By recognising and rewarding these six capitals, a more ethically grounded concept of wealth guides our human endeavours to create, distribute and reinvest forms of capital to meet a wide variety of needs.

The FairShares Model V3.0 is implemented through:

• five values and principles (01);
• six key questions (02);
• five learning and development methods (03);
• four legal identities (04)
• seven ICT support platforms (05).

They were initiated through a research programme on democratising charities, co-operatives and social enterprises involving academics at Sheffield Hallam University and Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK, and developed as part of an EU Erasmus+ project to create FairShares Labs. The model promotes cooperative social entrepreneurship that recognises and enfranchises the providers of different types of capital contribution.

Memberships (and shares in companies and cooperatives) can be offered to investors of every type of capital by redesigning companies, cooperatives, associations and partnership to fully recognise and reward enterprise founders, workforce members, users/customers and the creators/providers of financial capital.

First, we devised a set of values and principles based on a definition of social enterprise created in January 2012 by Social Enterprise International Ltd.  We link these values and principles to key questions for enterprise incubation and development.

Second, we identify who is best able to answer each question to develop a design philosophy and governance model.  Social auditing and diagnostic tools can help develop the architecture for ongoing development of ownership, governance and management systems.

Lastly, to encourage the social systems to endure, we apply the design principles to model constitutions for companies, co-operatives, associations and partnerships.  The model constitutions provide a kind of social DNA for the replication of the five principles by implementing them through new approaches to ownership, governance and management. We believe these systems will make it easier to achieve UN 2030 sustainable development goals.

From 2019, you will be able to obtain support for developing your FairShares ideas by joining a local or virtual FairShares Lab. Each lab will provide workshops and support tools to help you consider the questions in a FairShares Canvass.

Through workshops, learning processes and with coaching and support, you will be able to design your multi-stakeholder co-operative enterprise by answering the questions in your FairShares Canvass.

Photo by Gog Llundain

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(16 mins) Felix Weth — Fairmondo is an online marketplace owned by its users. It is open to professional as well as private sellers, with no general restrictions on what products and services can be offered, except for illegal offers or offers deemed unacceptable by our members. By contrast, through the positive promotion of products that fulfill a set of criteria for “fairness,” Fairmondo makes it easy for users to shop in line with their values. These criteria are constantly open for discussion and improvement by members and the broader user base. Founded in Germany in 2012, Fairmondo is a multi-stakeholder cooperative with open membership for every person who feels affected by its activities. Its statutes include a legally binding commitment to uncompromising transparency and democratic accountability. The managing board is elected by the employees, to ensure a culture of mutual respect within the operating team.

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Rory Ridley-Duff is a reader in cooperatives and social enterprise at Sheffield Business School, director of Social Enterprise Europe, and founder of the FairShares Association. They use Loomio to model their governance structure online, for effective, equitable stakeholding.

FairShares Association is a loose network of educators, researchers, and consultants  interested in multi-stakeholder co-ops. We’ve got people in France, Australia, New Zealand, and now in America as well.

There is no way of all meeting face to face, realistically. We use Loomio to keep our discussions alive.

The philosophy of FairShares is to grow more direct forms of democracy (over representative democracy). Because Loomio can have nested groups, you can have high levels of participation from people who are loosely connected, but you can also have people who are on governing bodies.

We like the combination of very open forums where you have have ‘one person one vote’ and open debates, but a group of members could also be making a decision around a change to the constitution, for example.

I think you make better decisions when you have inclusive, democratic processes. Particularly when it’s structured the way that Loomio structures it.

In the European project, we wanted to engage the research team with the wider network. That was a project on work integration in social enterprise, and there were five countries involved. The fact that you could translate text on Loomio was appealing, because people in different countries could write in their own language.

I believe in the integration of users and members of the community into an organisation that has substantial worker involvement or worker control. FairShares is a philosophy for doing that. It can act as a guide to the way you actually constitute your organisation, but I think, more powerfully, it’s a set of principles.

You can have a store who recognises who the founders, users, producers, and supporters. That’s the way that FairShares looks at the world; we organise around those four interest groups. We’ve set up our Loomio to model our governance, with different subgroups, and everybody in the general assembly.

What Loomio does, which email doesn’t do, is give you an audit trail of your decisions. It enables you to function like you’ve got a general meeting on all the time. All of the members get proposals, and they get time to consider and vote on the issues.

Loomio enables people whose voices were normally not heard to exercise their voices more effectively. People who were usually very dominant weren’t as dominant when it was being run through Loomio.

I’m quite hopeful for a technology-enabled sharing economy, where the organisations are cooperatively owned, rather than being owned by absentee investors. We will gradually work toward a genuinely participatory democracy at work. It’s the marriage of technology and the thinking of FairShares that will create the ability for different constituent groups to really bargain with each other as equals.

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