Nithin Coca, Shareable: So what does the concept civic economy mean to you?

Eguchi Shintaro, co-author of “Civic Economy in Japan”: It is based on the real meaning of “economy.” If you look at the etymology of the Greek word, it represents a community that actually is sustainable and generates and regenerates what it has from its resources.

In the concept of civic economy, civilization or people is the focus of economy. This is the focus of my research. Civic economy is originally a concept in introduced in Europe, but there has been this idea in Japan for centuries too to heighten and advance civilization through the economy, and as a byproduct this can also be a sharing economy.

Civic economy is basically where individuals share what they have — skills, knowledge, services — to develop the economy of a certain area. The original meaning is basically a community of cooperation… a community that is sustainable, that generates its own resources.

Can you tell me about the history of sharing or civic economy in Japan? What is the underpinning of sharing in Japanese society?

In Edo era, there were ideas and functions that were held by small organizations that were early version of banks. This is where people in communities pitch in and pool money to invest, and have that money held in cases. For example, [if] someone had a fire and lost everything, they might loan that money for them to rebuilt their lives. Or sometimes, they would give that money. This is a system of mutual help, beginning of cooperativism in Japan. Because it is related to civil economy, I am recently getting more interested in cooperativism.

Then, the sense of commons was stronger than sharing. For instance in a village, there might be a well that a community uses together, or cooperative housing, or families taking care of each other’s children. Within that small community, it was complete. From our perspective, it is sharing, but at that time, the sense of personal ownership was not so strong. It was much stronger to have a sense of commons.

What happened to these systems?

After the Meiji Restoration, Japan went through modernization. This meant the sense of capitalism and individualism has gotten stronger, so there is a sense of having individual resources. That’s why individuals and family unit has gotten much stronger. The idea of capitalism meant companies promoted the sales of appliances, and meant household owned things, and that’s when the idea of personal ownership was introduced.

What about the growing attention on rural economies in Japan. Can sharing help revitalize those economies?

During Japan’s bubble economy era, the economy boomed, and major cities became bigger and bigger, and basically have extracted from rural areas, which have declined in population and their economies declined too.

Today, the population is still declining in rural areas, and that’s why there are very few businesses willing to move to rural areas, and in rural areas they don’t see any venture capital. Young people are leaving these areas to look for jobs in big cities, and then they make money and send some money back. Gradually, rural area is becoming more elderly, and there is more aging population.

There is a danger of small towns or small cities maybe disappearing entirely. As far as local governments go, they need to stabilize their economy. And so, within the community, they have few resources, which are getting fewer and fewer. In rural areas … local governments haven’t put many efforts in building more entrepreneurs in their areas, so the sharing economy is one way for rural governments to create and generate funds for their own communities.

What is behind the more recent resurgence in interest in sharing or civic economy in Japan?

The Great Kobe Earthquake, and other disasters in Japan were important milestones. When there is a huge natural or social disaster, people learned that it was impossible to sustain or survive all on their own. That’s when the idea of mutual help was reintroduced and got stronger. Along with that, the Japanese economy stagnated, so this is when the idea of cooperation re-emerged.

The Great East Japan Earthquake is also an important point when the idea of mutual help got stronger. In other countries, there is a strong interest in cooperativism, and in Japan, there is a need to review and look at cooperativism again. Of course the basis of that is because it is very democratic. It’s not from the point of view of the study of the economy, it is also from how you can democratically operate,so it’s important to study it.

Can you tell me about civic economy projects that are representative of the potential for sharing to revitalize the economy?

One example is a Toyo-oka, Kinosaki Onsen in Hyogo Prefecture. It is a hot springs (onsen) town. It’s a very famous town because there is a novel written by a famous Japanese author, about 100 years ago. They rely on tourism.

In the past few years, there is a movement to create some projects to keep culture and people in the city. The project is launched by the local government, with one project, Books in Onsen started by onsen inn owners who had a union already. It’s like an Artists in Residence program, they invite artists to stay in this area and create something. In exchange for free residence, artists are supposed to open their studios, when they are rehearsing or creating, to residents, so they can come and watch what they do. Or they have to provide workshops for children. Kids can also use these facilities to create their own pieces of art. … For local residents, they see in the books and stories names of places that are very familiar to them, so in that way, it’s promoting literature, creation, and it supports tourism, because of the fans who want to come and get these books. They have already sold 100,000 copies. And many Japanese media have picked up these stories too.

Another example is Hagiso, in the eastern part of Tokyo, an area which has a lot of old buildings. It’s a building which used to be an apartment and which is 60 years old that was renovated to have a cafe, gallery, and shop.

In this neighborhood, Hagiso is in the middle and functions as a front desk, and you might have lodging in an old Japanese farmhouse, where you can stay. For bath, they will give a ticket to another facility which is a hot spring bath. If they want to eat dinner, they will get a list of restaurants in the neighborhood for them to pick. They can rent a bike. Since this is an old neighborhood, we have facilities where they have cultural experiences like a tea ceremony. So this is a system that was created in the neighborhood, and economy itself it pulls and is shared by institutions in the neighborhood. Small businesses getting together to mutually generate business and help create and sustain the local economy.

What do you see as the future for sharing?

There have been a lot of efforts to increase start-up companies, or educate entrepreneurs in local areas, starting in the late 2000s. Amidst that, there are sharing businesses build on sharing economy concepts, particularly using IT. This is chance, to see how IT technology can be used to help society. But of course, that does not mean that IT literacy is increasing among older age bracket. There is a need for us to increase the IT use among this age bracket.

There is little understanding of sharing among local governments. Cities need to develop this vision. Citizens, private sector, and governments all have to come together, and work in the same direction, with the same goals. We don’t have that yet — they are divided, and working separately. The people have not really felt or understood the Sharing City vision.

One of the biggest things right now is to help these groups understand each other and face the same direction — need to create something that people and the local government that can make their own city attractive, and build civic pride together.

 Cross-posted from Shareable

Photo by thomwisdom

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Sharing Cities have been generating a lot of attention recently thanks to the Sharing Cities Network and the announcement of Shareable’s upcoming book on commons-based urban solutions for municipal and civic leaders. Interest in Australia and New Zealand is growing too as evidenced by some recent events like the Melbourne Conversations panel on Smart City Leadership that I spoke at for the launch of Melbourne Knowledge Week last year.

In a recent interview with Wallace Chapman for RadioNZ Sunday, I talked about the rise of Sharing Cities,platform cooperativism and the shift from extractive to generative forms of ownership and value creation. This led to a series of invitations from Kiwis across the country keen for me to speak on sharing cities including a warm welcome by the Mayor of Christchurch, New Zealand, a city devastated by the 2011 earthquake and going through a period of experimental urban regeneration (see Gap Filler for inspiration).

The Commons in Christchurch is located on what used to be the site of the Crowne Plaza hotel which was demolished in 2012. The site is now a hub of transitional activity and home to a number of post-quake organisations.

Widespread interest in Sharing Cities makes perfect sense. In 1800 only 3% of the world’s population lived in cities. This figure has climbed to 50% today, and the global urban population is projected to reach around 70% by 2050. We are clearly living through the urban century and human civilization will either make it or break it in cities. The need to develop innovative thinking to address the climate crisis, resource constraints, inequality, and energy descent is greater now than ever.

That’s why Sharing Cities is a refreshing antidote to the top-down, technologically deterministic vision of the future we so often hear about in discussions of Smart Cities and the Internet of Things – a vision dominated by sensor networks, data mining and myriad opportunities for corporate and government surveillance.

Too many cities have been quick to embrace ‘smart technologies’ that attempt to overlay a city-wide digital operating system. Where integrated water, energy and transportation networks track and respond to the movement of people and objects. Who wins and who loses in this scenario?

It’s reminiscent of a scene from the 1969 Philip K. Dick novel Ubik where the protagonist gets into an argument with his “money gulping door” which demands payment every time he needs to enter or exit the building as his terms of service contract makes clear.

Chinese city opens ‘phone lane’ for texting pedestrians via The Guardian,

Sharing Cities on the other hand provide citizen-centric alternatives that focus on increasing the sharing capacity of existing infrastructure like public buildings and free wifi; provide access to idle or underutilised assets for ridesharing, coworking or urban agriculture; and strengthen the social fabric through deliberative decision-making like Citizen’s Juries, Participatory Budgeting and other forms of active citizenship.

Sharing Cities are an interesting hybrid between the public, private and community sectors and rely on a range of public goods and commonly owned resources to operate effectively. These include everything from the internet and road networks to open data and vacant public land. Cities are at the vanguard of the sharing movement as hubs of disruptive innovation, knowledge transfer and creative communities. Sharing Cities are about creating pathways for participation that recognise the City as Commons and give everyone in the community the opportunity to enjoy access to common goods and create new forms of shared value, knowledge, and prosperity.

The Agrocité urban commons project in the suburbs of Paris (via The Guardian).

The time has come for cities everywhere to emulate Sharing City trailblazers like Seoul and Amsterdam who recognise that sharing builds urban resilience, economic interdependence and social cooperation. City governments can help strike a fair balance by putting citizens first, supporting platform cooperatives and protecting the public realm. Cities can design the infrastructure, services and regulations that enable sharing in all its forms and strengthen the urban commons through policies for sharing cities that support food, jobs, housing and transportation initiatives to keep and grow wealth in local communities.

Sharing Cities give everyone who wants to participate in the sharing economy the opportunity to have a fair go. Government and business must work together with citizens to develop policy solutions that make sense for people, cities and sharing platforms. Sharing Cities provide a framework to make this vision for an inclusive sharing economy a reality.

This article originally appeared in Shareable. 

The post Sharing Cities: Why Ownership, Governance and The Commons Matter More Than Ever appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Reposted from our friends at The Extraenviromentalist.

Today’s textbook notions of business were developed during an unprecedented global economic expansion – a cultural condition that faces diminishing returns in today’s world. Can we build enterprises for a post-growth future that thrive among challenges of the next century? By reversing the process that privatizes profits, would unsustainable trends and drivers of inequality be subverted? Can a modern media and journalism industry flourish within a not-for-profit framework?

In Extraenvironmentalist #89 we first speak with Donnie Maclurcan of the Post Growth Institute about their organization’s upcoming book, How On Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World by 2050. Donnie explains ways that organizing business activities under the framework of not-for-profit enterprises can make meaningful change in the face of a seemingly intractable situation wrought by immense private wealth accumulation and slowing global growth.

In the second half of the show, we talk to Chris Nelder, host of the Energy Transition Show – the first regular podcast on the forthcoming XE Audio Network! We ask Chris about the ongoing contraction in US shale oil production during 2015 and the deteriorating financial condition of the industry in the face of a global deflationary undertow. The conversation is Episode #0 of the Energy Transition Show, which launches with Episode #1 beginning September 23.

//Segments on Soundcloud

Bonus Segment

// Links and News Items

The Energy Transition Show – launching September 23rd

As We Lay Dying –
Stephen Jenkinson On How We Deny Our Mortality

// Books

How On Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World by 2050 by Donnie Maclurcan and Jennifer Hilton

// Music (in order of appearance)

Lazy Knuckles – Polyglot via Soundcloud
Eric Clapton – Change the World (Mac DeMarco Cover) via IndieShuffle
Freddie Frank – This Old Rig (1961)
Cavaliers of Fun – Wiki via Tracasseur
Tube & Berger – Disarray Feat. J.U.D.G.E

// Production Credits and Notes

Our editor Kevin via Sustainable Guidance Youtube Channel

Episode #89 was supported by donations from the following generous listeners:

Stephanie in North Carolina
Wally in North Carolina
Stephen from Australia

The post Podcast of the Day: How on Earth with Donnie Maclurcan appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Reposted from Shareable magazine, Marie Goodwin talks about the challenges and rewards of exploring the gift economy.

Maybe this is you: you’ve been working for a while on your own, making a little bit of money, maybe a lot of money. But something doesn’t feel right. When you bill people for your time and expenses, something feels off. You hate that part. There are always the nagging thoughts, “Was it enough? Was it too much?” Maybe you’ve become friends with your client in the process of working with them and now sending an invoice feels uncomfortable to you. It nags at you. You feel apologetic about it. You think that the invoice monetizes a relationship that has become more than just about money. You won’t work for your friends because you’ve always been told that mixing money and friendship doesn’t work and now you are seeing one of the reasons why people say this. In fact, part of you would rather just give it to them as a gift, but you have to make a living. Right?

Or, maybe you are thinking about starting a small business on the side: selling kimchi or pickles or vanilla elixirs at the holiday market in town this year. You have real costs, but your experience tells you that if you are going to be selling these items to your friends and neighbors, what you really want to do is to give it away. What do you do?

Gift economics can help solve these nagging feelings that linger around the corners of for-profit businesses. Butwhat is the gift economy? Gift economics was the basis for exchange practiced by many cultures around the world until the creation of money, even in the West up to the middle ages. (See David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years). The essential idea is that when you have enough of a surplus of something, you give away what you can to friends and neighbors. With everyone practicing this type of exchange, a web of connection is forged. Everyone “owes” everyone else a favor.

In this way, people get their needs for food, water, shelter, clothing, and luxuries met. The more generous you are, the more you are held in esteem by your community. Your community esteem matters because, in times of crisis, that web then supports you in turn. Your generosity is your wealth and your security. Receiving gifts from others acknowledges that you wish to be in relationship with them and that you will be there when they need you. It is a very beautiful way to live.

More and more people are turning to doing business “in the gift” as a way to help them feel more authentic in their business relationships and bridge the friend/client divide. Some businesses are better suited to it than others: small, service-based businesses (coaching, consulting, and design for instance) and small, home-based production businesses are most easily adapted, but other larger businesses, or parts of them, can be adapted to gifting as well. There is no road-map for gifting in business; no one way to do it. However, I can offer some things to keep in mind as you consider how to apply gifting to your work in the world.

Gifting Does Not Equal Free

If you are confusing those words, stop! Our culture defines giving a gift as something we do either anonymously or as giving without any return expected. Both of these definitions remove the opportunity for a connection between giver and receiver, and denies the creation of the web of connection that undergirds true community. When you work in the gift, what you are doing is asking the receiver to decide on their own level of gratitude rather than you, the seller/creator, dictating it for them by attaching a price to the transaction. You are also asking them to choose the the timing of the return gift. The idea that gratitude is created in a business exchange is a novel way to view buying and selling but is the very crux of gift economics.

Accepting Money is Not “Gift-washing”

There are gift economy purists out there that think any exchange of money is tainting the gifting relationship. We don’t live in a hunter-gatherer culture, however, and money is needed by most people. It is a useful tool that allows us to give and receive gifts. Changing our relationship to money is a side effect of working in the gift. We move from a relationship where money is seen strictly as an asset to accumulate, to the view that money is just another way of expressing gratitude. Doing business in the gift is a new experiment and there is no right and wrong way. Don’t let people tell you you are doing it wrong because you accept money as a gift.

Be Ready to Explain Gifting to Your Clients

This is a very new way of doing things and most people won’t understand the concept of gift economics. They will hear “gift” and perhaps think “free.” They will get miffed when you ask them to check in with their own gratitude and come up with a number. They are likely to cry out in exasperation, “Just tell me a price already!” People are very used to not having to think deeply about gratitude, and it may cause some frustration. Be prepared with handouts and PDFs, as well as some links to essays and other online resources that explain gift culture and gift-based businesses (see below).

Serve Your Clients Deeply

If you are going to live your business life in the gift, you will need to examine the place from which you are acting and creating. No longer is your motivation necessarily about money. You are serving larger ideals: fostering gratitude, honoring friendship, serving connection to your community, contributing to the dismantling of the economic beast of neo-liberal capitalism. Whatever your motive, that place is what will keep you going when you are feeling doubtful about this whole gift economy experiment—and believe me, you will sit in that place of doubt often.

Be Ready to Turn Some Clients Down

Not every client is going to work out well for you. If you are going to have to work for weeks or months with a person and rely on their ability to grasp and participate in the gift economy with you, you want to make sure that you feel a deep connection with this person and enjoy the mutual project you will be creating together. If you are tabling at your local farmer’s market, be prepared for the fact that some people will not be generous at the moment of sale. So many people have been programmed with scarcity mentality. Some people, no matter what you do, won’t get it.

Let Go of the Idea of Immediate Return and Trust that Gifts Come in Many Guises

There are two main themes in gift economics: the first is service and the second is trust. You will do the work, hand it to your client or customer, and then ask them to assess their feeling of gratitude based upon their means and their satisfaction with the project. This is a vulnerable time, and you as the provider must move into a place of letting go of the outcome and self-talk around the project. It is easy to say to yourself, “Well if I was charging for money I would make X!” Even if the financial return is a disappointment, you never know what will come in the future: recommendations, new clients, food, emergency help, a second or third payment in the future, connections with people important to you, etc. Gift economics is a long game and in the end, in my experience, you come out better than you would if you had charged a set fee in the first place.

Barter is Taxable and Other Concerns

Some gifts may come to you in the way of barter and material goods. That is fine, as long as you can use these return gifts and that they are meaningful to you. Just keep in mind that barter is taxable, as are gifts over a certain amount. Talk that over with your accountant (who will, no doubt, look at you as if you have two heads when you tell him/her what you are doing.) If you are doing a lot of gifting work for one person, keep basic records for your taxes and report it as income.

Be Completely Transparent About Your Needs and Costs

You will have to humble yourself somewhat to work in the gift. If you are working with a client, be very honest about how much time and money you’ve put into the work. They need to know these details to be able to assess their gratitude. You aren’t guilting them, you are providing them with the means by which they can decide on how to gift back to you. Help them see all the ways you need help in your life. For instance, you might want to create a list of expenses that you incur every month: coworking or office space rent, utilities, website hosting, food costs, etc. and offer up these expenses as potential means of gifted payment. You might want to have a “gift” button on your website so that people can appreciate your work in the future, long after the primary work has been done.

Use Social Media or a Blog to Talk About Challenges and Successes

Consider starting a blog to share your experience of working in the gift to others. Perhaps start a Facebook group for your business or join the many Facebook groups that have gifting as a theme. There are many gift-based businesses out there whose owners are talking about the challenges and joys of gifting. I can recommend Adrian Hoppel’s blog about his (and his team’s) experience designing websites in the gift. Another notable example is the work of Brice Royer, who developed a gifting group and is helping people, and himself in the process, in his local area in Western Canada.

Read Up on Gift Economics

You are going to talk about gift economics a lot doing this work. You probably will want to read up on it a little. Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics is probably the best known work right now (Eisenstein works as an author and speaker in the gift as well). Other notable resources are the works of Genevieve Vaughn, Riane Eisler’s economic thinking, and, of course, Lewis Hyde’s masterwork from 1983 The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property.

Marie Goodwin is Chief Plate Spinner and External Hard Drive for Charles Eisenstein

##

Top photo by PhotoAtelier (CC)

The post Marie Goodwin on How to Run a Business in the Gift Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Enspiral Space is Enspiral’s co-working facility in Wellington, New Zealand. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Anna Bergren Miller  describes the inner workings of Enspiral, one of our favourite, P2P-based, social entrepreneurial networks. This article was originally published at Shareable.

While it seems clear that New Zealand-based social enterprise network Enspiral is doing exciting things in the social impact space, it can be difficult, at first, to understand what exactly Enspiral is. It is easier to begin with what Enspiral is not. Enspiral is not an incubator or an accelerator. It is not a training program, nor is it an advisory service. The website’s FAQ page, which describes Enspiral as “sort of a ‘DIY’ social enterprise support network,” offers both a promise and a warning to would-be Enspiralites. “If you’re an independent, entrepreneurial person with a deep commitment to service and social change and want to discover your own way to have an impact alongside like-minded people, Enspiral is fertile ground,” it suggests. “But you’ll need to find your own way, and there’s no program or official support.”

Enspiral’s hard-to-pin-downness is in part a product of its decentralized organizational structure, which is sometimes described as an open value network. The avoidance of power hierarchies is at the heart of the network’s mission. “From the beginning, the first idea was more people working on stuff that matters,” said founder Joshua Vial. “But it was also this idea about decentralized organizations—that there’s a real possibility, with technology now, for different management structures.”

Enspiral Members answer the question: What is Enspiral?

Vial launched Enspiral in 2010, several years after quitting his job at a web development company to split his time between volunteering and contract work. He began meeting people who, like him, were interested in social and environmental issues, but who—unlike him—didn’t have a steady source of income. “So I thought, if I can help other people get higher-paid contract work, maybe we can do interesting things together,” he recalled. He reoriented his consulting business to a collective focused on helping socially-minded professionals find work. “I started saying yes to every contract that came my way, and scrambling to find people,” he said. “We were just looking for like-minded folks.”

In four years, Enspiral evolved from a vision of “more people working on stuff that matters” to a global network of socially-minded individuals and enterprises. (Courtesy Enspiral)

From the start, Enspiral eschewed salaries and emphasized a marketplace model of resource distribution. “There are people with skills and there are different projects, but they’ve got clear budgets and clear deliverables,” explained Vial. “We allocate people to projects in different ways. That’s the key mechanic to getting things done.”

Around 2012, as the company continued to grow, Enspiral hired an administrative staff, which they called a “support crew.” But within a year, it became apparent that “it really didn’t work for us at all,” said Vial. “We started to get divergent experiences from the support crew and the contractors, and it felt like we were just under-resourcing a management team. We were doing things like you would at a normal organization.” So the administrative staff did something that is unlikely to happen at a “normal organization:” they fired themselves.

The Enspiral network includes over 150 contributors and friends from around the world. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Today, the hub of the Enspiral network is Enspiral Foundation, which Vial pictures “as the campfire we all sit around to have a collective discussion.” Enspiral regularly hosts public gatherings, like afternoon teas at Enspiral Space, its co-working office. Individuals interested in participating on a more regular basis can become an Enspiral Contributor by paying an annual fee to cover core operating costs. (The Foundation subsidies people who want to be involved but cannot afford to pay.) The next level of commitment is membership. Enspiral Members are usually involved in the group for at least a year before being invited, and are expected to participate in collective decision-making, and to attend retreats and other in-person events.

Individuals can choose among multiple levels of engagement. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Enspiral, though legally a limited liability company, acts as a cooperative. Every Enspiral Member owns one share in the organization. Shares cannot be sold, and the company does not pay dividends. “It’s your citizenship card in the collective, pretty much. Our Members are the ultimate locus of power in the group,” explained Vial. Enspiral Members make administrative decisions and budget collectively, with help from several open-source software programs. These include Loomio, a collective decision-making platform, and Cobudget, both of which were developed within the Enspiral network.

Enspiral Members participate in collaborative decision-making and budgeting. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Enspiral Ventures are companies that have voluntary revenue sharing and mutual support agreements with Enspiral Foundation. The agreements are flexible, and may be changed with one month’s notice from either party. Enspiral Ventures do not have any decision-making power in Enspiral Foundation beyond allocating the part of the budget they contributed through the collective funding process. “But because the Members are pretty much starting and running the companies, they’re doing it as a way of putting some of their effort and money into support for our whole mission of Enspiral,” said Vial. “It’s much less about, ‘Let’s go find sponsors we’re not that close to to give us money, because they want to get brand recognition,'” he explained. “It’s much more a collective of companies saying, ‘We’re all dependent upon one another. If we can make this central organization strong, then we’ll all get benefits from a richer community.'”

Enspiral Members commit to attending online meetings and in-person events, including retreats. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Enspiral’s financial model is simple: pay what you want. The organization experimented with equity-sharing, but Enspiral Foundation recently returned the shares. “We didn’t want to have the different dynamic of companies being bound together because they had no money to start with, and then they gave equity instead,” said Vial. “As opposed to other Ventures, which, because they were cash-rich, just contributed cash the whole time, and then can walk away with one month’s notice.”

As a result, Enspiral Ventures’ contributions vary by company. Enspiral Services, Vial’s original company, collects up to 20% of the revenue generated by each independent contractor under its umbrella. It then gives one-quarter of these contributions to the Foundation, using the remaining 15% to cover internal expenses and fund Services projects. Contractors can change the percentage they contribute to Enspiral Services on a contract-by-contract basis, and Enspiral Services, like all Enspiral Ventures, can renegotiate their contract with Enspiral Foundation at will. “It’s like, if you’re giving the Foundation too much money, then change your contract and tell us what you want to pay,” said Vial. “It becomes a prompt for conversation if some people contribute a lot and others don’t. It also gives you really good visibility over the value people put on the network.”

Enspiral Foundation is funded by voluntary contributions from Enspiral Ventures. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Dubious by the standards of conventional business practice, Enspiral’s funding strategy is working. Vial estimates that company brings in about NZ$10,000 each month through Enspiral Foundation, plus another NZ$10-12,000 from Enspiral Services. As the company expands, and as the Ventures secure larger contracts, a logical next step is direct funding of new social enterprises. “I think we’ll start to have enough financial strength to really invest in stuff rather than bootstrapping it,” said Vial. “Because a lot of us are tired of that approach. It’s hard work, especially when you do it over and over again.”

This sign appeared in Enspiral’s kitchen, a reminder that learning to say “no” is as important as saying “yes” in a collaborative workplace. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Not every company can be Enspiral, notes Vial. It would be hard to apply the Enspiral approach to existing organizations. “It’s just too different,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Hey everyone, you’re not getting salaried any more.'” And getting an Enspiral-type endeavor off the ground takes a certain amount of both patience and faith. Vial has heard from a number of groups worldwide interested in emulating Enspiral, but as yet none have come to fruition. In most cases, interest fizzled out after Vial made it clear that he could offer advice but not financial support.

Nevertheless, “I think if you’re doing a professional services collective, or if people are doing a community of social enterprises, then it’s a really powerful model for organizing,” said Vial. He sees particular promise in the area of urban innovation. “I think a lot of what we’ve learned is directly relevant to them,” he said. “When I look at the ‘let’s change our cities’ sort of community, often they’re really strapped for cash, and they’ve got really marginal business models.” Bike shares and community gardens are great, said Vial, “but they’re either cash sinks or they just scrape by.”

What worked for Enspiral would work equally well for would-be urban reformers, he says: convincing highly-paid professional service workers (like lawyers, accountants, or programmers) to sign on to a collective based on contract work. “It was hard work, but it wasn’t really risky,” explained Vial. “And off the back of that, this really rich ecosystem and financial base emerged for funding the more marginal businesses.” He wants people interested in urban environmental and social justice to know that Enspiral is there for them. “We’d love to help them get up and running,” he said. “I think this could be a really significant way to leverage wider resource flows for people who want to change the city, and change the world.”

Anyone can get involved in Enspiral, either through virtual friendship or at in-person community events, like this women’s tea. (Courtesy Enspiral)

The post Enspiral: Changing the Way Social Entrepreneurs Do Business appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“With the emergence of peer production, we potentially have the hyper-exploitation of human cooperation, and generalized precarity, because the value creators, who are now often the users as well, are not getting any reward for their contributions. Worker and consumer coops, to the degree they only work for their own members, are, in my view, insufficient models to integrate the new social and environmental externalities. Thus we need new models like the open coops I call for, which includes multi-stakeholdership and the co-production of the value chain by everyone affected by a provisioning service.”

Michel Bauwens, my friend and associate at the P2P Foundation is interviewed by Shareable‘s Cat Johnson on Multi Stake Holder Coops. You can find the original article here.

While the growth of cooperatives in a wide variety of industries is promising, the bar for social transformation needs to be, and has been, raised. As P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens said in a recent email conversation, multi-stakeholder coops are “where the action is.”

A multi-stakeholder cooperative (MSC) is, as the name implies, a coop that’s governed by two or more stakeholder groups. These groups can include workers, producers, consumers, owners, volunteers and community supporters. The brilliance of MSCs, also known as solidarity cooperatives, is that the various stakeholder groups throughout an enterprise have a shared vision that prioritizes equality, sustainability, and social justice.

Shareable connected with Bauwens to learn more about MSCs, their potential for social and ecological transformation, and why, facing the the peak of the extractive economy, rethinking how cooperatives do business is critically important.

Shareable: MSCs are like super coops, where producers, consumers and more are all working together. Why is this model important? What’s the most interesting aspect of it?

Michel Bauwens: Many traditional coops are for-profits that work for their members, and end up accepting the competitive logic of the neoliberal marketplace. An example that comes to mind is that Mondragon hires Polish workers at low wages to preserve its own corporate interest. So, the democratic aspects of one person, one share, one vote are certainly important, but no longer sufficient.

For us, multi-stakeholdership is part of a four-fold proposal for open cooperatives, which would involve four simultaneous changes. First, open coops should be oriented towards the common good, in their own statutes, i.e. not for profit, but profit being used to achieve the particular social goal; second, all people affected by the activity should have a say, this is the specific multi-stakeholder aspect.

These two characteristics already exist in the solidarity coop movement, especially in the delivery of social care in northern Italy (Emilia-Romagna) and Quebec, as reported by John Restakis in his excellent book, Humanizing the Economy. There are two extra requirements we suggest. One is that the new coops must co-produce commons, whether immaterial or material. The Catalan Integral Cooperative is an example of a new type of coop that only produces shared knowledge in common pool resources but it is not yet global in orientation, as the name suggests. However, its project to create a global coalition of open coops through Fair.coop is a step in that direction. The Allianza Solidaria housing coop in Quito is an example of a coop producing physical commons, as it reclaims the polluted ravines in South Quito, giving it back to the community.

The final requirement is a global approach, to create counter-power for a global ethical economy consisting of cooperative alliances. An example of that is the approach of Las Indias. Their coop is oriented towards the global and they have the interesting concept of phylia, i.e. a global ecosystem that sustains a community and its commons. The pieces of the puzzle are beginning to get in place, but they have as yet to find their integration in one clear example.

What kind of potential for transformation do MSCs hold, on a personal level as well as on a community level?

The problem with the capitalist market and enterprise is that it excludes negative externalities, [both] social and environmental, from its field of vision. Worker- or consumer-owned cooperatives that operate in the competitive marketplace solve work democracy issues but not the issues of externalities. Following the competitive logic and the interests of their own members only, they eventually start behaving in very similar ways.

One of the ways to integrate externalities is to integrate all affected parties in a multi-stakeholder structure, including bold moves like perhaps inviting in “representatives of nature,” who make sure ecological concerns are heard. If we would add to this mix the requirement to co-create commons, then not only would such a structure avoid negative externalities, it would produce positive externalities beyond the interests of its own membership.

Where are MSCs taking off? Is there any place in particular where they are thriving?

The field of social care in Quebec is exemplary, and Margie Mendell tells us 98 percent of the new coops are solidarity coops. John Restakis has described the situation around Bologna. Key here is that the care services are funded as a public service by the state, guaranteeing universal access, but the crafting of the process is a co-production of all stakeholders, including the patient communities and their families. Patients have a quite different vision of what they need than process oriented industrial hospitals, resulting in soaring satisfaction rates.

In the commons transition plan that was crafted for the government in Ecuador…we introduced two radical new concepts: one is public-commons partnerships, which should replace extractive forms of public-private partnerships which exclude the participation of civil society; and the other is the commonification of public services, as was done for public water in Napoli, which is now called Aqua Beni Communi, with a Commissioner for the Commons in place within the City of Naples.

MSCs require an advanced level of organization and communication, but committing to this process could prove to be revolutionary in creating vital, thriving organizations and communities. What are the biggest challenges to creating a MSC and what’s the benefit of working through these challenges?

The key issue for me is the balance between efficiency and participation; what is to be avoided is the weakness of time-consuming deliberations that end up exhausting the membership. So there needs to be trust between the various stakeholders, but once agreement is reached on the right direction, [there is] autonomy for those who have to implement it.

MSCs are about more than people making money—they’re rooted in democratic process and require a shared vision by all involved. What, would you say, is the higher purpose of these organizations?

In the old system, we have competing entities and within these entities there is cooperation. In the new system it is the opposite—everyone cooperates around shared commons, but within this cooperation, there is room for competition between various entities that build service and product models around these shared resources. In the old model, only self-interest is recognized, externalities are expelled from consideration, and “what is legal is ethical.”

In the new model, a plurality of motivations is recognized, including room for self-interest if it aligns with the common goal; and externalities are integrated in the market model. In the old model, exchange value is created for profit, and the new model, use value is generated and any profit is used to achieve that social goal.

What is the big picture vision for this movement?

The big picture is a move away from extractive forms of capital, to generative forms of capital, as defined by Marjorie Kelly in her book Owning Our Future: the Emerging Ownership Revolution. The problem is that even worker coops, like Mondragon, may end up behaving in capitalist ways on the capitalist market, without solving the grave problems that the world is facing.

With the emergence of peer production, we potentially have the hyper-exploitation of human cooperation, and generalized precarity, because the value creators, who are now often the users as well, are not getting any reward for their contributions. Worker and consumer coops, to the degree they only work for their own members, are, in my view, insufficient models to integrate the new social and environmental externalities. Thus we need new models like the open coops I call for, which includes multi-stakeholdership and the co-production of the value chain by everyone affected by a provisioning service.

Is there anything you’d like to add? What else should we know about the multi-stakeholder cooperative movement?

The key question is: Are we creating positive externalities and taking responsibility for our negative externalities? Are we not harming the common, but rather adding value to it?

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Top photo by Esparta Palma (CC). Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter

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