Stephanie Rearick:  Happy new year! (yeah, I know it’s a bit late but this too-long post took too-long to write! but you can take too-long to read it, there’s plenty of good stuff to be found)

I’m excited to see what big developments 2018 will bring, and expect that we’ll have some happy ones in MAN-land. There’s a convergence afoot among lots of likeminded people and their networks, all across the globe. And that’s all we need to remake this world. So let’s get on with it!

But first, some reflection on 2017…

I wrote much much less than usual in 2017, primarily because it was so extremely eventful and that eventfulness included breaking my shoulder (and other arm injuries from the same bike crash), and more recently getting tendonitis in my other arm while helping redo my roof.

So I’m trying to make up for some of that in this recap. Hope you enjoy it!

January we worked on proposals for hubs in the Madison MAN here at home.

February we decided to officially change our name from the Main MAN to HUMANs (Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks). Read more about that here.

Then we hosted another Summit.

We scheduled this to coincide with a visit from our friend Kali Akuno, of Cooperation Jackson. He and other friends were set to present at a public event called Resist & Build, of which Mutual Aid Networks was a sponsor. So we organized a summit around this event, and brought more of our active members and pilot stewards together for mutual learning.

A lot of very rich discussion and forward momentum happened here, and I’ve shared pictures of our whiteboards and shown where to find some notes here.

But now will note just one very lovely bit of serendipity –

Our friend Blair Anderson, a potential pilot steward in Detroit and generally amazing human and organizer, was in Chicago for a family memorial. The night before our summit’s last day, Blair suddenly felt called to come to Madison. He went and booked a bus at one in the morning, then got here early the next day. He called me in the morning to ask what was happening here, and I was able to invite him to our last day of workshops and planning.

Blair came and gave us a really beautiful and poignant history of his own family, through slavery, then chain gangs under Jim Crow vagrancy laws, then civil rights activism, to Black Panther leadership, to political imprisonment, to organizing new ways of thriving in this culture. And then introduced an incredible vision of making a mutual aid network that can provide meaningful sanctuary to people under threat for a variety of reasons, unfortunately the list of which grows daily.

This discussion spawned lots of new ideas and energy. And also inspired me to think of creating a Church of HUMANs (for real, I’ll share details later) and gain a fondness for the adjective “superversive.” Superversive incorporates, transforms and transcends all which comes before it. That’s the HUMAN approach to our economy.

Speaking of (needing) a new approach to our economy – In March we officially Ran Out Of Money. Well, it actually does hurt. But it is the way of getting all our (my) skin in this game. As the main person who has relied on Mutual Aid Network work for somewhat of a livelihood, it’s giving me a new urgency to making this work to support me doing what I feel called to do in this world.

April – I did a MAN tour of New Zealand!!! This one I did post about, a bit, as I went – in segments 1 and 2 (more photos here). And it resulted in a couple radio interviews you can hear here. But in a nutshell, I was given the most incredible opportunity to tour New Zealand for three weeks, with 11 different stops and hosts, at no monetary cost to myself. My hosts paid for my flight so I could speak at the Living Economies Expo (amazing!) in Lyttelton (home of the famous Project Lyttelton and Lyttelton TimeBank that did such fantastic work in earthquake relief after the 2011 quakes). Then Cherie Conrad put out word to cooperative economy leaders throughout the country and I was hosted for the rest of the time on an epic journey of learning and sharing experience, ideas and inspiration. I learned how they approach savings pools and was also able to show how MAN frameworks could turn savings pools into a more deliberate driver of equity. Tons of beautiful ideas emerged throughout the trip, and are taking form as Mutual Aid Networks of Aotearoa (MANA).

I returned home April 22 and a week later I broke my arm (left humerus right up by my shoulder) in a bike crash. Ouch.

May – The week after breaking my arm I flew to Barcelona Spain to present at the fourth International Complementary Currencies Conference. Actually, staying with 10 friends at a beautiful home in Barcelona was a fine place to recover from a freshly broken arm. And my presentation went well too, despite my awkward gesturing with a sling-bound arm… Here are the slides to the presentation I gave and here is the paper I wrote, Becoming HUMAN: Superversive Strategies in the Face of Fascism and Ecocide, in order to be able to present. Unfortunately I wrote the paper in a hurry so it isn’t academic enough in style and doesn’t have good citations in order to be publishable. But I do hope to keep working on the theme, and implementing the ideas. The gist is that, during this time of the US doubling down on corporate hegemony, private ownership and deregulation, Mutual Aid Networks are a form of corporation that should position ourselves to compete for the new economy and win by playing a smarter game that’s more fun and that includes everyone.

And speaking of smarter, I had the immense pleasure of meeting some of the people from Cooperativa Integral Catalana, a beautiful project I’ve heard about (in concert with Fair Coop, another favorite of mine) for years. I got to talk a lot with Joel, meet one of the coop’s founders, and tour their Barcelona space (photos from there). Here’s an article that p2p Foundation ran about them. Check it out! They’re great at integrating different sectors of a local economy to make a pretty self-sustaining system.

June we held a small MAN retreat and pilot exploration in Detroit and attended the Allied Media Conference.

During the conference we crashed the meeting of the Digital Stewards, a Detroit organization making mesh wireless networks owned and operated by neighbors, who also use them to create community communication systems. We plan to replicate this in Madison and beyond! We were also thrilled to connect with people from Red Hook Initiative in Brooklyn, who train in this and lots of other cool tech stuff. Hopefully we’ll work together in the future.

For our pilot exploration we held a discussion about how to move forward on a couple projects, including the sanctuary network that came up in our February summit, and a learning circuit between different pilot sites including St. Louis, Detroit, Jackson, and Madison. We had people from St. Louis, Madison, and Detroit, and laid the initial groundwork for a more future work in Detroit and between sites.

July 27 was an inauspicious day, when we lost the wonderful Cheri Maples to injuries she’d sustained in a bike/van accident the previous summer. The loss of Cheri was huge for me personally and for all of us professionally, and as humans. Cheri was instrumental in helping to start and run the Dane County TimeBank, and especially its various transformative justice efforts including the TimeBank Youth Court, mindfulness and NVC training in prisons, support for people coming home from prison, and timebanking in jails. This work was just one piece of a lot of interconnected, powerful, beautiful work in the world as a Dharma teacher (ordained by Thich Nhat Hanh) and former cop, corrections official, assistant WI Attorney General, and more. You can read more about her here.

Summer was spent building the Madison MAN Cooperative, for which we met weekly.

October I did a little MAN tour through Ohio and then Asheville NC. Ohio stops included Columbus, Youngstown, and Yellow Springs where I presented at the Economics of Happiness Conference hosted by Community Solutions, and also did a MAN exploration there. Lots of exciting possibilities, and the conference was cool.

Youngstown was an informal chat at the TimeBank Mahoning Watershed’s monthly movie night.

Columbus was particularly fruitful, and fortunately we solidified more of a relationship with the Care and Share TimeBank and especially Steve Bosserman, who has been helping a lot with Mutual Aid Platform software and way more. Here’s his report on the Columbus MAN developments:
“We gave a presentation at our September Care and Share Time Bank potluck to prep the audience for your program at the October Potluck on the OH-NC tour. Here’s a link to the presentation handouts.

Also, following your visit, we posted a summary of outcomes to our CSTB Facebook group in which we outlined ways we could bring CSTB more fully into the MAN experience. Here is the link to that post on Facebook and as a viewable Google Doc.

In addition, based on your tour visit, we are featuring MAN in a grant proposal to be submitted by the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio (IACO), Simply Living, and CSTB to the Ohio Humanities in March with a preliminary review next month. The purpose of that grant is to have faith groups, “nones”, and secular humanists convene a set of online and face-to-face conversations in the Columbus area to explore how we can move more aggressively toward a “time-based economy” rather than remain dependent on the prevailing monetary economy.”

Awesome!

Then I headed to Asheville NC at the invitation of our friend from the Impact Economy summit and Madison mapping summit, Paul Hartzog.

At the end of the Asheville trip Steve Cooperman took me to meet Kevin Jones, co-founder of SOCAP and champion of Impact Hubs, among other stuff. We had a quick and energetic chat about each of our work. He’s working toward making a long-term investment model for young people to invest in forests. I was able to show him the way MANs can create means for people with money to directly redistribute it, investing in communities with less access. He was intrigued enough to become my first-ever patron! Helping me with a regular donation toward my living expenses, Kevin got the ball rolling on the vision we’ve held for awhile, creating crowdfunded patronage that everyone can tap into. His generous support will be a good motivator for us to create a web-based template to accept contributions like this regularly, in all kinds of currencies and resources. Watch for it!

November – We incorporated the Madison MAN Cooperative, our multi-stakeholder cooperative which we intend to be our city-wide MAN pilot site!

And the next day I flew to LA and went straight to Santa Ana, about 40 min. south, to spend time with the amazing and wonderful Ana Urzua, one of my fellow BALLE fellows and powerhouse cooperative organizer, and her friends and colleagues. I learned some of what they’re doing with Santa Ana Building Healthy Communities and beyond, and we held a MAN pilot site exploratory discussion that was super exciting.

December 13 we held the official launch party for our Madison MAN Cooperative. And one of the first projects we’ve set up is to host a monthly gathering with food and childcare, to make it easy for people to drop in after work or whatever they need. We’ll partner with a founding member organization, Dane County TimeBank, to be at each other’s monthly events so that each of us can have a presence on both a weekday and a weekend each month. The point now is maximum accessibility and consistency so we can keep inviting people in and building our collective work. Stay tuned!

If you’ve gotten this far, you just read a long-ass post. (or skipped ahead. but that’s OK. You can always search keywords if you want to know about certain places, or bits of work, or you can read bit by bit or skip it altogether). Thanks for bearing with me!

Follow the links to learn more about each thing, and join us in our soon-to-resume office hours. And of course join the HUMANs global cooperative network.

And thanks for your interest, work, support, and everything else.

Enjoy your 2018!
–Stephanie

founder of this version of Mutual Aid Networks, Board President of HUMANs

The post Mutual Aid Network: an update appeared first on P2P Foundation.

by: Time Bank Hull and East Riding

Click here for event registration and more information

COME HELP BUILD A NEIGHBOURLY NEW GLOBAL ECONOMY! We have what we need, let’s connect, collaborate and make it happen! We can do it!

Communities around the world are piloting MANs designed to meet life’s economic needs – food justice, work redesign, sustainable energy, community justice, housing and transportation access, travel and culture exchange, etc etc. Local MANs are connecting in a global cooperative, the Main MAN, in order to support each other’s success and build a network of networks that can engage the 100% in a neighbourly
global economy. We’re hosting a summit in Hull, United Kingdom to learn from each other and take our work and connections forward.

What to expect: New learning, nuts and bolts action for local communities, access to ongoing technical assistance, training in using MAN tools for your own projects plus mutual support among projects around the world, deepening knowledge, building relationships. And fun, music, art, and nature. Join us prior to the summit for Hull’s Freedom Festival 2-4th September. Then on the 5th, the summit will start with an overview of the Mutual Aid Network, go on to visioning #thesocietywewant on the 6th in partnership with the Webb Memorial Trust, deepening to exploring the tools including tech and then focussing in on the Hull pilot at the end of the week with a day outdoor camp and evening celebration to finish. Click here for draft schedule.

Where possible we will offer homestays, feed you delicious food, and schedule plenty of time for enjoyment. You will leave with concrete actionable ideas for how to work with people in your own community to build your dream economy.
For more information see http://www.mutualaidnetwork.org/man-up-summit-uk-sept-2016/

Registration Fees Explained: Sliding Scale – Day Tickets and Full Week:

Wherever possible, we are using MAN tools (eg sharing, gift, timebanking) to create this week of events. However there are some real monetary costs we need to cover so we would be very grateful if you be as generous as possible in your registration amount. Of course we want everyone to be able to attend and participate. If these suggested donations put an undue burden on you financially, you are allowed to select a lower fee. We ask you to make an honest evaluation of what is within your means for attending the conference. If you are able to contribute more it will help us greatly both with the cost of programming, travel and food. Any excess will be put into the Mutual Aid Network which you can all be part of! There is also a ticket option for time exchange. We need lots of helpers to help with cooking, accommodation hosts, food contributions and bicycles. Is there anything else you can offer? Let us know and we’ll be in touch! Thank you in advance.

When: Monday, 5 September 2016 at 09:30 – Saturday, 10 September 2016 at 22:00 Add to Calendar

Where: Hull – Hull, United Kingdom – View Map

The post Mutual Aid Network: 1st European Summit – September 5, Hull, UK appeared first on P2P Foundation.

August 22-28, 2016 Madison Wisconsin

Mutual Aid Networks (MANs) are a new type of networked cooperative ‘creating means for everyone to discover and succeed in work they want to do, with the support of their community.’

Come help build a neighborly new global economy!

We have what we need, let’s hook it up, plug it in and turn it on.

We can do it!

– food justice, work redesign, sustainable energy, community justice, housing and transportation access, travel and culture exchange, etc etc. Local MANs are connecting in a global cooperative, the Main MAN, in order to support each other’s success and build a network of networks that can engage the 100% in a neighborly global economy. We’re hosting a summit in Madison Wisconsin to learn from each other and take our work and connections forward.

Goal: To bring together many active participants and leaders of projects and organizations, to share skills in ways that are practical and replicable, and to learn to apply them in our own communities. We will build collaborative relationships and ongoing mutual support.

What to expect: New learning, nuts and bolts action for local communities, access to ongoing technical assistance, training in using MAN tools for your own projects plus mutual support among projects around the world, deepening knowledge, building relationships. And fun, music, art, and nature.

We will offer homestays, feed you delicious food, and schedule plenty of time for enjoyment. You will leave with concrete actionable ideas for how to work with people in your own community to build your dream economy.

Affordable sliding scale registration – Details TBA

For more information see mutualaidnetwork.org

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The post Stephanie Rearick on Building Community Livelihood Through Mutual Aid Networks appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Help our friends at the Mutual Aid Network (MAN) build local, resilient, peer to peer economic networks through their crowdfunding campaign.

We are The MAN: Mutual Aid Networks

What would it look like if everyone were doing the work they loved; what they felt called to do? What if everyone had the opportunity to build their skills to their maximum capabilities and then apply them to making their communities whole and beautiful?

Mutual Aid Networks are a new type of cooperative, designed to connect us in a network of mutual support that creates means for us to do exactly what we want to do with our lives, from solving hard problems to taking care of loved ones and neighbors to making art.

We can be the Job Creators!

The aim of Mutual Aid Networks is to redesign how we work; to apply what we know about economic and community building tools to create a new vision for work. Instead of getting jobs so we can afford to live, we decide how we want to live and create community supports for each other to do what we want to do. We want everyone to become the inventors, freelancers, entrepreneurs, homemakers, artists, and caregivers they want to be, with some material security because we choose to provide that to each other.

Help support an economy that values, rewards, and catalyzes abundance

Eight pilot sites are currently forming MANs to:

• Provide healthcare and wellness within the community (including disability inclusion) (Allentown, PA; Providence, RI; Waterville, KS; and Bergnek, South Africa)
• Increase energy conservation and renewable energy production (Madison, WI and Lansing, Michigan)
• Provide food security through locally and cooperatively owned and operated food production and preservation. (Allied Community Coop in Madison, WI; Waterville KS, Bergnek, South Africa; and Lansing, MI)
• Provide transportation to meet basic human needs, such as food and medical services? (Allentown, PA and Madison, WI)
• Re-engage disenfranchised segments of society (ex., youth, the homeless) through restorative justice youth courts comprised of their peers.? (Madison, WI; St. Louis, MO; and Hull, UK)

…and much more.

Please support our pilot sites by clicking on their crowdfunding links above and learn more about each pilot on our website by clicking the map below.

The Main MAN meta-cooperative now links the pilots together to create comprehensive budgeting tools that track all forms of capital – TimeBank hours, mutual credit, shared resources, and community savings and lending pools. These online tools connect individuals, organizations, and projects.

This crowdfunding campaign will provide us with the money we need to develop our infrastructure via software, communications tools, training and travel, outreach and more. And because we manage our wealth in innovative ways and connect it with cooperative tools and practices, it goes much much farther than it would in a traditional giving model.

What’s Needed to Make it Happen

We are using open sourced project coordination software now and we’ve built a team that can adapt it to meet our unique needs. The platform links pilot projects to technical assistance, shared materials resources, and shared learning across different cultures, geography and countries. Hundreds of hours have been donated to date. Your contributions will help cover out of pocket expenses for programmers and organizers.

• $3500 – Wezer (exchange and project management software) enhancements and hosting costs
• $2000 – Integrating exchange software between the different pilot sites
• $2500 – Tech support to keep everything online and running smoothly
• $4000 – Coordinating and developing shared resources between pilot sites

Please support us in creating the new economy, one that works for the 100%!

Mutual Aid Networks are the brainchild of The Dane County TimeBank, a mutual credit time exchange and Time For the World, our project to learn from and share what we’re doing with communities working on similar efforts around the world.

Contribute to the Campaign here.

The post Support the Mutual Aid Network’s Crowdfunding Campaign appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Stephanie Rearick explains:

“A Mutual Aid Network (MAN) is a new type of cooperative that pools and stewards value and rewards good work with cooperative economic tools such as timebanking, business-to-business mutual credit, and cooperative saving, lending and investment models.

The goal is to create an infrastructure that empowers people to come together for common purpose and generate, share and steward the resources needed to realize their common goal. This infrastructure will support networks that overlap, connect and share with other networks operating under common principles and using similar yet varying tools and approaches.

We have incorporated a cooperative registered in the state of Wisconsin, which has excellent cooperative law and history. This establishes the framework for future MANs.

The Mutual Aid Network (MAN) framework can be adapted to any size, for any group of people choosing to join together for common purpose that fits agreed-upon streamlined core principles and standards. So you could make a Wisconsin MAN, a neighborhood MAN, a MAN for artists who wish to support each other, a global MAN to develop and steward the infrastructure needed by local MANs… more detail and examples here.

We aim to help establish at least six pilot sites in different locations around and outside the US. The team that has developed the MAN concept to date, Time For the World, and the initial MAN pilot sites will create the legal infrastructure to enable additional MANs to form easily, providing templates of needed agreements and documents for easy localization. Each MAN site will be expected to assist new sites, smoothing the way for more rapid spread, improvement and replication.

The mission of Mutual Aid Networks is to create means for everyone to discover and succeed in work they want to do, with the support of their community.

The community uses timebanking, mutual credit, shared resources (like tool libraries, shared equipment and supplies) and cooperative saving, lending and investment models (like the Mission Asset Fund in San Francisco, JAK bank in Sweden, and New Zealand timebanks’ Savings Pools) to generate, steward and allocate resources toward the group’s agreed-upon goals. All of these models and tools are currently in use around the world, all with success to varying degrees.

This project is an effort to connect them in a comprehensive system capable of:

* Identifying need for, generating, and compensating all kinds of work, not just that which is routinely valued in the market economy

* Facilitating leadership, resources, and skill development within a community to meet its own self-identified needs in a manner that generates and sustains healthy, human-scaled community and economic development.

* Essentially, providing groups of people with the skills and resources to come together to develop and implement projects and share the wealth they generate.

* Using trans-local learning and sharing to rapidly improve, replicate and scale. This means that all MANs will actively share their processes, tools, outcomes and improvements, and support each other in their efforts. It also means that each local MAN has access to a much broader array of expertise and resources than it would were it only local.

* Create ways to harness the value inherent in communities in ways that generate more collective wealth and rebuild the commons – indigenous community economic development.”

The post Project of the Day: The Mutual Aid Networks in Madison, Wisconsin and beyond appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Watch the interview with one of the co-founders Stephanie Rearick here at:

The post Impact Economy 2015: Stephanie Rearick on Mutual Aid Networks appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Mutual Aid Networks build the local economy so it works both for people like you and for the larger goal of community wealth building. Collaborative economic strategies – timebanking, price-based mutual credit, shared resources, and cooperative savings and lending pools – are now being used successfully as separate strategies around the world. By bringing these forms of community sharing and exchange into a comprehensive, complementary system, we have created a scalable model that is being used by the economically disadvantaged to make their communities more economically and socially resilient.”

I had the privilege in May this year to meet with Stephanie Rearick who is involved with the Mutual Aid Network. The MAN are currently preparing for their first MAN Up Summit from Aug 20th to 28th in Madison WI and it looks like a really exciting event. They are also crowdfunding the development of the MAN on IndieGoGo. This ground breaking initiative deserves your support. MAN offer regular learning series about the initiative. http://www.mutualaidnetwork.org/man-web-summit/ Also check out the recent interview with Stephanie as part our series documenting the work of women co-creating the P2P society.

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I want Madison to be seen as a birthplace of the network that is connecting every person on the planet, indirectly, to every other person on the planet, in an explicit agreement to support each other’s right to their best possible life. Is that so much to ask???

Continuing our series on P2P women we present this interview with Stephanie Rearich. Interviewer was Michel Bauwens.

Stephanie Rearick and her friends and co-workers have been constructing a solidarity-based economic network in Madison, Wisconsin, and beyond:

* Can you tell us a bit about your background and what brought you to your current political and social engagement ?

I was fairly apolitical growing up, until I volunteered for Amnesty International on a US death penalty case at age 18, then decided to go for it and worked for Greenpeace for 6 of my most formative years (age 20-26). Then I became a co-owner of a small local business (Mother Fool’s Coffeehouse) and an independent musician. I stayed active in social justice issues, focusing on the over-incarceration and racial disparities thereof in my community. I worked a lot of drug policy, believing (still do) that the War on Drugs is the single biggest driver of selective enforcement of laws and, consequently, racial disparities.

In the course of all this work it became painfully apparent that our economy was an active enemy of everything I cared about. There would be no way to have a meaningful impact on any of the systems I was pushing on without a fundamental change in our economy.
I became very preoccupied with this ‘missing link’ feeling in 2004 and decided to read a book that had actually been on my shelf for many years – The Future of Money by Bernard Lietaer.

Lietaer’s analysis of the problem and possible solutions changed my worldview. I found timebanking to be the most compelling model – simple, elegant, egalitarian – and I knew I had to test it out to prove it could be as powerful as I thought it could. And I felt I had no choice but to get one going as quickly as possible, and to try out all the things it appeared to me it would be able to do. So I founded the Dane County TimeBank in 2005 and have been at it ever since.

I’ve come to see timebanking as a way we can decide what we’d like to do in our communities, then ‘hire’ our friends and neighbors to help us, all by freely exchanging our time and talents with one another.

But my desire has always been to work at a bigger picture level, to connect more sectors of economic, community, and creative life than timebanking can do on its own. And have now begun to move more into that realm, developing Mutual Aid Networks in an effort to create the legal, social, and financial framework to redesign how we approach work and compensation.

It’s reminding me of a powerful curiosity I developed when I was reading Das Kapital (Marx) for a class my first year of college – I really wanted to find out, if everyone did exactly what they wanted to do, would all the necessary work get done? And I guessed, yes it would, and lots of beautiful ‘unnecessary’ work too, and probably with much greater quality and care. And now I hope MANs help us test that out!

* What can you tell us about Madison itself and its contradictions ?

Madison is a beautiful small-ish (300,000ish) city on an Isthmus. It has a longstanding tradition of progressivism and human-scaled livability. Our city planners were very deliberate in choosing a route toward education and recreation instead of industry. We’re the State Capitol and the hub of the University of Wisconsin system. Madison regularly makes top 10 lists for best places to live in the US.
On the other hand, Wisconsin has the highest racial disparities in incarceration in the US, with Dane County (Madison’s home) taking the lead in the state. A recent “Race to Equity” report shows that Madison continues to have a dismal ‘achievement gap’ and horrendous wealth inequality along racial lines, and a new report by the Annie Casey Foundation finds Wisconsin dead last as the worst place in the nation to raise black children.

* What is the aim of the Mutual Aid Network, how did you go about creating this project, what is the situation today and what do you see as the next steps ?

The aim of Mutual Aid Networks is to redesign work. To apply what we know about economic and community building tools to creating a new vision for work – instead of getting jobs so we can afford to live, we decide how we want to live and create community supports for each other to do what we want to do. The aim is kinda to turn everyone into freelancers, entrepreneurs, homemakers, artists, any combination thereof, with some material security because we choose to provide that to each other. Many of the resources that we need to access through sharing or exchange are available from people in our local communities. So why not agree to exchange everything but money whenever we can, and save our money for the things we really can’t get from people we know? Why not pool our money so when big expenses arise, each of us can access as much as we need without having had to stockpile a huge amount individually? Why not connect all these various tools and processes that people have been using individually, often with significant success, for generations? We believe that simply connecting various processes and people into a functioning ecosystem will increase the power of these systems exponentially.
I, along with a large rotating cast of wonderful collaborators, went about creating MANs by embarking on a very deliberate learning journey, inviting people along to help out in any way possible. We started in 2010 at the behest of our most generous funder, who had been supporting the Dane County TimeBank and wanted to see it become self-sustaining.

The learning journey included participation in many conferences, producing and presenting papers with an academic partner, and then creating and delivering a monthly work-and-learn series called Builders Workshops. During the series (still ongoing) we identified strengths and limitations of various complementary currency and resource sharing models, including timebanking, gift economies, price-based mutual credit, cooperative savings pools, and cooperative ownership. We came to the conclusion that the limitations of each could be filled by the strengths of others. We decided to create a model and process to test this. And we realized that economies are at root social processes and constructs.. So we’re focusing on creating a community, a culture, that will embrace risk and innovation and sharing in service of building a real solidarity economy that works for the 100%.

* Are you connected with any broader social movements that is bigger than the local importance of the M.A.N. project ?

First, we have MAN pilot sites lined up in 16 locations, mostly around the US (including Detroit and St. Louis) but also in UK, Sweden, and France. With interest in Zambia and other farther-flung locations. We are connected to timebanks, transition towns, permaculture practitioners, restorative justice activists, health and wellness projects, and solidarity economy activists. I’m personally most excited by our collaborations with activists against police brutality and the prison industrial complex. All of these connections will begin to become very visible as pilot sites and our project sharing software come online, starting late in August.

* Do the concepts of p2p, the commons, the sharing economy mean anything specific in your work ?

P2P, the commons, and the sharing economy are all core in our work and have been explicit goals for us. But by “sharing economy” I mean genuine sharing, not selling things to each other through for-profit intermediaries. I see the economy we’re building as a real p2p economy, with people providing both the work and the security to one another. I see MANs filling an explicit need to build an economic engine that feeds the commons rather than eating it (the latter concept I gained from Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics). As for the sharing economy, we aren’t really using the phrase much since its cooptation but we really are working to build the real one.

* Where do you want Madison, and the wider world, to be in say 2025-2030 ?

I want Madison to be seen as a birthplace of the network that is connecting every person on the planet, indirectly, to every other person on the planet, in an explicit agreement to support each other’s right to their best possible life. Is that so much to ask???
But this is true, even if it seems a bit ambitious. I want 2015 to be remembered as the turning point, the ‘dark before the dawn’ time when we realize our current system is lashing out so viciously precisely because it is about to die.”

* Anything else you want to add ?

The only other information I want to convey is about MAN Up Summit August 20-28, and our web summit happening now. Information on all of it at http://mutualaidnetwork.org – (the August info coming soon).”

The post 100 Women who are co-creating the P2P Society: Stephanie Rearick of the Mutual Aid Network appeared first on P2P Foundation.