Get your ticket for the conference!

Time flies: it seems that while we weren’t looking Growfunding has already turned five! In the past five years, we have joined hands with thousands of people to build up Brussels from the bottom up. That means it’s high time for a celebration, but also to see if we’re doing things right. On Friday the 19th January we’re organising an international conference

Together with Brussels residents, city makers, academics, policy makers and six ‘partners in crime’ (La Ruche from Montreal, Patronicity from Detroit, Spacehive from London, Co-city from Paris, Goteo from Spain, Ideaginger from Bologna and Voor Je buurt from the Netherlands), we will be sharing our knowledge and experiences an all-day debate on ‘The Civic Crowdfunding City’.

What kind of city do we want to live in? And what role can civic crowdfunding play in building this city?

What kind of a city and society can we create through civic crowdfunding? And just how democratic will this be?

We’ll compare good practices from 8 world cities within four different themes:
>          The inclusive city: how can civic crowdfunding be used to include people that are otherwise excluded from urban life?

>          The pup-up city: which kind of urban spaces are created through civic crowdfunding and what are the characteristics?

>          The Arrival city: which social and cultural infrastructure is created for refugees, migrants and newcomers through civic crowdfunding?
>          The circular city: How can civic crowdfunding contribute to the creation of a circular economy?

Click here for the entire programme e-and the names of the speakers.

PRIX LIBRE / VRIJE BIJDRAGE / FREE DONATION

Tickets for the conference on Friday 19/01 will be available through this growfunding-campaign. Contact frederik@growfunding.be if you need an invoice.

It’s entirely up to you how much you (or your employer) want to pay to participate in the full-day ‘The Civic Crowdfunding City’ conference. The higher your contribution, the more tickets we will be able to make available free of charge to people unable to afford them. These tickets will be distributed through our partner organisations, such as Globe Aroma, Cinemaximiliaan, Article 27, samusocial and klein kasteeltje.

There is no admission fee for students, contact dennis@growfunding.be to reserve you place.

Everyone who has provided support for this event will be sent our digital publication on the Civic Crowdfunding City (estimated publication date: May 2018).

Oh, and by the way, we’re also looking for around twenty volunteers to help us ensure that the event runs smoothly. If you’re interested in participating, don’t hesitate to register as a volunteer via our brand-new Volunteer button;-)

PARTY ALONG?

You can find all info and the programme on www.growfunding.be/bazaar. Prepare for a fantastic line-up of Brussels artists: an ‘empty shop’, a fashion show by Tony Bland, a dance performance by The Slayers, concerts by Nawaris, Arumbo and Fanfakids, great beats from the 54Sound, and more. You can find a detailed programme: friday and saturday. Tickets for the concerts and performances can be purchased through the Beursschouwburg theatre. All income generated by this event will go to current growfunding projects.

(This text was translated by Ubiqus Belgium, Growfunding’s language service provider)

https://www.facebook.com/events/161683631093820/

Photo by Medialab Prado

The post The civic crowdfunding city conference appeared first on P2P Foundation.

A big thanks to Remix the Commons and Commons Spaces – two groups in Montreal, and to Alain Ambrosi, Frédéric Sultan and Stépanie Lessard-Bérubé — for pulling together this wonderful snapshot of the commons world.  The overview video is no introduction to the commons, but a wonderfully insightful set of advanced commentaries about the political and strategic promise of the commons paradigm today.

The overview video (“Les communs dans l’espace politique,” with English subtitles as needed) is striking in its focus on frontier developments: the emerging political alliances of commoners with conventional movements, ideas about how commons should interact with state power, and ways in which commons thinking is entering policy debate and the general culture.

The video features commentary by people like Frédéric Sultan, Gaelle Krikorian, Alain Ambrosi, Ianik Marcil, Matthew Rhéaume, Silke Helfrich, Chantal Delmas, Pablo Solon, Christian Iaione, and Jason Nardi, among others.

The individual interviews with each of these people are quite absorbing. (See the full listing of videos here.) Six of these interviews are in English, nine are in French, and three are in Spanish.  They range in length from ten minutes to twenty-seven minutes.

To give you a sense of the interviews, here is a sampling:

Christian Iaione, an Italian law scholar and commoner, heads the Laboratory for the Governance of the Commons in Italy. The project, established five years ago, is attempting to change the governance of commons in Italian cities such as Rome, Bologna, Milan and Messina. More recently, it began a collaboration with Fordham University headed by Professor Sheila Foster, and  experiments in Amsterdam and New York City.

In his interview, “Urban Commons Charters in Italy,” Iaione warns that the Bologna Charter for the Care and Regeneration of Urban commons is not a cut-and-paste tool for bringing about commons; it requires diverse and localized experimentation. “There must be a project architecture working to change city governance and commons-enabling institutions,” said Iaione. “Regulation can’t be simply copied in south of Italy, such as Naples, because they don’t have the same civic institutions and public ethics as other parts of Italy….. You need different tools,” which must be co-designed by people in those cities, he said.

Jason Nardi, in his interview, “The Rise of the Commons in Italy” (27 minutes), credits the commons paradigm with providing “a renewed paradigm useful to unite and aggregate many different movements emerging today,” such as degrowth, cooperatives, the solidarity economy, ecologists, NGOs, development movements, and various rights movements. He credited the World Social Forum for helping to unite diverse factions to fight the privatization of everything by the big financial powers.

Charles Lenchner of Democrats.com spoke about “The Commons in the USA” (11 minutes), citing the important movement in NYC to converted community gardens into urban commons.  He also cited the rise of participatory budgeting movement in New York City today, in which a majority of city council districts use that process.  The City of New York is also encouraging greater investment in co-operatives, in part as a way to deal with precarity and income disparities.

Silke Helfrich, a German commons activist, discussed “Commons as a new political subject” (27 minutes).  She said that “it’s impossible today to know what’s going on about the commons because so many things are popping up or converging that it’s hard to keep up with them all.”  She said that there are three distinct ways of approaching the commons:  the commons as pools of shared resources to be managed collectively; the commons as social processes that bring commoning into being; and the commons as an attitude and way of thinking about a broader paradigm shift going on.

Kevin Flanagan gave an interview, “Transition according to P2P” (19 minutes), in which he speaks of the “growing political maturity within the commons world, particularly within digital commons, peer production and collaborative economy.”  Flanagan said that there has always been a politics to the commons, but that politics is moving from being a cultural politics towards a broader politics that is engaging hacker culture, maker spaces, and open design and hardware movements.   Commoners are also beginning to work with more traditional political movements such as the cooperative and the Social and Solidarity Economy movements.

Lots of nutritious food for thought in this well-produced collection of videos!

The post New Videos Explore the Political Potential of the Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Jay Walljasper: Welcome to everyday life in Quebec — Canada’s second largest province with 8.2 million people. Here:

• Business owners gather at an elegant Montreal event center to celebrate the 20th anniversary of a large-scale economic partnership. The former chief of Quebec’s largest bank is the guest of honor.

• Sidewalks bustle with people walking in and out of homes, offices, bank, pharmacy, workout studio, and coffee shop at Montreal’s Technopole Angus — a development that already sports 56 business with 2,500 employees and will eventually encompass a million-square-feet of real estate.

• Morning-shift workers unload barrels of paper onto conveyor belts emptying into giant shredding machines on the shop floor of Recyclage Vanier, a Quebec City firm specializing in secure disposal of confidential documents.

• A line snakes down the street for a matinee at the Cinema Beaubien, an art deco movie house in a quiet Montreal neighborhood. Taxis line up across the street waiting for customers who will soon be getting out of the early show.

• Leonard Cohen’s gravelly voice rings through the taproom at La Barberie Brewery, located near Quebec City’s business district. Their Belgian-style saisons and bestselling blackberry blanc beers are enjoyed throughout the province. A few blocks away, an 18th century monastery inside Quebec City’s historic walls has recently opened its doors as a hotel and spa.

Yet these scenes of economic activity are different in a notable way from similar ones occurring throughout North America.

Each enterprise involves a cooperative or non-profit organization — which together make up 8-10 percent of the province’s GDP. More than 7,000 of these “social economy” enterprises ring up $17 billion in annual sales and hold $40 billion in assets (Canadian dollars). They account for about 215,000 jobs across Quebec.

Quebec’s social economy (also translated as “solidarity economy”) extends far beyond the province’s two major cities, and includes manufacturing, agricultural cooperatives, daycare centers, homecare services, affordable housing, social service initiatives, food co-ops, ecotourism, arts programs, public markets, media, and funeral homes. The capital that fuels all this economic activity comes from union pension funds, nonprofit loan funds, credit unions, government investment, and philanthropy.

Photo by SuperSamPhotography via Foter.com

“We always say the social economy is simply the formalization of the commons,” says Nancy Neamtan, co-founder of Chantier de l’Economie Sociale, a network of social economy organizations whose anniversary banquet is described above. “It’s social ownership, the goal of which is a sustainable, democratic economy with a market — instead of a market economy. Our mission is building a broader vision of what the economy actually is.”

“When Chantier started out, a lot of people said it wouldn’t work. We had unions, women’s organizations, green groups, and many thought it was too diverse,” Neamtan says. “But it does work.” Evidence for her assertion is visible all around — Chantier’s office is tucked into a six-story building that takes up most of a city block, all of which is filled with social economy organizations.

Not all of these social businesses are new — some of the credit unions, cooperatives, and union pension funds go back a hundred years. “But they were largely invisible to many people until the name social economy became popular,” Neamtan adds.

Quebec’s social economy ranges from a video game creator’s cooperative to a social integration program for Haitian immigrants to a co-op grocery in a remote town on the Gaspe peninsula to a network of 8,000 home healthcare workers, half of whom were on welfare before being trained for the field. Here are more examples showing the range of these enterprises:

Groupe Paradoxe

Chantier de l’Economie Sociale’s 20th anniversary celebration was staged in a renovated church run by Groupe Paradoxe, which teaches at-risk young people job skills in the booming audio-visual presentation, events, and meetings industries.

Desjardins Group

The banker honored for his work at Chantier’s banquet was former president of the Desjardins credit union, founded in 1900 and today the province’s largest financial institution.

The Nitaskinam Cooperative

Also on hand at the banquet was Nitaskinam, an Inuit-run cooperative which designs clothing inspired by art of the Atikamekw people, which has doubled from three to six members in its first year.

“The social economy is our traditional economic model and fits with our values,” explains co-founder Karine Awashish, who is also an economic development official of this tribal nation. “I see good opportunities for us to create new social economy jobs in forestry, health services, tourism, arts festivals, and youth projects.”

UTILE Student Housing Cooperative

One of the youngest entrepreneurs at the banquet, Laurent Levesque, helped launch a student housing development organization with other activists involved in the headline-grabbing 2012 Quebec Student Strike, collaborating with Chantier de l’économie Trust.

“Students pay 70-80 percent more in rent on average,” Levesque says, adding that this “creates an inflationary spiral” that hurts not just them, but their low-income neighbors. With start-up capital from the Concordia Student Union and further funding from social economy partners like Desjardins and the province of Quebec, UTILE is set to break ground on apartments for 160 students.

Technopole Angus

It’s no coincidence that that the Desjardins credit union has a branch in the new Technopole Angus sustainable urban village, which brings opportunities to a working class neighborhood that was rocked when the Canadian Pacific Railway shuttered its machine shops in 1992. A number of historic brick structures were repurposed, and new eco-friendly buildings constructed, with more planned for the project’s phase II. The community will eventually include 500 affordable housing units, 450,000 square-feet of office space, 20 local shops, four public squares, a bike-pedestrian main street, and a one-acre urban farm growing organic produce.

Recylage Vanier

A nonprofit organization started 30 years ago by two out-of-work men who realized the recycling industry could benefit the disadvantaged, as well as the earth, Recylage Vanier offers training for people struggling to find work because of low job skills, recent immigration, substance abuse, mental illness, disability, or other challenges. Jobseekers arrive here for a 24-week program that emphasizes work readiness and life skills as well as on-the-job experience. Most are long-term unemployed, who have been sent by the Quebec employment bureau and social service groups.

“They have to get along with a boss, get along with colleagues, master simple tasks and then take on new ones with more responsibility, all the way up to driving a forklift,” says Nicolas Reeves, one of Vanier’s managers. For the final four weeks, they split their time between the recycling plant and job hunting with the help of staff counselors. About 85 percent of graduates find work, and 10 percent seek further education, according to Reeves. Recylage Vanier faces stiff competition from two private companies in the field, so clients who value the organization’s mission are important to their success — including the province of Quebec, which provides about half their business.

Photo by Liboiron via Foter.com

Cinema Beaubien

This is nonprofit neighborhood movie house explicitly proclaims its mission to “defend the primacy of persons and labor over capital in the distribution of its surpluses and incomes.”

The cinema’s importance as a community gathering spot can be witnessed in the long lines at the ticket booth, where patrons merrily chat with one another rather than staring at their phones. Taxis wait across the streets to whisk moviegoers to their next destination, about half of which are from the Taxi Co-op Montreal. (In Quebec City, all taxi drivers belong to a cooperative.)

La Barberie Cooperative Microbrewery

Operating as a worker cooperative for the past 20 years explains the success of this brewery and brewpub, says general manager Jean-Francois Genest, who joined La Barberie three years ago after running his family’s bookstore and later converting another bookstore into a cooperative.

“The co-op is a good plan to keep a place going,” Emilie DuMais, who’s tended bar here for eight years, says. “Sharing the profits means you attract the best workers. For our part, we try to make their jobs as interesting as possible, offer more holidays and higher pay. You have much more ambition working for yourself than working for someone else.”

Le Monastere des Augustines

A convent dating back to 1700s in the heart of Quebec City’s walled city has just opened as an elegantly renovated hotel, spa, museum, and conference center. It is organized as a nonprofit in accordance with the social mission of nuns still living there to promote holistic health and spiritual renewal. Besides tourists, spa patrons, and participants in corporate meetings, guests also include activist groups holding retreats and health care workers seeking a reprieve from the stress of their jobs.

RISQ

In 1997, Chantier created RISQ (Reseau d’Investissement Social du Quebec), which has invested $25 million in technical aid and capital for social economy businesses, resulting in 1,786 new jobs, 5,119 jobs maintained, and job training for 1,527 marginalized workers across Quebec, according to their calculations. RISQ financial analyst Nathalie Villemure, who worked for many years in private banking, notes that they see fewer defaults than commercial lenders: “These people have a cause bigger than themselves, so they work harder and we help them find solutions.”

Fiducie

In 2007, Chantier launched Fiducie, a $50 million “patient capital” (or slow money) fund that provides long-term, non-guaranteed loans of $50,000-1.5 million to promising cooperatives and non-profits with less than 200 employees. “We don’t expect to see anything in repayment for 15 years,” says General Manager Jacques Charest. Thirty million of the investment came from union pension funds with the rest from the federal and provincial governments.

What We Can Learn from Quebec’s Social Economy

While Quebec possesses a distinct culture and history, the emergence of a strong social economy across the province provides practical lessons for other places.

Recognize the Social Economy When You See It

Cooperatives and nonprofit initiatives already exist throughout the U.S. and most other countries, so the first step is seeing, naming, and claiming the social economy as part of the commons we all share.

Look Widely for Inspiration and Ideas

Neamtan points out that the American tradition of community organizing was a big influence on their early work, especially community development corporations (CDCs) that arose to tackle problems of disinvestment in urban neighborhoods.

The Dudley Street Initiative, which transformed a low-income community in the Roxbury district of Boston, was a particular inspiration for her. The proliferation of cooperatives in the Basque and Catalonian regions of Spain provided another model for bottom-up economic development.

Seek Solidarity

Social economy initiatives benefit from the longstanding sense of solidarity in Quebec, where French speakers were discriminated against and their local economy dominated by English-speaking Canadians, Americans, and English. A analogous situation can be found among racial and social minorities, and in rural and deindustrialized regions where economic power is wielded from outside.

Tap the Power of Government

Government agencies have been a partners and funders in many projects through the years. Social economy initiatives often arose even when conservative politicians were slashing government programs to provide a more humane alternative to strictly market-oriented development. Legislation passed by the left-center Parti Quebecois in 1997 gave the social economy movement a big boost by offering local governments more leeway in supporting community and cooperative efforts to create jobs and promote entrepreneurship.

Partner with Unions

“The labor movement boosted the social economy by making the choice in the 1980s not to just negotiate contracts but to create jobs and support civic enterprises,” explains Neamtan, which led to the creation of the landmark Quebec Solidarity Fund, an $11-billion-dollar pension fund, of which 65 percent is invested in small- and medium-sized Quebec-owned businesses.

Partner with Faith Organizations

Historically, the Catholic church controlled many aspects of life in the province, and priests enthusiastically promoted cooperatives and non-profit institutions as models of the church’s social teaching.

By the end of the 20th century when the church’s influence waned in the face of increasing secularization, social economy organizations found numerous opportunities to set up shop in closed churches and convents. The church remains an ally, Neamtan notes, “especially now that Pope Francis talks all the time about the solidarity economy.”

Header photo by szeke via Foter.com 

The post What Quebec Can Teach Us About Creating a More Equitable Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The first featured session is –

THE COMMONS, STATE POWER AND NEW POLITICAL MOVEMENTS

https://commonsspace.hackpad.com/THE-COMMONS-STATE-POWER-AND-NEW-POLITICAL-MOVEMENTS-tznP7zj0hTd

The Market/State is in crisis and representative democracy seems to be broken. Many argue that both problems need to be addressed for the sake of social coherence and security. We think, that adressing them properly implies rethinking the core ideas that state power and representative democracy are based upon.

The commons provides a framework that allows to protect traditional ways of living wherever people wish them to be protected, while at the same time enabling voluntary forms for creating new ones. It allows for thinking a fair, free and sustainable future. Hence, there is nothing in the current institutional arrangement or in the system of representation that truly recognizes and defends the commons. There are no emancipatory world-views nor special types of institutions — which helps explain why the commons are usually ignored.

It is often claimed that the Commons points to a way beyond both Market and State. We claim that the also provides a way to deepen democracy – if a multitude of people and political agents stand up for it. That is: if we want to strengthen the Commons and deepen democracy, we need to challenge how economic and political power are being shaped, channeled and reproduced – through market forces and through (the territorialization of) economic and political power via the State and the political apparatus. That is what commoners are doing! They take power and production into their own hands. Political parties and state institutions should support such efforts. Instead, their often-corrupt ways of „doing politics“ and their economic policies — neoliberal, developmentalist and/or extractivist — ignore or even criminalize the commons and commoning.

During the last decade, several new political movements have challenged the forces that solidify power relationships in society: Occupy, M15, social movements in several Latin American countries, DIEM25 in Europe, the climate justice movement, digital activists including Wikileaks, the people who supported the Bernie Sanders campaign in the US, and others.  Each  of these movements has shown that change comes from the edges and from below, from common people doing uncommon things, while using new technologies and ways of relating to each other.

How transformative and “commonistic” are these movements? How do they frame their work, strategies and slogans?  What role do they play in the fight for the commons and what role does the commons as a discourse and political paradigm play for them? This is a fairly unexplored topic!

In a moderated fishbowl discussion at Commons Space of the World Social Forum 2016 in Montreal/Canadá, we want to assess and openly discuss some of the achievements and aspirations of these political transformations from a commons perspective.

Some questions might trigger the conversation (the focus will finally be determined by participants):

On the notion of the commons:

• (How) Does the commons provide a strong and positive narrative to empower progressive political movements?
• Is the notion of the commons and is the practice of millions of commoners present in the discourse of these movements?
• Is there an understanding of the commons as a political framework and paradigm shift in values, rather than (only) a policy for managing resources?
• … [YOUR QUESTION]

On commons principles and political movements:

• What is the relationship of these movements to the commons (movement), if any?
• Does commoning exist within social/political movements and if so, how does it transform them?
• Are these movements acting according to commons principles?
• … [YOUR QUESTION]

On strategies:

• Do new political movements rethink and reshape democracy toward a more radical democracy?
• Are progressive political movements (and commoners) up to re-imagining state power as a strategy for shifting legality, resources and support for the commons?
• Do these new political movements represent a window of opportunity to widen the space for commoning — or will their protests simply accelerate enclosures, hyper-nationalism and repression?
• … [YOUR QUESTION]

Organizers:

Silke Helfrich, Commons Strategies Group (concept, methodology, moderation) Elizabetta Cangelosi, Transform (coordinator, logistics)

contacts: Silke.Helfrich@gmx.de ; betta.cangelosi@gmail.com

Participants:

Everybody(!) is invited to participate in this fishbowl discussion especially if belonging to one of the new political movements or active for the commons (the methodology will be explained at the beginning), starting with 4-5 inputs, 5 minutes each.

There will be a sequence of thesis being discussed to structure the debate.

Invited guests:

• Juliano Medeiros, Fundação Lauro Campos/ Member of RAIZ, tbc
• Elizabeth Peredo, Trenzando Ilusiones (Bolivia), tbc
• Lisa Fithian, (USA) (http://organizingforpower.org/about/about-lisa/)or
• John Restakis, Synergia, Cooperative Movement (Canadá, tbc)
• sbd. from Occupy or the Bernie Sanders campaign, tbc
• sbd from Climate Justice Movement

? please SUGGEST AND INVITE OTHERS as you see fit. Remember, it’s a FISHBOWL discussion! (drop me a note to Silke.Helfrich@gmx.de

When?

August 11, 2016 (Thursday):    lunch and discussion

12:00 to 2:00pm:         lunch, mingling & 1 on 1 interviews

with Remix the Commons broadcast team

2:00 to 4:00pm:         fishbowl discussion

Where?

Radio Auditoire; Montréal, 5212 Boulevard St. Laurent

Related events at WSF (Commons Space)

Commons and Public Power: Wednesday,  August 10, 9 – 11 am , Radio Auditoire

Commons as a new Political Subject: (Transform! Global Social Justice), Thursday, August 11, 9 – 11 am, UQAM Pavillon A, Local A-2580, 400 rue Sainte-Catherine Est

You can also join the mailing list here – http://lists.p2pfoundation.net/wws/review/wsf2016

The post THE COMMONS, STATE POWER AND NEW POLITICAL MOVEMENTS appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this talk, John focuses on the concept of the partner state and what can be learned from previous experiences, such as those in Italy.

Very clear sound, and worth listening to.

Watch the video here:

Photo by micurs

The post John Restakis on the Cooperative Experience in Emilia-Romagna and What It Means Today for Transformational Change appeared first on P2P Foundation.