The post When citizens take matters into their own hands: a closer look at citizen collectives established in 2015 and 2016 appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>By Dirk Holemans et a. Oikos, 2018: In order to find responses to current societal challenges, citizens increasingly take control, including in the form of citizen collectives that produce goods or services themselves, usually as a quest towards a more sustainable alternative. With the support of the King Baudouin Foundation and in the context of its Observatory of Associations and Foundations (Observatorium van Verenigingen en Stichtingen), Oikos think tank carried out the first research on these collectives throughout the country: who facilitates them, how important are they and how do they position themselves among other actors in society such as the classic civil society, governments and companies? With a desk study, a survey and in-depth interviews, Oikos mapped citizens’ collectives established in 2015 and 2016.
Increasing number of establishments
In 2015 and 2016, 249 citizen collectives in Belgium were launched spread over the entire country (map available). 127 among them answered the survey and 106 (48 from Flanders, 36 from Wallonia and 22 from Brussels) completed questionnaires were included in the analysis (21 respondents were found not to comply with the definition or were not established during the study period). Of those 106, most are active in areas such as food, agriculture, energy, social inclusion and the sharing economy; more than half classifies their activity under the label ‘environment and sustainability’ (graph available).
This is the first comprehensive investigation for the French-speaking citizen collectives. On the Dutch-speaking side, Oikos, on the other hand, has historical figures from 2004 onwards (graph available), indicating that 2009 was a turning point : the number of establishments has grown strongly ever since and nothing points to a stagnation of this growth.
What is a citizen collective?
Not all activities that citizens organize together are citizen collectives. A neighborhood barbecue or a temporary action group against logging is not. Then what is? Some elements are necessary to be able to speak of a citizen collective:
- to meet local needs, with the aim of long-term structural results;
- the members take control of the production / execution of the goods or services themselves (although sometimes it is possible to call on paid (service) suppliers);
- citizens are the promoters and determine who belongs to the group, and who can use or manage the resources, goods or services;
the members have a say in the form, the organization and the action lines for the future;
A few examples: with a social grocery, cooperative library of things, or community supported agriculture where consumers are closely connected to a farmer and are committed to reducing production, or even participating in the harvest.
Pioneers: highly educated working M/F/X in their thirties and forties
Citizen collectives are largely the work of 25- to 45-year-olds, and the real pioneers are usually 36 to 45 years (graph available). Young people and seniors are hardly represented. There is a balance in the participation of women and men, and single people, cohabitants and married couples are fairly equal (graph available).
Among the pioneers in citizen collectives, highly educated people are strongly overrepresented: 86.3% have at least a Bachelor’s degree (graph available– compared to 45.6% of the population aged between 30 and 34 years according to Statbel’s figures). Most pioneers (84.8%) combine their engagement with a job (of whom four out of ten half-time).
53.7% of the respondents are politically engaged. Half of the respondents (48.6%) estimate that the political preference of the pioneers of their citizens’ collective is left on the political spectrum (graph available).
Relationship with government and industry: a healthy distance
Most citizen collectives (58%) are self-sufficient. 78% came about without public participation. But they think a good relationship with the government is important (80%). Approximately 1 in 3 consults with the municipal authorities about the activities and services they offer. The relationship with the (local) government does not always go smoothly: some are satisfied (“the city made our operations possible”), others less (“we mainly got headwinds”).
According to a minority (16.8%) of the citizen collectives, companies see them as competitors. They themselves see their own role in relation to the business sector as additional (in Wallonia), cooperative (in Brussels), or innovative (in the three regions). (graph available).
Little inclusive
The sectors in which they operate show that citizen collectives often strive for a more sustainable society. They inspire other actors from industry, government and civil society. Partly because of their urge for proximity and small scale in their approach, they still play a modest role as an alternative to production and / or consumption, alongside those (more) dominant actors.
If citizen collectives really strive for a sustainable and inclusive society, then consideration must be given to ways of involving disadvantaged citizens in this citizens’ movement.
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]]>One of these activists was Robert Swann, co-author of The Community Land Trust: A Guide to a New Model for Land Tenure in America. In the book he explained that, “Israel has been one of the few countries in the world to be successful in preventing the process of uprooting the poor tenant farmer from taking place. The leasehold system has brought security of land tenure to the small farmer and his family and has prevented the control of land by absentee landlords, speculation in land, and the exploitation of farmworkers by a landowning class.”
After learning about the mechanics of a system that had demonstrably protected communities against these unwanted outcomes, Swann and other members of this group, such as the Albany Movement and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s Slater King and Charles Sherrod, put their knowledge into practice. They would go on to form the first Community Land Trust (CLT) in the Southern US state of Georgia.
ABOVE: Robert Swann and Charles Sherrod with members of New Communities, Inc. at planning meeting circa 1970
Less than one year after the trip to Israel, New Communities Inc. was registered as a farming co-operative and CLT. It was created as a direct response to the political disenfranchisement and vicious economic retaliation faced by Black communities, with the understanding that banding together and sharing ownership of the land would enable these communities to be more resilient and secure their land more effectively. In the following years, New Communities acquired 5,735 acres of land – 3,000 of which was cultivated farmland. At the time in the late 1960s this was the largest tract of land held by African Americans.
CLTs are legal models that separate the ownership of the land itself from the ownership of anything built (or growing) on the land. Importantly, CLTs effectively remove land from the market and, by democratising decision making and offering leases, ensure that the land is used for purposes that serve the surrounding community. New Communities did exactly this by offering leases that allowed farmers and homesteaders to use and manage the land communally.
New Communities operated for a decade and a half, but by the 1980s they were facing the impacts of drought, mounting debt, and racial discrimination. This prevented the acquisition of emergency loans from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), and New Communities had to reluctantly sell its land and farms.
Although slavery officially ended in the US in the mid-1860s, it persisted for well over a century after. Once sharecropping was phased out, many white landowners often retaliated and did everything in their power to prevent African Americans from acquiring and retaining land, even pressuring federal agencies like the USDA to deny resources to Black farmers. In fact, the USDA had to pay $13M in 2010 to members of New Communities after losing a class action lawsuit, in which is was ascertained that there had been widespread racial discrimination with regard to loans for African American farmers.
Yet New Communities was not a failure, but rather a seminal experiment in community economics – one which has been learned from and replicated in various ways by hundreds of CLTs across the US and around the world. Mtamanika Youngblood, an early member of this movement, explained that New Communities took “civil rights one step further into economic independence and economic rights, using agriculture as an economic base.” What was significant was their understanding of the interplay between land, finance, and agriculture.
For a community to be resilient against external shocks and capable of directing its own development, it must be able to allocate sufficient resources to the efforts it sees as critical. This not only necessitates a stable system of land ownership and egalitarian land usage – such as the CLT model – but it also requires consistency and risk-management around agricultural production, in addition to a mechanism or set of mechanisms that allow a community to self-finance its own projects.
It’s no coincidence that experiments in community finance and local currency are often linked to agricultural production – think of the grain banks of Ancient Egypt. Agricultural activity directly produces commodities of value in the form of food and materials, but it requires the ability to pay in advance for seeds, equipment, land, and labour.
Since crops are subject to unpredictable external factors like weather, agriculture carries inherent risk. For a financial system that perceives each loan or investment as isolated, loans that increase food security and the overall health of a local economy are neglected or seen as high risk.
Jim Golden and his draft horses Spike and Rosie. His SHARE loan was to complete a barn for the team.
This is where community finance can play a role. Just as organisations like Kiva, a peer-to-peer microlending platform, enable businesses to take out low or no-interest loans guaranteed by their peers today, the SHARE (Self-Help Association for a Regional Economy) programme enabled community finance during a time of historically high interest rates. From 1981 to 1992, the SHARE programme enabled residents of the Berkshires region of Western Massachusetts to collateralise loans to local business – businesses which would otherwise be rejected for bank loans. At the time, the US Federal Reserve had dramatically increased interest rates to fight rampant inflation. By the summer of 1981, interest rates on business loans was sometimes as high as 20%, yet the share programme enabled small businesses to take out loans at half that rate from their own community.
SHARE’s innovation in community finance continued to be successful and, among other programmes, advised two farms in the region to issue a scrip currency. One of the local farms needed funds to heat their greenhouses during the winter when cash was short; the other needed to repair and recover from fire damage. These farms sold what were called Berkshire Farm Preserve Notes for $9 during the winter. Once the harvest came, they accepted the notes back for $10, effectively giving a 10% discount to customers who pre-purchased farm produce.
Robin Van En (center) and other Indian Line members by Clemens Kalischer.
Yet viewed from the other side, this can be understood as a safe 10% return on investment – paid in farm produce – to those who invested in local agriculture. Analysing this further, this type of scrip currency can be seen as a grassroots financing scheme, one not dissimilar from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model.
Under the CSA model, all risks and rewards are shared with the community rather than absorbed by the farmers alone. Community members finance the operations of a CSA farm by pre-paying for CSA shares – a claim to a portion of the farm’s produce in the upcoming season. During a good year, community members with CSA shares receive high-quality produce below market prices; during a bad year, the financial impacts of the bad harvest are absorbed by the community. Importantly, the community reaps long-term benefits regardless of what happens. By smoothing out a farm’s income and insulating it from market shocks and external risk, the community ensures its own access to nutritional food.
In the same spirit, local currencies can and have given communities the tools to self-finance in times and places when the existing financial system cannot or will not do so. Local currencies serve multiple purposes and, depending on how individual currency programs are designed, each will serve some purposes better than others. It is important not to think of local currencies only as incentive systems that increase regional spending; local currencies can also be democratic systems of finance, tailored to the specific needs of the communities they exist in. These systems can (and already do) extend community credit to efforts which would otherwise not receive loans or funding.
The problem of accessing large-scale investment becomes less and less an issue as a regional currency achieves greater adoption. The Sardex currency system in Sardinia, Italy has been receiving a lot of press recently, and currently clears over €8 million in mutual credit payments between business each month. Another mutual credit system, the WIR in Switzerland, provides the means of over 1.5 billion Swiss francs per year and has been growing since 1934 when it was started to address a lack of access to credit. In Kenya, the Sarafu-Credit programmes operated by Grassroots Economics are also mutual credit systems, and they provide microfinance zero-interest loans in local currency to businesses and vendors who would otherwise have no access to credit.
Sharing a common thread with crowdfunding, lending circles, and even investment through credit unions and public banks, local currencies tap into the latent potential for communities to finance their own development. Just like these other community finance initiatives, any profits generated by endogenous financing from local currencies continue to enrich in the region.
Unassumingly nestled at the bottom of a sleepy hill in South Egremont (also in the Berkshires region), Indian Line Farm exists as an example of what the intersection of land, finance, and agriculture could look like in the new economy. Not only was it the first CSA farm in the United States, but Indian Line accepts the BerkShares regional currency as payment. BerkShares was started in 2006 by the same community that initiated the share programme and Berkshire Farm Preserve Notes, and still circulates today.
BerkShares local currency.
If that weren’t enough, Indian Line Farm also sits on CLT land and the lease requires that land to always be used for farming – it can never be used for any other purpose. In an innovation rare among existing CLTs, the farmers at Indian Line are not only entitled to equity derived from value they add to buildings on the land, but also from the value of perennial stock and organic soil improvements. By including this in the lease, the CLT ensures that the farmers’ economic incentives will always remain in alignment with the long-term environmental goals of the community.
Most often, when CLTs are mentioned in the media, it is in relation to low-income housing. This is because CLTs dealing with affordable housing or neighbourhood restoration have tax exempt status under US federal law. Yet there is nothing that actually requires a community land trust to be used for low-income housing.
In fact it is possible for all types of land to be held by CLTs, and it is also possible for equity to be given to individuals living and working on any type of CLT land.
Though a tax-exempt CLT cannot offer equity to individuals, it can use a two-tier framework to do so, where a subsidiary holding company manages the land and offers equity to those who live and work on it. This framework -commonly used by churches and educational institutions – was developed and acted upon by the Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires that holds Indian Line Farm’s land.
(in photo from left to right: Bob Swann, Ursula Cliff, Susan Witt, Frank Lowenstein, Clemens Kalisher, Elizabeth Keen and Al Thorp celebrate the 1999 partnership formed in order to transfer ownership of Indian Line Farm from the estate of Robyn Van En. Photo by Clemens Kalischer.)
This framework allows all types of land to be donated, including land used for commercial purposes, and business owners or other leaseholders are entitled to equity in improvements made to businesses or anything else built on CLT land. As far as land reform goes, this innovation is truly groundbreaking in the way it enables most types of land to be held securely in common.
These three elements – land, agriculture, and finance – fundamentally influence the wealth flows and power dynamics that permeate society and shape it. By using and improving existing models, communities can build a resilient foundation where decommodified land is held in trust, the risks of agriculture are socialised, and regions maximise their ability to self-finance. With a foundation this solid, a community would be primed and equipped to direct its own development in any way it sees fit.
Aaron Fernando is a community currency consultant who has worked with multiple community currencies across the United States, and is also a writer focusing on local movements, new economy initiatives, and behavioural economics.
Lead image Indian Line Farm, by Jason Houston.
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]]>When I left the metro station in Vanves, south of Paris, I discovered a pretty, modern and flowery city. Just a few steps from the station, I found the porch I had been told to look for, and crossed beneath it to find the participative habitat where I would spend a week. It was a large building, nestled between the wall of the cemetery and the surrounding houses, wrapped around a tree-lined garden. Suzanne, a young retired woman, welcomed me and gave me a tour of the property.
La Fonderie is a project begun in 1984. This building was first a factory, bought by a developer forced to buy it as part of a lot, but who didn’t know what to do with it. He was delighted when the families (first 3, soon 10) offered to buy it so they could do some work and make their participatory housing project a reality.
From the beginning, the habitat was intended to save energy and be environmentally friendly, but the craftsmen capable of building a wooden frame building (more than just soundproofing) were not legion at that time. The group agreed to a compromise: the building would be made of concrete with a wooden frame, and a very nice wooden façade would be added. It was no easy task, as the building was completely twisted and the carpenter in charge of its cladding almost threw in the towel several times! All of the residents had to persuade and encourage him to finish.
After two years of work, the building finally emerged: 9 apartments from 70m² to 120m² in various shapes; a common room; two shared guest rooms; a workshop and a shared cellar; as well as a garden equipped with a compost. The only thing young couples completely overlooked at the time was the issue of aging. There are stairs everywhere. Nothing was planned to make life easier for people with reduced mobility, so it’s a question of adding an elevator in the column provided by the architect, but it wouldn’t solve the problem for apartments that are almost all duplex or triplex.
The truth is that when the project was started, the inhabitants were not planning to be doing this 30 years later! This is a particularly exemplary experience because, after all this time, the same families (with one exception) remained in the area. Of course, the fifteen or so children who grew up there have now moved away, but the original couples are there and continue to operate the common parts of the place – for example, welcoming people like me, or opening the meeting room.
What is the secret of such longevity? First, a fairly strong convergence of values eg., ecology, anti-liberalism (or, anti-neoliberalism) and practices. Most of the inhabitants of La Fonderie are also involved in local associations like the local newspaper, environmental film festival, cyclists’ association, etc. They took part in the creation of the first AMAP (community-supported agriculture) in Vanves, opening their collective compost to the inhabitants of the district. In short, they are people who are comfortable with community life and citizen involvement.
The second secret is that community life is governed by clear rules, based on unanimity. At first, there was a monthly meeting (sometimes more) to discuss all subjects. In time, the unwritten rules of common life were integrated by everyone. Today, a single annual meeting is enough to solve a number of unusual questions. Things also happen informally: in the corridors, the garden, or during the many shared meals. There’s also a whiteboard outside for “on-duty” messages.
Conflicts? Of course there were some. But they all got settled, the most effective method being… time. Today, most of the inhabitants of the place are retired, and are not always present in the building. The question of community sustainability arises. What will happen to the place? Will it be sold gradually to the highest bidder in a context where the PLU jumped 30%? Suzanne is confident that “We won’t all leave at the same time,” she explains. “It’s also possible that we can gradually integrate new inhabitants seduced by our way of life, acclimatize them and pass on our traditions.”
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