Co-operative Assistance Network Limited

Focusing on finance

From assisting clients setting up financial management systems, to helping them raise finance for their enterprises in the first place, CAN’s raft of finance-related products and services has seen a surge in demand over recent years.

CAN has supported Stokes Croft Land Trust (SCLT) to develop and launch their community share offer, which is raising money to transfer two properties otherwise known as the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft HQ in Bristol, into community ownership.

As we move to delivering training courses and workshops online and creating and delivering webinars, we are developing comprehensive guidance for participants and trainers, setting up registration systems and file sharing protocols and moving the contents of dozens of presentations from Powerpoint to a format more suitable to online working.

Our new Registered Address is:

1-3 Gloucester Road

Bristol

BS7 8AA

This is also the new address for our South West Regional Office.

All other contact details are unchanged.

We publish newsletters irregularly and infrequently but when we do we always include a Special Offer.  This time it's 15% off any Risk and Resilience Analysis purchased before 31 December 2020.

If this may be of interest to you, please contact our Governance Product Area Team Leader Austen Cordasco at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for an informal conversation.  Don't forget to claim the discount!

by Taking Over or Creating Buildings and Assets the Co-operative Way

The Webinar

A Doer's Guide to the Wicked Spreadsheet Financial Projection Tool
“If only I had a Wicked Spreadsheet”

Date and time: Wednesday 21st October 2020 at 1.00 p.m.

Duration: Two and a half hours.

Format: Presentation, demonstration and a collective practical exercise.

How much: Free of charge, thanks to funding provided by The Hive – a support programme for co-operatives delivered by Co-operatives UK in partnership with The Co-operative Bank.

Benefit: The Wicked Spreadsheet (the name was dubbed by an excited early adopter) provides a mechanism to help you look quickly at the financial viability and income projections of a potential space, place, property for long-term community wealth generation and ownership.  The Wicked Spreadsheet compiles learning from many previous similar exercises and is designed to remove the drudgery and technicality from the process.  The Wicked Spreadsheet will be yours to use on license for FREE and further ongoing support will be available from CAN, the creators.

Who should attend: Members of groups considering taking on community assets of any kind, officers of local authorities or infrastructure organisations facilitating community wealth building and opportunities for community ownership.

The presenter: Co-operative Assistance Network Limited (CAN) has been facilitating community enterprise and community asset building for more than thirty years.  Associate Deana Wildgoose has practical experience of both establishing and working with community enterprises, conducting feasibility studies and developing business plans.  She will bring the subject matter to life – never will numbers have been so much fun.

How to book: Please email Chris Funnell at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and tell us a few words or a web-link about your organisation and/or the project you have in mind.   Note: places are limited and it’s first come first served.

It will come as no surprise that CAN has been taking risk and resilience analysis seriously for a long time and even less of a surprise that our famous tool box now includes a tried and tested Risk and Resilience Analysis tool.

This analysis enables us to produce a Risk Register for any enterprise and to assess the preparedness of that organisation to mitigate against, cope with and recover from any of those risks occurring.  In turn this will assist the development of a strategy to apply limited resources (aren’t they always) to making the organisation increasingly resilient against future shocks.  Progress can be measured by repeating the exercise after an interval of, say, a year and comparing results.

We look at over 280 mitigation techniques to measure how well the organisation is prepared to avoid, reduce the impact of and recover from over 50 risk factors in 11 “departments”. Agility, internal resilience and external resilience are evaluated for the organisation as a whole and departments and risks that have a particularly low resilience are flagged up for priority attention.

Although this is a detailed analysis the process is very efficient by design in order to make it as affordable as possible.

We cannot say exactly how long the exercise will take (and therefore how much it will cost) because this is a consultancy service that will be tailored to the needs of each client, and our clients vary enormously in scale and style, and we will first need to agree a plan for data gathering.  But, as a guide and drawing from experience, we could expect data gathering to take between one and 2.5 days and analysis and report generation another day.  Please see our Prices and Terms of Trade for our rates.

From our experience over the last few months of helping our clients through the pandemic we have actually been able to identify more growth opportunities, funding and investment opportunities than during a normal trading period.  The availability of the cheap-and-easy Business Bounceback lending has enabled us, for example, to acquire “match” grants and investment for product development that had previously been (to say the least) more difficult.

If you feel that your enterprise, or one that you know, might be in a situation to develop but not sure how to find the resources then please contact Chris Funnel at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..  You may wish to take advantage of our First Consultation Free scheme.

To celebrate our 30th birthday and to help launch our new Website Start up Package we are delighted to offer you a 50% discount on this service if you place an order before 22June 2019. To claim your discount just quote Website Package Special Offer when you place your order.

Our ICT Product Area Team Leader is Austen Cordasco This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

If you have ever worked for or with CAN or supported us in any way, if you are a happy customer or a fellow co-operative development worker, you are warmly invited to our party.

If you intend coming, please let Chris know.