Problem addressed

The economic and financial crisis has had a grave impact on public spending in Greece, with large cuts in funding for social services and education. In the northern Athenian suburb of Halandri, five of the nine municipal kindergartens closed down in 2011, leaving over 50 people without work, and the parents of 2 000 pre-school age children with very few childcare options. At the same time, high schools faced cuts, which increased class sizes and negatively affected the quality of teaching.

Innovative solution

The Halandri Parents Social Cooperative Enterprise was founded by a committee of parents in 2012. It aims to fill the gaps in public services by empowering and mobilising community members to drive solutions themselves. Through its cooperative model, it responds directly to changing childcare and education needs in the local area, through several initiatives based on one principle – profit-free quality childcare and education that puts the learning of the pupil first.

The cooperative started with a childcare programme in 2012, setting up small schools in private homes to meet the demand for affordable childcare in the area. The programme relies on parent volunteers to keep fees low. In 2013, the cooperative expanded to set up a school of private tuition, which offers classes to high school students preparing for university exams at affordable rates.

The school uses modern educational practices to capture and activate the students’ interest. Teachers and parents have collaborated to create a curriculum that fosters critical thinking and teamwork in the classroom, while addressing each student individually according to their needs and abilities. The objective is to provide quality education with standards such as a child-to-teacher ratio of 8:1 and six-hour working days for educational staff.

Key results and benefits

The cooperative employs four full-time paid employees, eight part-time paid employees and ten volunteers. The childcare facility accommodates over 20 children from the neighbourhood.

One of the key benefits of the cooperative is that it has been able to set up additional activities addressing emerging problems in the community. In addition to childcare and private tuition, for example, it set up a parent group coaching programme, which aims to raise public awareness, foster the exchange of opinions, and educate parents and adolescents on a series of general and specialised parenting topics.

Another key benefit of the cooperative was bringing together other stakeholders working in the field – the Margarita Vocational Training Centre, for example, which promotes the social and professional inclusion of young people with learning disabilities. One of the key results of this cooperation is that the cooperative has hired two trainees from the centre who had previously been long-term unemployed. One person with a disability from the centre has since become an employee and a member of the cooperative.

Potential for mainstreaming

The income of the cooperative comes from donations and fees for childcare and tuition. 60% of profits are reinvested into the cooperative, while the remaining 40% finance staff costs. Staff, who tend to be previously unemployed parents and teachers, are paid on the basis of a 2009 collective agreement, meaning that teachers’ salaries are significantly higher than the post-crisis market average.

The cooperative’s sustainability and potential for transfer to other countries is evident in its cooperative model, which can be replicated in other contexts. The structure of the cooperative – in which workers or members own the business equally – allows it to be directly driven by community needs, and thus to be flexible in responding to these demands as they evolve. The work of the cooperative is made possible by the vast network of students, parents and teachers that it has developed. This would be a key condition for successful transfer of the initiative to another context. The network also functions as a space for learning, where innovative education ideas can be exchanged, developed and mainstreamed.