Create!

Along with direct action and other forms of resistance, a transformational movement must also have a constructive program that builds new institutions based on the values that the movement aspires to achieve. These may eventually replace the old systems. From small, worker-owned cooperatives to national advocacy groups, hundreds of thousands of people around the country are working to create democratic and sustainable systems that meet the basic needs of all people.

The Case For Returning Disaster-Prone Areas Back To Nature

September 29, 2024 Jonathan Rosenbloom, Next City. Create! climate crisis, Development, Rewilding, sacrifice zone

This week there were three wildfires burning within 100 miles of Los Angeles. Sadly, this isn’t breaking news; it’s the opening salvo of California’s new reality. Each year, wildfires trigger a predictable sequence of events: the fires burn, homeowners flee, firefighters battle the blazes often to catastrophic loss and, once the ash settles, people rush to rebuild grander homes, frequently in the exact same spots and typically directly or indirectly funded by taxpayer dollars. Despite the increase in frequency and intensity of wildfires and other natural disasters, people continue to be drawn to high-risk areas.

This Land Is Co-Op Land

September 28, 2024 Amie Stager, In These Times. Create! Cooperatives, Farmer Labor Party, History, Minnesota, Worker Rights and Jobs

I’m standing on the dock, watching sunlight reflect off the waves, when the sound of a bell calls my attention to the Finnish dance hall towering over the lakeshore. The mojakka—a Finnish beef soup — is ready. I head to the dining room with the dozens of other people who have gathered here at Mesaba Co-op Park for the annual midsummer festival, a weekend of live music, talent shows, maypole dancing and meals. The park consists of more than 240 acres of land, including a spring-fed lake. Such places are usually owned and administered by a government or kept as private retreats by companies or rich people. Mesaba, in contrast, is neither privately nor government-owned, but collectively owned by members of a cooperative who foster relationships with each other and the land outside of corporate or government structures.

Creating A Co-Owned Pocket Community

September 24, 2024 Kirsten Dirksen, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! California, Community, Housing, Intentional Community, Oakland

Phil Levin and Kristen Berman wanted to live with their friends, but they didn’t want to sacrifice their privacy, so they started their own intentional community where you can choose your neighbors and eat together but still have your own home. Today, on their one-third-acre lot in Oakland (California), there are 20 adults and 4 babies living in 6 buildings with 10 units. There's a 4-plex with 5 adults, 2 apartments with 2 or 4 adults upstairs and families downstairs, and 2 houses with families. They started with a group of friends who joined together to create an LLC to buy a lot with 3 buildings, but once California changed the ADU laws, they added 2 extra structures of around 900 square feet each: one now houses a single family, and another is their community house with a kitchen, dining room, living room, and coworking space.

London Saw A Surprising Benefit To Fining High-Polluting Cars

September 24, 2024 Syris Valentine, Next City. Create! Car-Free Community, Cars, Children, emissions, England, Environment, Europe, London, pollution, Transportation, United Kingdom (UK)

Restricting the volume of high-emitting vehicles roaming city streets carries many benefits, from clearing the air to quieting the urban din and beyond. Recognition of this simple fact has led to the proliferation of clean air zones, designated regions within a city where vehicles must meet strict pollution standards or pay a fee to operate within it. At last count, over 300 such areas had been established across Europe. In London, which boasts the largest ultra-low emissions zone in the world, a study has found a secondary benefit: Kids started walking and biking to school more. In 2018 — the year before London’s rule took effect in the center of the city, and five years before the zone encompassed its entirety — researchers at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University saw in the impending policy an opportunity to conduct a natural experiment.

The Role Of The Credit Commons In The Commons Economy

September 22, 2024 Dave Darby, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Credit, Localism, New Economy, The Commons

I’m talking to you from Stroud, where a group of us are trying to build the commons economy, and I know you’re doing something very interesting, and related, in Liverpool, which we can touch on today, but maybe we can talk about that in more detail another time. In Stroud we have the beginnings of a housing commons and climbing commons, and there have been conversations about a water commons, land commons, food commons, energy commons. We’ve got some top specialists, ready to go. Now we can’t really have a thriving commons economy using bank-issued, debt-based money. We need a credit commons to be at the core of it, don’t we?

How Feed Black Futures Is Challenging Structural Racism

September 19, 2024 Tina Jenkins Bell, Resilience. Create! Black America, California, Food and Agriculture, Food Apartheid, Racism

Don’t call it a food desert. “Food apartheid” is closer to the truth. Describing a place as a food desert, says food sovereignty activist Sophi Wilmore, “implies that this is a natural phenomenon—that the lack of healthy, fresh, nutritious foods in certain neighborhoods is par for the course, normal, organic.” On the contrary, says Wilmore: The real issue is structural racism, and unjust systems that keep people impoverished, hungry, and positioned for incarceration. Wilmore is the co-executive director of Feed Black Futures, a community-based, Black, queer-led food sovereignty organization in California that connects Black and brown farmers with Black mamas and caregivers whose lives and families have been impacted by incarceration and the criminal legal system.

A Radical Way To Change The UN Security Council, Including Its Name

September 16, 2024 Stephen Crilly, Scheer Post. Create! Peace, Sustainability, United Nations (UN), UNSC

What conditions might compel the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to relinquish their veto power? In exchange, what conditions might the other member states agree on to make it happen? These are important questions to pose to the public as the 193 member states negotiate a Pact for the Future for the upcoming Summit of the Future to ensure the organization’s usefulness for generations to come. Let us hope that the P5 — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — as well as other member states have the wisdom to institute reforms as soon as possible. Some Council reform proposals consider adding individual countries as permanent members, such as India or Brazil.

Minneapolis Residents Are Building Yurts To Shelter Homeless Neighbors

September 16, 2024 Lorena Bally, Next City. Create! Homeless encampment, Homelessness, Housing, Minneapolis, Yurts

Christin Crabtree walked out of St. Paul’s Church in Southern Minneapolis feeling hope on the morning of July 24. An organizer with the local unhoused resident outreach project Camp Nenookaasi, she left the community meeting believing that locals would work together with the 80 people living in Nenookaasi’s three small encampments to help keep each other safe. But at 6:30 a.m. the next day, residents at all three camps woke to police-enforced evictions. Officers arrived with heavy machinery to heave residents’ tents, bikes, blankets, mattresses and clothing into a garbage truck. Within minutes, residents lost access to medical records, identification, cellphones and other belongings.

The Baristas Who Took Over Their Café

September 15, 2024 Osita Nwanevu, In These Times. Create! Baltimore, Cooperatives, New Economy, Worker Rights and Jobs

In July 2023, early morning visitors to Baltimore’s Common Ground coffee shop found a sign taped to the door⁠. With a thank you to the Hampden community that had sustained it for 25 years, owner Michael Krupp announced the shop would be ceasing operations “effective immediately.” Common Ground employees released a statement saying they had only been notified themselves the previous afternoon and, notably, had been a few months into forming a union. According to Common Ground barista Nic Koski, the effort was sparked by “general workplace concerns in terms of people wanting more fair, equitable wages, especially between in front of house and back of house, and better treatment — wanting to look into health care and benefits.”

Football As A Commons

September 15, 2024 Yavor Tarinski, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Privatization, Soccer, Sports, The Commons

In his book Football in Sun and in Shadow, Eduardo Galeano pointed at the commercialization of the world’s most famous sport and its detachment from the grassroots. In it he says that “when the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play, got torn out by its very roots. Professional football condemns all that is useless and useless means not profitable.”2 Once again we saw this in the 2014 World Cup in Brazil where modern football appeared for what it really is: a mechanism serving the logic of constant capital accumulation, aggressive towards those at the bottom who cannot afford to participate in this celebration of modern consumerist culture.

The Urban Gardens Where Gender And Climate Justice Grow

September 15, 2024 Peter Yeung, Next City. Create! Ecuador, Food and Agriculture, Gender equality, Urban Farms

Up in the lung-busting altitudes of Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, 71-year-old Maria Achiña and 70-year-old Alegria Irua are busy digging up soil and plucking weeds from their modest allotment of kale, onions, broccoli and cilantro. The green-fingered pair are part of a group of local women who till the land beside the neighborhood’s health clinic, which is free to them under the city’s celebrated participatory urban agriculture project focused on gender, climate and food justice. “It gives us good food to eat and a bit of income to help pay the bills,” says Achiña, who lost both her husband and daughter in recent years. “And besides, us old ladies, we need to fill our time with something.”

Takeover! A Human Rights Approach To Housing

September 13, 2024 Ann Garrison, Black Agenda Report. Create! Book Review, Homelessness, Housing, Human Rights

Cheri Honkala and the Poor People’s Army, also known as the Poor People’s Campaign for Economic Human Rights, produced their book about how to take over abandoned federal properties. In the City of Philadelphia, where the Poor People’s Army is based, scholar Elsa Noterman reports that there are 10 abandoned properties for every single homeless person. Nevertheless, the wait times to receive public housing are years long. Their neighborhood, Kensington, has been devastated by factory closures since the passage of NAFTA. “Call to Movement: The Politics of Love,” the first section of the introduction to TAKEOVER!, is inspiring, heartrending and, like the rest of the book, beautifully written.

Why Transition? And Why Now?

September 12, 2024 Chris McCartney, Resilience. Create! climate crisis, Community activism, Transformation, Transition Towns

There is a lot to keep us awake at night. War, signs of environmental collapse, rising inequality. Then there’s the countless personal daily worries demanding our attention – bills; stressful work; children and elders needing support; getting the healthcare we need. It can be an overwhelming mix, inducing anxiety and making our world feel unstable and insecure. Burying your head in the sand, and narrowing your focus to what you can control in your own household or shopping basket seems like a perfectly rational response. Then this summer, many communities were rocked by racist violence and protests, and a wave of community mobilisations saying everyone is welcome.

Burkina Faso Nationalizes United Kingdom Gold Mines

September 11, 2024 Steve Lalla, Orinoco Tribune. Create! Burkina Faso, Decolonization, Gold, Mining, Nationalization, United Kingdom (UK)

Burkina Faso will nationalize two gold mines at a cost of about US $80 million. The Boungou and Wahgnion mines were sold last year by London-listed Endeavour Mining to Lilium Mining for US $300 million. On August 27, the mines were purchased by Burkina Faso’s government for a fraction of this cost. “This strategic move is aimed at reclaiming Burkina Faso’s mineral wealth,” said Joe Hotagua of African Streams, “ensuring that a larger portion of the profits benefits Burkinabe people.” Endeavour Mining is based in London, UK, and claims to be the largest gold producer in West Africa. It also possesses assets in Senegal and Ivory Coast. Recently, allegations of serious misconduct have been levied against its mining operations in Ivory Coast.

The Private Pilots Flying Abortion Seekers Across The Midwest

September 9, 2024 Lucas Frisancho, Next City. Create! abortion access, Abortion Bans, Abortions, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Mutual Aid, Reproductive Rights, Transportation

In the fall of 2022, Mike climbed into the pilot’s seat with an idea. For the past few months, the private pilot had been volunteering with the Illinois-based Midwest Access Coalition, an abortion support fund that he’d come across in his post-George Floyd anti-racism journey. “I thought, there’s gotta be people out there helping people travel for abortions, because it’s not like every medical facility you go to provide abortion care,” says Mike. Next City has agreed to use Mike’s first name only to protect his safety and privacy as he engages in this sensitive work. “So I reached out to say, hey, I want to volunteer for anything you might need – driving, hosting, whatever.”

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