Introduction
Hello everyone! Today I want to share my experience on our Cooperatives Officers Meeting.
I have really learned a lot in the past few hours and it is all thanks to our member turned teacher Mr. Sanchez. He really opened our minds today. He was also very clever, just when we thought it was just a simple thing. Then he surprises us by revealing the truth behind what he did. Truly a very smart guy.
Meeting Start!
The meeting started around 9AM in the morning. When the meeting started he throws us a curved ball at the start. He said that he will give us 5 minutes to think up for answers for two questions that is he going to asked us. He said that he will start at the front of the crowd.
All of the people then turned their attention on me since I just moved to the front to take a picture of the whole scene. I immediately turned my concern and said please don't me go first. I am quite a new officer and honestly I don't know if I could give a good answer.
And so he moved the order from front to back, to back to front. Which really is quite ideal for me coz like I said I am new and I wanted to know what the others would answer and so I can get ideas from them.
Then Mr. Sanchez turned to the board and wrote the questions for us to answer.
He also explained to us clearly what the questions mean and how we could answer them. Honestly this was clearly to measure how each one of us view the Cooperative and how we could improve it. After the 5 minutes he gave us was over, now it's time for us to show our answers to the questions.
Each One Of Us Answered The Question
Obviously I was not in the picture, coz I was the one who is taking the pictures in the front most 😅
Anyways I was so surprised by the answers each and everyone of them gave. I can clearly see their love, passion and dedication to the Cooperative, Community and to Mother Nature as well.
The answers that really stood out for me were the following:
- "We need to plant trees near water sheds in order to produce more water and help keep the water sheds clean."
- "We need to plant more beautiful plants and flowers around our office so that we may look presentable to the outside and encourage more potential customers to our mini-hotel and function hall areas."
- "We need to take good care of our customers and ensure that we will have enough water supply soon to supply all of our customers day in and day out."
- "We need to have a water filtering system installed in our office so we can offer clean filtered water to the people at a very low price, which then open business opportunities for people living in the mountain areas of our town."
- "We need to find ways to help the community, we have the funds to do it. It's just a matter of what we should do to have a meaningful impact to the community around us."
All of the other answers were good as well both those above are the one's that really stand out to me. To be honest, I wasn't expecting these kind of answers as I thought that most of them really didn't care for our Cooperative as I felt that we were stagnant for a couple of years.
You might be wondering why I felt that way. My answer is because I never heard of something the Cooperative has done that is noteworthy for the past few years that I have been with the Cooperative.
Anyways, my answer to the questions where. We need to have a suggestion box, so we will know what our customers think of our services and they may be able to give us ideas on how to improve our services. They could also suggest things we can do to the community as well. By doing this, we are extracting ideas from more people than all of our officers combined. And we never know what kind of crazy bright idea people will have. Just like what we were doing right now, sharing all of our ideas and goals for the Cooperative. There might be people out there who can give us ideas on how we could improve that we can never think about. As they say more heads are better than one right?
As for the second question, my answer was really simple. If there is any work to be done that needs a volunteer. I will offer my time and effort for the greater good of the Community and our Cooperative.
After all of us have answered the question. He then took out a piece of paper that has a list of all of our answers in it. He said "These are all the answers that you all have given me during this time. To be quite frank these are much better than the ones' written in your 5 year Development Plan". We were all stunned by the shocking turn around. We all thought that he only asked us that question so that he will know where we stand the cooperative.
He told us that if he asked us to come-up with another 5 year Development Plan it would not have resulted the way he has it now. The goal for this activity was for us to formulate a 5 year Development Plan without making it sound that we are making one.
Totally brilliant! I couldn't think of any more words to describe this man. I mean when I do read back at the question it does sound like making a 5 year Development Plan ain't it? But the way he told us to, it feels like it was just your casual question that all of us never really thought of it.
After he told us of a recap on all the answers we gave him. He told us that all of our answers were great. But now we need to weigh all of those and he introduced "Cost Benefit Ratio" to us.
Cost Benefit Ratio is essentially weighing the cost to make a plan a reality vs the benefits we or the community might get. He sited that if a plan that costs 200 thousand will only benefit a hundred people doesn't look as good as a plan that costs 50 thousand but will benefit a thousand people. It doesn't necessary mean that the first plan is bad, it's just we need to give more priority to plans that have a much higher Cost Benefit Ratio. Which does make sense and we all agreed to it. Hopefully we can pull through all of the plans we all suggested so far.
Lunch Time
12PM is fast approaching so he decided to let us have our lunch break. During these occasions, our cooperative will always provide lunch for us. We each one had one packed lunch for each of us. Sadly these are the only photos I got for lunch since I took out my lunch pack and went home 😅. It's not that I don't want to eat with my co-officers, it's just I have a son to feed so better get myself home 😇
Afternoon Sesson
The afternoon session was different from the morning one. Since he was already done with the agenda of letting us make a 5 year Development Plan for the Cooperative. Now it's time to tackle on some other areas that needs fine tuning. And Mr. Sanchez really does have sharp mind to tell us some flaws on how we do things currently.
One of our goals for our 5 year Development Plan is to gather/recruit more members for our Cooperative. He noted out to us, if we want more people to get interested in our Cooperative we need to stop doing old fashion boring Pre-Membership Education Seminar (PMES). All cooperative members must under-go this seminar before one could get accepted to become a member of any cooperative.
The problem with our current PMES is that it takes too long to finish and is quite boring. He said that our PMES should be short and precise. One thing he suggested to us is to make a little story that will cover a lot of ground during a PMES. Since during PMES we need to tell to the participants what a Cooperative is, how it started and it's core values. All of this can be done by telling a short 2 to 3 minute story and he actually made one for us today.
The story he told us about was a story about a certain place where poverty was quite rampant. Three friends thought of a way that will hopefully let them out of the rat race. All of them were poor and couldn't make a business all alone. The first one offered salt, the second one offered flour and the third one offered corn. They banded together to sell all of their products in a single business. They buy their own products and sell the ones they can't consume. Soon the other small time merchants who saw them asked them if they could join in as well and they did. Soon the business bloomed and grew. And that's when the Cooperative was born.
He told us that the story is a little crude but if given the time he knows we could make a better one. What the story has pointed out is that the three friends cooperated together to form a business, which they can't do alone due to the lack of funds. The other small time merchants joined in as well on their own accord and that's where voluntary/open membership comes from.
For us who are already in the Cooperative knew there and then that the story does show what a Cooperative is. It was short and concise to say the least and all of us were quite in awe.
He said, if we can break down parts of the PMES into a short story that the PMES will proceed more smoothly and will not be boring which does make sense to me at least but as far as I could see all of the other officers agrees as well. By doing this, we will have more time to answer the participants questions than letting them go on in a very boring presentation.
Next he showed us how we can convince people to join our Kaabag Ko Program. This program in a nutshell is like a small insurance for people who can't afford to pay thousands of pesos per month on insurance companies. The main idea is each member will give 100 pesos if one of the members die. It doesn't matter what the cause of death is, the Cooperative will give 100,000 pesos to the members beneficiaries.
For some this may sound like a very good deal but to most people it doesn't. That is why we need a strategy to hook in more people coz as of now the Cooperative is loosing a lot of money with this. The program currently only has less than 700 members on it and so the Cooperative will loose 30,000 pesos every time a member of the program dies and that is not good for the cooperative. We need to recruit 300+ more members to completely have it sustainable
But as it stands, most people don't get the benefit of entering such program and so he pointed out how people can benefit from it. People love money and so in order to entice possible recruit, you need to show it using numbers
An example of this is if a possible member is 45 years old. Let's say he will die at an age of 75 years old. So that's 30 years worth of contribution which would cost him roughly around 72,000 pesos. The cooperative will give his family 100,000 pesos if he dies so they will still get a profit of 28,000 pesos. Now what if he dies in 3 years? So it would have only costed him around 7,200 pesos giving him a profit of 92,800 pesos.
Now most of the time people would argue that it will not benefit them in the least since they would have already been dead by that time. The purpose of this program is not to give you a better life, but hopefully help your beloved love one's after your death. So what Mr. Sanchez suggested to us is we should not target the parents, instead we should go after the children. What he means is that since the parents will most likely go opt for this, the children might since they are the one's that will hopefully cash in the money that their beloved parent's will leave behind.
This again was another brilliant idea from Mr. Sanchez. He said that you guys are looking at the wrong way to approach this. Again all of us can do was nod to his brilliant plan. It does make sense doesn't it?
Next on the menu is we should have looked on our ratings and compare it to the ratings of a standard cooperative. Sadly with the way we currently do things we can't even do half of the standard ratings for cooperatives. We really still have a long way to go as a cooperative.
One thing he noted about us is that our Cooperative has the funds to do more but why haven't we done anything? Our funds are literally just sitting ducks for years now. Hopefully in the next 5 years or so, we can do all of the plans we had for today and make it a reality.
And so our meeting is officially over.
Closing Remarks
I really learned a lot today. I'm not kidding and I mean it. I just hope I can retain all of these knowledge in my very small brain capacity. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way. I usually have a lot to say during the closing remarks but I was really overwhelmed today. I feel like my brain is about to explode lol
If you are still reading this then thank you. I didn't mean to make it too long but I guess I got too carried away. I know I could have told you guys more but I'm tired and sleepy as of this moment. So that's it for me today. Have a great weekend ahead!
NOTE: All Photos/Images used in this blog was taken by and owned by me. You can use these photos however you like but please put a backlink to this post right here and a backlink of my profile here on hive. Thank you and Have a Great Day Everyone!
About Me
I am PinkHub a certified Pinkaholic. Living in the province of Cebu in the Philippines. I am an aspiring Photographer and a Noob Blogger. I love to take photos of the sun whether sun rise or sun sets. The same goes for the sea, wildlife, insects, trees, plants and nature as a whole. I also like to do some traveling in the future as well. I'm an open-minded person so if you have any tips you can give me then just go ahead and throw it all at me in the comments. I welcome all comments good or bad with open arms and legs 😁
Face your problems, but if the problem is your face. Worry not I can edit 😇
We have something like this in our local community for the sake of helping families who are left behind. Instant cash that is greatly needed in times of emergency. Maybe not as big as what you have but ay least there is. Kind of bayanihan way.
To be honest we also have a small scale program like that and that's where the idea came from really. Which is a great help to say the least but many people still find it hard to get into coz they don't see the benefit.
That is why I said it is clearly much better to show it in numbers coz people really like money lol
Yay! 🤗
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Congrats on your productive session with the facilitator. !PIZZA
Thank you bro 😁
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That is true, hopefully such strategy will work. To be honest we need more members so that we won't be loosing money
Oh well I hope that you do get more members, and get them soon!
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