In April this year - and very much enabled by that support - our friends in Ireland took a step further, and founded a new co-op federation inspired by worker and social-community cooperatives like Great Care, Dublin Food Co-op and Belfast Cleaning Society.
Sam Toland is the Secretary of the new organisation and a long time Solidfund member himself. Here he reflects on the journey, Solidfund's part in making it happen, and their strategy for building awareness and solidarity through worker-led cooperation.
"Two kinds of cooperatives have been represented well in Ireland - farmers' and agricultural co-ops, and credit unions. But worker, social and community co-ops historically had no federal body or network to promote and advocate for their models of cooperation.
So in 2020 a group of cooperators from across Ireland set out to fix this, with worker cooperatives at the heart. We were supported with a £3,600 distribution from Solidfund that gave us confidence build our first association. We achieved real inter-cooperative collaborations and successfully applied for further funding for training networks. We did great joint advocacy work, including a very impactful submission on the upcoming Co-operative Societies Act in the Irish parliament. But it was hard work scaling up and maintaining the loose network model - and difficult to get cooperatives to fully commit as organisational members.
Originally we'd asked co-ops for a small financial contribution. Maybe because of the pandemic, even modest financial asks slowed or stopped co-ops from committing, and we lost momentum.
But the original Solidfund money later proved instrumental in an unexpected way. In spring 2026 we formed a steering committee to create a new federation, and agreed that the money should be applied to this new phase of the project, in the spirit of the original funding. With this modest resource behind us, we could ask co-ops and their governing bodies to put their reputation behind the idea - rather than asking for their cash straight away - and we got an enthusiastic reaction.
It allowed us to establish ourselves credibly in the eyes of prospective members, with a professional domain and email, a website, and a first in-person assembly to build momentum.
That meeting took place last April, and delegates from six co-operatives signed our founding constitution: one worker co-op, two social multi-stakeholder co-ops, two community co-ops and a credit union. The federation was registered on 18 June 2026 and we're now reaching out to international bodies aligned with our purposes, including the European federation of worker and social cooperatives, CECOP. So while we've needed to reach out beyond the country's very small ecosystem of classical worker co-ops, this project is very much worker led - in fact Solidfund itself has been a big inspiration for us in thinking about how to move forward.
What Solidfund and its members understood so well is the power of a modest injection of money with no strings attached - and no admin to deal with. It catalysed so much more than the size of the grant might suggest. Once we decided to keep things lean, it actually gave us a surprising amount of runway to get up and running and build the case for why member co-ops should contribute funds to our work in future years.
You can find our new Irish federation at the website cooperatives.ie - we look forward to working more with the worker co-ops in the UK and internationally, so watch this space!
Sam