Why is it that although cooperatives, mutuals, and other forms of self-help enterprise, have made tremendous progress since their inception, many fail to prosper and others are hijacked by self - interested groups, and in many cases demutualised?
via Cooperative Principles Plus
According to community economics advocate Michael Shuman, mainstream economic development today is a scam. States and local government agencies spend big money to lure corporations to their region but do little to stimulate the local economy or support local businesses.
This note presents policy ideas about entrepreneurship and enterprise creation derived from or, at least, inspired by Jane Jacobs' writings. The argument is that the main training grounds for entrepreneurial, technical, and business capacities are existing businesses.
Read more from David Ellerman on his website
This project aims to create democracy without the state through the creation of overlapping councils and communes at various political scales to govern the territory, as well as working to
PV Squared, a Best for Workers B Corp, is an accredited solar energy design and installation company based in Greenfield, Massachusetts. PV Squared was founded in 2002 with a very particular mission—to create living wage careers as part of a business that would be committed to the local community. After a major manufacturing facility in the area had moved overseas, leaving many jobless.
Even as environmentalism took on big new problems in the seventies, it also seemed to promise an escape hatch from continuing crises of inequality, social conflict, and, sometimes, certain kinds of people.
Curtis Bay, already the most polluted neighborhood in the city, would be made into another sacrificial victim—the nation’s largest trash burning incinerator was going to be built less than a mile from Benjamin Franklin High School that hundreds of young people from the community attended every week day.
The Student/Farmworker Alliance (SFA) is a national network of students and young people organizing with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to eliminate sweatshop conditions in the fields and build a food system based on justice and dignity for farmworkers.
MADISON, Wis. (8/19/15)--Robert King, senior business development specialist at Salal CU, Seattle, likes to joke that Central Food Co-op was the credit union’s "beta test" in launching member business services.
We are now living in a global community whether we like it or not. As global citizens, we have a choice to either cooperate and work to change the existing system, or to build anew and create ways to disengage and divest from the non-working parts of the current system as new ones are built.
Matt Cropp interviews SECU CEO Jim Blaine about credit union growth, scale, and development, among other topics.
Watch more from Cooperative Vermont on their Youtube channel.
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Editors: Leslie Brown, Chiara Corini, Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Lou Hammond-Ketilson, Elizabeth Hicks, John McNamara, Sonja Novkovic, Daphne Rixon and Richard Simmons.
The move to a new economy is underway, whether we like it or not. The many cracks widening in latter-day capitalism are creating new pressures and opportunities for people to do things differently. The real question is whether we patch over those cracks with more of the same, or nurture the seedlings for a more beautiful world that are sprouting up and breaking through.
Anarcho-syndicalism is one of the major forms of social anarchism. The idea behind anarcho-syndicalism is to combine the economic methods of syndicalism with the revolutionary politics of anarchism.
