What’s the Role of the Legal System in Creating an Equitable Economy?

In this episode of Next Economy Now, Erin Axelrod, a Partner at LIFT Economy, interviews Janelle Orsi, founder of The Sustainable Economies Law Center.

Orsi is an attorney living and working in Oakland, California. Her law and mediation practice is focused on helping individuals and organizations share resources and create more sustainable communities. She works with social enterprises, nonprofits, cooperatives, community gardens, cohousing communities, ecovillages, and others doing innovative work to change the world. Her primary areas of legal specialty are real estate, small business, nonprofit, and estate planning law. In addition to her private practice, Orsi is co-founder and director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

Orsi is the author of “Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy” and co-author of “The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life & Build Community,” a practical and legal guide to cooperating and sharing resources of all kinds. Orsi has also written for Shareable.net.

In this episode, Axelrod and Orsi discuss a number of topics, including:

• What if people could divert their funeral financing into burial plot land conservation easements?

• The radically transformative power of worker-ownership

• What does the real sharing economy look like? Loconomics Cooperative as a model to emulate

• What is a multi-stakeholder cooperative and why that might be important

• Healthy workplaces and how to alleviate nonprofit burn-out

• “Permanent real estate cooperatives” as an iteration of community land trusts to lessen the divide and make land trusts accessible to a more diverse socioeconomic group

• How to catalyze a consumer revolution to create a tipping point for cooperatives

Towards the end of the podcast, Axelrod and Orsi coin the term, “democravore,” to indicate an idea of mobilizing groups of people to come together to prioritize food spending at worker-owned food businesses.

 If you only have two minutes, click here for a highlight from the interview.

This is part of a series of Next Economy Now podcasts we are publishing on Shareable. You can also listen/subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Overcast, Stitcher, or your favorite podcasting platform. 

This article is cross posted with permission from Shareable.net.