Zebra will work with your organisation or community group to help you develop and improve the work that’s important to you by:
- Providing training that meets your needs
- Engaging in community development work
- Providing facilitatation services
- Offering external supervision
- Helping to write and implement policies
- Evaluating projects in a way that enables you to learn from what’s worked well
Our core values run through everything we do, so you can expect our work to be inclusive and build on your strengths, progress and successes. We generate our income from the work we provide.
We’re an equal pay workers’ co-operative, based in Plymouth and working mostly in the South West of England.
Plymouth Fairness Commission
The Commission (PFC) convened on April 17th to begin its year of work to assess, identify and make recommendations for the tackling of unfairness in the city.
Commissioned by Plymouth City Council and comprising a membership of around 25 individuals with backgrounds or roles of particular relevance to this task, PFC has a challenge: first to decide on what it means by fairness; then to engage in a thoroughgoing assessment of the city against the agreed principles of fairness; then to draw up clear, ambitious-whilst-achievable recommendations; and, throughout its existence, to engage with the City Council and other stakeholders such that there is clear commitment to implementing the recommendations.
Marc of Zebra Collective is one of the commissioners on PFC. He says, “I’m pleased to have been asked to join the commission. It’s a bigtask – to take a serious look at unfairness and to begin to tackle it – and this challenge is compounded by national / societal-level factors that maintain inequality. We must not be naive about this task in its context, but we are right to highlight unfairness where we identify it, and to say it is unacceptable to do nothing – indeed to be ambitious in attempting to tackle it.”
Fairness Commissions have sat in other cities such as Liverpool, Newcastle, and in the London borough of Islington (chaired by Spirit Level author Richard Wilkinson).
Go to www.plymouthfairnesscommission.co.uk to keep informed of progress.
Co-operatives
As a workers’ co-op we’re signed up to a set of co-operative values and principles which were first articulated by the Rochdale Pioneers in 1844, and which have been developed, refined and agreed on by generations of co-operators since. We’re members of Co-operatives South West and Co-operatives UK and make it our business to support other co-ops wherever possible.
We strongly believe that all human beings have a capacity for co-operation and fairness which is at least as strong as our capacity for competitive self-interest. And yet our social, political and economic systems are structured to encourage competition and reward ruthlessness. We believe this is the single most significant reason we find ourselves in the current global economic and ecological crisis, and the reason why there seems to be no clear way out. For a readable introduction to some of the research and evidence to support this, try It’s Co-operation Stupid by Charles Leadbeater.
