Stephanie Rearick and Leander Bindewald: If it wasn’t crystal clear just weeks ago, it is now: The economy as it stands is currently positioned in direct opposition to social and environmental objectives. For the sake of the wellbeing of our communities, our children, and our planet, it is imperative we change the voracious path of our consumption culture and consider how we might create opportunities for people to find meaningful work.

At the Mutual Aid Network, we have developed a new type of networked cooperative — one that, among other things, lets people find talented collaborators for personal, neighborhood-wide, or even city-wide projects. Here’s how we make it happen:

The first step is to bring people together around a common goal of any size and scope to form an individual “Mutual Aid Network.” The common goal can be anything — a group of friends aiming to redesign each person’s work life, a watershed restoration initiative, a city-wide energy efficiency and renewables program, a decentralized cooperatively-owned manufacturing initiative, a travel and culture exchange, or a meal program to ensure that everyone in a neighborhood has enough to eat. While each network is entirely autonomous, the underlying principles it follows are from drawn from commons governance and cooperative models.

To achieve the common goal, members pool and steward resources by combining any of the following tools — all tried and true in the patches of solidarity economy, big and small, over the course of generations:

• Shared resources or the commons: Participate in tool libraries, makerspaces, shared laundry facilities, and so forth.

• Timebanking and swapping: Exchange time credits — for example, an hour worth for a service, be it babysitting, cooking, cleaning, rides, light carpentry, gardening, art/music/language lessons, in exchange for a service. Contribute frequent flyer miles, meals, plots of land, buildings, equipment all to be acknowledged in community credits that are fair, transparent, and always mutually beneficial.

• Price-based mutual credit currencies, for business and highly professionalized service: Buy a $1,000 piece of equipment from a participating business for 1,000 points of interest-free credit, to be paid back by selling $1,000 worth of goods and services to the network. Taxed according to applicable laws.

• Savings pools and community investment: Contribute to a common pool of money to be allocated to collectively agreed causes or members with one-off financial needs, be they for a home, health care, or even burial expenses. Examples of this abound around the world and include the Mutual Aid Societies in the U.S., the original Building Societies in the U.K.

And then there is the “Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks,” formerly referred to as the Main Mutual Aid Network, which is one big global cooperative owned by all individual Mutual Aid Network sites. The members connect, share resources and best practices, and support new Mutual Aid Network sites all around the world by using the same approach and principles applied in the local sites.

Of course we don’t expect everyone to be solely working in the Mutual Aid Network context, but expect that more opportunities will build over time. Our strategy is to start with a number of pilot sites with different focus areas, strengths, and limitations, and have each one commit to supporting one another and help foster new sites. Eight pilot sites have signed up already, and at least eight more are in the works.

The economy of the 21st century is something we’ve been prototyping throughout human history. Now we can connect those ideas and practices that have proven to be sustainable over time and use technologies to connect, exchange, share, and learn collaboratively and effectively. Networks of networks can quickly connect to create a world where everyone has the opportunity to build the skills needed to make whole, happy communities. We are already doing it, across the world, independently and increasingly interdependently. Please join us. What you can do:

• Join an online orientation

• Join the Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks (formerly Main Mutual Aid Network) global co-op (U.S. based, global membership)

• Join the Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks work groups

• Explore creating a pilot site

• Participate in our Summit in Madison, Wisconsin, from Feb. 17-20

• Sign up for our e-mail list

All of those opportunities, plus more learning resources, can be found at: www.mutualaidnetwork.org

Here are some of our pilot projects:

Madison, Wisconsin

Allied Community Co-op is the first Mutual Aid Network pilot site. It’s where some of the organization’s fundamental ideas were born. Located in a food desert with little infrastructure (no school, grocery store, library, or neighborhood center), the Allied Co-op is working to bring a food buying club and a cooperatively-owned grocery store to the neighborhood.

The Social Justice Center, a multi-stakeholder nonprofit building in Madison’s affluent East Side, is a convening partner in exploring Madison’s second Mutual Aid Network pilot, which will be an inter-city partnership connecting Allied Co-op and many other local stakeholders in a network of resource-sharing and exchange initiative designed to create more equitable distribution of existing resources across the city.

Lansing, Michigan

The Mid-Michigan bioregion is home to a number of both for-profit and nonprofit cooperative enterprises, including the Mid-Michigan Time Bank, the Lansing Maker’s Network, and the Mid-Michigan Renewable Energy Cooperative. By leveraging time, tools, and talents, these groups will form the backbone of the Mid-Michigan Mutual Aid Network to help the region find new ways to build a sustainable new economy.

“Mutual Aid Networks provide a platform for communities to build from the ground up through identifying strengths and resources that are present globally which can be put into action through local location-specific projects,” says Marshall Clabueaux, a renewable energy activist and social entrepreneur.

Providence, Rhode Island

In the Providence Bay Area, the Fertile Underground Natural Cooperative is working to get a catering truck on the road. This truck will take food from farms and supermarkets and offer the raw, natural ingredients for free, while selling the prepared food. The goal of this project is to reach places that have limited access to fresh food and provide cooking demonstrations using seasonal produce.

Waterville, Kansas

Wellness Weaver, a timebank, has collaborated with partners around the US to connect people who want to create a FUNctional Health and Wellness Workers Cooperative — a wellness-oriented Mutual Aid Network.

“The value of the Mutual Aid Network is to bring the wisdom and expertise of those that have used time banking formally as a way to help develop and support the best functioning Wellness Oriented Mutual Aid Network,” says Helen Stucky Weaver, retired nurse and founder of Wellness Weavers.

St. Louis, Missouri

Solidarity Economy St. Louis is currently working to incubate African-American cooperative businesses, co-host a local conference around the theme of “Health, Wealth, and Disrupting Capitalism,” develop a time bank youth court program, engage in community organizing efforts to create a neighborhood food hub in the food desert of North St. Louis, and promote community development of vacant land.

“Being part of the Mutual Aid Network allows us to connect to and co-create a global movement of people who are working to build just and sustainable economies,” says Julia Ho, founder of Solidarity Economy St. Louis. “The only way for us to truly achieve mutual aid in our own communities is by extending mutual aid to others.”

Bergnek, South Africa

Bergnek Community Projects is a community development initiative that was started to empower and uplift women and youth through sustainable business ventures. The program provides access to food, clean water, and reproductive health care for women and girls in school. The long-term aim of the group is to build a community health care center.

Hull, United Kingdom

This Mutual Aid Network aims to create a chain reaction that goes back into communities. It meshes a thriving timebank with 600 members and the Hull Coin initiative, the City of Culture’s 2017 nomination, which is currently mobilizing 4,000 volunteers.

“When I started the TimeBank back in 2010, I saw it as the solution to everything,” says Kate Macdonald. “I realized in time that it is ‘one’ solution and that to have a viable parallel economy, we need different options which have strengths to use in different circumstances. When I heard Stephanie speak about Mutual Aid Networks a couple of years ago, I realized this had been what I had been looking for. What is often missed is a mechanism to join things up.”

Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania

The Mutual Aid Network of the Lehigh Valley addresses the social determinants of health of communities’ most vulnerable members, including formerly incarcerated people, juveniles aging out of the foster care system, homeless populations, individuals recovering from addiction, and newly settled refugees. This project address tackles these issues by tackling social isolation, one of the key factors that contributes to poor life and health outcomes.

These eight initiatives demonstrate that building a solidarity economy that serves every human being on the planet is possible.

A previous version of this article appeared in the July 2016 issue of STIR magazine

Header photo courtesy of the Mutual Aid Network.

The post The Mutual Aid Network Takes a Ground-Up Approach to Create a Collaborative Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Here’s a very inspiring interview with Solidarity St. Louis, an anti-capitalist, social justice and commons-oriented collective out of St Louis, Missouri. We’d like to thank the author, Mira Luna, for encouraging us to republish it.

Since early August, the tragic killing of Mike Brown has caught fire in the news. It’s no surprise that mainstream media has limited the conversation to this one isolated incident. But it leaves a crucial void of voices for change that are working to solve the economic inequalities that create racial injustice in the first place.

Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) is a grassroots organization that has taken the lead in organizing the community around the Mike Brown case, systemic racism and building a solidarity economy in St. Louis through a new project called Solidarity Economy St. Louis. We caught up with MORE Organizer, Julia Ho, to get MORE’s unique take on how sharing projects can support social justice organizing and why we shouldn’t ignore social justice in the struggle to create a new economy.

Why did MORE shift into solidarity economy organizing from more traditional political organizing?

In 2011, the Occupy movement sparked a pattern of people thinking about the economy in a different way, so we shifted our organizing strategy. We asked ourselves, “How can we do decentralized, anti-capitalist work and support what’s already happening?” Around this time last year, we decided it would be most effective to create a campaign working from two angles 1) connecting and sharing best practices for solidarity economy projects and 2) building political and economic power through organizing. We also knew that racial divisions restricted access to resources in the city and felt that a robust solidarity economy network could play a role in addressing those problems.

In St. Louis, a major symptom of racial oppression is the criminalization of poverty, which leads to further economic insecurity and segregation. For example, cities depend heavily on traffic fine revenue to sustain themselves, which creates an unfair burden on the working poor and those affected by racial profiling because unpaid fines often lead to bench warrants and jail time. Currently, we are working on an initiative to get traffic fines paid through community service projects that are managed through our local timebank, the Cowry Collective, while also putting pressure on the municipal courts to stop issuing these warrants in the first place.

Launch event for Solidarity Economy St. Louis

Why did this work lead you to start a new project – Solidarity Economy (SE) St. Louis?

We wanted to build a local network of people who are doing similar projects and could also pull together to fight economic and racial injustice. Our idea was that MORE would help to convene this table, but that the network would consist of groups and organizations that extend beyond our membership.

SE St. Louis currently does campaign organizing, education, and strategy meetings with people affected by bench warrants. We work with the Cowry Collective Timebank, the Organization for Black Struggle, Sistahs Talkin’ Back, the Coalition to Abolish the Prison Industrial Complex, Grace Hill’s MORE Dollar Network, Blank Space, sustainable deconstruction and recycling organizations, free stores, art collectives, immigrant rights organizations like Latinos en Axion, the St. Louis Ecovillage Network, and are looking to connect with several urban gardens and neighborhood tool libraries.

Can you explain your plan to address the injustice of bench warrants for minor infractions through the use of timebanking or other alternative economic practices?

Through our work around bench warrants, we’re hoping to shift the conversation around alternative economics to call attention to systems that oppress people and exclude them from the current economy, such as the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC). It’s hard for people to participate in the alternative economy if they have to fight daily to survive, to not get put in jail or lose their housing. Recently, a group of local lawyers sent a letter to Mayor Knowles, the mayor of Ferguson, to clear all fines for nonviolent offenses (there are about 3 warrants of this kind per household). The reasoning behind this amnesty initiative is documented in a white paper by the ArchCity Defenders.

As a result of the hard work of these lawyers, combined with pressure from our campaign and national media attention in the aftermath Mike Brown’s murder, Ferguson actually amended its city charter to include several reforms to the municipal court system. Most recently, St. Louis City announced on October 1st that 220,000 warrants for nonviolent offenses will be cleared. These changes were big victories for our campaign, but these are just first steps. Clearly, there is still an enormous amount of work to be done to ensure that people are not being exploited by the courts or the police. In addition to the other work that MORE has been doing in Ferguson, one of our next steps is to start a Timebanking program that will expand throughout St. Louis which will allow people to work off their fines by exchanging services in their community.

Cowry Collective Timebank Meetup

What’s your long-term vision for economic transformation in St. Louis and how do shared resources, the commons and cooperatives fit in?

Ultimately, our vision is to see people having true democratic power over their resources and the decisions that affect their lives. In St. Louis, corporate power rules. Peabody, the largest privately owned coal corporation in the world, is headquartered here. Monsanto is headquartered here. Boeing has a major base of operations here. These corporate powers, along with many others, heavily influence public policy and funnel money into nearly every cultural institution. As a result, people tend to turn a blind eye to the fact that these corporations are robbing millions of dollars in tax breaks per year from public schools and other city services.

Last year, we were working on a ballot initiative campaign called Take Back St. Louis that over 8 months received 36k signatures. Take Back St. Louis was essentially designed to divert tax breaks ($61,000,000 to Peabody alone) to green jobs, community gardens and renewable energy projects. It got on the ballot, but Peabody successfully filed an injunction and even inserted an amendment at the state level that prohibited St. Louisans from passing any initiatives that limit tax breaks to coal corporations. We are in the midst of an appeal process now, but the Take Back St. Louis campaign is a perfect example of how our democracy is currently being subverted.

Another major issue in the city is massive plots of vacant homes and land, which are a direct result of decades of white flight. St. Louis has over 10k vacant homes and many more private vacant lots. Developers see it as an opportunity, the city sees it as a blight, but what about the people that live there? How do we develop St. Louis in a way that’s constructive of a new economic paradigm? People are already doing it, but it’s not being recognized or supported in the ways that it should be. We want people who live in these communities, who are primarily low income people and people of color, to be dictating where the city’s resources are spent.

Map of Shared Resources in St. Louis

St. Louis has been the subject of a lot of media attention around racism lately with the murder of Michael Brown. How does your work address systemic racism?

This moment is significant because it is a chance to push forward a national movement against systemic racism. Mike Brown is not the first Black man to be killed by the police, and sadly he will not be the last–every 28 hours, a Black man or woman is extra-judicially killed. Bench warrants are just one small symptom of the widespread problem of the criminalization of Black and Brown communities. So we are doing what we can to uplift organizations that are already deeply rooted in the community, such as the Organization for Black Struggle and the Coalition Against Police Crimes and Repression, and also support newly politicized and radicalized young leaders off of the streets by training them in their organizing skills.

Do you have any particular models of cities or projects you look to for inspiration?

We originally took a lot of inspiration from Solidarity NYC, their mission and vision. We’re also excited to connect with organizers in Detroit with the Our Power campaign, as well as folks with Cooperation Jackson who are doing incredible work to transform their local economy.

How can people get involved?

• We just organized an event about Mike Brown and the bench warrant campaign and have a upcoming big event called Ferguson October from October 10-13th.
• You can get further updates on campaigns and events from the Solidarity Economy St. Louis or MOREFacebook pages or follow #UnWarranted.
• Donate to the legal support fund for justice for Mike Brown
• Donate to the Ferguson October Weekend of Resistance

Header photo courtesy of Ferguson October

The post Movement of the Day: Solidarity Economy St. Louis appeared first on P2P Foundation.