cooperatives

To Build a Community Economy, Start With Solidarity

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Building a community economy.” That ethic, heard from ADP members and workers alike, defines the Springfield-based nonprofit. Deputy Director Keya Hicks, who was an active member before joining the staff, explains the power of the idea, loosely taken from the work of the late feminist scholar Julie Graham: “These are folks who live right in the community. They want their lawns to be mowed. They want their snow to be removed. They work for United for Hire; they pay rent from those checks to keep the property running, so the wealth circulates in the community.”

Gar Alperovitz: The Next American Revolution?

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Welcome to the spring of sequester and discontent. Just ahead, whatever happens in the world of politics, a world of people are going to experience yet more cuts to education, housing, healthcare, and there’s no solution to poverty in sight. Even for those who were flushed with excitement last November, the new term is already feeling like a pretty glum place. What real change is likely to come? Probably not much. By how much are real wages going to grow? Probably less. ”If you counted poverty the way every other nation in the world counts it, a quarter of our society is in poverty,” says political economist Gar Alperovitz. So why is it then, that Alperovitz also says we may be witnessing the prehistory of the next American Revolution? What’s up?

Ann Arbor: A Sharing Town

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I was on assignment for Shareable in Ann Arbor, Detroit and Chicago to help students organize sharing economy projects. I had a hunch that you can find sharing anywhere. Maybe it looks different in the Midwest than the Bay Area where I’m from, which is a kind of charismatic poster child of sharing economy. I gathered from living in Kansas this past year that Midwesterners do more informal types of sharing based on existing relationships. This may be less visible to the outsider than sharing that’s facilitated by the Internet. There are agricultural, energy, and telecommunications cooperatives (the ultimate shared enterprise) throughout the Midwest which serve millions of people, but they don’t necessarily identify as part of the sharing economy.

Capitalism in Crisis: Richard Wolff Urges End to Austerity, New Jobs Program, Democratizing Work

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As Washington lawmakers pushes new austerity measures, economist Richard Wolff calls for a radical restructuring of the U.S. economic and financial systems. We talk about the $85 billion budget cuts as part of the sequester, banks too big to fail, Congress’ failure to learn the lessons of the 2008 economic collapse, and his new book, "Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism." Wolff also gives Fox News host Bill O’Reilly a lesson in economics 101.

How the coop movement can help us win together

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Workers at the former Republic Windows & Doors have been much celebrated in the press for their victory over Bank of America. Their story is an inspiration, and a precious victory that we will continue to cheer. True to the cooperative movement, their transition to become New Era Windows was supported by a network of allies who propelled the workers into the limelight and helped them overcome those banks that were deemed too big to fail. Theirs is a story of sharing ideas and making a joint effort at movement building, with co-op developers, unions, and the workers themselves as players.

The economy: Under new ownership

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Something is dying in our time. As the nation struggles to recover from unsustainable personal and national debt, stagnant wages, the damages wrought by climate change, and more, a whole way of life is drawing to a close. It began with railroads and steam engines at the dawn of the Industrial Age, and over two centuries has swelled into a corporation-dominated system marked today by vast wealth inequity and bloated carbon emissions. That economy is today proving fundamentally unsustainable. We’re hitting twin limits, ecological and financial. We’re experiencing both ecological and financial overshoot.

Can we cooperate our way out of trouble? A review of ‘The Resilience Imperative’

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I spent many years as a corporate lawyer, employed by large corporations to fly around the world and do deals. That is, until I realised that the businesses I worked for, although admirable in many ways, weren’t properly taking into account their impact on people and planet. They were (very efficiently) running in the wrong direction. So ten years ago I left the corporate world and went looking for better models for business, working with charities, fair trade businesses and cooperatives. I soon realised that none of the old models are really serving us any more. Corporations place too much emphasis on shareholders’ needs, while cooperatives place too much emphasis on the collective needs of their community, and neither properly take into account the needs of individuals, of society as a whole or the ecological needs of the planet. What is required, I concluded, is a fundamental re-think our basic organising models for business and to adopt structures that are scaleable and designed to serve multiple stakeholders. But what might this look like?

Energy transitions – Feb 13

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•Solar for All •Energy-Efficient Mortgages now widely available in the US •EDF asks would you do the washing when the wind is blowing? •Energy Co-ops Bring Energy by the People, for the People Through Social Innovation •Why councils could be the answer to the energy crisis