Hear from our Co-op Young Members’ Group

Our Co-op Young Members’ Group help us make sure the voices of young members are heard in Co-op.  

We caught up with the team to find out more about their work supporting Co-op in its mission to make membership work better for young people.  

Hi, we’re Caty, Iqra, Ivan, Nishika, Remell & Tom. We’re a core team of six Co-op Members aged between 16-25 and we work with Co-op for a few hours every month to share our voices, thoughts and ideas. We also help Co-op connect with more young members to make sure our collective voice is heard across the business. 

Shaped with young members, for young members

We’ve loved working with colleagues from across the business over the last 12 months to see how we can make Co-op Membership work even better for others our age. We’ve heard from thousands of other young people already to help us understand what young members want and need from Co-op and now we’re working with teams to build what we’ve learnt into future plans.  

Co-op is already responding to what we’ve heard, including by making it easier to take part in the annual AGM by reducing the spend threshold required to get a vote – something that we heard is a barrier for young members.  

We know young people want support accessing skills and opportunities, so when we were asked to help test a new employability toolkit for Co-op last year we jumped at the chance. We are happy to see Co-op has now made this online tool available for free to all members and the wider community.  

Looking to the future 

Good stuff is happening and there’s more coming up. This year we want to help break down what it really means to be a memberowner of a co-operative and why that’s different to other types of businesses, so more young members can understand our Co-op and hopefully take part in it. We want to encourage more young members to vote at our AGM to make sure their voices are heard.  

We are collaborating with The Co-op Foundation to launch an annual survey for young members to help us dig deeper into the issues young people have told us are important to them. We’ll be asking young members for their views and experiences to help ensure the work of the Co-op Foundation and Co-op Young Members’ Group continues to respond to and meets their needs.  

Get in touch

To learn more about Co-op Young Members’ Group visit www.coop.co.uk/CYMG,  email coopyoungmembersgroup@coop.co.uk or follow @coopyoungmembers on Instagram.