Today's Sunday Times features an article on co-operative consortia, people or businesses who come together to form mutual trading units. Consortia are particularly common in the agricultural sector but the benefits of sharing costs and overheads have seen the model growing in popularity.

Click here to view the article.

OpenSpace operates as a co-operative consortia, we are individuals and small social enterprises with our own separate businesses. We co-operate together to maintain our co-working space, sharing the costs such as rent, bills and internet services. Collaborating as a consortia has allowed us to achieve much more than we could alone and it's a model we'd highly recommend.

There's more information on co-operative consortia at Co-operatives UK's site.