Search

I am one of the lucky people who learned sociocracy the way a person learns their first language — finding myself immersed in practice. I did not learn it by instruction; I learned it by doing when I joined a self-managed organization that had been running for 15 years and had been doing sociocracy for a while. I did not pay much attention to our governance at first — after all, many things are new when you enter a new organization. I remember, however, the first time I noticed meetings there were different.

Hylton, a fifty-nine-year-old Jamaican with dreadlocks and a rolling accent, belongs to a community organization that supports small black-owned farms like this one. Once part of the estate of General Hartwell Hill Tarver, one of Georgia’s wealthiest slave owners, the land was sold in 1912 to the farmers who planted the pecan grove. These days it belongs to New Communities, a black farming cooperative founded in the Sixties that is widely considered to be the country’s first community land trust.

Since March, Desert Indigenous Collective has helped about 15 families in the Phoenix area with items ranging from pet food to paper towels. Those who request assistance receive supplies in bulk intended to last up to two weeks. The work is almost entirely funded by online donations and community support, with some funding coming directly from collective members, who balance this work with full-time jobs.

Spring 2020 was upon us and plans were being made for the usual work of paving and tree maintenance when COVID-19 hit. Almost as quickly as we heard about the virus, Vermont’s Governor put us under a Stay Home, Stay Safe order. Little did we know that our lives were going to change as people were laid off, businesses and schools closed and the government mostly shut down. Folks were now at home and asked not to go out unless they absolutely had to. 

We at the TESA Collective are thrilled to release the fifth title in our suite of activist games: STRIKE! The Game of Worker Rebellion. STRIKE! is a groundbreaking and beautifully-illustrated cooperative board game for 2 – 4 players about building worker power. TESA’s previous games have been played in over 30 countries by more than 200,000 people.

A mutual credit network is a pool of businesses, traders or individuals that sell or seek goods and services within that internal market. The network issues its own “money” and the members use it to trade with each other. If you sell within the market you gain credit to spend with other members; if you buy, you owe a debt to the market until someone needs your product. Mutual Credit in fact, allows you to trade without conventional money. It solves cash flow problems without seeking a cash injection.

A national coalition of labor unions, along with racial and social justice organizations, will stage a mass walkout from work this month, as part of an ongoing reckoning on systemic racism and police brutality in the U.S.

In his speech in 1934, sociologist and civil rights activist William E. B. du Bois called on Black communities across the country to develop an economic nation within a nation. He was a lifelong advocate of economic cooperation to enable African Americans to shape their own economic destiny.

Starting in 1970 and over the next ten years, Detroit Printing Co-op produced dozens of book titles and millions of pamphlets, journals and posters for diverse social and political currents in Detroit, the Great Lakes area and internationally. Legendary co-ops often have competing and murky origin stories. Danielle Aubert has interviewed some of the key participants, as well as going to secondary sources to show how the co-op stood in a tradition of propaganda, education and organising by anarchist and socialist printers in America going back to the early nineteenth century.

Cooperatives were previously limited to only a few industries, each with their own specific legislation but this changed following the passing of the 2012 Cooperative Framework Act. Cooperatives could now be established in almost any sector, and requirements to launch one were drastically reduced.

Since 2009, the latest incarnation of Food for Life has been providing food to the Atlanta community.

Urban commons are resources in the city that are managed by the users in a nonprofit-oriented and prosocial way. They go by many names, from grassroots activism to community-led initiatives, but are united by two main characteristics. First, they are managed by the users through a collective, participatory process of accessing, managing, and developing the resource called commoning. Second, commons projects measure value based on how their use for community members, rather than measuring them by their ability to generate profit.