Footprint Workers Co-op Gets Help from BfGWY to Take the Next Steps in Evolving and Expanding Their Business

Footprint is a small workers co-op specialising in Risograph printing.

Their services, workshops, and outreach activities champion arts, culture, and community action and ensure everyone can get involved – from beginner-friendly risograph and zine-making workshops, to technical workshops for artists and students, and a mobile print studio that goes to book fairs, schools, and libraries.

Clare from Footprint Workers Co-op.said, ‘In short, we want to contribute positively to a society in which we all have our needs met. We’re dedicated to embodying cooperative values and ethical practices, and supporting mutual aid projects, arts, and community. We have helped many people create art, publish their own work and learn new skills.

 ‘We’ve supported countless groups over the years by offering subsidised printing for unfunded campaign groups, working for things like anti-racism, climate action, migrant solidarity, trans rights. We’ve shared the joy of people getting to see their art or writing printed and published by bringing our printers to different events and community groups to collectively make a zine-in-a-day (a zine is a self-published DIY booklet).’

The majority of their income comes from printing art, booklet and leaflets for customers and the rest comes from delivering workshops and teaching riso printing, plus an online shop that sells zines they they’ve printed for other people or published themselves.

Their clients and customers range from artists who work with printing or self-publishing, poets and writing collectives, other co-operatives and independent businesses, community groups, campaigning organisations, to people in the local area just wanting to print out a few pages.

One long-term relationship has been with Leeds Queer Film Festival (LQFF) -Footprint originally printed basic flyers and programmes for them for free as a donation to the volunteer-led group, but now they are one of their biggest customers, commissioned bespoke illustrations and printing a range of publicity material and merchandise. Plus, Footprint run some of their workshops as part of the festival to help people reflect on the films they’ve seen and capture queer stories.

The co-op has five workers – four who do the day-to-day printing and running the business, and a founder member who now mainly does co-op development and helping other people achieve their co-operative goals.

Clare said, ‘As we are such a small business and everyone works here part time, we all do a bit of everything. Though sometimes a job comes in that we know will particularly suit Hannah’s eye for detail, or Hils’s love of colour.’

They needed help from BFGWY to:

  • recognise how unique their business is, explore how they’d like to evolve and expand, and create goals to help them do that
  • secure grant funding that will allow them to expand their workshops to work closely with specific groups and empower people through self-publishing

The help they received was:

  • 1-1 coaching
  • 6-months of specialist training, development and networking via the BFGWY Growth & Resilience Programme

Clare’s Top Tips

  • Hook up with workers.coop for help and advice.
  • Good communication is essential – you need to discuss when things go wrong and how to improve efficiency. As ‘peer managers’ you need to take suggestions and direction from each other when appropriate and pass on relevant skills to each other.
  • You often have to learn something new and have to deal with tricky situations and developments. That’s the flip side of being in control of your own business – you are responsible for everything!

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