“We wanted Darwin to be about inventing new ways of working, new ways of doing business, new ways of enjoying life. It was about reinventing the city. From the outset, our ambitions came up against the limits imposed by environmental concerns, at a time of major upheaval, resource shortages, and, whatever some might say, ever-mounting greenhouse gas emissions. A word in which efforts to curb travel have failed and food security is at stake. We can’t think about the city, about new ways of working, new types of business, or new kinds of leisure activities without looking at their environmental impact. This is what we are trying to do at Darwin: question these effects, question the consequences of our acts on a daily basis. So we decided to seek the best ways of going about limiting such impacts.”*

– Jean Marc Gancille, Darwin and Evolution co-founder

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Kelly McCartney: As more and more consumers get savvy about where they put their money, how do cooperatives expand their supply to meet the demand? After all, worker-owners each have a stake in the co-op’s future and a vote on the co-op’s decisions. And that can be a problem if a business needs to secure a bank loan in order to scale up operations. Individuals within the group can’t—and shouldn’t—be singled out as loan applicants.

Enter the Working World, a financial services organization that invests in worker- and community-owned operations using the principles of non-extractive capital that eschews collateral and ties “loan returns to project success to minimize risk, both for our fund and the enterprises we help thrive.” Businesses “based in and built to serve low-income neighborhoods” are the Working World’s specialty, and loans are repaid from income generated by expanded operations. In a nutshell: no profits, no pay back. Though the Working World has a $5 million loan fund, it isn’t trying to get rich off the labor of its loan recipients. In fact, it’s a non-profit, with a revolving door of capital investment and repayment.

After getting a start in Argentina in 2004, the Working World has established a Peer Network of 27 locally controlled funds that support worker co-ops in New York, Chicago, Spokane, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and other cities in the U.S., as well as across Argentina and Nicaragua. The Working World will even help a business form as or convert to a cooperative model, or partner an existing co-op team in the Peer Network with an emerging one that needs some expertise.

Further still, while non-extractive capital managed by a financial cooperative is clearly still the exception, the Working World aims to make it the rule by fostering regional hubs around the world that can fund co-ops within their commmunities. As each local fund grows through loan repayments and capital investments, it can lend bigger and bigger sums, where appropriate.

One such hub is happening in Baltimore, after the folks at Red Emma’s Coffeehouse partnered with other local co-ops an advisor from the Democracy at Work Network and some sharing economy attorneys in the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED). Additionally, the Southern Reparations Loan Fund and the L.A. Co-op Lab are also early entrants in the field. These local groups will work in tandem, initially, with the Working World, though loan payments will stay within the hub groups to be portioned back out to other cooperatives.

The post The Working World: Funding Co-ops with Non-Extractive Capital appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The U.S. government allows tax deductible donations to socially beneficial organizations incorporated as non-profits. However, the Internal Revenue Service needs proof that the non-profit corporation is actually operating to benefit society. (Apparently, no such scrutiny is applied to anonymous, for-profit corporations operating in known tax havens).

As a result, a small group of people intending to develop a blighted neighborhood, or provide job training to unemployed adults faces a huge obstacle. They cannot attract tax deductible donations without incorporating and filing voluminous tax documentation annually.

Ioby (In Our Back Yard) provides non-profit, incorporated status to ordinary people who want to do good. It enables accountantless and lawyerless groups to conduct crowdsourcing that is tax deductible for donors.

Ioby is, well, your very own shell corporation.

Extracted from https://www.ioby.org/about

What we do

ioby helps neighbors grow and implement great ideas one block at a time. Our crowd-resourcing platform connects leaders with funding and support to make our neighborhoods safer, greener, more livable and more fun.

ioby believes that it should be easy to make meaningful change “in our backyards” – the positive opposite of NIMBY.

How we do it

ioby uses the concept of crowd-resourcing (a term we coined) to drive projects to success:

       crowdfunding + resource organizing = crowd-resourcing

Crowdfunding is the pooling of small online donations for a cause or project.

Resource organizing is a core tenet of community organizing that considers activists and advocates the best supporters to ensure the success and long-term stewardship of a cause or project.

As a combination of these two, ioby’s platform gives everyone the ability to organize all kinds of capital—cash, social networks, in-kind donations, volunteer time, advocacy—from within the neighborhood to make the neighborhood a better place to live.

Extracted from http://www.shareable.net/blog/iobys-erin-barnes-on-the-nonprofit-advantage-in-civic-crowdfunding

This was really part of our founding initiative. The US Forest Service had done all this research in 2007 on the grassroots groups that stewarded open green space in New York City. They inventoried these groups, and they found that about seventy percent of them are volunteer-run and more than half had annual budgets of less than a thousand dollars.

Our interest was in supporting this civic vanguard in this grassroots, mobilized network of people who just were responding to the urge to protect and care for open spaces and public spaces in cities. By being able to extend our 501(c)3 status through fiscal sponsorship, we’re allowing those groups a couple different things.

One is their donors can write off their donations to those projects. The other is the groups don’t have to feel forced to incorporate because they can use ioby as a fiscal sponsor up to a certain point so they don’t have to have that urge to incorporate. They can stay unincorporated for longer periods of time or possibly even consider incorporating in a different way.

Then I guess the third part is, and I think that this varies depending on groups, so I would say some groups have said that being able to operate under ioby’s fiscal umbrella has, in some ways, legitimized their work in the eye’s of some of their potential donors or supporters. It’s about people’s perceptions of where they’re putting their funding or who they’re throwing their weight behind.

Photo by IvanWalsh.com

Photo by deeje

Photo by Parvin ?( OFF for a while )

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Participants at the Cooperation 2015 conference in February, 2015, a precursor of the Chamber of Commons event. Photo provided by Steve Ediger.

The following article is cross-posted from our friends at Shareable.

By Nina Misuraca Ignaczak

That stalwart community institution known as the Chamber of Commerce may soon have its counterpart in the sharing economy.

The US Chamber of Commons, a startup organization dedicated to “recognizing, supporting and highlighting the “green shoots of a budding Generative Economy,” is trying to get a new form of chamber off the ground: one to connect social entrepreneurs, L3C’s, B-Corps and other enterprises focused on triple bottom line, sharing-economy approaches to commerce and community development.

The group sees its role as advocating for the four broad categories of organizations outlined in Marjorie Kelly’s Owning our Future: (1) Commons Ownership and Governance (2) Stakeholder Ownership (3.) Social Enterprises and (4) Mission Controlled Corporations.

On October 10, the group will hold an event in Chicago and in 30 other cities across the globe to call for the establishment of Chambers of Commons.

The Chicago event is designed to plant the seed for a larger movement. The day will start with a consensus workshop, with a goal of arriving at a shared definition of the Commons. Next up is an action planning workshop to develop a start-up plan for a Chicago Commons, which will be the first iteration of what organizers hope is the first of many Chambers of Commons across the nation and globe.

“We plan on discussing and coming to consensus on what we (the people in the room) mean by the Commons, both material and immaterial,” Steve Ediger, one of the project coordinators, said in an email to Shareable. “Then we will plan the startup of the first chapter of a ‘Chamber of Commons’, an organization that will work to bring other commons-oriented entities together in development and protection of the Commons.”

The discussion will address an array of Commons-relevant topics such as the environment, public land, the food supply, public education and transportation, open-source software, the internet, arts and culture and taxpayer-funded scientific research. Unclaimed realms such as the oceans, Antarctica and outer space will also be on the agenda.

Organizations, projects and individuals in the Chicago area working on Commons-oriented initiatives in the economic, environmental, community, and cultural sustainability spheres are invited to participate. National and international organizations with a Chicago presence are also invited to participate.

In an article for the Huffington Post, writer Sally Duros quotes Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, on the need for a Chamber of Commons:

“The old way is this. Here’s a problem. We need resources to solve that problem. We create a hierarchy to direct resources at the problem,” Bauwens says.

“Here’s another way. There are enough people in the world with time, skills and energy who would be willing to work to solve that problem. The new solution is to create a commons and a platform that allows people to self-aggregate and collaborate to solve that problem.”

You can register for the Chicago event here.

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