Sharing Economy

How Communities Can Build Wealth By Knocking On Doors

By Oscar Perry Abello in Next City - Jennifer Meccozi spent two decades chopping onions as a restaurant cook before she became “chief door knocker” in Buffalo, New York, or in other words, director of organizing at People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) Buffalo. PUSH is a membership-based community organization dedicated to affordable housing, equitable jobs and ecological sustainability for the West Side of the city. “People know that there are door-knocking campaigns and community organizers do it all the time, but have they thought of this consciously as a tool for economic development,” explains Keane Bhatt, senior associate for policy and strategy at the Democracy Collaborative, based in Takoma Park, Maryland. Bhatt is co-author of Educate and Empower: Tools for Building Community Wealth, a report released today that features profiles of 11 organizations including PUSH Buffalo.

Energy, Democracy, Community

August 5, 2015 John Duda, www.medium.com Create! Baltimore, Cooperatives, Environment, Sharing Economy, Worker Rights and Jobs

By John Duda in Medium - But there’s another lesson to be learned from Curtis Bay: organized communities can successfully demand something other than business as usual. It started with just a few high school students, who started talking about building neighborhood resistance to the incinerator. With the help of local economic human rights organization called the United Workers, that small initial group snowballed into a massive campaign, bringing students and neighbors together with supportive activists and artists from across the city, all showing up at meetings of the institutions who had signed up to purchase power from the planned incinerator, and demanding they do otherwise. Against all expectations, as of August 2015, it looks like they are winning. The consortium of school boards, local governments, and nonprofits has canceled their contracts with Energy Answers, and the incinerator is far from even beginning construction. Meanwhile, Curtis Bay residents have become leading voices working to create an alternative development plan.

Here’s What a Commons-Based Economy Looks Like

July 3, 2015 David Bollier, www.bollier.org Educate! Commons, Cooperatives, Sharing Economy

By David Bollier - So what might a commons-based economy actually look like in its broadest dimensions, and how might we achieve it? My colleague Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation offers a remarkably thoughtful and detailed explanation in a just-released YouTube talk, produced by FutureSharp. It’s not really a video – just Michel’s voiceover and a simple schematic chart – but the 20-minute talk does a great job of sketching the big-picture strategies that must be pursued if we are going to invent a new type of post-capitalist economy. Michel focuses on the importance of three specific realms that are crucial to this new vision – ecological sustainability, open knowledge and social solidarity. Each is critical as a field of action for overturning the existing logic of market capitalism.

Save An Iconic California Medical Pot Collective

July 2, 2015 Mollie Reilly, www.huffingtonpost.com Create! California, Law, Marijuana, Sharing Economy

By Mollie Reilly in Huffington Post - The Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz, California, provides medical cannabis to seriously ill patients at little or no cost. Founded in 1993 by Valerie and Mike Corral, WAMM functions as a cooperative: Instead of purchasing marijuana like one would at a traditional dispensary, the collective's 850 members receive low- or zero-cost bud, depending on need and ability to donate. That model, however, has left the collective financially vulnerable. Confronted with the possibility of folding, WAMM is now turning to the community it has served for two decades for help. In 1992, the Corrals were arrested for growing five marijuana plants in front of their home. The charges were dropped after Valerie claimed medical necessity, but they were arrested again the following year.

The High Cost Of Fighting For The $15/Hr Minimum Wage

April 17, 2015 Leo Gerard, www.alternet.org Resist! Finance and the Economy, Living Wage, Sharing Economy

This is no plea for pity for corporate kingpins like Walmart and McDonald’s inundated by workers’ demands for living wages. Raises would, of course, cost these billion-dollar corporations something. More costly, though, is the price paid by minimum-wage workers who have not received a raise in six years. Even more dear is what these workers have paid for their campaign to get raises. Managers have harassed, threatened and fired them. Despite all that, low-wage workers will return to picket lines and demonstrations Wednesday in a National Day of Action in the fight for $15 an hour. The date is 4 – 15. These are workers who live paycheck to paycheck, barely able to pay their bills, and certainly unable to cope with an emergency.

The Co-op Alternative To Uber

April 15, 2015 Mary Hansen, www.yesmagazine.org Create! Sharing Economy, Transportation, Uber

Gebremariam isn’t just complaining about it. Instead, he and 644 other drivers are on a mission to form a new taxi company that will be both worker-owned and unionized. The new co-op, Green Taxi, will have a fleet of hybrid or high-efficiency vehicles, and will offer a ride-hailing app. The drivers aren’t going it alone. The Communications Workers of America Local 7777 union is playing a key role in helping them break into Denver’s heavily regulated taxi industry. The new cooperative faces many legal barriers before they can get taxis on the road. For example, the Public Utilities Commission, which oversees the industry, requires potential new companies to prove that they have a viable business plan, that more drivers are needed, and that the new company won’t put existing ones out of businesses.

Co-ops Enable Low-Income Women To Work As Owners

April 2, 2015 Eleanor J. Bader, www.truth-out.org Create! Co-operative, Sharing Economy, Women

Co-ops not only give low-income and immigrant women a way to enter an often unwelcoming - and in some cases, hostile - economy, but also give them a way to exert some control over their work lives and simultaneously support themselves and their families. They have consequently been some of the early adopters in the not-yet-critical-mass movement of worker-owned cooperative businesses that has begun to catch fire in towns and cities throughout the United States. Melissa Hoover, executive director of the Democracy at Work Institute, estimates that there are presently between 300 and 400 worker-owned businesses operating domestically.

Artist Creates Tank That Gives Away Free Books

March 27, 2015 Amanda Froelich, www.trueactivist.com Create! Education, Sharing Economy

Imagine walking down the street and being confronted by a massive war tank… fully loaded with a library full of books. It’s knowledge being given away in the most inventive way possible, and it’s all thanks to eccentric Brazilian artist, Raul Lemesoff. His mission? To “battle ignorance and spread knowledge.” The “Weapon Of Mass Instruction” (Arma de Instruccion Masiva) was created by converting a 1979 Ford Flacom into a bizarre tank-like vehicle complete with a swiveling turret, a non-functioning gun, and space to store about 900 books – inside and outside of the vehicle. Featured MyModernMet, it sure is one of the best uses of a war-like machine we’ve ever seen. Lemesoff drives though the streets of Buenos Aires and delivers books to young and old alike. His only demand? That they promise to read what he’s given them.

Building Urban Food Resilience

March 4, 2015 Steve Jones, www.resilience.org Create! Food and Agriculture, Sharing Economy

Back in the days before the burst money bubble of 2008 it seemed like community gardening and environmental projects in the voluntary sector could access all sorts of funding, and indeed many did. Times were good for gardening and environmental projects, funding was fairly easy to acquire and it was regular. On the other side of the the burst money bubble there is still funding about but the need for services and resources is much greater than it has ever been due to the shock and trauma caused by the credit crunch, and subsequent efforts to support and prop up a crooked and greedy banking sector that caused it. There is a huge need in terms of access to cleanly grown fresh food in the UK. Food banks gave out over one million food parcels in 2014 which was followed by a proliferation of newer food banks opening up all over the country.

Time Banks: Tool For Restorative Justice & Community Strength

February 28, 2015 Beverly Bell, www.truth-out.org Create! Community, Sharing Economy

Timebanking is mutual credit, where whenever somebody provides a service to a member in a timebank, they get credit, which they can redeem for that same amount of time to get something they need from someone else in the network. It's fluid and flexible. Timebanking doesn't have to involve a direct exchange between two people, and it doesn't have to happen in the same span of time. The impacts are pretty profound. Matching people up based on who needs what and who can provide what is a different approach to an economy. It's an understanding that everybody has needs and everybody has assets. Also, you don't have to wait to have money to pay for a service you need. The norm in this society is that we have a human-service kind of economy through charity.

Winery Transforming Cleveland’s Most Notorious Neighborhood

February 13, 2015 David Sax, www.magazine.good.is Create! Cleveland, Sharing Economy

Chateau Hough’s grapes may be grown on the terroir of a former crack house that Frazier had the city tear down, but his process is not much different than that of many upstart winemakers today. His right-hand man at Chateau Hough is Manny Calto, an Italian-American construction broker and streetwise former Teamsters official who resembles a bald Buddha in Crocs and learned about wine by supplying Ohio’s vineyards with labor crews, often ex-offenders. Calto first heard about the vineyard from a pamphlet Frazier had distributed to churches. “I thought, ‘Chateau Hough, what is this, a rib joint?’” Calto says. The two became fast friends. Calto walks the vines with Frazier regularly, helping him research techniques and troubleshoot problems.

Greece’s Solidarity Movement: ‘It’s A New Model – & It’s Working’

February 4, 2015 Jon Henley, www.theguardian.com Create! Greece, Poverty, Sharing Economy, Unemployment

“A long time ago, when I was a student,” said Olga Kesidou, sunk low in the single, somewhat clapped-out sofa of the waiting room at the Peristeri Solidarity Clinic, “I’d see myself volunteering. You know, in Africa somewhere, treating sick people in a poor developing country. I never once imagined I’d be doing it in a suburb of Athens.” Few in Greece, even five years ago, would have imagined their recession- and austerity-ravaged country as it is now: 1.3 million people – 26% of the workforce – without a job (and most of them without benefits); wages down by 38% on 2009, pensions by 45%, GDP by a quarter; 18% of the country’s population unable to meet their food needs; 32% below the poverty line. And just under 3.1 million people, 33% of the population, without national health insurance.

Solidarity, PA

January 15, 2015 AbScher, www.dissentmagazine.org Create! Sharing Economy, Solidarity

Showers and Vitale are among the civic leaders working with Mayor Vaughn Spencer to improve people’s lives, create living-wage jobs, and green the economy using a more democratic and localized style of economic development. They serve on the Mayor’s Sustainability Committee to mobilize those civic initiatives to rebuild Reading that supplement the official actions taken by the city administration. Their work started even before the mayor was elected in November 2011, when civic leaders met to plan how the city could avoid the draconian actions—such as selling off public assets like the city’s water authority and appointing private consultants to run the city—often taken by cities under Act 47. After Mayor Spencer took office in January 2012, their interest expanded to nurturing worker co-ops along with other “solidarity economy” approaches that are designed to create more democratic control of businesses, finance, and utilities.

New Organization For Solidarity Economy, Postal Banking

January 14, 2015 It's Our Economy, www.itsoureconomy.us Create! Cooperatives, Finance and the Economy, Sharing Economy

An expanded organization dedicated to postal and public banking, worker-owned cooperatives, debt forgiveness, and basic income will host a variety of speakers in its Spring 2015 phone conference series, according to the group’s web site. Commonomics USA, formed by veterans of the public banking, debt forgiveness, and foreclosure prevention movements, aims to “advance economic justice, reclaim the commons, and promote democratic economies through nonpartisan partnerships with America’s public officials, grass roots activists, and the general public,” according to its web site. Working with postal unions and other policy groups, the new organization will focus on postal banking, the delivery of basic financial services through the post office, during much of 2015, according to the group’s policy director, Matt Stannard.

FairCoop: Virus Of Cooperation Infects A New Economy

January 10, 2015 Pablo Prieto and Enric Duran, www.roarmag.org Create! Capitalism, Finance and the Economy, Sharing Economy, Technology

These thoughts inspired the creation of FairCoop. One of us, Enric Duran (co-founder of the first integral cooperative) chose a cryptocurrency, Faircoin, anonymously encouraged a community take-over of said cryptocurrency, and bought a significant amount of all existing coins at a low price, unnoticed. Enric then brought together people from the CIC, the P2P Foundation, the Dark Wallet team, and other activists, to co-design an initial vision of how FairCoop could help build a worldwide cooperative: An Open Coop totally independent from banks or states, where everyone could have control of their own projects and money, yet overseen by a collective structure acting as a trust network. Success is about trust, even in post-capitalism.

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