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Ekhilur, a nonprofit citizen cooperative, is pioneering an innovative approach to strengthening the local economy. Instead of creating a new currency, it operates its own payment system — regulated by the Bank of Spain — to maximize the circulation of the existing euro within the community for as long as possible.

For growing numbers of media companies, employee ownership offers journalistic freedom and job stability.

David Bollier discusses the second edition of 'Think Like a Commoner'.

Since their inception, The Trans and Queer Fund and UmaUma Buy Nothing group, both based in Kenya, and an untitled queer collective in Uganda have organised themselves to be independent from foreign donors, which they say do not understand the realities of the communities they serve.

In this session, Stephanie Rearick of Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks discusses getting started on projects and Julian Rose of Endstate ATL and New Economy Coalition discusses key considerations for sustainability, including governance, power, conflict, and more. 

Bethany and Tim of the Cheeseboard Bakery and the Arizmendi Association of Co-ops talk about the model of worker co-op development they have been successfully pursuing in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Linda Wurzbach recently retired from a successful 12-person education consultancy using an employee ownership model.

Since their emergence in the late 1990s and early 2000, these firms have proven to be intensely transformative for their workers, faced as they are with having to quickly learn how to self-manage their new worker cooperatives that were the formerly crisis-riddled investor-owned firms or sole proprietorships that had previously employed them. More broadly, Argentina’s worker-recuperated enterprises show how the creation of new worker-run firms has many positive externalities for the revitalization and wellbeing of surrounding communities.

Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard is a Community Justice and Social Economic Development Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College. She is an internationally recognized and widely published political economist specializing in cooperative economics, community economic development, racial wealth inequality, solidarity economics, Black Political Economy, popular economic literacy, and community-based approaches to justice. In this broadcast, she discusses the history & importance of Black economic cooperatives.

Even when collective activity manages to establish a rupture with the dominant order, giving space to a different set of values, it still continues to be framed by the forces of domination along their own criteria, so that their ideological hegemony remains unchallenged.