Members debated and approved a £5,000 distribution to MyCool Class, to help with the growing pains of recruiting new teachers and students to the world's first international platform learning workers' co-op.

Members voted £7,000 towards startup costs for Selgars Mill in Devon - the first residential events and organising space for co-ops in the UK since the Co-operative College sold Stanford Hall more than twenty years ago.

Solidfund members supported and helped organise Cooperation Jackson's UK speaking tour in the spring, and voted money towards startup costs for a new All-Ireland solidarity economy network.

SolidFund members voted to underwrite the costs of running this year's Co-op Camp at the Green Gathering Festival.

SolidFund members discussed and voted in favour of a proposal to donate £500 to a fledgling project aimed at preserving records from the wave of British worker co-operatives and co-operative development in the 1970s-1990s.

SolidFund was born out of an idea we had at the first Worker Coop Weekend, in 2014. One reason for setting up the Fund was to guarantee we could hold worker coop gatherings every year. So check out Worker Coop Weekend 2016, 6-8 May. This year it's in Staffordshire.

Co-operatives UK has just published new research on worker co-ops, by Virginie Pérotin of Leeds University. Titled 'What do we really know about worker co-operatives?', Pérotin's paper refutes one or two widely shared assumptions.

CICOPA, the world federation of worker coops, has released a video reflecting the inspiration and experiences of young worker and social cooperators from 9 countries.

With support from the Fund, three members of Belfast Cleaning Coop visited Custom House Workers' Coop in east London in June 2015, to show support and learn from each other.

Fifteen brave souls congregated last Wednesday in a theatre rehearsal room in Hackney with plenty of flipcharts, marker pens and laptops, to build the SolidFund website.