Commons

I delivered the following remarks last week at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, in Oxford, England, on January 5, 2024. It was part of a session in the Oxford Town Hall with the noted British activist-scholar-commoner Guy Standing, entitled, "Commons and Commoning: A Progressive Vision of a Good Society." 

Can creativity flourish and remain within the control of commoners? Or will businesses inevitably capture creativity and convert it into private property to make money?

Equal Care Coop and Clapton Commons are mapping a local landscape of care and support in Clapton Common, Upper Clapton. Using KUMU, a powerful system mapping platform, we are creating an interactive map that makes the often invisible grassroots networks of care and support more visible and accessible to people giving and receiving care.

Equal Care's pilot in Commons-based care in Hackney builds on five years of work developing and delivering a ‘teams model’ of home care in Calderdale, Yorkshire.

How might the commons paradigm be applied to cities in a more focused, effective way?  To find some answers, I recently interviewed two leading thinkers and advocates for urban commons, Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione.

Venezuelan cooperative network Cecosesola has won the 2022 Right Livelihood Award.

A crash course in the work of political economist Elinor Ostrom, who championed the commons and communal governance as practical frameworks.

It is now abundantly clear that the world we have inherited is no longer working, And yet there are many hopeful signs of people imagining and building a different type of future.

In the latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning, I speak with Alanna Irving, Chief Operating Officer of Open Collective, a nonprofit that handles the complicated, messy administrative and financial work for small, often-underfunded collectives.

Degrowth, as a form of resource reloca(aliza)tion through social action, should also be considered as not only an answer to climate change but a form of intrinsic social practice that is present in humankind.