This is a CTP of initiative: RIPESS/ APRES‐GE (Switzerland)
In 2004, the association for the promotion of Social Solidarity Economy (SSE) - APRES-GE - emerged in Geneva (Switzerland). The interviewee considers that this was a critical turning point because it was the first time that the idea of gathering different kinds of organisations into a platform in the field of SSE was put into action.
Until then, there was no such organization in Switzerland, as he explains: "Despite the growing number of cooperatives in Switzerland, which was as high as in several other countries such as Italy or France, there was a lack of a structured SSE movement in our country". Therefore, a bottom-up process aiming at organizing by incorporating members of this movement into a network was launched, with an inclusive or integrative vision. By "integrative vision", the founders meant that the network would comprise several kinds of entities: "What really differed between the French and the Swiss perspectives was that we intended to gather actors according to values and practices rather than legal status". More concretely, this meant that the federation would attract not only cooperatives or non-profit structures (such as associations) but also public limited companies. However, all of them would have to share common values and practices related to SSE. The federation of SSE actors would be constituted according to SSE principles (in terms of governance, salary and wage conditions, sustainable development etc.) rather than sector and/or economic issues.
APRES-GE was concretely founded in 2004 by 3 persons, following a decision which had been taken by them in the train coming back from the European Social Forum the year before. After having registered the association, they quickly organized the first "SSE days", which took place in the Workers University of Geneva on the 18th and 19th of November 2004 and to which around 100 organizations and 200 persons participated. During plenary sessions and workshops, several key issues were raised, such as the lack of recognition of the utility of SSE organizations, the most adapted legal status for them, their relations with the State as well as lucrative enterprises, their management etc. This two-day gathering resulted on a consensus on the creation of a SSE Chamber, including potential services it could offer to its members and the project to develop a common ethical Charter (which is the subject of another CTP). These two days were fundamental because they showed the shared interest of many actors from different sectors(such as education, local agriculture, building sector) for a federation that would defend and promote their interest. Such enthusiasm convinced the founders of the merits and appropriateness of their initiative.
At the beginning, APRES was created by 3 men, who were all already involved in the Swiss SSE movement with an expertiserespectively on finance, housing and work integration issues. For that matter, they had very complementary skills and expertise: the first one was a former banker who had reconverted in SSE; the second one was at the time a green representativewith a political vision;the third one was at the head of one of the biggest work integration companies in Switzerland, bringing practical inputs. This expertise brought not only credibility but also quite legitimacy to their association. As the interviewee explains, "the 3 founders had credibility not only with future members (ie. players on the ground) but also with key actors, including local authorities". Moreover, they brought their networks with them, which eventually helped to reach potential members.
Despite the lack of resources, they quickly managed to attract members from different sectors: "From the beginning, we managed to get a rather wide basis of members from different sectors, with strong enthusiasm because people realized that they did work neither witha business perspective, nor with a public one". Founders' effort would be focused on the diffusion of SSE and sustainable development principles in order to help them make sense of that "third-sector" perspective.
The role of local authorities was limited at the beginning. The founders did not seek public money for the creation of their association, in order to remain fully independent:"To us, it was very important to be able to make propositions and to look for support from local authorities while maintaining a total independence from them, especially regarding governance".
This desire for autonomy also influenced the relations with political parties.Moreover, the founders wanted to apply the inclusive vision they had applied for the recruitment of members: instead of becoming "the Chamber of the Greens" or "The Chamber of the Socialists", they tried to link ties with various political parties, including representatives from the centre-right. They decided to take a social innovation stance with a balanced representation of political parties.
Closed connections were also developed with the academic field from the beginnings. This was facilitated by the fact that one of the founders was alreadya lecturer in higher education. Academics were invited to various events (including the first "SSE days" organized right after the creation of the Chamber) and they provided inputs and advice concerning future developments of the Chamber.
Two earlier related events were central to the creation of APRES-GE (2004): first, the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre (2002) which made the founders aware of the necessity to federate SSE actors back home; and second, the European Social Forum of Paris (2003) which acted as a trigger to do so.
One of the founders, who had already attended the first edition of the World Social Forum (WSF) in 2001, organized a delegation from Geneva to go to its second edition, held in Porto Alegre from 31 January to 5 February 2002.The WSF is a space that, according to its Charter of Principles, is dedicated to "reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society [...] which are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Mankind and between it and the Earth (WSF, 2001). The event, aimed at facilitating social transformations,was organized at the time simultaneously with the World Economic Forum (WEF), to protest against it and to propose an alternative.
During the 2002 edition, SSE became an important theme and was recognized as an integral part of the movement for an alternative globalization. Participants from all over the world had the opportunity to exchange about their own practices and the lessons they learnt while trying to apply SSE principles. The principle motivation of the Geneva delegation was"to see what was happening outside Switzerland and to be able to take some distance". They came back convinced with the idea of "the necessity to gather all members of the Geneva SSE together". In the interviewee's own words, "we had to travel very far away to come to the conclusion that there were many people, acting in isolation, who needed to be federated. We thought: 'If others managed to do so, we should do it as well". Processes such as learning-by-doing, sharing experiencesand mimicry were central for the creation of APRES-GE.
After the 2002 WSF edition, the founders went to its regional equivalent, the European Social Forum (ESF) held in Paris from 12 to 15 November 2003. Concretely, the decision to create a SSE network in Geneva was taken in the train coming back from Paris: "When we came back from the ESF, we decided in the train to create that organization. We went for a beer and we thought that the acronym APRES [which stands for Association de la PRomotion de l'Economie sociale et Solidaire] was a beautiful name [...] We almost did the first General Assembly in the club car!". Exactly one year after, the first "SSE days" were organized in Geneva.
Even though the founders did not face any contestation as such when creating their association, they had to overcome several interlinked difficulties: the lack of an SSE vision at the national level and consequently the absence of a recognition of a third sector (neither public, nor business-related) as well as the tendency for SSE organizations to identify with other companies in their economic sector rather than with other SSE organizations. At the federal level, there was not historically any inclusion of SSE references in Swiss policies. As the interviewee explains, the division of the country between the German-speaking and the French-speaking parts was an obstacle to the development of a SEE vision:"We can see that SEE movements are very limited in Germany because this country lacked a tradition of academic research on the subject. Since the German part of Switzerland, which is predominant at the national level, is highly influenced by what happens in Germany, there was no SEE perspective at the federal level". Similarly, very few references were made to SEE at the local level.
Consequently, there was a missing recognition of a third sector, which would go beyond the traditional public/private division: "We were in a dichotomous world, when it came down to actors' representations, between public and private or between for-profit and non-profit organizations". In the absence of a historical social economy movement, the main challenge consisted in the recognition of this SEE third-sector. Such recognition was favoured by processes such as the dissemination of knowledge, especially towards members who still identified themselves as part of a sector, rather than as part of a third-sector of the economy.
At the internal level, the members of APRES, despite the enthusiasm they showed when the Chamber was created, still struggled to position themselves on the economic spectrum, usually divided by sectors: "We still had people who recognized themselves as part of an economic sector. For example, local farmers tended to be linked to other farmers without sharing common values. Our job consisted in showing that a local agriculture cooperative project was more related to a sustainable housing cooperative than to the industrial farmer in the field near-by". This difficulty was overcome throughmeetings of members and a work on values, based on a participative methodology. As the interviewee recalls, "this was a process with a strong human dimension which led people to feel like being part of that community of the beginnings".
The creation of APRES was obviously a key moment of the initiative, and the founders understood quickly that there was potential for the development of a SSE movement in Geneva.
The success of the SSE days in 2004, characterized by a strong craze with over 100 organizations attending the event, convinced the founding members of the relevance of a SSE platform. This success provided the impetus for organizing really quickly activities that did not involve too much money. For example, they rapidly published a guide for SSE entrepreneurs in Geneva providing legal, fiscal and other kind of practical advice in order to make things easier for enterprises seeking to foster and turn to SSE. They also created “le café des bonnes pratiques” which is a monthly session of exchanges between members organized during lunchtime (and which still exists). As the interviewee explains, the founding members understood that they had to ride the wave of success quickly by providing concrete outputs to actual or potential members. They understood there was a demand for these kind of activities, and, in this sense, they anticipated the need for a platform which would organize them.
Moreover, they not only saw the absence of a third-sector as a problem (as stated in the contestation part), they also considered it as an opportunity because it helped in preventing potential rivalries between social economy and solidarity economy: “If there had been the vision of a third-sector, it would have meant that a structured social economy movement already existed and sought to defend its interest and his place as it was the case in other countries like France [...] Since there wasn’t a structured cooperative movement, we didn’t have to cope with rivalries between solidarity economy and social economy”. This absence of a third-sector was indeed felt as a potential factor of success.
They also understood quickly that this absence of an historical structured SSE movement, would force them to take an educational role by communicating about SSE: “It took us a lot of work and we had to make huge effort to explain what SSE was about [...] and especially that it wasn’t limited to work integration social enterprises”. In order to do so, they used several channels of access: “We started to communicate by participating to public conferences [...] We relied on existing dynamics because we [the founders] were the pillars of important networks [...] So we tried to generate buzz: we organized conferences, we made people come, we approached every political parties [...] all of that in order to gradually create an awareness of the SSE concept”. More generally, the founders understood that Geneva represented a fertile ground for the development of a SSE movement but that someone had to take the lead by convincing people and organizations to join such movement.
The choices made by the founders had implications on the Chamber's future developments. They recognized that the start-up dynamic of the beginnings (i.e. a dynamic a creativity) which attracted numerous members, was lost somewherebecause of an institutionalization or bureaucratisation process. Concentrated on the internal challenges faced by the Chamber (regarding its structure and the development of criteria for membership), the founders began to miss what was critical for their members, especially their economic development.As recognized by the interviewee, "I think that we did not pay enough attention to our members' economic development challenges, with members thinking 'Values and principles are nice but regarding my economic problems, they do not help'". This progressive shift, leading to a discrepancy between the Chamber's work and its members' demands, was not addressed as quickly as it should have, from the point of view of the founders.
This can be partly explained by the fact that the association status chosen by the founders has turned to prevent rapid changes from happening. As the interviewee explains, "When you have cumbersome governance structures, which means that you need to go through the board for each strategic decision, the reactivity becomes limited. We should have put a strategic steering to be able to reposition rapidly". The balance between participative governance (one of the key values of the SSE movement) and fast responsiveness(essential for members of this movement) was not easy to find.
On a more general level, the SSE concept has also lost some attractiveness these last 10 years. As the interviewee recognizes, "The SSE concept stopped to be sexy at some point and this was not understood by our team quickly enough. And we have seen a lot of new different projects develop, in the spirit of what we can see in the movie 'Demain'". These new forms of engagement, which are very practical in essence, might not be that compatible with the network model, as acknowledged by the interviewee: "For the young generation, the Chamber/network/federation model might have become obsolete". The role of the Chamber might still be relevant yet, especially regarding its capacity to develop long-term visions on SSE issues, as was raised by the interview:"The SSE movement has been a pioneer. We have now to work with other movements, such as the benefit corporations or the transition movements, which are very close, sometimes closer than what one can imagine, but which miss an integrative vision".
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