Democratic Budget 2024-25: Overview and timeline

Cooperative Power was founded in 2018 to put real power back in peoples’ hands.  We built our cooperative to give people power over their energy bills, rebuild economic democracy across Australia, and fight the climate crisis.  Since 2020, we have asked our customer members to collectively decide how we should spend the money our cooperative makes. In those three years, we have allocated over $330,000 back into good works in our community, and taking back the commons for everyone.

For many of our members, our democratic budget will be the first time they’ve ever had a chance to determine the strategic future of a business and what its profits are best used for. Our customer members are what makes CoPower so great and your ideas are key to power us into the future.  

This is now our fourth democratic budget.  The last four years have been an amazing journey. With almost no capital, the collective commitment of civil society organisations and voluntary labour we have grown to become a community that powers over 4,000 households across the continent!

This budget we are proposing to move beyond this start-up phase and invest in organisational capacity and staffing to support our cooperative to flourish into the future. Democracy and customer members are the heart of what we do.  The budget strategy is proposing to;

1. Formalise democratic processes through customer member action groups that determine our goals and build momentum in key areas, 
2. continue to fund a reduced amount of impact campaign projects to drive change in communities, 
3. expand our member benefits to support households to make homes more comfortable, get-off gas and reduce bills,
4. continue to invest in community renewable energy,
5. and invest in staffing to resource our operations. 

Our democratic budget timeline

We’re holding two workshops and two votes over the next couple of months. You can take part in as many or as few of these as you want. You’re not obliged to come to any of the online workshops – and you will still be able to vote or go to any workshop if you’ve missed a previous one. We’ll email out links to the online workshops and the voting portal closer to each date.

• On the Saturday 20th April we will share our budget strategy for 2024- 2025 and ask for customer member input by Tuesday 30 April.
• Our first workshop is on Tuesday 30 April from 7:00pm to 8:30pm and will talk about our budget strategy for 2024- 2025, ask for input, share any comments received and finalise the budget proposal.   
• Our first vote will be from Saturday 4th May to Saturday 11 May and will ask customer members to vote Yes / No to adopt the budget strategy.
• *If the strategy is adopted in the first vote, then the below process will follow.  If the strategy is not adopted in the first vote, we will then propose a participatory process to update or create a new strategy which is then voted on again.
• Applications for impact campaigns and member benefits will open Monday 13 May and close on Monday 10 June.
• Wednesday 22 May the CoPower Energy efficiency Action group meets to consider member benefit proposals. All customer members are welcome, and this is an opportunity to discuss proposals to assist customer members make their homes more comfortable, get-off gas, reduce energy use and save money.
• Our second workshop is on Thursday 20 June from 7:00pm to 8:30pm and we will hear from impact campaign applicants, member benefits proposals and have a discussion.
• Our second — and final — vote will be from Saturday 29 June to Saturday 13 July and will ask you to rank the impact campaigns and member benefits to determine the allocation of funds.