Above: The New Economy post card. It includes wind turbines, worker cooperatives, credit unions, alternative currencies, solar panels, local food, low carbon forms of transportation.
Seven Days to a Just and More Sustainable World
It’s becoming clearer every day that something is wrong in America. We see symptoms of a deeper problem through our own experiences with growing inequality, chronic unemployment, financial instability, undemocratic consolidations of power, environmental crisis, and the declining well being of communities, families, and individuals. Many of us have come to the realization that our economy is out of control; undermining many of those things we hold most dear. For some this leads to despair or resignation, for others it inspires activism, and for increasingly more Americans it leads to a desire and a commitment to innovate and build something that works better for the people, planet, and places we love.
New Economy Week is a celebration of this innovative spirit, an opportunity to shine a light on the thousands upon thousands of things that everyday people are doing right now to build a new kind of economy. These innovators are all around us engaged in the work of growing co-operative and independent enterprises, democratizing and stabilizing finance through credit unions, finding new ways to share skills and goods, new ways to measure success, and new ways to meet growing human needs on an all too finite planet.
From October 12-18, we will be highlighting events, actions, reports, works of art, and other projects across the United States and Canada. By calling attention to the thousands of things people are doing right now to build a new kind of economy, we hope to inspire more participation in this movement and catalyze a conversation on the need for deep, systemic change.
We invite you to take part in this celebration, to convene your friends and your community, and to explore how you could be a part of building real alternatives in the midst of the place you live.
If you’re already organizing something that seems like a good fit for New Economy Week, add it to the map!
If you’re looking for ideas about what to do in your community, visit our get involved page!
This is a frightening moment. Republicans in Congress are threatening a choice between austerity and collapse. The nation is transfixed, waiting for the results of a high-stakes, short-term political confrontation. Yet, as Gar Alperovitz recently wrote in the Huffington Post:
“When we look soberly at the long-term trends, it is clear that we face a systemic crisis: a deep failure of the institutional basis of the traditional strategy for holding corporate capitalism in check. Poverty rates, income inequality trends, global warming, incarceration rates — these and many other three and four decade trends began long before the recent House Republican difficulties — and they are all but certain to continue on their current course long beyond the political problems of the moment.”
“In short, what we need is not just simply more pressure for reform around the edges of the system, but a movement to build a new economy, a movement that will build steadily over time as the civil rights, feminist, environmentalist and, indeed, conservative movements built up long term strength, step by step, until major political power was achieved.”
The New Economy Coalition is ready for that movement and so are the thousands of people joining us to take part in New Economy Week (October 12-18), a celebration of the myriad innovative steps that everyday people are taking right now to build a new kind of economy that prioritizes the long-term well-being of people, place, and planet.