Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This first in our series of briefing papers on building An Economy That Works explores the underlying phenomenon of ‘secular stagnation’ – a long-term decline in the rate of growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
On July 3, the Co-operative Party in the U.K. launched a report at parliament outlining a strategy to double the size of the U.K.’s cooperative sector by 2030. The report, written by the think tank New Economics Foundation (NEF), was commissioned by the Co-operative Party and comprises a vision of the party’s goals.
This is a story about people who build their own machines. It’s a story about people who, due to necessity and/or conscious choice, do not buy commercial equipment to work their lands or animals, but who invent, create and adapt machines to their specific needs: for harvesting legumes, for hammering poles, for hitching tools onto tractors.
Bâtiment 7 opened to the public in May of this year, still entirely staffed by volunteers. The large complex houses a bicycle workshop, a car repair garage, a woodworking workshop, a co-op grocery store, a library and event space, a bar and a tiny microbrewery — and that’s just the ground floor.
How can cooperatives work together? In Japan, cooperatives have banded together to form the Japan Cooperative Alliance (JCA), an umbrella organization that seeks to promote inter-cooperative collaborations, lobby for pro-cooperative policies, and provide better information and education about cooperatives to the general public.
We try to conceive of Cecosesola as a personal process of development, not as work. Work! Just thinking about it makes you tired! It isn’t always successful, and it isn’t for everybody.
It turns out that the fashion world has quite a large cohort of designers, fashion houses, scholars, and activists who want to revamp the global fashion marketplace. To my surprise, there is quite a movement underway to invent new ways to design, produce and distribute clothing.
Whatever they are called—vouchers, scrip, credits, certificates or coupons—sound private and community currencies can be spent into circulation by any trusted producer or reseller who is ready, willing, and able to reciprocate by redeeming the equivalent amount as payment for real value.
Progressives reference the ‘new economy’ in order to describe a system that is based on social and environmental justice. Yet type these words into any search engine and you’ll find that we don’t own it, neoliberals do.
Both the Cleveland and Preston Models represent a reinvention of a longstanding political tradition that played a significant role in the development of mass socialist politics in Europe and North America.
Resonate is a music streaming co-op and a great example of a platform co-op which is changing the way business works. In the run up to the OPEN 2018 Platform Co-op conference we interviewed Peter Harris, Resonate Founder and CEO.
If people can create their own livelihood, I won’t say business, because it’s more than just business — but if we can create and control own livelihoods, it eliminates the long legacy of exploitation, of abuse, that people — particularly black people — have suffered in this community.
