Interview

Julian Manley has been an active member of CPA for more than a decade. He has served on its Board for several years and had a vital influence over it becoming a Community Benefit Society, co-owned by its members. This reflected Julian’s longstanding interest in sociocratic and cooperative principles of governance, an interest first triggered through his involvement with Mondragon in the Basque Country in Spain, and more recently manifest through being one of the key figures involved in the Preston Model of Community Wealth Building development in the UK. In this interview with Paul Hoggett, Julian describes how his involvement in another social innovation, Social Dreaming, brought about his connection to Mondragon, a massive network involving more than 70,000 worker cooperative members producing everything from high tech goods to consumer durables. Later, through this connection, Julian was able to contribute to the seeding of a similar initiative in Preston. The Preston Model offered a very different model of economic and social regeneration, one which flew in the face of neoliberal globalisation, and it quickly caught the eye of leftist policy makers in various parts of the UK. The connection between this model and green approaches to community regeneration is explored in the latter part of the interview.