EEUK Director and Co-founder of Enterprise Educators UK’s Sustainable Society SIG, Catherine Brentnall from Manchester Metropolitan University, reflects on the recent ‘Co-operative Catalyst’ event, held at the University of Salford.

Last week, Enterprise Educators UK supported an event which brought together educators, co-operative practitioners and ecosystem partners for a ‘Co-operative Catalyst’ event to explore how enterprise education can support a thriving co-operative economy. The backdrop for the event is policy interest in expanding the co-operative economy and a recent government call for evidence on how this could be achieved. Co-operatives UK highlight cultural and educational barriers as a significant hindrance to co-operative growth, making the role of education and enterprise educators a vital one.

In science, a catalyst is a substance or agent that speeds up a reaction and makes a process happen faster. We could think of ‘co-operative catalysts’ as enterprise educators or partners who accelerate a shift towards co-operative thinking and business models, helping democratic enterprise ideas grow faster. The ‘co-operative catalyst’ day created a timely space for reflection and action on this. Throughout the day, contributors returned – explicitly and implicitly – to a question that continues to gather momentum in enterprise education: what forms of enterprise are students typically invited to imagine?

We began with a panel discussion on “Why co-ops? Why now?”, bringing together voices from across practice – from worker co-operatives to community-led housing and energy initiatives. These conversations grounded the day in lived experience, surfacing how co-operative models respond to contemporary challenges not simply through innovation, but through participation, power sharing and democratic structures that enable real, material improvements in people’s lives. As the day unfolded, we moved from rationale to practice. Mark Simmonds from Co-op Culture offered a rich account of what supporting co-operative start-up and development looks like on the ground, highlighting both the strengths of co-operative approaches and the gaps in mainstream enterprise support. This was complemented by a series of shorter sessions exploring how co-operative thinking can be translated into educational practice – from embedding ownership and regenerative thinking in the curriculum, to developing frameworks and tools that move beyond growth-led models and towards a co-operative and commons imagination. My colleague Dr Nor Yusup and I shared the potential of the ownership element of regenerative business theory to help elevate the question of ‘who owns it?’. You can read an accessible summary of this on page 17 of the spring edition of the Teaching Business and Economics journal. Across these exchanges, a consistent theme emerged: when we shift the questions we ask – towards ownership, participation, and who benefits – new possibilities for enterprise education begin to open up.

In the afternoon, Mark Simmonds took us through a sociocratic dialogue, where participants collectively explored what it means to become a ‘co-operative catalyst’ in their own context – surfacing both opportunities and barriers, and experimenting with more democratic approaches to structuring conversation and decision-making. What became visible through the day was that this question – ‘what do you need to be a co-operative catalyst?’ – is especially vital during these times of intensifying social and ecological pressures. Alongside the policy attention on expanding the cooperative economy, the idea of being a ‘cooperative catalyst’ feels less like a

niche interest and more like an existential one in the context of extreme wealth and social inequality, and the depletion of the communities and biosphere on which human society depends.

If co-operatives offer credible pathways towards more sustainable, democratic and place-responsive forms of economic activity, then the challenge for enterprise educators is not only to advocate for them, but to actively cultivate the conditions in which they can emerge and thrive. This calls for reflection – on how we teach, support and legitimise enterprise – but also for action: to experiment with new practices, redistribute voice and agency, and re-orient entrepreneurial aspiration towards collective wellbeing. In this sense, becoming a co-operative catalyst is not a fixed identity, but an ongoing commitment to reshaping the possibilities of enterprise in ways that are more aligned with the futures we urgently need.

On the day of the event, the event highlighted co-operatives not as a singular solution, but rather as a broader invitation: to expand the repertoire of organisational forms, ownership models and value logics that we make visible to students. As Suneel Kunamaneni reflects in his follow-up to the event, many of the challenges our students are drawn to – across food, housing, energy and community wellbeing – are not simply problems of innovation, but of coordination, governance and collective action. The conversations at the co-operative catalyst event resonated strongly with this perspective, suggesting that a fuller version of enterprise education may depend on how far we are willing to engage with these questions. You can read Suneel’s full reflection here: What forms of enterprise are students invited to imagine? And please join the Sustainable Society SIG to take part in this ongoing conversation and bring your reflections and actions to this agenda.