“Courage,” Ella Baker said, in 1931, to a phalanx of young African American co-operators gathered in Pittsburgh. They had come from across the country to organize for a radically democratic society – based on solidarity and justice – and to inspire their communities with a vision of a Black commonwealth.
I spent this last weekend in Boston at the CommonBound Conference organized by the New Economy Coalition. They summarize the purpose of the conference as:
Co-ops, time banks, lands banks, and community financing are all rooted in principles of solidarity, participation, and cooperation as opposed to competitive individualism. Join us to explore and celebrate Philadelphia’s Solidarity Economy.
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
5:30 pm to 7:30 pmChrist Church Neighborhood House, 4th floor
20. N American St.
wheelchair accessible
When Farah Tanis began to meet with a group of low-income women to discuss their economic challenges, she found that nine out of ten were survivors of domestic violence or sexual assault.
"Most of us had grown up in poverty and we started looking at what were the systemic causes of poverty for us," she said. "We started looking at economic security as a human right and an extension of the Civil Rights."
Shareable is soliciting seed grant proposals to support the development [of] resource sharing and solidarity economy projects to be launched by Dec 2014. Along with 20-25 seed grants of $500-$1000, Shareable will offer a support package which includes training, project promotion, and peer support from the Sharing Cities Network.
Ann Arbor Public Schools custodians are pursuing an alternative solution in an attempt to save their jobs as district officials consider outsourcing their work to a private company.
More than 100 people interested in how cooperative businesses can help move the Central Texas economy toward shared abundance and prosperity, came together at the second annual Austin Cooperative Summit brought by the Austin Cooperative Business Association and NCBA CLUSA.
In 2009, the American political economist Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Economics. Strictly speaking, she was neither an economist nor was the prize a Nobel but, in fact, the Swedish bank prize. Born “poor”, in her own words, in California in the summer of 1933, she published Governing the Commons in 1990 and died in 2012 of cancer.
Worker-owned co-ops got a boost on Monday when Independent Senator Bernie Sanders unveiled an initiative in Vermont that champions what many call "the new economy
10th June 2014 — The Neighboring Food Co-op Association (NFCA) Board of Directors recently approved a resolution on The Co-operative Legal Identity, which seeks to protect and promote co-operative business principles, “to ensure the integrity of statutes and use of the co-operative name, and to promote use of the co-operative business model as an effective tool for self-help, poverty reduction, human developme
COPAC has been engaged in building cooperatives and promoting alternative models of local development for over ten years. This guide is a result of these years of grassroots practice and learning.
[V]alues that exist only in relation to what they oppose are not enough to engender the collective spirit necessary to overthrow the most powerful corporate system in history and the ethos at its core. Some of the presenters confronted the weekend's spiritual problem outright.
“The Venezuelan government and commune movement are taking steps to move towards the creation of what is referred to as a “communal state”, which involves community organisations assuming collective control of local production and decision making.
Event: Tuesday, June 17 @ 11am Pacific
First, let’s start with a critique of the older cooperative models:
Yes coops are more democratic than their capitalist counterparts based on wage-dependency and internal hierarchy. But cooperatives that work in the capitalist marketplace tend to gradually take over competitive mentalities, and even if they would not, they work for their own members, not the common good.
