Lambeth cooperative council
Lambeth is becoming the country's first cooperative council. That means in future the council will do things with local people instead of doing things to them. We believe that when you give residents more power, together with appropriate support, services from housing to street cleaning to care for the elderly will improve and our community will become stronger.
Read more about how to get involved and make a difference to your community
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We are working with community members, including young people, to set up the Young Lambeth Cooperative (YLC) which will be a community owned organisation, totally independent from the council. Once in place, the YLC will have responsibility for allocating budgets for some services for children and young people including adventure playgrounds and one o’clock clubs run previously by the council.
We want to encourage as many young people (aged 11 and over), parents, local residents, groups and organisations as possible to come on board to ensure that decisions are as representative of the borough as possible. Any person, no matter what their age, can get involved and we particularly want to hear from young people. There are lots of opportunities and people can be involved in different ways.
To register your interest, please complete the Young Lambeth cooperative registration form.
The Workshop
In September 2012 it was decided to start The Work Shop Project to work more closely with local residents to explore how existing pathways might possibly be re-shaped over time to develop new social and organisational infrastructures to make collaboration more effective.
It was set up in a vacant shop in West Norwood and in the initial phase, over three weeks in November and December 2012, 540 conversations were held between local residents and 58 council and partner staff members. These conversations led to some fresh ideas about how we could overcome the challenges of collaboration and how to make West Norwood a better place to live.
Read more about the Workshop in our report
A range of cooperative projects around Lambeth. These include projects where the council has given new powers direct to residents or transferred its assets and others which are community-led initiatives that fit in with the council's cooperative ethos.
Find out how you can get involved and make a big difference in your area.
You can find more information about the development of our work to become a cooperative council on this page.
Cooperative council toolkit
Support for people who live, work, provide and use services in Lambeth to move to more cooperative ways of working.