Aaron Tanaka joins us to share observations from a number of years of leadership in one of the U.S.’s more dynamic environments for solidarity-economy organizing — and comes to a root question of social change work, as cast by Boston Ujima Project’s Nia Evans: “How do we make the air that we’re breathing?”
Aaron Tanaka joins us to share observations from a number of years of leadership in one of the U.S.’s more dynamic environments for solidarity-economy organizing — and comes to a root question of social change work, as cast by Boston Ujima Project’s Nia Evans: “How do we make the air that we’re breathing?”
What does it mean to bring the element of employee ownership into private-equity-driven acquisition and restructuring deals, as the organization Ownership Works has recently been formed to do? David Ellerman proposes several points for consideration.
Open Collective’s Mike Tekh Strode talks with us about organizing for solidarity-economic change in Chicago, work he has undertaken over many years and which developed a sharpened focus with 2018’s Chicagoland Cooperative Economy Summit.
In the soil of a perduring heritage of indigenous social life and traditions, solidarity-economy practices are being nourished where to the casual observer’s eye only an overdeveloped tourism economy and its toxic byproducts might be apparent.
We talk with Neal Gorenflo about Shareable, from the moment of painful introspection that led him to abandon a conventional corporate career and begin building strategy-minded community, to the work catalyzing growth of the urban commons the organization does today.
There is powerful change at work worldwide in the thinking that underpins pursuit of what has been called “progress” — at its heart, an awakening to the importance of the understanding and capacities of indigenous peoples.
“You have to know what you own,” Tiffany Brown and Kate Poole tell the people who join Chordata Capital’s investor cohorts. Theirs is an approach to managing wealth that foregrounds interconnectedness and counsels refusal to look away from the manifold harm cumulative capital causes under the existing economy’s terms.
Something new has emerged in Maryland’s local media landscape: a Black-led, cooperatively owned and managed news organization. At its heart is a commitment to journalistic credibility and community connection.
“The Partner State represents economic democracy, transcending the conventional dualism between private capitalism and state,” John Restakis says in the first part of our conversation with him. Here, in part two, we explore further the implications of an expanding democratic sphere.
In the U.S., owning the place where one lives represents both an essential basis for and a significant hurdle to entry into full participation in the economy, and the country’s urban centers are increasingly zones of division between the economically included and excluded. Alternatives to homeownership conventionally conceived offer steps toward meeting the challenge.
How will 21st-century societies meet the challenge of reestablishing the position of the citizen, a role progressively stripped of status and prerogatives with the rise to dominance of corporations? We talk with John Restakis about the way forward argued for in his new book, Civilizing the State.
Rebecca Lurie has unusual depth and breadth in activism for economic change. Now a professor with City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, she was a union carpenter first. She talks with us about her initiatives blending community and worker ownership development with labor organizing.
We talk with Matt Cropp about the work of cultivating worker ownership at the state and local level, drawing on insight gained in his role as director of one of a still relatively small number of public offices across the U.S. set up for this purpose.
Tim Huet expands on the Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives vision in this installment of our conversation with him. Several years ago, the membership began to see the organization’s challenge as something larger than establishing cooperative businesses only. We talk about the implications of that shift.
Cooperativism, weighed against the dominant system with its extremely narrow focus on the accumulation of private capital, is an approach to economic development with many intrinsic advantages. How then to think about cooperatives’ much smaller numerical share of the “pie” vis-à-vis that of conventionally structured businesses?
Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives co-founder Tim Huet talks with us about challenges and lessons drawn in two decades of cultivating cooperative businesses — individual businesses, in the first place, but businesses with common stake in a cooperative network as well.