From the notes to the video

CLTs (Community Land Trusts) provide many benefits, including: getting people out of the rent trap, keeping properties from speculation and avoiding gentrification. This means that we can have more stable communities.

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DESCRIPTION

This course presents inspiring local, regional, and international solutions in community energy, local food, social care, land tenure, and cooperative finance that address current concerns for environmental and social well-being. It introduces the knowledge and practice of co-operation, economic democracy, and the commons and invites your participation in an intensive program of exploration, instruction, dialogue, and practical training in systems change and transition.

OBJECTIVES

• Outline and explain the problematic, and transformative vision.
• Discuss emerging food system alternatives and strategies for transitioning to just, sustainable food systems.
• Recognize the role of public policy and bottom-up innovation in renewable community energy.
• Outline the philosophy, rationale, and organizational forms of user-controlled models of health and social care.
• Discuss enclosure, and the alternatives of commons and land trusts.
• Describe community development finance and co-operative capital raising and their potential to secure democratic and socially directed investment for the common good.
• Synthesize key ideas and practices that define systemic transition.

Target Audience: We imagine that if you were attracted to this course, you will be someone who shares our general world view and vision, and wants to broaden and deepen it and join us and others to develop it. That is its principal purpose, but a secondary purpose is to link people and projects that share these views in practical ways. In this first presentation, you are likely to be people who are already engaged in social change work in three crucial movements – co-operation, commons, and sustainability. Most are already actively working to make this world view a reality. You may be active in the environmental movement, human or animal rights, social equality and development, the solidarity economy, co-operative finance and alternative currencies; the Transition Movement, permaculture, local food, eco-villages, the digital commons, peer-to-peer and open educational resources, community energy or many others.

Course is offered by Athabasca University in collaboration with Synergia.

COURSE INSTRUCTORS

Reposted from Canvas.net

The post Towards the next system: Transition to co-operative commonwealth appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Consider the Dutch organization BroodFondsMakers, based in Utrecht, an insurance-like system for self-employed individuals.  When a public insurance program was abolished by the government in 2004, a small group of self-employed individuals got together to create their own insurance pool.  More than a commercial scheme, members of the groups meet a few times a year, and even have outings and parties, in order to develop a certain intimacy and social cohesion.

When someone in a group gets sick for more than a month, they receive donations from the group, which usually have between 20 and 50 members. The mutual support is more than a cash payment, it is a form of emotional and social support as well. BroodFonds now has more than 200 groups and about 10,000 members participating in its system.

Another STIR article describes a new prototype for childcare in England that aims to overcome the well-known problems of high cost, low quality and poor availability of childcare.  The new cooperative model, Kidoop, is meant to be co-produced by parents and playworkers, and not just a market transaction. The model, still being implemented, aims to provide greater flexibility, better quality care and working conditions, lower costs, and a system that parents actually want.

Elsewhere in STIR, Mike Lewis provides a great overview of the Solidarity Economy in his article, and Jessica Gordon Nembhard, author of Collective Courage, gives an interview that highlights the role of coops in helping African-Americans create a measure of economic independence and mutual support for themselves – lessons could be fruitfully applied today.

Barcelona is a hotbed of experimentation of participatory self-organization these days, a trend accelerated by the commons-friendly Barcelona City Council and mayor.  A searchable online map shows hundreds of Solidarity Economy organizations. In Rojava, a federation of cooperatives represents one of the largest, most daring experiments in building a “social economy” that moves beyond the inequality, precarity and ecological destruction of capitalism. Drawing upon the philosophy of Murray Bookchin, the Kurds have developed hundreds of coops and community councils that emphasize household use value over market exchange value.

Read this special issue of STIR, and then check out the special podcast on the Solidarity Economy.

The post STIR Magazine Explores the Solidarity Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.