* Report: Weaving the Community Resilience and New Economy Movement: Voices and Reflections from the Field. By the Post Carbon Institute, 2014

Cat Johnson introduces the report:

“The new economy has several different names including the sharing economy, the solidarity economy, community resilience, transition, the oppositional economy, and more. At its core, however, is an awareness that the existing economy, which thrives on maximizing growth and profits at all expense, has failed us.

Although various organizations and movements work on different facets of social change and have different beliefs and methods, there’s a lot of common ground including a desire for a healthy environment, thriving communities, equitable distribution of wealth, sustainable lifestyles, and strong democracies. There’s a largely unacknowledged shared vision among groups, but there’s not yet an overarching movement that unifies them all into a cohesive group. The Community Resilience and New Economy Movement (CRNE) aims to change that, at least in North America.

For the report “Weaving the Community Resilience and New Economy Movement: Voices and Reflections from the Field,” presented by the Post Carbon Institute, CRNE researchers interviewed dozens of leaders within the new economy, environmental, social justice, labor, democracy and indigenous rights movements to find the places that they interconnect. Interviewees included Noel Ortega from the Institute for Policy Studies, New Economy Working Group; Michael Toye from the Canadian Community Economic Development Network; Joe Grafton from American Independent Business Alliance; Sarah Baird from the Center for a New American Dream; Carolyne Stayton from Transition US; John Duda from the Democracy Collaborative; Sandy Wiggins from the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies; and Shareable’s Mira Luna.

What they found was “a portrait of a rich and vibrant movement, full of promise and hope for a better future and still very much in formation with many opportunities for creative engagement, collaborative movement-building, visioning, and developing strategy.” Spotlighting this shared vision is just a beginning and there’s much work to be done. It’s an interesting and important attempt to bring cohesion to these diverse movements.