Last week, 12 students of the OD&M training visited the training nodes (Florence, Bilbao, London, Dabrowa Gornicza) exploring the local ecosystems of alliances between Universities, makers communities and enterprises. The mobility gave the possibility to build mutual knowledge and relations between students from the four countries, and has been a very positive experience for both visitors and hosting organisations.

Student’s experiences describe the rich learning environment of the four nodes of the project:

• In Poland, students had the occasion to work together on robotics based on open source hardware, and visited Łódź where they were able to customize their robots and see how revitalization of textile city looks like.
• In the UK, the week has been focussed on Social Enterprise and Intellectual Property in a context of Open Design, Co and Participatory Design Practices. Through tours, design activities, and workshops the students worked in teams to develop enterprise propositions focused on OD&M activities.
• In Spain, mobility focused on transferring to students the experience of the exercise carried out in collaboration with Fekoor – Etxegoki, an association that manages a group of apartments that provide autonomy to people with reduced mobility. During the week the students had the possibility to know the city of Bilbao and its transformation model, and they visited the most important open work spaces in the city.
• In Italy, they visited the spaces of Manifattura Tabacchi, and reviewed the solutions for the space developed by Italian students, with the aim of adding elements draining from their local learning experience in their OD&M training. Mobility students also presented, as a moment of peer learning, the solutions developed on their own challenges/contexts. Moreover, they participated to the event “Erasmus4Ever, Erasmus4Future” organised by Impact Hub Florence and INDIRE – Italian National Agency for Lifelong Learning Education.

The mobility has been aimed at defining commonalities and differences with their local context and with the solutions prototyped in their learning experience to inspire and influence both visiting and local students and their ideas/prototypes. It has been a success that hopefully will be replicated in next years.

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A new VICE Special Report: The Future of Work premieres April 19 on HBO.

This video has been reposted from the HBO youtube channel.

The post The Future of Work – Jobs and Automation in Estonia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Spazio 13 is Bari’s good practice for Com.unity.lab network.Com.unity.lab is an European consortium within the framework of the URBACT programme. The main policy addressed by Com.Unity.Lab is a Local Development Strategy focused on a Co-governance process that organizes and brings together a bottom-up participatory perspective with top-down public management practices, ensuring a horizontal and collaborative local approach, to decrease and mitigate the various forms of exclusion: social, economic, environmental and urban.to follow Com.Unity.Lab network: https://www.facebook.com/ComUnityLab-…

to follow Spazio 13:https://www.facebook.com/spazio13bari/

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Shanna Hanbury: Rio de Janeiro is a city of extremes. Inequality is rampant, and while a small elite enjoy the “luxury” of housing, high quality education, and concentrated public funding, the majority of its citizens share the rest. The best examples of sharing are born not out of excess but from scarcity and collective problem solving. How do you build a house without money? How can you study if you can’t afford to pay for a bus to class? How can a farmer survive with no land? How can people without access to resources reasonably start up a working business? And of course – how can people help each other stay safe?

1) Housing

There is no data to show the magnitude of self-built houses, but it is a common phenomenon in Rio’s favelas as well as in the suburbs of the city. The local term mutirão — mutual collaboration — is one of the strongest tools used. These constructions are done slowly, spanning many years, and materials bought in small amounts, and with the collaboration of friends, neighbors, and family. According to Geraldo Fonseca, a builder who lives in Maré, all the houses in his neighborhood were built this way. When asked how many houses he has helped build, he said: “Too many to count. Neighbors would come to help, and in return, I would help them too. We need one another to help with the construction and the struggle.”

Photo by Thais Cavalcante

2) Culture

The spectacle of Rio’s carnaval parade is famous all over the world. Less known however, is how samba schools function within their communities as vibrant cultural centers. There are more than 80 samba schools in Rio, located in neighborhoods left aside by the public authorities. According to carnaval expert Fabio Fabato, people gravitate to samba schools looking for fun, belonging, and identification. “People from these communities are the driving force of the samba schools and the samba schools are their driving force — it’s a very intrinsic relationship. Everything is done very collaboratively.” Samba schools fill a void in these under-funded and forgotten neighborhoods. Apart from the year-long process of preparing for the Carnaval parade, there are dance and sewing workshops, and the community will often gather for feijoada and music, among other activities.

Photo by Beija Flor

3) Education

Rio is lauded as one of the most queer-friendly cities in the world, but discrimination in the job market, particularly against trans people, is widespread. PreparaNem came about to fight this marginalization through education — and it aims high. Most people who enter the program are either homeless or living in very precarious conditions, presenting very specific challenges. All classes are accompanied by meals, and part of the funding of the project goes simply to pay for public transportation to and from classes, which most students would not be able to afford. There are three centers in different regions of the cities, each with around 20 students every semester. All of the teachers are volunteers — a total of 165. So far, 38 students have managed to get into university, and another 20 are now in formal employment or technical courses.

Photo courtesy of Prepara Nem

4) Food

The activists of the Landless Movement (MST) have taken their struggle from rural farming settlements straight to the heart of the city center. Terra Crioula “Creole Land” is a space for small-scale farming collectives to sell their produce while bringing urban dwellers closer to the struggle for land reform.

The movement has a long and arduous history. Most of Brazil’s agriculture is dominated by monoculture. The latest study by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics concluded that 45 percent of Brazil’s rural land was in the hands of 0.9 percent of landowners. However, thousands of families have occupied unused land all over the country. None of the farmers use agro-toxins, and the food is sold at accessible prices, in stark contrast to high-end organic food fairs. In 2016, the space was recognized as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of the city.

Photo by Pablo Vergara

5) Work and money

Casa Brota, or “Sprout House,” provides a space for entrepreneurs to work in the heart of one of Rio’s largest favela complexes. The house also hosts a monthly slam poetry night called “Slam Laje” and a variety of workshops and talks. These range from investments in crypto currencies and online content creation, to nutrition and self-care. The house sustains itself with boarding through Diaspora.Black and AirBnB, as well as contributions.

Interest in entrepreneurship in favelas is much higher than the general population: 46 to 23 percent. For Marcelo Magano, one of the founders of the space, entrepreneurship runs through the veins of the favelas: “It’s an inheritance we have gained since slavery, where black people have had to turn to entrepreneurship in order to survive.”

Photo courtesy of Casa Brota

6) Staying safe

You know those days when you are coming home from work thinking about what to make for dinner and you run into a military police operation happening on your doorstep? It might seem absurd to some, but this is the reality for millions of people who live in Rio de Janeiro. In the first 100 days of 2018, there were 2389 registered shootings in Greater Rio, with hundreds of people wounded and dead.

Fogo Cruzado, a collaborative data lab brings together information from collectives, individuals, news reports, and the police to create a map of gunfire incidents in real time, and help people dodge getting caught in the crossfire.

Header photo of Casa Brota/Sprout House by Katiana Tortorelli

The post These community groups are transforming Rio de Janeiro into a Sharing City appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It all began when my good friend Roxana Bacian felt stuck in our jobs and started having regular conversations about the kind of learning and development we wanted to participate in – and couldn’t find!

We wanted learning that was first and foremost a social experience. We wanted something that was affordable, flexible and wouldn’t lag behind the workplace. We wanted something that reflected values of cooperation and sharing. And finally, we wanted something with a bit of magic to it.

So we set out to create the thing we couldn’t find, learning as we went about how to make it possible. What we developed was a 6 month learning accelerator called the Learning Marathon which is self-directed and fully peer-to-peer (by which I mean there are no teachers, lecturers or trainers other than the peers themselves). We both participated in our pilot, and now I continue to offer the service. Enrol Yourself  brings groups of 10–12 people together to pool their resources, skills, creativity and enthusiasm, each working toward an outcome they couldn’t achieve alone, guided by their personal Learning Question. By synchronising their learning and development they make it more effective, deeper, and much more fun.

Enrol Yourself is an ongoing enquiry into how groups of people can turn to one other to produce powerful learning experiences outside of institutions and traditional formats. We base our activity on the assumption that there is enough experience, wisdom and creativity within groups of ‘ordinary’ adults to make this possible. We’re exploring how this assumption within adult education might empower people at the individual level, and contribute to a collective consciousness shift at the societal level.

The future of work (not to mention global challenges) seems set to demand more frequent and ongoing learning and development from adults. Our goal is to build a community-led model to make this possible. We’re piloting a distributed approach to growth whereby we ‘train the trainers’, facilitators who initiate peer learning communities where they are. Our facilitators are currently looking for pioneering participants in Glasgow, Birmingham and London.

I’m an avid reader of the P2P Foundation blog and have found the principles really helpful as Enrol Yourself has developed, a checklist for whether we’re embodying the values we intend to. So, how are we applying P2P and commons based approaches? Here are some reflections.

1. Information and other commons

Each peer group we connect creates an information commons, both amongst themselves but also drawing on the ever expanding information commons online. And it’s not just a commons of knowledge but a commons of vulnerability and experience that we aim to facilitate. We do this by encouraging peer groups to expose their thinking, their self-limiting beliefs and their ideas to the group as they go. The value of commoning such things within the group is to create a very safe space in which risks that would usually seem out of the question can be taken. Commoning the process of learning as well as the content also leads to a unique opportunity to develop ‘metacognition’ which means awareness and understanding of the learning process itself. Demand for this ‘skill’ is on the rise in the workplace as employers increasingly prize adaptability over prior experience which can be dated.

Placing support in the commons, rather than awarding it by merit, is another concerted effort that we make. I’ve written previously about the value of unconditional support for adults, and how rare and valuable a commodity it is, not just for learning outcomes but for wellbeing outcomes too. Our next step is to figure out how we can common publicly more of what we common within peer groups. This is a challenge for a small team with limited resources, but a live question for us nonetheless.

Market and state should be servants of civil society, not the other way round

Education has always had a crucial role in strengthening the will of people against (near) unstoppable market forces. Today this is more important than ever. Worryingly, in the UK participation in adult learning is actually declining. We can see in stats that show numbers of mature students have plummeted by more than half since 2011. Workplace training is declining too, and the self-employed population, who have no formal learning and development provision, is on the increase.  It generally follows that he who funds something gets to dictate the agenda. Which can be seen as a strong argument in favour of independent and autonomous learning spaces. Of course it is crucially important that learning connect to the requirements of the world of work: vocational is essential. But so is learning that doesn’t serve commercial, capitalist agendas. For civil society to take more power into its hands, instead of watching as it slips through our metaphorical fingers, we need a multitude of independent spaces within which people and communities can craft their own agendas, gaining purpose and resolve as well as skills.

Preparing for a consciousness shift toward networked participation

Participation is by nature a two-way, or multi-way process. It is not as simple as our governing bodies opening the participatory ‘floodgates’. For participation to be a positive thing, the quality of participation on both sides must be high. If our societal and global challenges necessitate an increasingly participatory and cooperative existence (debate whether this is the case separately!), then it follows that we must learn in this way too. We will need to be adept at accessing the knowledge, resources and support we require through networks, rather than through the one source, one teacher, one voice that we’re used to. What we lose in simplicity and ease of navigation we gain back in cooperative and collaborative skills, collectively setting us up for a brighter future.By nature participation requires compromise. On an individual level this can feel very ugly, damaging our egos who scream that their identities are being compromised by this new way of doing things! But the ugly compromises can give life to a new consciousness, more fit for the reality of the 21st Century. It is the role of educational structures, Enrol Yourself included, to make spaces for and support people to make these transitions which can be painful but ultimately rewarding.

A move toward work as creative expression

Maybe a future where everyone can earn a living doing what they love is now inevitable. Maybe it’s as much a utopian pipe dream as it always has been. Or perhaps the truth is that there is simply a wider divide between those for whom it is an inevitability, and for those for don’t have the option.

Whatever the reality, the process of mainstreaming purpose, creativity and problem solving as the heart of education and learning is very much underway the world over. I see this as a hugely positive thing, an energy that can resist opposing forces that would see all education as vocational. But we do need to be careful about creating a sense of entitlement, an expectation that work is the space in which everyone will continue their creative journey. For the majority this is not the case, but this doesn’t have to mean they must all surrender their dreams and grow no further. Enrol Yourself is designed to integrate alongside working life. We aim to help people to carve space in their lives for personal development and creative expression, regardless of how they make their living.

• Applications are open in London, Birmingham and Glasgow. Find out more and sign up.
• We’re accepting expressions of interest from folk who’d like to participate in an online version of the Learning Marathon.
• We always love to hear from peers and potential collaborators, you can reach us here: [email protected]
• Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Medium and Facebook.

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Megan Hafner and Elizabeth Ramaccia:  Far too many young people in the United States today are growing up without tangible examples of people impacted by a problem having the opportunity to shape their own reality. A teenager in a rural community could feel this absence after the town’s lone employer, which long provided the power and leadership to look after the basic needs of most people, shutters its doors, and no one knows quite how to fill its shoes. For a teenager growing up in an urban Rust Belt neighborhood, it could be because for decades her community was redlined, and power was, and still is, systematically denied.

We believe that knowing how to shape your own reality—be it individually in professional or personal matters, or together as communities—should be a core part of young people’s education. With that knowledge, they will be better equipped to navigate their own futures as well as participate in shaping the future of the place they call home. This belief, however, begs the questions: What does it look like for a community to own its own future? What do the people who make up a community need to know and be able to do?

In 2014, we founded Why We Work Here (WWWH) and embarked on a year of research to observe, record, and analyze what it looks like when various place-based groups seek not just to “fix” problems head on but also to make problem solving an inclusive, community-driven process, wherein power and leadership are shared. We selected six groups to look at across the country, representing a range of sectors (nonprofit, private, and philanthropic) and issue areas (economic development, environmental sustainability, education, housing). Each group distinguished itself in how it saw its role in and relationship to its community, and the degree to which it controlled decision-making processes. All saw measurable, positive, equitable change ensue from their efforts. We wanted to know: How do they do what they do? What do they believe? And, technical skills aside, what do they know how to do?

We discovered that, despite hailing from different sectors and geographical locations, the approaches used by these organizations have strong common threads, including:

• Leadership development and capacity building. The groups recognize that supporting self-aware, empathetic, and action-oriented residents capable of working collaboratively across differences is critical for change to be transformative and enduring. Specific projects or efforts are vehicles for ongoing capacity building as much as they are about project-specific outcomes.
• Building a foundation of trust. The groups prioritize the development and sustenance of trusting relationships, both between them and the greater community and among community members. They do this through supporting diverse constituencies by identifying common values, being transparent in their own decision making and operations, and delivering on their word.
• Shared vision. The groups recognize the value of “looking at the same picture,” and work to ensure that stakeholders are a part of the development and execution of a shared vision.

These tenets, along with the specific skills and mindsets we identified through our research as essential to the groups’ effectiveness, are the inspiration and underpinnings for WWWH’s current work with educators and high school students. Through real, project-based experiences that are contextualized in the community, we support young people to recognize their own agency in shaping both individual and community-wide outcomes, and equip them with the skills to act with courage. We work closely with educators so that they can lead these programs and integrate skill-building activities into the regular school day.

We would like to share the stories of three of the groups we researched in the hope that tangible examples can help others imagine how their own actions could support alternative futures for their own communities.¹ 

Incourage Community Foundation

Gus (left) was a high school principal in 2000, when Consolidated Papers, Inc. and the regional economy collapsed. Today, he and his teammates (Corey, center, and Heather, right) facilitate resident engagement efforts at Incourage and focus on building strong relationships and networks founded on trust. Their goal is to move people from a place of “They will take care of it,” to “I have a responsibility to be involved,” and eventually to “We can have shared stewardship of this place.”

Incourage is a community foundation that’s fostering a participatory culture whereby residents are shaping a renewed, inclusive economy in south Wood County, Wisconsin.

For much of the twentieth century, the regional economy of south Wood County was dominated by the paper industry and flush with stable jobs that allowed most people to live comfortably. In 1999, however, Consolidated Papers, Inc.—a Fortune 500 company headquartered there—announced that it was cutting seven hundred jobs, and the following year it was sold to a foreign company. By 2005, total employment in the county had been cut by 40 percent.² The sudden loss of this economic anchor heightened social divisions and the sense of hopelessness throughout the community, and resulted in the loss of a shared identity.³

The collapse was a wake-up call for Incourage—then the Community Foundation of Greater South Wood County—which at the time operated the same way as many community foundations: it reacted to the needs of the community. Its board and staff began reexamining the foundation’s role toward helping the region heal and regenerate a local economy. Their belief was that upward, lasting change would be possible if residents could develop the enduring confidence and competencies to envision and implement community-wide transformation.

In the past decade, Incourage has invested in efforts that are laying the groundwork for a new culture of collective self-determination locally, including their most ambitious project yet—the community-led redevelopment of the Tribune Building, once the home of the local newspaper. Incourage purchased the abandoned building in 2012, and since then it has facilitated a process for the community to direct the building’s redevelopment and programming.⁴

As anyone involved will tell you, this was about more than a building. At its core, the Tribune is a vehicle for building relationships based on mutual interests and hopes, for establishing new skills and ways to collaborate constructively, and for rebuilding a collective sense of confidence to act proactively. Regular meetings begin with a discussion of what progress has been made to date and how the current evening’s activities will influence the development process. Community members—usually several hundred in attendance—work in groups around a programmatic component of shared interest: the microbrewery, the kitchen incubator, the children’s spaces. Groups are led by community members who are trained facilitators.

While the Tribune process itself encourages new expectations, behaviors, and mindsets in participants, it also builds off of previous efforts investing in adaptive leadership skill development and building partnerships to support a stronger local economy. “What we’re seeing now wouldn’t have been possible previously,” an Incourage staff member explained, referencing the way participants are coming together to hear one another and collaborate and recognizing the value and potential of their own ideas.

Saint Paul Federation of Teachers

When her undergraduate advisor encouraged her to do her internship with SPFT, Zuki said, “Are you crazy?!” She felt like she’d been burned by teachers as she tried, and failed, to get answers and support during the first few years of her oldest son’s schooling. She reluctantly took the internship, however, and found herself a part of the pre-contract-negotiation listening sessions SPFT was facilitating. She saw how many teachers had both the same desires and frustrations as she did. Today, she’s a huge advocate for teachers, and she wants more parents and teachers to have control over how their schools are run. She’s a trainer for Parent Teacher Home Visits, a PTO chair, and she was elected to the school board in late 2015.

The Saint Paul Federation of Teachers (SPFT)⁵ is a teachers union that has evolved its priorities and built stronger relationships with parents in order to support the development of “the school system Saint Paul students deserve” (one of SPFT’s main rallying cries). Nationally, the dialogue about the problems with U.S. schools often focuses on the deficits of teachers and the ineffectiveness of teachers unions. This story was playing out in Saint Paul, Minnesota, as well, and many teachers felt deeply discouraged by the divisive climate and narrative that excluded the voices of the people at the heart of the matter: teachers, parents, and students.

SPFT functioned for many years like a traditional union: members paid dues, and contract negotiations centered on pay and benefits. In 2005, in light of the heightened debate about education and teachers, the union’s new leadership saw an urgent need to rethink the role and strategy of the union in order to better support teachers and respond to the real needs of schools and students.

Since then, SPFT has transformed its organization in a number of ways—including, most emblematically, its approach to contract negotiations. Arguably one of the biggest tools a union has to turn a vision into reality, SPFT uses the process of developing its negotiation document as an opportunity to build a shared vision for the district that’s grounded in the needs of students, parents, and teachers.

SPFT functioned for many years like a traditional union: members paid dues, and contract negotiations centered on pay and benefits. In 2005, in light of the heightened debate about education and teachers, the union’s new leadership saw an urgent need to rethink the role and strategy of the union in order to better support teachers and respond to the real needs of schools and students.

Since then, SPFT has transformed its organization in a number of ways—including, most emblematically, its approach to contract negotiations. Arguably one of the biggest tools a union has to turn a vision into reality, SPFT uses the process of developing its negotiation document as an opportunity to build a shared vision for the district that’s grounded in the needs of students, parents, and teachers.

During this process leading up to its 2013 negotiations, SPFT engaged teachers and parents in a series of listening sessions. They discussed three questions: “What are the schools Saint Paul children deserve?”; “Who are the teachers Saint Paul children deserve?”; and “What is the profession those teachers deserve?”⁶ What they came up with was a bold, constructive vision that became a guide for the union’s negotiations. Just as important, teachers and parents saw each other as allies who ultimately wanted the same opportunities and outcomes for children and wanted to support one another to achieve their shared goals.

While most collective bargaining sessions remain closed, SPFT opened its sessions to the public. Because of SPFT’s consistent and deep investment in teachers and parents up to this point, throngs of people filled the negotiating room as conversations heated up. Union members and parents went door to door and rallied outside in the depth of winter. Parents created their own Facebook pages to better organize themselves in support of their students’ schools and teachers. Ultimately, the school board agreed to negotiate on every point they presented, which included smaller class sizes, less standardized testing, and the hiring of additional librarians, nurses, social workers, and counselors.

Today, more teachers are joining the union and more parents are getting involved in ways ranging from running for the school board to becoming trainers for the Parent Teacher Home Visits.⁷ In a move to support leadership development for both teachers and parents, SPFT employs two full-time organizers, who support long-term constructive strategies and focus on matching people’s interests and availability with opportunities to get involved.

People United for Sustainable Housing

Often referred to colloquially as “the mayor of the West Side,” David “Saint” Rodriguez is a leader, activist, and prominent personality in the neighborhood. A lifelong resident there, Saint struggled for much of his life and was imprisoned for several years. He had a hard time finding work after his release, but noticed a construction crew rehabbing a house nearby and started showing up every day as a volunteer. “I treated it like a job,” he recalls. Soon, it became one. His basic needs met, Saint was able to look beyond the paycheck from PUSH and see the holistic way the organization facilitates neighborhood-led local development. Today, he carries a strong sense of neighborhood responsibility with him and is an active member of PUSH’s board.

People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) in Buffalo, New York, is a member-driven organization that combines community development and organizing to address Buffalo’s West Side residents’ needs and build greater community control of resources.

Buffalo’s West Side is a poor neighborhood in one of the nation’s poorest cities, and has suffered from decades of disinvestment. Yet the neighborhood has a rich cultural legacy, and today it’s more diverse than ever. Its affordability allows many to build new lives—including refugees from Burma, Somalia, and other countries beset by conflict—yet because it borders a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, the West Side’s affordability is being jeopardized as property values rise.

PUSH began, humbly, in 2005, when its cofounders went door-to-door listening to issues voiced by residents. Jennifer Mecozzi, PUSH’s organizing director (now its logistics coordinator), was one such resident. “[One of the founders] came to my house one day and asked all these questions…. He didn’t write anything down, but he must have really written a book after he left. He came back about three months later…and he brought up everything I had talked about. I was totally impressed…so I thought, ‘Well, you took the time to do this, so I’ll go to a meeting.’”⁸

Based on what the founders heard—that vacant and substandard housing was a major problem for many—they began rehabbing a house in the neighborhood. Many service providers had previously entered and exited the neighborhood, and many residents had grown accustomed to and skeptical of newcomers promising support and solutions. PUSH quickly set itself apart from its predecessors by being action oriented, responsive, and accountable to the conversations staff had with residents.

Today, PUSH is building a self-supporting ecosystem in the West Side neighborhood: it builds housing for sale and rent; provides energy-efficiency retrofits; develops urban gardens and storm-water management infrastructures; manages green economy and construction crews who hire locally and pay living wages; and runs an afterschool program for neighborhood youth. The ideas that become campaigns or programs come from residents through many avenues, including annual community congresses, regularly convening working groups, and conversations community members and PUSH staff have that happen organically.⁹

PUSH’s focus on building human capital every step of the way gives this ecosystem durability and power. The success of its capacity building and leadership-development efforts relies on first addressing the most basic, unmet needs of residents (housing, employment) and then supporting individuals to participate more deeply in actions that support their community’s shared future.

These groups recognize that making inclusive, community-driven processes the norm and sharing power and leadership calls for a cultural transformation that takes a long time to evolve, necessitates immense patience and thoughtfulness, and requires an appetite for risk and for practices atypical of their sector. Their investments are paying off, however, and we hope that their pioneering efforts will serve as examples that will help other organizations, regardless of sector, issue area, or geography, to facilitate deep cultural transformation in their own communities.

Notes

1. The stories are from interviews conducted by the authors over a four-month period in 2015, and from the organization’s websites and/or other supplemental materials.
2. Judith Millesen and Kelly Ryan, “Community Foundation Leadership in the Second Century: Adaptive and Agile,” from Here For Good: Community Foundations and the Challenges of the 21st Century, Terry Mazany and David C. Perr (New York: Routledge, 2014).
3. Ibid.
4. “Tribune: Our Community Accelerator,” Incourage Community Foundation website, August 31, 2015.
5. All information in this section was taken from Eric S. Fought, Power of Community: Organizing for the schools St. Paul children deserve (St. Paul, MN: Federation of Teachers, 2014).
6. Fought, Power of Community, 11.
7. “Parent Teacher Home Visits,” Saint Paul Federation of Teachers website, accessed November 7, 2015.
8. From an interview with the authors, October 2014.
9. “About Us,” PUSH Buffalo website, accessed November 7, 2015.

Megan Hafner is one of the cofounders of Why We Work Here, a community stewardship development program for high school youth. Previously, she worked with Elizabeth Ramaccia on the strategy team at Purpose, a social impact consultancy and incubator in New York City. Megan has a background in media, storytelling, education, and community organizing. At Purpose, she focused on projects connected to public education and sustainable food systems. She has also worked with the independent global TV/radio news hour “Democracy Now!,” in New York City.

Elizabeth Ramaccia is one of the cofounders of Why We Work Here, a community stewardship development program for high school youth. Previously, she worked with Megan Hafner on the strategy team at Purpose, a social impact consultancy and incubator in New York City. Elizabeth has a background in community development and civic participation. Prior to Purpose, she led community-based design projects at a housing nonprofit in rural Alabama. Her prior research focused on the role of design thinking in community leadership development in underresourced American communities.

Photo by Johnny Silvercloud

The post What Does It Look Like for a Community to Own Its Future? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Egalitarian communities constitute a more advanced version of experimenting with alternative economy than ecovillages. They share labor, land, and resources according to one’s needs and everyone contributes in a chosen way. In Kommune Niederkaufungen, one usually needs to integrate into one of the work collectives to be accepted. Members can spend money according to their needs but in Acorn community there is a monthly pocket money to cover extra expenses such as alcohol or cigarettes, whereas in Niederkaufungen expenses of above 150 Euros need to be announced. Both communities operate enterprises. In Kommune Niederkaufungen, some members are employed outside. In Acorn community, weekly 42-hour work contribution is required but each member decides what activities to do and no checks are in place.

Basic needs

In both communities where I conducted interviews raising children is considered to be a work contribution and is valued in the same way as activities that earn money. Recognition for care and reproductive work is part of the feminist philosophy of these communes and their pursuit of egalitarianism. In this way parents do not need to choose between making a living or raising children. Since work arrangement is quite flexible and many members work in the same place where they live (in Acorn community this is the case for majority of activities), it is easier to combine work with child care. Also non-parents can choose to participate in child care as a work contribution.

Thanks to these conditions parents can respond to a child’s needs without the stress of economic survival. The first three years of life define emotional development and negligence can lead to trauma and behavioural or emotional disorders. Research examining physiology and theories of child development underline the need for constant availability of an adult and touch in early childhood (see articles by such authors as Darcia Narvaez and Jean Liedloff). This is more difficult to organize in the mainstream society.

Learning environment

Communes provide an environment that makes it easier to pursue homeschooling or unschooling because of the close availability of many adults with diverse skills and knowledge. For example, a member of East Wind, a commune in Missouri, teaches French to one of the children by taking a walk and talking to them in this language. Children in Kommune Niederkaufungen go to school, either a public one in their neighborhood or an alternative school in the city center. However, they can tap on a vast expertise at home having access to many adults with diverse knowledge. (In Niederkaufungen, some members work in education).

Community skills and multi-age group

Children need multiple attachments, according to Peter Gray, and this is how children have been raised in indigenous communities.1 In the book “Free to Learn,” Peter Gray points to the advantages of being part of a multi-age group and engaging in free play with other children for learning and emotional development. Furthermore, he elaborates on the importance of unstructured play time with other children. Citing survey date, he mentions that one of the main obstacles for limiting such free activities with children in the neighborhood is the concern for safety. Parents prefer to occupy children with extracurricular activities because they are sure that they are taken care of. In a commune, it is easier to establish conditions for children to have free play. The children and their parents know each other and there are many trusted adults around so that children can play in safety.

Peter Gray shows that children learn skills that they observe are crucial in the adults’ world by playing. Growing up in an environment where a lot of discussions and decision-making takes place, this may encourage them to develop related skills. One of the members of Kommune Niederkaufungen said that there is a practice of exercising patience and letting someone express oneself in conflicts, which contrasts with the way his friends treated each other in his life before joining commune. This may also be an example for children.

Disputes among parents

Living in a commune requires a lot more discussions and collective decision-making than living an individualized life. For example, what parents allow to their children may affect other children more directly than in mainstream living. It can become a source of conflict. A father left the commune Niederkaufungen because of the decision of other parents to have satellite television. It was impossible to isolate this child from mainstream media influence. In this commune, at least four people needed to make a veto to block community decision. Parents in this commune gather regularly to talk about their children.

The impact on the society

Certainly the way children are raised shapes their personalities. Aggregated, it results in the human relations and values of society. Jean Liedloff considers touch deprivation in early infancy to be responsible for insatiable wants and searching for solace in consumerism. Narvaez asks what impact depriving babies of their basic human needs will have on the entire society. Peter Gray observes that inter-age education contributes to the development of empathy and compassion. Communities provide conditions to raise emotionally healthy and cooperative individuals. Hopefully, they will inspire mainstream society to create conditions that resemble communal child care.

Articles on Acorn community

Gajewska, Katarzyna (September 2016): Egalitarian alternative to the US mainstream: study of Acorn community in Virginia, US. Bronislaw Magazine and reposted on PostGrowth.org.

Gajewska, Katarzyna (21 July 2016): An intentional egalitarian community as a small-scale implementation of Post-Capitalism. P2P Foundation Blog.

Gajewska, Katarzyna (10 January 2016): Case study: Creating use value while making a living in egalitarian communities. P2P Foundation Blog.

Gajewska, Katarzyna (27 December 2014): An intentional egalitarian community as a small-scale implementation of postcapitalist, peer production model of economy. Part I : Work as a spontanous, voluntary contribution. P2P Foundation Blog.

Katarzyna Gajewska, PhD, is an independent scholar and futurist writer (Facebook: Katarzyna Gajewska – Independent Scholar). She has been publishing on alternative economy, non-digital peer production, universal basic income and collective autonomy since 2013 and is mainly interested in psychological and emotional aspects of transition to a postcapitalist society.

You can support Katarzyna’s independent research and writing here.

Originally published on Postgrowth.org

Photo by edtrigger

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Amanda Abrams: For years, Wayne Trevor was a typical resident of West Norwood, a suburban region in south London. He knew a couple of his neighbors and mostly thought of the area as a place to commute to and from his job as a customer strategy senior sponsor at the Transport for London. But all that changed in 2014. That year, a team of researchers and local council staff joined forces and transformed West Norwood into a hub for community participation — also known as an “urban village” — and Trevor said it was the “start of a transformational journey” for him.

The project was spearheaded by Tessy Britton, director of Participatory City, a London, England-based initiative supporting projects that strengthen social cohesion among city dwellers. Britton launched the pilot project in West Norwood, which mobilized 1,000 people to initiate and participate in 20 community projects, including starting a “library of things,” sewing classes, and communal cooking sessions.

Trevor, who is interested in food systems, got involved with an urban gardening program and spearheaded a group of 20 neighbors who were also interested in gardening. Together, they wound up cultivating carrots and fruit trees and bees, and eventually began running a 200-square meter community garden. “Before, I knew just a few people,” Trevor says. “[The project] completely transformed my approach to community and people — now, I’m a lot more trusting.”

Like Trevor, most participants said that the initiative added to the neighborhood’s vibrancy and made it easy to start new projects. Many also said that it strengthened bonds among people and increased the community’s ability to collectively respond to social, economic, and environmental problems.

Search for “urban village” online and many of the entries that come up will refer to an urban planning concept of residences clustered near shops and offices. In the U.S. in particular, it’s a fairly new idea that focuses on neighborhood design. But an urban village is traditionally much more than a physical space. It’s a network of relationships; a community of interrelated people. Similarly, a true urban village isn’t just a real estate grid and the marketplace exchanges that occur there. Among those who focus on sharing and the commons, it’s a term that refers to a collaborative way of life — a relatively small, place-based urban community where people cooperate to meet one another’s many needs, be they residential, economic, governmental, or social. In the process, they wind up transforming their own experience of that community.

And these kinds of urban villages are on the rise around the world, especially throughout northern Europe. Metropolises like Berlin and Copenhagen host do-it-yourself communities like Holzmarkt and the long-running Christiania. Israel is seeing a growth in urban kibbutzim. In South Korea, Seoul is aiming to establish “sharing villages” throughout the city. While ecovillages and intentional communities are still more popular in rural areas, where agriculture plays a key role, urban villages are seen by their proponents as a natural and obvious antidote to the problems of climate change, economic inequality, and social isolation.

“The city is a normal environment for this because there’s critical mass, so it’s logical,” says Tine De Moor, a professor focusing on “Institutions for Collective Action in Historical Perspective” at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “I’ve been describing these cooperatives for quite a few years, but they’ve only been growing since.”

How urban villages look around the world varies hugely. They range from basic experiments in participatory governance to broad-spectrum projects that provide many critical services to residents. What the most effective urban villages have in common is their grassroots nature — the people who participate in them have created them.

For example, there are projects in development around the world, like Australia’s Smart Urban Villages and the Deeltuin in Utrecht, that are innovative and groundbreaking, containing residential units and a broad range of shared services. However, many of these initiatives were planned by developers, not the end users, and the levels of participation in decision making tend to reflect this.

While cohousing complexes may qualify, an urban village doesn’t have to be a physical space that’s built from the ground up. It can simply be a concept and an activity that’s overlaid on an existing urban community — a much faster process than the seven years the average cohousing project requires to come to fruition.

Above all, an authentic urban village is defined by its participatory ethos — and that’s both its strength and its weakness. Working together to create something builds a sense of community among participants that’s otherwise very difficult to manufacture among a collection of strangers. The effort ensures that the product genuinely meets everyone’s needs, usually at a low cost.

But it’s a different way of interacting than many people are accustomed to. “We’re used to having someone from above telling us what to do, having one person deciding for everyone,” says Genny Carraro, the managing director of the Global Ecovillage Network Europe, an international group that includes urban villages. “It’s a very different mindset. You need to understand that you have to move from your individual space to the common space. If you pretend that your needs will be answered in the same way, then it’s not going to work.”

An Urban Village in Seoul

That’s certainly been apparent with Seoul’s Sungmisan Village, a model example of an urban village and a neighborhood-level economy. In 1994, a group of families living by Sungmi Mountain in northwest Seoul created a preschool to serve their kids. That brought them together, as did a battle a few years later against the municipal government to save the mountain from a water treatment facility. When their activism succeeded, the families decided to create an alternative school for their now-older children.

They wanted something distinctly different from what was offered in public schools, but agreeing on the school’s mission and curriculum didn’t come easily. “We had endless debates. Different opinions among teachers, between parents. We had very serious splits that divided us,” wrote one of the early members, explaining the negotiation and consensus-building that was required of the group.

The result was an unusual school focusing on ecology, practical skills, and individualized learning that opened in 2004. Along the way, the community collectively created other services: a low-power broadcasting radio station, an organic food cooperative, a car repair shop, a tea house, a community theater, and many other projects tailored to the residents’ needs. Those projects persist today, though generational change has shifted the village’s flavor somewhat.

Video of Sungmisan Village by UrbaParis

Resident Sanghoon Kim adds that motivating residents to initiate projects is always a challenge. “A heavy burden is on a few core people. They are kind of in a constant burn-out mode,” he says.

What is key about Sungmisan, aside from the accomplishments, is the collective way it’s been created. The community bonds that have been forged through collaborative activity and shared spaces are particularly critical in a country whose rapid modernization means that many residents are alienated from one another and from traditional practices.

Sungmisan Village map. Photo by Monica Bernardi

Sungmisan Village has run parallel to a broader sharing movement that Seoul’s mayor, Park Won-soon, launched in 2012. His “Sharing City” project utilizes idle spaces, common goods, and shareable services across the city by encouraging grassroots, bottom-up efforts by citizens as well as facilitating the work of local startups. It’s a brand-new experiment and a major step for a metropolitan area with 10 million inhabitants. Mayor Park won the 2016 Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development for the project.

Top left: Sungmisan cafe, top right: childcare cooperative. Bottom left: consumer cooperative, bottom right: theater. Photos courtesy of icoop.

In order to focus the initiative more closely, Park and his team are going hyper-local — turning entire apartment complexes into “sharing villages” where resources that can be shared are more intensely sited. The project is still getting off the ground, and two apartment complexes were selected as pilot sites earlier this fall.

Senior Urban Villages

A very different type of urban village is the “senior village” that has become popular in the U.S. Originating in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood in 2001, senior villages are member-run organizations that allow older urban residents to age in place and delay or avoid having to move to retirement homes. The groups utilize volunteers, and members sometimes pay an annual fee to hire staff who provide assistance — like transportation, home repairs, and medical services — to those who need it.

The groups now number around 230 and are spread out across the country, though particularly concentrated on the coasts. They provide social opportunities and fortify bonds among people who might otherwise become isolated. So when an elderly woman calls on volunteers to help her with repairs in her home, gets a ride to a doctor’s appointment from a village member who’s still driving, and asks another village member to accompany her to an exercise class, she is deepening her sense of social cohesion, contributing to the stability of her community by staying in her home, and remaining relatively independent and vital.

Those conclusions are borne out by research. An article in the Journal of Gerontological Social Work by Carrie L. Graham, Andrew E. Scharlach, and Bradford Stark published last year showed that a majority of senior village participants felt that membership had enhanced their sense of connection to others and ability to count on others — and those feelings increased the longer they were part of the group. And it’s all grassroots-driven. A hallmark of senior villages is that they start from the bottom up, says Natalie Galucia, executive director of Village to Village Network, an umbrella group that helps senior villages get going and shares best practices. “Family members or friends hear of it, realize it’ll benefit them and their community, and work together to create it,” she says. Later, the members can adjust the group’s structure as needed.

That’s what’s occurred with At Home in Alexandria (AHA), one of roughly 35 senior villages in the Washington, D.C. area. Founded in 2011, the group is like most other senior villages, providing members with transportation and assistance with home related-tasks like hanging pictures or installing new computer software. But members have also developed a wide range of social activities, including monthly brunches and dinners, current events gatherings, and trips to the movies.

“I lost my husband not quite two years ago, and I’ve made so many friends through AHA — I’ve met people I’d never have met otherwise,” says Nancy Kincaid, who’s been a member since the group’s founding. She’s part of a new effort to create a “buddy” program that will pair older and younger members on a one-on-one basis.

The villages’ missions are fairly specific and limited, and once they’re up and running, they don’t require too much effort. As a result, explains Galucia, few of the villages experience problems. “They’re mostly good about resolving whatever the conflict might be,” she says. Plus, her organization acts as a facilitator when problems arise, and can flag worrisome practices before they become a real problem.

Participatory Living in London

Standing in stark contrast to the simplicity of senior villages are Britton’s London experiments in participatory living. For Britton, the West Norwood project was just a successful prototype compared to the big project that her team are now scaling up to. Using the detailed information gathered from the earlier program about how and why people participate in community activities, Participatory City — in collaboration with the local council — is launching Every One Every Day, a five-year initiative that will cover the entire London borough of Barking and Dagenham.

Every One Every Day from Participatory City on Vimeo.

With groundbreaking funding totaling $8.5 million, the project — which began in November — aims to work with over 25,000 people, creating 250 projects, and 100 businesses. It may feature many of the projects that occurred in West Norwood, but will also include retrofitting an old warehouse to create a makerspace where businesses in food, manufacturing, or retail can incubate and flourish. Essentially, Britton and her colleagues are making a giant bet that collaborative city living — that is, a giant urban village — will improve the health, finances, and overall well-being of Barking and Dagenham’s residents.

But right now, exactly what those projects will look like is unknown, and that’s because the area’s residents will come up with the ideas themselves. While Every One Every Day sounds like a top-down initiative, it’s not. The organizers will help with infrastructure and provide support, but by and large, they’ll simply be creating an atmosphere that builds on already-occurring activity and encourages residents’ involvement and sense of ownership.

Graphic from “An illustrated guide to Participatory City” by Amber Anderson

After all, facilitating genuine participation among members of an urban village or other collective gathering isn’t particularly easy. Some people wind up taking on too much responsibility, and everyone frequently has to wade through long discussions to come to an agreement. Britton and her colleagues acknowledge that while public participation is likely the key to a more healthy, egalitarian future, getting there can be challenging.

So they spent their time in West Norwood looking at what works and developing best practices, and now they’ll apply them in this new project. “We’re trying to be completely person-centered,” says Britton. Activities will be short and close to home, groups will be welcoming and non-threatening, and the aesthetic will be cheerful. “We’re serious about trying to chop down every barrier possible so everyone can participate. We’re enticing people back into public life, inviting them, making it exciting,” she says.

It certainly worked for Trevor. Following the West Norwood project, he quit his job with London’s transport authority and is now working with Britton on the new initiative. He’s confident the same thing can work in Barking and Dagenham. “One thing leads to another, then another, then another — and suddenly you have all those people engaged,” he says.

Barking and Dagenham is one of London’s poorest boroughs, and one of a handful of boroughs that voted for Brexit, making the experiment particularly intriguing and important. The goal, ultimately, is to utilize the growing “participation culture” to build resilience and build community.

After all, in a world where the social fabric seems to be rapidly fraying, the economy is uncertain, and the future of the planet is at risk, is there a better way to hit the reset button than to come back to the neighborhood level and begin to genuinely rely on one another again?

Header image: Sungmisan grocery cooperative. Photo by Monica Bernardi

Top left: Sungmisan cafe, top right: childcare cooperative. Bottom left: consumer cooperative, bottom right: theater. Photos courtesy of icoop.

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“I was in the forest today and I came out taller than the trees”

Karin Eyben, writing for Voluntary Art’s series on Cultural Commons, tells the story of Garvagh People’s Forest.

Karin Eyben: Garvagh (from Irish: Garbhach, meaning “rough place” or Garbhachadh meaning “rough field”) is a village in County Londonderry. It was developed in its current lay out by the Canning family in the 17^th Century following the 1640s rebellion with land confiscated by the Crown from the O’Cahans.

Garvagh once lay on the edges of the famous Glenconkeyne Forest which stretched from north-west from Lough Neagh, down the Bann valley, nearly to Coleraine, and across to the Sperrin mountains in the east. In 1607 this area was described by Sir John Davys, the Irish attorney-general, as “well-nigh as large as the New Forest in Hampshire and stored with the best timber in Ireland.” (Irish Woods Since Tudor Times, 1971). It formed in its day one of the biggest, and possibly the densest, oak forest in the country and became notorious for the hide out of the woodkernes; “a race of outlaws driven from their miserable dwellings by the Norman invaders, rarely emerging from their retreats in the impenetrable forests except in pursuit of plunder.”(http://www.clanmcshane.org/TheMacShanes.PDF) They became the most formidable enemies with which the first planters in Ulster had to contend with. By the end of the 17^th century the woods of south Derry had become mostly depleted with the woods exploited by the Crown with the timber used for casks, barrels, buildings and ships.

Garvagh Forest today is 600 acres and is a mix of broad leaf and conifer forest. From its more recent story as land ruled by different chieftains in Gaelic Ireland and managed through the Brehon laws, to private ownership through the Canning family who built the ‘big house’ in the forest to the state managed and owned from the 1950s as a commercial forest this small piece of land has evolved through different forms of ownership and management.

Understanding this history and the complexity of people’s relationship with the land and the forest is a key underpinning of the Garvagh People’s Forest project. The story of this project began with the closure of Garvagh High School (also sitting on the former Canning estate) in August 2013. There was significant level of community grief and anger at the time which was gradually shifted to exploring the potential of a community asset transfer of the land from the Department of Education to community management. The feasibility of this is still being explored. However, during this process, a new conversation began noticing the asset of the neighbouring forest and to what extent understanding the value of the forest could contribute to wider community well-being. A year was spent testing out different possibilities in the forest, led by Garvagh Development Trust (GDT), a local development trust, with the support of Corrymeela, such as creative community events and establishing a collaborative relationship with a number of local primary schools to explore the value of young people learning outside. This year established enough evidence to allow GDT to apply to the Big Lottery for five years funding to grow the project. We were successful in this bid with this new chapter of the story beginning in August 2017.

Garvagh People’s Forest (GPF) has as its mission to grow value in the forest with and for local people with a simple premise: time outside makes us feel better (if warmly dressed lol) and when we feel better we are in a better place to do interesting things for ourselves and with others. We have five strands to the project:

1. Developing a Forest School in collaboration with six local primary schools and three pre-schools with the ambition of increasing the time young people learn and create outside; this includes growing the skills and confidence of local educators in connecting young people to the outdoors;
2. An adult education programme, ‘classes in the forest’, where people with skills give time to share and teach those skills with others. For example, we have just completed a 5 week Unplugged in Garvagh Forest course teaching basic woodworking skills using reclaimed wood and making useful household items; this has led to the opening up of our Library of Tools & Forest Resources;
3. Growing community with imagination – this focuses on using the forest for community events that invite people to look at the world around them differently in the medium of the forest. We are currently planning a Time Travel Festival for the first weekend in August exploring the layered histories of the Garvagh area through an interactive adventure and challenge from Mesolithic Times to the Future through different sites in the forest;
4. Contributing to greater physical and mental well-being framing this work through 5 Indicators of Well Being: Notice; Learn; Give; Move; Connect.
5. Reflection, Learning, Evaluation, Community and Advocacy.

Garvagh Forest is already well loved by individual walkers, mountain bikers and families. Garvagh People’s Forest is building on these relationships with an invitation to shift from individual connections to exploring the potential of collaboration across individuals and local groups potentially sharing if not shifting the sense of ownership and responsibility with the Forest Service, local government and the State. Our dream is that by the end of five years there is a community-led integrated plan for Garvagh Forest informed by understanding of how the forest works, its biodiversity, social and commercial interests and most importantly that the forest is understood, shaped and used by local people through activity contributing to wider common good.

So how does Garvagh People’s Forest fit into the ‘cultural commoning’ movement? The initial decision that began the project was a small act of creative courage as it was driven by intuition as opposed to any evidence. The intuition was that the forest is a key aspect of shared cultural heritage and well-being and that so much more value could grow from people’s relationship with the forest and the local environment if we worked collectively. The forest offers a difference space and tangible focal point for all kinds of commoning work as well as giving value to the work that is happening across Garvagh. We also firmly believe that the sharing of responsibility and ownership of the forest will be better for people, the environment and the place of Garvagh.

We have recently crowd-funded for the purchase of nine Lost Words Books by Robert McFarlane and Jackie Morris for Garvagh Forest schools. All over these islands, there are words disappearing from children’s lives. Words like Otter, Bramble, Acorn, Dandelion, Bluebell are gone from many dictionaries disconnecting young people from the heritage, history and landscape around them. The loss of words is the loss of a relationship and the loss of the art of noticing and learning from our natural world and understanding our place within it.

We hope that the next year we can shape our programme of work and activities in the Forest recovering the words that have been lost to the people around it.

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Photo by stevecadman

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The TepozHub is an office jointly used by several people and initiatives, where the infrastructure is available to all who contribute. There is also the secondhand and barter online initiative and the community radio station Tepoztlán. Our family decided that all this offered a unique potential to create a special learning context for our children as well as for neighborhood youths and adults…and so we decided to contribute to the transformation from the bottom up and to focus on building an alternative to education with many others who shared our views.

It all began when we as a family had to choose a school for our children to attend. Making a wise choice became more and more intense as we realized that other parents were grappling with the same question. But to us, it became a decision of life beyond the school and even education. We felt it was more important to ask how we wanted our children grow up and learn. We thought about how we would spend the time that we devote to our children, and how we would have to change ourselves so that they could grow up free, being exactly who they are, and make decisions about their own lives.

All these questions made us want to reinvent learning as something deeply connected with the joy of life and something that requires care. They strengthened our desire to ensure that we could connect life and learning in our children’s lives, and also in other people’s lives, and especially in our own. We wanted to open up a path that everyone could take, a path through which we would reinvent ourselves and define what to do, a path on which we would expand our means, opportunities, and skills to learn and take action, and together with other people experience and bring about the vitality that lies in learning itself.

That is how we came to establish Camino Abierto, the Open Road, a space for pursuing alternative forms of learning and living on this planet. The name refers to the poem “Song of the Open Road,” written by Walt Whitman in 1856. Camino Abierto sees itself as a community for self-directed learning. This is where we try to integrate learning and living, and in the process, build community ties. Our group includes families whose children go to schools and others whose children do not. We meet on a regular basis to exchange views, and we organize common activities, tours and outings as well as workshops that everyone can participate in.

Our starting point is our own interests, creativity and skills. Every month we compile a calendar with all activities that we want to do. For example, we learn about the balance of life in the orchard and in the biology of the region, about the natural world with expert talks and hiking. We are developing a new global consciousness through our film club. We get to know ourselves through contact with nature, exploring our comfort zones and our boundaries. We learn to reinvent ourselves in the meeting with others, and we learn about the power of the word in reading groups where we grapple our feelings towards others. We work on social integration, occupying the public space where we use bicycles, tricycles and roller skates² – which requires redesigning the public space – and we create communal spaces, designing projects for community parks and orchards. In short: We shape and live learning as commons!

Building and revitalizing our community are the most meaningful, essential and useful learning of our time. It takes place from a local initiative in a small and human scale. People assume that learning happens naturally; they integrate it into their family lives and in a natural way, and it leads to actions. Thus the very process of creating networks for mutual support results in more resources and relationships becoming available – and over time, this brings about a learning-friendly context and spaces of communality.

People in many parts of the world are starting to recover and claim learning as a commons, and are creating new structures to make it real. The initiatives vary widely, but they all share the feature that the people are directing their learning themselves. Learning as a commons is embedded in meaningful contexts. It is founded on people developing their own interests and addressing problems and questions in their lives. Doing all this in a self-directed and free way – “unschooling” themselves³ – lets people find their own ways of learning that exist beyond the logic of the state and the market, both of which are increasingly shaping school curricula and undermining academic freedom.

“Learning as a commons” is a challenge because it always has to be rethought and re-enacted with others. Also, in contrast to homeschooling, it must take place within the community itself. The challenge lies in developing unique living environments in which children and youth can take courses, work on projects, solve problems, or simply play. Learning as commoning must create an ambiance that is embedded in active life, and in which there is no room for coercion, pressure, manipulation, threats and anxiety. Such “learning communities” do not seek to imitate school, but rather to create environments in which the people involved do things, and in which they do better and better at what they are doing, not least because they themselves benefit from it. Learning in this way is encouraged. Girls, boys, youths, men and women all have the capacity to learn for themselves, provided they are interested, are offered a suitable context, and have the resources and the liberty to do so.

Real learning empowers us to decide how we spend our time and how we give the world meaning – from our identities and relationships with others. That is how learning sticks; people understand and remember it, and it is useful for taking care of ourselves, others and nature. Curiosity and creativity are at the center of attention – and they can unfold in horizontal networks among similarly minded people, supporting solidarity and exchange. At the same time, such a process opens up substantial individual potential for development. All this creates the conditions for people to shape their lives themselves and to live life to the fullest. In other words: learning is living. Learning as commoning has an impact beyond the learning itself. It affects family life in different convivial forms, gender relations, and the organization of work, time and good living. It is a process for building another basis of understanding.

Instead of education what we really need, in the words of Gustavo Esteva, the founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca, is “to find ways to regenerate community in the city, to create a social fabric in which we all, at any age, would be able to learn and in which every kind of apprenticeship might flourish.…When we all request education and institutions where our children and young people can stay and learn, we close our eyes to the tragic social desert in which we live.”⁴

It is hard for us at Camino Abierto to imagine approaching learning from a culture of individualism, yet at the same time, most of us are not deeply embedded in communities. The reality of our lives does not correspond to the commons. That is why this way of shaping life is also an opportunity for us to establish and enliven our own experience of community in everyday life. Ivan Illich described the magnitude of this task like this: “We have almost lost the ability to dream of a world in which the word is embraced and shared, in which nobody limits the creativity of anybody else, in which every person can change life.”⁵

Yet it is not all that difficult to create alternatives, and the implications are considerable. There are many opportunities for developing a real intercultural dialogue that comes from learning by doing. Autonomous learning communities can connect as equals with other worlds beyond “education,” and with other learning communities, especially with those that rely on “new commons” created by information and communication technologies. Learning as commoning brings the possibility of building relationships and networks in a horizontal exchange, between those who were born into a culture of individualism and those who were born into a rich community. Together, they can develop the knowledge and wisdom to build their autonomy: the beginnings of a rich interculturality. All new structures of learning could be conceived of as commons – popular education, community-based and supported schools, educational institutions, vocational training centers, learning communities, even universities.

The Zapatista communities in Mexico are an impressive example of taking demands for educational autonomy seriously. As J.I. Zaldívar writes, Zapatista education offers an incredibly strong anchor for “establishing learning from the bottom up and seeking those elements within the communities themselves that combine the local reality with the universal; developing them beginning with their local foundation, and relying on the knowledge present in the indigenous farming communities in the process….” He continues:

It has succeeded in developing an educational system with various levels that were developed by the Zapatista communities themselves, referring to their history and their geographical surroundings; […] it sets its gaze on the Zapatista communities, even when seeking to better organize what these communities have been doing for centuries, namely training those people who will attend to life in the communities, in the final analysis so that they will not die, but will on the contrary be reborn time and again”⁶.

In the Mexican state of Oaxaca, the Universidad de la Tierra (in English, the University of the Earth, or “Unitierra” for short) takes a similar approach. It was established in 2001⁷ to provide free learning opportunities, especially for youths who have not completed school or vocational training. It employs learning methods that people have always used in their own ways. Unitierra is an example of creating places of conviviality⁸ where everyone plays a part, where people learn communally, and every individual can still do what he or she is interested in.

The founder of Uniterra, Gustavo Esteva, puts it like this: “Knowledge is a relationship with others and with the world; it does not mean consuming a good that is packaged in bite-sized insights. In the best case, consuming such a tidbit means receiving information about the world. Yet knowledge means learning from the world, by entering into relationships with it, with others, and with nature, and by experiencing them. […] At the university, the youths learn things they are interested in from people who do or produce something in particular; in this way, they not only acquire specific skills and capabilities, but also observe the lives of people who pursue certain activities and can figure out whether that is what they really want to do in life. What they learn is useful for the communities they come from, and the young people derive dignity, esteem, and income from it.”⁹

Unitierra is also a place where people think about the economization of learning, in other words, the fact that “education is learning under conditions of scarcity and is therefore, seen from a historical perspective, a relatively young practice that [emerged with] the economic society. Everywhere, people and entire peoples are taking up initiatives that are no longer limited to reforming the educational system or making it their own. Instead, they are leaving it behind.” Here, Esteva agrees with Holt¹⁰ when he adds, “our competence in life emerges from our learning by doing, […] to be precise, being alive and living means nothing other than learning.”¹¹

Learning as a commons is in fact functioning in a number of countries. In Udaipur, Rajasthan, a de-educational movement called Shikshantar is focused on regenerating diverse informal knowledge systems and nurturing radical learning communities within the larger spirit of gift culture. Inspired by commons freedom-fighters such as Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, Shikshantar has created an intergenerational community “unlearning” center with a library, Slow Food café, urban organic farm, upcycling maker space and community media studio. At an annual Learning Societies Unconference, learners can enter into deeper dialogue, friendship and collaboration among learning communities across India that are seeking a radical, systemic rethinking of monoculture education and development.

Another project in India, Swaraj University, hosts a two-year self-designed learning program for people between sixteen and thirty years old. The learners, called khojis (seekers), are encouraged to reconnect with the wild and explore their deeper passion, purposes, needs and gifts within a larger context of community living. Their co-learners (“faculty”) in reclaiming the abundance of the commons include other khojis, artisans, healers, tribal fishermen, small farmers, street children, grandmothers and activists, among others. There are no “degrees” required to join and no degrees issued because certification is regarded as another tool of enclosure. To support the program,khojis are invited to contribute whatever they can to operating costs and to pay it forward to help others participate in the future. A notable part of Swaraj University is the cycle yatra, in which a group of young people travel in rural areas on bicycles for one week, without any money, digital technologies, medicines or planning.

In Ciudad Bolivar, a neighborhood in the southwest of Colombia’s capital Bogotá, Libertatia is a social center for children and youths of the most disadvantaged social classes of the city’s population. Libertatia is designed as a space for learning and dialogue, for exchanging knowledge, and is managed by the young people themselves. There are neither teachers nor students, but workshops where the people involved learn critical thinking in order to change their living conditions.

The Purple Thistle Centre of Vancouver, Canada, was established in 2001 as an alternative to schools that is managed by youths themselves. The focus is on art and activism that help young people gain experience the challenges of community needs and self-organization.

The Otherwise Club in London has been a place of self-determined learning for more than twenty years. It was established by mothers for children and youths. The Otherwise Club has been cooperating with the London Community Neighbourhood Co-operative (LCNC), an ambitious project supporting environmentally sensitive practices in housing, working life, and in the communities and neighborhoods themselves, since 2011.

The Learning Exchange started in Evanston, Illinois, in the US in 1971 and rapidly spread to more than forty communities. It is closely tied to the ideas that social critic Ivan Illich set forth in his book Deschooling Society.¹² People documented on file cards what they wanted to learn as well as what they could teach and what they wanted to share. After just two and a half years, 15,000 people had registered to teach or learn 2,000 topics. Today, there are similar “Learning Exchanges” in many states of the US.

The Synergia Project at Athabasca University in British Columbia, Canada, uses online tools to share extensive research about cooperation – whether through formal knowledge or tacit knowledge – to teach how to build new types of institutions for a sustainable and socially just future.

Since 2013, the Cusanus University in Gründung, Germany, has been an ambitious educational institution that offers a critical, transdisciplinary masters degree program in economics, with a special emphasis on the formation and creation of society and the economy. The state-accredited university is committed to the notion of community. One example of how this is expressed is the campaign Denken Schenken (“Thinking Giving”) in which the community of students itself raises support for its members and also decides how to distribute funds, including scholarship grants. In their vision statement, the founders of Cusanus speak of “empowering people to educate themselves.” By this, they mean that “within the social community, every person should be permitted to educate himself or herself in moral and intellectual freedom.” That includes learning how to “creatively develop and reflect on [one’s own subject area] beyond pure imparting of knowledge.” The school also encourages students to take part in “interdisciplinary dialogue as well as to participate creatively in society rather than focus on narrow specialization.” “In the process, we explicitly include the level of values and meaning,” the website reads.

That is surely what unites the experience of those who participate at Camino Abierto and so many other commons: learning must have meaning for our lives and for the lives of the people with whom we are in relationships.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Claudia Gómez-Portugal M. (Mexico) is a Mexican activist promoter of the transition agenda and founder of the organization SAKBE Commons for Change (Spanish: Comunicación para el Cambio Social) and the Free Learning Communities for Life initiative. She is a strategist in communication for social change, effective participation, knowledge sharing and community revitalization.

Image by TepozHub.

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