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New Economy

Insights Into GAS: Solidarity Purchasing Groups

August 7, 2024 Tamat, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
Discover what it means to be part of a Solidarity Purchase Group (GAS) through the interview with Vincenzo Vizioli, president of AIAB Umbria. With a journey that began in the late 1980s, Vincenzo explains how his choice for organic and biodynamic farming has evolved into a model of sustainability, cooperation, and mutualism. In the video, Vizioli tells the story of the Italian Organic Movement and the birth of GAS and IAP, highlighting the importance of sustainable agriculture and the need to promote social participation and community resilience. He then delves into the concept of GAS, explaining how these groups not only facilitate access to quality organic products but also promote a fair and solidarity-based economy.

The Union Co-Ops Council: Seventeen Years Of Forging Worker Alliances

August 2, 2024 Dylan Hatch, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
As the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC) celebrates its twentieth anniversary in 2024, July marks seventeen years since the founding of its oldest member council – the Union Co-ops Council. Established to bridge worker cooperatives and organized labor, the Council has become a crucial player in both movements, fueled by the resurgence of unions and worker co-ops throughout the beginning of the 21st century. Just as the USFWC concludes its first twenty years with renewed energy, ambition, and capacity, the Union Co-op Council also reflects on its successes and sets a clear path forward to advance worker ownership and power.

Repair Café And Darning The Planet

July 26, 2024 Anahi Martinez Encinas and Dora Napolitano, Resilience. , , ,
Getting dressed is a universal human trait, but the textile industry is collapsing environmental systems everywhere. Relearning basic skills and taking back the agency in what we wear and how we wear it is an act of resistance and an invitation to reimagine ways to inhabit the planet. Repair Café & Darning the Planet practice will help you learn specific skills for visibly mending your own clothes and textiles in community. It will also encourage you to reflect about what making an item of clothing means. Zurciendo el planeta (Darning the Planet) creates spaces to learn and practice various mending and recreation techniques, responding to the specific needs of the garments that participants want to mend.

How To Start Participatory Budgeting In Your City

July 23, 2024 Lerner Hadden, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
Has your city been making cuts to schools, libraries, firefighters, and social services that you are not happy with? Think you could do a better job managing the budget? There is a way in which you can have that opportunity through a process called “participatory budgeting (PB).” Currently, residents of over 7,000 cities around the world are deciding how to spend their taxpayer dollars, and you could follow their lead by starting PB in your city. What Is Participatory Budgeting? In 1989, the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre developed a new model of democratic participation, which has become known internationally as participatory budgeting (PB). Through this process, community members directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget.

An Eco-Socialist Education Agenda

June 21, 2024 The Last Farm, Resilience. , , , ,
Our education system is a mess. The reason is obvious: it’s being eroded by capitalism. This erosion takes many forms, from the privatization of schooling itself to altering curricula to meet the demands of employers to undermining the state’s capacity to deliver universal public education, and so on. It’s one of many ways that capitalism shreds our social fabric, keeping us in a constant state of crisis and anxiety. For the same reason, there is also a great dearth of education for adults and the elderly. Instead of a lifetime of learning and enrichment, adults are lucky to get job re-training after a layoff and the elderly might get to learn a new card game after being shipped off to the old people warehouse.

Social Currencies In Prosumer Communities And Networks

June 19, 2024 Roberto Spano, Resilience. , , , ,
This practice consists of creating a community of prosumers who exchange products and services, creating a process of eco-social regeneration around the local economy, thanks to the exchange facilitator that is social currency. It serves to regenerate the local economy and local communities, to weave trust in the act of consumption, to weave the economy around local production and the real needs of communities and finally to support productive processes that are regenerative for the ecosystemic environment. In the communities and networks, different ways of exchange and social currencies are practised:

Will The Revolution Be Funded?

June 15, 2024 Zac Chapman and Nairuti Shastry, Portside. , , ,
In April 2022, grassroots organization Mijente unveiled a political framework in which it advocated for a threefold strategy of working within, without, and against the state to achieve its political goals. This framing was inspired by a movement group in Chile, the Movimiento de Pobladores en Lucha. We propose a similar path: building strategic alignment across groups working within, without, and against philanthropy. We aim to share the historical and present-day value of diverse approaches to fundraising that include but are in no way limited to philanthropic investment. Moreover, we seek to show how aligning work within, without, and against philanthropy can catalyze power building on the Left.

If This Is Us At 20, What Could We Be At 40?

June 14, 2024 Michael Johnson, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
My main work over the past 44 years has been about figuring out how we can consciously develop democracy all over this country. This has included 16 years of active involvement with the cooperative/solidarity economic movements. I believe that bringing this developmental perspective to the cooperative movement can be a rich and productive way for celebrating the 20th birthday of the USFWC. I have two suggestions for consciously growing the worker co-op movement, which naturally reach beyond to the whole cooperative economic movement. The first is to make full use of both Eleanor Ostrom's work and the wisdom emerging from the field of cultural evolution.

Twenty Years Of Building An Economic Alternative To Capitalism In The US

June 3, 2024 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , ,
The US Federation of Worker Cooperatives recently turned twenty years old. Clearing the FOG speaks with Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, a professor and author of "Collective Courage: A History of African-American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice," and a charter member of the USFWC, about the work to create a national cooperative organization and the rise of the cooperative economy in the United States. She spoke about the role that cooperatives have played in advancing social and economic justice, the benefits of cooperatives not only to the individual but also more broadly to their communities, and the history of cooperatives that preceded the rise of capitalism and also how cooperative economies offer a better alternative to capitalism.

Cooperatives In China And Prospects For Their Significant Growth

May 14, 2024 Ali Al-Assam, Orinoco Tribune. , , , ,
During my recent visit to China from April 14th to 24th, 2024, I had the opportunity to engage with seasoned members of the cooperative movement, among whom were British nationals who live in China. A highlight of my trip was spending a substantial part of a day, together with colleagues from ‘Friends of Socialist China’, exploring an agricultural cooperative in the north-eastern Jilin province. The law on Specialised Farmer Cooperatives was passed by the National People’s Congress, coming into effect on July 1 2007. As stated by Tim Zachernuk In his excellent study of cooperatives in China: “The law acknowledges international cooperative experience as codified in the cooperative principles formulated by the International Cooperative Alliance.

Advancing The Commonsverse

April 23, 2024 David Bollier. , , ,
Bollier and Helfrich’s theory restores an older tradition of a moral critique of capitalism in the tradition of “moral economists” such as Karl Polanyi and H.P. Tawney. It raises important questions about the socio-ethical foundations of our society and economy, the relationship between civil associations and the state, and the nature of the state. In the final part of this introduction, we discuss the complex relationship between the commons and the state. We frame this relationship as one of mutual dependency and argue for the careful redesign of our institutions of public administration and democratic governance to make them more receptive and accessible to the creative powers of the commons.

Synergies Among Fair Trade And Cooperative Economic Principles

March 26, 2024 Gizem Bülbüller, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
Cooperatives have become increasingly prominent as organizational models amid the crisis conditions facing the world. Rather than advocating for the replacement of the capitalism-based economy with an entirely new model, there’s a growing trend of critiquing and adapting capitalism. Governments, international organizations, and the private sector are now including cooperatives in their agendas, recognizing their potential to blend traditional cooperative goals with newer social entrepreneurship objectives.

If The Workers Take A Notion

March 15, 2024 Matt Noyes, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
“Works for All,” the latest film by Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young, shows what can happen when workers and unions take worker coops seriously. The story is told by the workers and organizers themselves, with minimal narration. “That’s by design,” Dworkin says. “The film is not about us, it’s about them.” From their stories you get a fuller picture of what it can mean to be in charge of your own workplace—from better wages and decision-making power to fundamental respect. In one telling moment, cooperative food hub (distribution center) manager Zeke Coleman talks about his previous job driving a truck for a pork company.

‘Commitment Pooling’ To Build Economic Commons

March 2, 2024 David Bollier. , , ,
Sixteen years ago, when he moved to Kenya, development economist Will Ruddick realized that many poorer communities are not as helpless as they might think. They may not have as much money to meet their needs, but they do have goods and services to offer each other -- cooking, tutoring, bike repair, taxi rides, and so forth. The real problem is the scarcity of a currency to enable exchange; the national currency, the Kenyan shilling, is not so plentiful in many neighborhoods. So, working with small businesses and households, Ruddick and members of the group he founded, Grassroots Economics, set out to create what he calls "community inclusion currencies."

Baltimore’s Co-Ops Show There’s Another Way To Work

February 16, 2024 Working People, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
Baltimore has become what many consider to be ground zero in the emerging “solidarity economy” and the formation of worker-owned, cooperatively run businesses. There’s something important going on here, and there’s a lot that we can all learn from our fellow workers who are in the cooperative space—people who are living, breathing proof that there’s another way to run a business, that there's another way to run our economy, and that there are other ways we can treat work and workers. At a recent event hosted by the Baltimore Museum of Industry titled "Work Matters: Building a Worker-Owned Co-op," Max moderated a panel including workers and representatives from Common Ground Bakery Café, Taharka Bros Ice Cream, A Few Cool Hardware Stores, and the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED).
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