Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Transnational corporations have become the dominant force directing our world. Humanity is accelerating toward a precipice of overconsumption, and the large transnationals are the primary agents driving us there.
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.
“Knowing that we need better jobs and a good environment? That’s all you need to know to tell your lawmakers,” Short says. “It’s up to us to express our will.”
The latest episode of the Upstream podcast takes a deep dive into the worker cooperatives movement: a broad selection of organizations, activists, and cooperatively-structured workplaces that advocate for and embody workplace and economic democracy.
Platform cooperatives that are member owned and democratically controlled – allowing everyone that is affected by the business, be they customers, suppliers, workers or investors, a say in how the business is run and managed.
Buen vivir comes from Indigenous movements in Latin America and implies “right living” or life in balance with communities, natural systems and future generations. Our grassroots partners, financial investors, and adviser allies—all leaders in alternative economic practices—had joined the gathering because of relationships built up over time with my organization, Thousand Currents.
Steward-ownership is relatively new as a term, but the underlying concept is almost as old as limited liability corporations, the structure adopted by most modern companies. The original steward-ownership model was invented by Ernst Abbe, co-owner of the successful German optics manufacturing company ZEISS, founded in 1846.
Regenerative Development is a development paradigm designed to push beyond sustainability. While sustainability focuses on development today that protects the ability of future generations to develop, the priority of regenerative development is to apply holistic processes to create feedback loops between physical, natural, economic and social capital that are mutually supportive…
A wellbeing economy has the fundamental goal of achieving sustainable wellbeing with dignity and fairness for humans and the rest of nature. This is in stark contrast to current economies that are wedded to a very narrow vision of development—indiscriminate growth of GDP.
It is all too clear that our economy is precarious, economically, socially and ecologically. Steady State Manchester promotes the Viable Economy, which means greater resilience, localisation, and balance as economic activity is treated not an end in itself, but rather as a means to deliver a sufficiently prosperous future without continual “growth”.
By understanding the key reasons why the global economy behaves as it does today, we will be in a better position to discern the core patterns underlying economic behaviour and, if we choose, to change them. Two key drivers of today’s global economy are externalities and subsidies.
The Sustainable Economies Law Center is an organization based out of Oakland, California, that puts economic democracy front and center in its mission to support community resilience and grassroots economic empowerment.
