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

February 15, 2017

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 iTunesOvercastStitcher, or your favorite podcasting platform. 

Header image of Orsi by Chris Tittle. 

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

Janelle Orsi

Janelle Orsi is the Executive Director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which facilitates the growth of more sustainable and localized economies through education, research, and advocacy to support practices such as barter, sharing, cooperatives, urban agriculture, shared housing, local currencies, community-supported enterprises, and local investing. Janelle is also a "sharing economy lawyer" in private practice, specializing in helping communities share housing and cars, form cooperatives, launch urban farming initiatives, and form social enterprises.  Janelle earned her J.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Law.

Janelle is the author of Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies (ABA Books 2012), and co-author of The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life & Build Community (Nolo Press 2009), a practical and legal guide to cooperating and sharing resources of all kinds.
 
In 2010, Janelle was profiled by the American Bar Association as a Legal Rebel, an attorney who is “remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation.” In 2012, Janelle was one of 100 people listed on The (En)Rich List, which names individuals "whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures." In 2014 Janelle was elected as an Ashoka Fellow.

Tags: new economy, sharing economy