Just Change Update ...directly linking communities Our views, news and more !! Just Change in 2010 2010 Somehow the act of removing one year's calendar from the wall and replacing it with a new one seems to provoke new ideas, new inspiration, new challenges. So it has been with us. We have come a long way but are yet to arrive where we want to be. The journey continues... The year gone by was a year of consolidation. Three team members, Shikha, Subhash & Dilip from Just Change Trust were on deputation to the Just Change India Producer Company – one to each branch. During the year they have worked to streamline, strengthen and put in place place robust systems to make the business sustainable. Their success has been phenomenal and tcommunity members have taken over. All three branches are computerised and women there handle computers and the JC software. Speaking of which, 2009 also saw the emergence of a fully operational, in house custom designed software package, JC CASH, designed by Manoharan, our in-house software & sytems genius! It handles all the business transactions of JCIPC including the accounting, stock and other related number crunching. Another huge success! So we are almost there ... but not quite!! We are at a point where scale has become crucial. Even if we reach optimum scale in our three current Branches – BVM, SAWARD and RGNS – it will still not be enough. So we need to scale up by bringing in new members. We also discovered that groups that have not done any kind of business activity require a lot of support just to get the hang of the basics. We are looking to attract larger groups who already have some kind of business experience. By drawing them into the JC fold, we are likely to be able to achieve the volumes and scale we need much faster. Another issue is that we have been very consumer focussed. Though it was a deliberate decision to build a secure market by organising consumers the time has come for us to ensure that this will result in more significant benefit to our producer members. Again we are faced with the scale factor. And so 2010 becomes a year of challenges. A challenge to scale up to ensure significant benefit to both producers and consumers, and to work on the third leg of JC - drawing in investors. We aim to do this through a number of strategic approaches. First, work with AMS to get Just Change Retail started in Gudalur. Building on the success of the AMS savings programme the time seems right to launch into trading. Initial conversations have been held and during the year we will probably see trading operations through Just Change shops starting off in Gudalur as well. Secondly, work with SVA in Orissa to draw them more into the family. Though they are founding shareholders of the Company, we have not had the resources to work as closely with them as we would have liked to do. Thirdly, apart from our current members, we are talking to a few large producer organisations to explore thepossibility of them joining us. And finally, we hope to launch our investor model. So watch this space and wish us luck for 2010....another year of change, another year of Just Change. Thank you all for interest and continuing support. Just Change Team India Four's Company too! The fourth Annual General Meeting of Just Change India Producer Company Ltd (JCIPC) was held in October 2009 at Kozhikode, Kerala. Around fifty shareholders from all members groups were present. Celebrations began with a prayer and lighting of the lamp, and four candles symbolising the Company's years of existence. Stan lead the group in an ice-breaker, dividing everyone into groups – cats, dogs, chickens, cows – for a quick & enthusiastic 'Raja Says' (a version of Simon Says) before getting down to business. Each member group presented a Branch Report highlighting their financial progress and community mobilisation efforts over the last few months. Group discussions for the rest of the day focused on how to get ALL federation members involved in JC. Four teams stood in four corners of the room. A pack of biscuits was placed behind each team. A rope tied into a loop was placed in the middle of the room. One member from each team came forward to hold onto the rope. Stan announced that the aim of the game was to grab a pack of biscuits without letting go of the rope. rope gameRound I: Once the rules were explained, two teams decided to send in 'bigger & stronger' people! All four people pulled and pulled in different directions without any success. No one managed to get a single biscuit. Round II:This time the people were sent in had wisened up to things, and instead of pulling, they all moved together to each corner and reached out to get the biscuits. When Geetha couldn't reach, Ratnakumari helped her! This way, all four people managed to get a pack of biscuits for their teams! Stan wound up the game talking about unity, and working together towards fulfilling a goal. If one in the group pulls in a different direction, we will not succeed. “But”, he pointed out, “after all your hard work, where are the biscuits?” No group had any of the biscuits as Stan had managed to collect them all! He explained how sometimes despite our hard work and efforts, the benefits or gains go to someone else! For example, our hard earned wages from the NREGA (right to work programme) go from us to local traders. In the game, Stan represented markets and traders, the teams were consumers. And the biscuits? Any one in the team could have handed the biscuits over to those holding the rope, but none felt enough ownership over the biscuits to do that! Similarly, JC can only work when our Federations and Sangams feel ownership over our business! The evening session was an open one, and there were requests for more discussion about the concept of JC. Vijaykumar from SAWARD explained the idea, based on our trading experiences over the last five years. He spoke about markets exploiting both consumers and producers, since these groups seem to have opposing interests. But the only ones who benefited where those with capital and therefore, power. He explained how buying rice directly from producers in Madurai gave a benefit to both sides. Dilip used examples of coriander and sugar to demonstrate how JC was able to hold prices for consumers, when market prices hit the roof. On the other side of the coin, when the price of coconuts and coconut oil crashed, JC was able to pay our producers a steady price! The first days events wound up with a sing-song after dinner. After the a brief recap of previous sessions, the morning of the second day was spent acting out a role play. Each team was given 10 minutes to prepare a role play on how they would convince Bhagyasree SHG to join JC. There were a lot of laughs and chuckles as everyone really got into their roles. jcipc Having come up with many ideas on how we can spread the message of JC to our members and increase member participation in JC, we split up into groups to discuss practicalities. The long list of plans included designing posters, songs, pamphlets, street plays, mela (fete) and so on. After a short break, the events for the day wound up with the formal AGM, for the passing of some resolutions and legal requirements. Stan thanked the shareholders for their enthusiastic participation. A special mention was made on behalf of those shareholders from Orissa who could not be with us. PK Shobana, one of the Company's Directors, proposed the vote of thanks, thus concluding the largest meeting of the JC family for this year! INVESTORS - the third part of Just Change We envisage Just Change as a cooperative of producers, consumers and investors. So far we have focussed on establishing direct links between producer and consumer communities; work on bringing investors into the JC fold has not yet begun. With volumes of trade both in India and between India and the UK growing steadily, the need to create mechanisms by which investment can be brought into the equation is now imminent. We hope to give you an overview of the Just Change concepts of capital, investment and return. Participative CapitalIn mainstream business, the most common method of attracting investment is through the issue of shares by a company. The buying of shares by an investor goes towards providing the company with the capital it needs and the returns paid by the company to the investor over time provide the financial incentive for the investor to invest his monies in the company by buying such shares. However, conventional notions of ‘capital’ and ‘investment’ do not sit well within the Just Change model. Just Change talks of participative capital, based on the premise that it is not the infusing of capital alone that generates surplus or profit. A producer also “invests” in the economic activity of a company through the act of production, as does a consumer through the act of consumption. All three actors (i.e., producers, consumers and investors) through their independent actions contribute directly or indirectly to the generation of surplus/profit. It must not be assumed that all surplus generated by the company should be automatically owned by the investors of capital. Just Change challenges the correlation otherwise made between capital and ownership of/entitlement to surplus of a company. We believe that capital investment plays a participative role along with labour and consumption. Hence the distribution of surplus must be mutually agreed upon by all three parties and cannot be the sole prerogative of infusers of capital. While Just Change accepts the notion of “investment” being the act of putting in something in anticipation of returns at a later time, we argue that all returns or gains need not be purely monetary. The JC construct of returns seeks to recognise other forms of incentives which we believe are somewhere intrinsic to human nature – though perhaps forgotten or eclipsed by conventional notions of ‘gains’ or ‘incentives’. The larger focus of such financial participation would be the social return on investment – though measurable social benefit to the community – and inculcating within the investor a feeling of having a long term stake and involvement in the community invested in. By ‘social returns’, we refer to incentives which are based on a broader concept of ‘value’ than incentives located within traditional economic paradigms; broadly, gains and benefits identified by stakeholders and communities to which, conventionally, market values are not ascribed. For example, member of the Ambitampotty Consumer Society point out how important it is for them to have women running their local shop. They also sell locally grown goods like bananas, coconuts and pepper, thus keeping some of their money circulating within their local economy instead of letting it leak out. They have created atleast two jobs for their members, but none of these benefits can be measured or counted by the conventional yardstick of monetary returns. From the point of view of Just Change, such investments would be valuable not just from the point of view of financial infusion, but through the involvement of likeminded persons in helping to steer the economic progress of the community. We hope our investor model will be founded on the principles of participative capital and non-financial incentives. The focus at this point of time is on determining the modalities of and frameworks within which instruments for investment may be established. We hope to report further developments on the investment framework in the coming months. SAVING for a JC day savings at srimaduraiValli & Saraswathi work with the Adivasi Munnetra Sangam (AMS) at Devarshola in Gudalur. For the last few years they have been collecting savings from 30 adivasi villages in Devarshola. Almost 250 families have been saving regularly and have a total of fifty thousand rupess deposited in their bank, the Adivasi Mutual Fund. “The biggest advantage of savings is that we have money to pay our annual health insurance” says Valli. “For the last two years, eight out of twelve families in Board village, Devarshola, have paid their insurance premium from their savings accounts” (the Gudalur Adivasi Hospital has a community insurance programme for member of the AMS which covers all their basic health needs). The AMS is a founding member of Just Change and the first to experiment with direct community to community trading. However, during this pilot trading phase, the problems of credit and indebtedness were highlighted. AMS realised that they were not yet ready to take on the risk of credit management. Instead, they decided to start a savings programme for villages and individual families. In an age of mushrooming micro-credit and self-help groups, the AMS was certain they wanted to focus on savings, not on loans! “We need to stay out of debt and be independent for all our needs” says KCKrishnan of the Mullukurumba tribe. “Though our incomes have increased, we are not able to keep the money circulating within our economy and it flows out of our community.” He talks about the Postman economy of the adivasis, where families deliver their hardearned wage labour money straight into the hands of local traders from whom they buy household goods. They don't benefit from the money, just receive it and pass it on immediately. Savings Coordinators In 2007, eighteen adivasis joined as Savings Coordinators to monitor and keep accounts of savings in AMS villages. At the beginning of 2010, about 140 villages of the AMS have started saving. So far, about 1400 member families saved over Rs.5 lakhs (around ₤7000). Like the families of Board village, many use their savings to pay annual health insurance premiums. Others use it to repay old debt or to spend during festival seasons and stay out of further debt. On an average, savings vary from Rs.10-25 per week. AMS currently supplies tea, coffee, honey and soaps to the JC network, and buys coconut oil from JC Kerala. This year, they hope to start full-scale trading in Gudalur and their savings programme has laid the perfect foundation for Just Change!