Campaigning

Why we campaign

We want to make a long-term difference to member-owners and their communities.

Our campaign work helps break down the barriers that prevent us from building fairer and safer communities. Working at a systemic level adds value to our funding programmes and helps create long-lasting change. 

We believe co-operation is at the heart of strong communities and is key to generating meaningful change. That’s why we are partnering with others who put young people and those with lived experience at the heart of their campaign work.

Youth custody: our new campaign focus

Young people told us they want to live in fair communities that are safe and crime-free and that prioritise rehabilitation of those who come into contact with the justice system. They told us this is something they wanted us to focus on as part of our campaign work – so that’s what we did.

We spent months listening to young people who have been in contact with the youth justice system and organisations who have supported them. We also looked for ways we could add value to work already taking place to reform the youth justice system to create safer communities as a whole.

Our research exposed the damaging impact youth custody is having on children, many of whom have already been exposed to adversity and trauma that has negatively affected them. If we want to build communities where everyone feels safe, we need to ensure under 18s who come into contact with the youth justice system are supported onto the right path so they can transform their lives. But right now, youth custody is causing further trauma and making it harder for them to achieve their potential. 

There is a need to radically rethink the use of imprisonment for both under 18s and those working in the system that are already doing their best to provide support. We want to help influence this much-needed reform through our campaign work by calling for more effective community-focused, rather than custodial, approaches to justice.

We will do this by partnering with Alliance for Youth Justice and Transform Justice over the next three years to:

• Call for reduced use of custodial remand for children
• Call for greater restrictions on the use of custodial sentences in child cases

Want to understand why keeping children out of custody is so important? Explore the resources from our campaign partners below:

Ensuring custody is used as a last resort
Podcast on the misuse of child imprisonment
Fighting Fatalism in Child Remand

Find out more about our campaign work and how you can support us by emailing Sophie Beresford on sophie.beresford@coop.co.uk

Our campaign efforts align with and enhance work already being delivered across the business to creating safer communities for our colleagues and member-owners, particularly the Safer Colleagues, Safer Communities campaign. 

Together we’re helping to deliver on Co-op’s vision of co-operating to build more value for our member-owners every day.

Our campaign history

We’re not new to campaigning.

In 2019, we launched our first youth-led behaviour change campaign, Lonely Not Alone, to tackle the stigma of youth loneliness. We wanted to help young people feel more confident talking about loneliness to improve their mental wellbeing and deliver on Co-op’s vision of Co-operating for a Fairer World.

At its peak, 25% of young people in the UK had heard about our campaign, and there are now hundreds of stories and messages of support on our beautiful digital universe that was co-designed with young people in 2021. We had impact too:

• In November 2022, 55% of young people said loneliness is a normal emotion (up from 43% in February 2019)

• In November 2022, 83% of young people said they’d taken an action to help others (up from 73% in February 2019)
  

We stopped promoting our Lonely Not Alone campaign at the end of 2023. The digital universe is now manage and maintained by Digital Wonderlab. Read more about our Lonely Not Alone campaign and its legacy here.