and Africa.As a consequence, over the last four years, we have secured an increasefrom 18% in 2004 to 43% this year in the percentage redistribution of subscriptions with a commitment to reaching 50% within the next twoyears. That increase has allowed us to build Cooperatives Europe into acredible organisation but, it does not allow enough to develop our work streams as we would like.The response of the Board of Cooperatives Europe was to develop a portfolio of possible work streams, for example, activities around climatechange and development, as well as two added value business services inenergy and pharmacy. We then invited our members to invest in thosework streams that best met their co-operative and business objectives.As a result, we have received additional funding of just over Euro100,000, with for example:

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Confcooperative in Italy putting up Euro 30,000 to be shared between energy and pharmacy work.

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The Co-operative Group in the UK putting £30,000 and fully paidsecondment into the office in Brussels for a year, to work on the