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.

A Tale Of Two Yarn-Makers Reviving The Local Mill

September 3, 2024 Marissa Tiel, Resilience. Create! Local Economy, Small Business, Sustainability, Textiles

For nearly a decade, the Spinsters were a fixture at the Bellingham Farmers Market. Their booth was easy to find: market goers just needed to look for their brightly coloured yarns in vibrant cyan and deep magenta. Founders Kate Burge and Rachel Price commuted to the market by bike — neither one owned a car at the time — and set up most Saturdays. The duo, who named their company Spincycle, specialized in a type of craft practised by few others in the early 2000s: kettle-dyeing and hand-spinning wool into beautiful skeins. Unlike most commercial yarns, which are spun and then dyed, the yarn Burge and Price create is dyed first, before it’s spun into yarn.

Cascadia And The Global Resurgence Of Bioregional Activism

September 1, 2024 David Bollier. Create! Bioregions, Cascadia, Ecological Systems, The Commons

One of the most encouraging recent developments has been the resurgence of bioregional thinking. About four decades ago, in the late 1970s and 1980s, there was a huge public appetite for re-imagining the economy, eco-stewardship, and lifestyles around natural bioregions, but it gradually waned with the advance of neoliberal ideology. Now bioregionalism is emerging again, with much more force and sophistication. A great deal of vanguard leadership, then and now, has come from activists, academics, and social innovators in the Pacific Northwest. They are often associated with the term Cascadia, which is the name they've adopted for the bioregion stretching from British Columbia and southeast Alaska to Washington State, Oregon, Idaho, and Northern California.

Farming While Black

August 29, 2024 Next City. Create! Black America, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Racial Justice

Once upon a time, 14%of farmers in the United States were Black. That was in 1910. But that number has dwindled. Today, Black farmers comprise less than 2% of all growers across the country. On this week’s episode, our host Lucas Grindley notes: “That's more than 14 million acres of lost land.” This loss, along with the discrimination and violence perpetrated against African-American farmers and the current movement of more Black people returning to agriculture and land stewardship, is the subject of the documentary “Farming While Black,” which was released in 2023. Mark Decena, the writer and director of the documentary, describes it as a Venn diagram of social justice, climate justice and food sovereignty.

Worker Coops Bring Undocumented Workers Into The Labor Movement

August 28, 2024 Tareq Saghie, Labor Notes. Create! Immigration, Labor Movement, New York City (NYC), Worker Rights, Worker Rights and Jobs

How can immigrants without work authorization avoid being hyper-exploited, and instead find work where they have some autonomy and collective power to raise standards? A movement that has been incubating in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, might offer some answers. Sunset Park boasts one of the highest concentrations of worker cooperatives in the United States. This business model, brought to the neighborhood by the Center for Family Life, guarantees all members standard and legal wages, a voice in their company’s governance, and control over their schedules. Since members are business owners, not employees, they also do not need work authorization.

Bike Theft Discourages People From Riding Bikes

August 26, 2024 Maylin Tu, Next City. Create! Bikes, New York City (NYC), Safety, Transportation

In 2019, I rode my bike about one mile to the metro station and locked it to a bike rack out front. Then, I took the train to a friend’s party. When I got back, my bike was gone. I couldn’t afford to buy a new bike, so I went without one for the next two years. It’s a familiar scenario for many bike riders. In a city like L.A., bike theft feels as everyday as sunny skies and fruit carts selling delicious sliced mango and watermelon. One report estimates that a whopping two million bikes are stolen every year in America. Many people don’t replace their bikes, a fact that Brooklyn-based cyclist and entrepreneur Shabazz Stuart often cites. “It’s just the 800-pound gorilla in the room,” he says.

Shining Light On Energy Equity

August 25, 2024 Ian Carbone, Resilience. Create! Clean Energy, Energy, Equity, Solar

As a faculty member at Allegheny College in Northwestern Pennsylvania, I work with students to design and install solar arrays for churches, housing nonprofits, and other organizations that serve our community. Collaborating on local solar projects has taught me a great deal. But what stands out most from my experience is that vulnerable populations are being left out of the energy transition. As I meet individuals and organizations who are actively pursuing solar installations, it is clear that these stakeholders possess a certain degree of time, knowledge, and/or financial resources that enable them to entertain the idea of a solar investment.

SADC Holds 44th Annual Summit In Zimbabwe

August 23, 2024 Abayomi Azikiwe, Black Agenda Report. Create! Africa, climate crisis, Economic Development, Liberation

President Emmerson Mnangagwa of the Republic of Zimbabwe has emerged as the regional chairperson of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) 44th Annual Summit which was held in Harare on August 17. SADC is a 16-member regional organization composed of states and their affiliates extending from the Republic of South Africa to the Seychelles and as far north as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Since 1980 when its predecessor organization, the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), was founded in Lusaka, Zambia which later transitioning towards SADC in Windhoek, Republic of Namibia in 1992 to the present era, the mission of the grouping is to foster economic cooperation, peacekeeping operations and solidarity with other oppressed and exploited people in Africa and around the globe.

Solving The Housing Crisis Via The Commons

August 23, 2024 Dil Green, Resilience. Create! Housing, The Commons, United Kingdom (UK)

In Stroud Commons, we’re looking to find ways to speed up the building of the commons – especially the housing commons, which we were talking about in terms of ‘the rock on which the commons can be built’ before we’d even formed the core group in Stroud. Dil Green of Mutual Credit Services (MCS – who design models for the commons in all sectors), posted a message in our chat group, giving his take on the housing crisis, and how we might speed up the housing commons by allowing / helping / encouraging people to put their house into the commons, and carry on living in it for the rest of their life – and pass it on to their family, too.

How US Governments Could Crack Down On Greenwashing

August 22, 2024 Emily Sanders, DeSmog. Create! Fossil Fuels, greenwashing, Media, United States

“Experts agree: [carbon capture and storage] is one of the most important low-carbon technologies required to achieve societal climate goals.” So says ExxonMobil, in a Facebook ad targeting hundreds of thousands of people across the United States. The ad, which launched last October and ran most recently this month, leads viewers to a 30-second video with computer-generated models and captions describing a seemingly idyllic process. “The CO2 is safely and permanently stored beneath impermeable rock,” one says. Exxon has pledged to invest billions of dollars in CCS, a technology aimed at capturing and sequestering carbon emissions (much of which is used to recover more oil).

Los Angeles Has A Climate Crisis And A Housing Crisis

August 22, 2024 Awoenam Mauna-Woanya, Christopher Rhie and Christopher K. Tokita, Next City. Create! climate crisis, Housing, infill housing, Los Angeles

Since taking office, Mayor Karen Bass has rightly focused on housing and homelessness in Los Angeles. But given the growing climate crisis, it’s crucial to maintain this focus while empowering our city to take effective climate action. Already, the City and County of Los Angeles have committed to an ambitious goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. To reach this critical target, we must make serious changes — especially in how we build our cities and suburbs. This fundamental factor in our carbon footprint is so often overlooked in climate action plans. It’s also the key to tackling both our environmental challenges and our city’s housing affordability crisis simultaneously: infill housing, or the practice of building new housing on vacant or underused land in cities.

Aligning Our National Organizations With Co-Op Principles

August 20, 2024 Rebecca Kemble, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Cooperatives, Democracy, Self-Determination, Worker Rights and Jobs

In his 2010 Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) article “What should our movement look like in 2040?,” John McNamara, past president of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC, “the Federation”) and current Co-Director of the Northwest Cooperative Development Center, used the metaphor of building a house. He saw the first four years of the USFWC (2004-2008) as the foundation laid by the cooperation and collaboration amongst three democratic regional formations: the Western Worker Cooperative Conference, the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy and the Midwest Worker Cooperative Conference.

How Should Cities Use The Land Freed Up By Highway Removal?

August 19, 2024 Morgan Florsheim, Next City. Create! carless community, Highways, Urban Design, Wisconsin

The 20th-century era of urban planning saw highways carving scars across the landscapes of many American cities, leaving in their wake a legacy of displacement and destruction. Today, removing freeways seems to offer a path to repairing some of this harm and moving away from car-centric infrastructure. But highway removal alone is not enough. Whether removal projects make good on their promises to mend some of the damage caused by freeway construction and redesign cities at a more human scale depends entirely on two questions: Who controls the reclaimed land when a freeway comes down, and how will those decision makers use it?

The Path For Abolishing The Police Already Exists

August 18, 2024 Joe Mayall, Scheer Post. Create! Accountability, Community Safety, Defund the police, Police, State Violence

America watched in horror this spring as armed phalanxes of police assaulted peaceful pro-Palestine protesters on campuses across the nation. The raids on student encampments ranged from dubious arrests to snipers on campus rooftops. This most recent episode of widespread police aggression only reinforced Americans’ belief that law enforcement is quick to violent escalation. Last year, a nationwide ABC News-Washington Post survey of 1,003 adults found that only 39% of Americans polled were confident police were adequately trained to avoid excessive force, and only 41% believed they treated Black and white people equally.

Unlocking Community Energy Democracy

August 17, 2024 Nick Pearce, Resilience. Create! Cooperatives, Energy, Energy Democracy, United Kingdom (UK)

‍The UK Labour Party’s overlooked Local Power Plan could be an ambitious force ushering in a new generation of renewable energy by handing power to the people. Although the possibilities for local energy democracy abound, public detail on the plan is scant. Labour is promising a £3.3BN fund to support community ownership of renewable generation. This would offer grants and loans to local authorities and communities to “create one million owners of local power,” according to the plan. The proposal would be for Great British Energy (GBE), “a new, publicly owned clean generation company”, to partner with councils and community co-ops to develop 8 GW of clean power by the end of the decade.

2024 Roadmap For Opioid Settlement Funds

August 14, 2024 Mariah McGough, VOCAL-US. Create! Drug War, Harm Reduction, Opioid crisis, Public Health

Unfortunately, since we released our inaugural Roadmap last year, the overdose epidemic has only gotten worse. In fact, we are in the midst of an unprecedented overdose epidemic, with more than 220 people each day dying from opioid-related drug overdoses. Rather than focus on proven solutions —such as supportive housing, services and care — state lawmakers across the country are instead trying to “ticket and arrest” their way out of the problem. These punishing measures are torn directly from the well-worn pages of failed Drug War and “tough on crime” playbooks, which for decades have failed to get people off the streets and into stable housing.

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