About This Episode

In 2010, The American Bar Association named Janelle Orsi a Legal Rebel, for being an attorney who is remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation. We agree- Janelle is a rebel with a cause, transforming the way we think about leadership in this shifting economy. From participatory leadership to salary transparency, Janelle is leading by example to expand our definition of leadership. In this episode, Janelle shares examples of how her organization’s leadership practices create opportunities for every level of staff to be engaged in contributing to the organization.

About Janelle Orsi

Janelle Orsi is a lawyer, advocate, writer, and cartoonist focused on cooperatives, the sharing economy, land trusts, shared housing, local currencies, and rebuilding the commons. She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which facilitates the growth of more sustainable and localized economies through education, research, and advocacy. Janelle has also worked in private law practice at the Law Office of Janelle Orsi, focusing on sharing economy law since 2008. Janelle is the author of Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies (ABA Books 2012), and co-author of The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life & Build Community (Nolo Press 2009), a practical and legal guide to cooperating and sharing resources of all kinds.

Janelle’s cartoons include Awkward Conversations with Babies, The Next Sharing Economy, Economy Sandwich, Share Spray, The Beatles Economy, The Legal Roots of Resilience, Housing for an Economically Sustainable Future, Transactional Law Practice for a Sharing Economy, Governance is Life, and Citylicious.

Janelle is an advocate for a more open, inclusive, and accessible legal profession, and you can see her 10-minute presentation on transforming the legal profession here. Janelle supervises two legal apprentices — co-workers who are becoming lawyers without going to law school. Janelle and her apprentices are blogging about the process at LikeLincoln.org. 

In 2014, Janelle was selected to be an Ashoka Fellow, joining a robust cohort of social entrepreneurs who are recognized to have innovative solutions to social problems and the potential to change patterns across society.  In 2010, Janelle was profiled by the American Bar Association as a Legal Rebel, an attorney who is “remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation.” In 2012, Janelle was one of 100 people listed on The (En)Rich List, which names individuals “whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures.”

In her words…

“I’ve come to realize, if we cultivate the right conditions, we can end up with communities and organizations where, a lot of people, or even all the people, feel that they have power and agency to just shape the world around them.” “I have a lot of hope and optimism for what I think we can do in this world. I think a lot of my role as a leader has just been to help impart that same enthusiasm. I do that. I really hone my skills as a communicator and I do a lot of speaking, I draw a lot of cartoons, I do a lot of writing in ways that I hope inspire other people. What ends up happening is that when other people are inspired, they’re highly intrinsically motivated to get involved. That’s my form of leadership, it’s spurring a lot of voluntary and intrinsically motivated participation in this work as opposed to coercive. I almost never want somebody to do something if they don’t feel intrinsically motivated to do it. For me, my style is to create the vision and communicate it in a way that people are going to want to and feel really driven to get involved in.” “I think we need to start young and just get everybody used to having more power in agency. I think most people walk around their cities or their neighborhoods and they watch things happen. They see, ‘Oh, that building got bought up by a big developer,’ or, ‘That building’s being torn down.’ They watch things happen and it just sort of washes over us, but we don’t always necessarily feel like we have the power or opportunity to change things or shape the world around us. To the extent that we can start practicing that in small ways and creating opportunities for people everywhere to practicing that in small ways, it’ll, I think, ultimately lead to people doing it in bigger ways and having a bigger impact.” “Sometimes I hear people say, ‘there are too many nonprofits,’ or ‘there’s too much redundancy.’ You know, we don’t need more nonprofits, but in a way, I think that we do, because every organization or every program within an organization is a space in which people are able to have a lot of agency and power and to take things on and to achieve a lot. And the degree of social change that we need, if we really are gonna make it through this next 10 years, we have the UN predicting that 2030 is the year in which basically climate change is gonna be irreversible. These are huge problems to take on and of course, the inequality’s been getting worse. Racism’s been getting worse. We’re on a trajectory where things are getting worse, and so to really turn things around, it’s gonna take a lot. A lot of people really focusing on making that change.” “I think the nonprofit sector will grow and that it should grow and that there should be a diversity of organizations working in the same sector. A lot of people say, ‘don’t just duplicate efforts’. But I think we should duplicate efforts. We need a lot of people doing the same kind of work, but doing it in their unique communities, in their unique ways, trying innovative things. And so I think a plurality and diversity and multiplicity of nonprofits emerging in coming years I think will be important. And I think the highly participatory leadership structure is gonna be really critical to that in order to create that leaderful society.” “I just think the passion and the dedication and the intrinsic motivation of nonprofit workers is perhaps the most valuable resource that we have for social change. That it’s the workers themselves and the drive and the motivation that we bring. That’s what’s really going to make change. And then in order to tap into that drive and into that motivation, we have to be thinking about our organizational structures and our organizational culture. So it could really come down to that. Maybe this is my way of saying that nonprofits that aren’t really thinking deeply about their structure and their culture right now are missing an opportunity to tap into that incredibly valuable resource.” 

Questions Answered on this Episode

• What is shareable leadership?
• Why do you think it is beneficial in the nonprofit sector?
• What issues or opportunities do you see in traditional structures of leadership?
• Cooperatives and shared economy models are seeing a surge in popularity. In many ways, cooperatives, in particular, are creating new economic opportunities for people who may have been previously counted out. How do we invest in those leaders and groups to prepare them as their organizations grow?
• How would you describe your leadership style?
• What has been the overall response to the concept of shareable leadership?
• Are there specific conditions under which the model will thrive or fail?
• What response does “shareable leadership” get from funders? Have they embraced the concept?
• Our current political climate has birthed leaders that haven’t followed the typical trajectory but felt the need to lead in order to create something better. Do you have any predictions about leadership structures and what we may see in the next 5 or 10 years?

The post Janelle Orsi on transforming the way we think about leadership appeared first on P2P Foundation.

About This Episode

In 2010, The American Bar Association named Janelle Orsi a Legal Rebel, for being an attorney who is remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation. We agree- Janelle is a rebel with a cause, transforming the way we think about leadership in this shifting economy. From participatory leadership to salary transparency, Janelle is leading by example to expand our definition of leadership. In this episode, Janelle shares examples of how her organization’s leadership practices create opportunities for every level of staff to be engaged in contributing to the organization.

About Janelle Orsi

Janelle Orsi is a lawyer, advocate, writer, and cartoonist focused on cooperatives, the sharing economy, land trusts, shared housing, local currencies, and rebuilding the commons.She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which facilitates the growth of more sustainable and localized economies through education, research, and advocacy. Janelle has also worked in private law practice at the Law Office of Janelle Orsi, focusing on sharing economy law since 2008. Janelle is the author of Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies (ABA Books 2012), and co-author of The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life & Build Community (Nolo Press 2009), a practical and legal guide to cooperating and sharing resources of all kinds.

Janelle’s cartoons include Awkward Conversations with Babies, The Next Sharing Economy, Economy Sandwich, Share Spray, The Beatles Economy, The Legal Roots of Resilience, Housing for an Economically Sustainable Future, Transactional Law Practice for a Sharing Economy, Governance is Life, and Citylicious.

Janelle is an advocate for a more open, inclusive, and accessible legal profession, and you can see her 10-minutepresentation on transforming the legal profession here. Janelle supervises two legal apprentices — co-workers who are becoming lawyers without going to law school. Janelle and her apprentices are blogging about the process at LikeLincoln.org. 

In 2014, Janelle was selected to be an Ashoka Fellow, joining a robust cohort of social entrepreneurs who are recognized to have innovative solutions to social problems and the potential to change patterns across society.  In 2010, Janelle was profiled by the American Bar Association as a Legal Rebel, an attorney who is “remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation.” In 2012, Janelle was one of 100 people listed on The (En)Rich List, which names individuals “whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures.”

In her words…

“I’ve come to realize, if we cultivate the right conditions, we can end up with communities and organizations where, a lot of people, or even all the people, feel that they have power and agency to just shape the world around them.” “I have a lot of hope and optimism for what I think we can do in this world. I think a lot of my role as a leader has just been to help impart that same enthusiasm. I do that. I really hone my skills as a communicator and I do a lot of speaking, I draw a lot of cartoons, I do a lot of writing in ways that I hope inspire other people. What ends up happening is that when other people are inspired, they’re highly intrinsically motivated to get involved. That’s my form of leadership, it’s spurring a lot of voluntary and intrinsically motivated participation in this work as opposed to coercive. I almost never want somebody to do something if they don’t feel intrinsically motivated to do it. For me, my style is to create the vision and communicate it in a way that people are going to want to and feel really driven to get involved in.” “I think we need to start young and just get everybody used to having more power in agency. I think most people walk around their cities or their neighborhoods and they watch things happen. They see, ‘Oh, that building got bought up by a big developer,’ or, ‘That building’s being torn down.’ They watch things happen and it just sort of washes over us, but we don’t always necessarily feel like we have the power or opportunity to change things or shape the world around us. To the extent that we can start practicing that in small ways and creating opportunities for people everywhere to practicing that in small ways, it’ll, I think, ultimately lead to people doing it in bigger ways and having a bigger impact.” “Sometimes I hear people say, ‘there are too many nonprofits,’ or ‘there’s too much redundancy.’ You know, we don’t need more nonprofits, but in a way, I think that we do, because every organization or every program within an organization is a space in which people are able to have a lot of agency and power and to take things on and to achieve a lot. And the degree of social change that we need, if we really are gonna make it through this next 10 years, we have the UN predicting that 2030 is the year in which basically climate change is gonna be irreversible. These are huge problems to take on and of course, the inequality’s been getting worse. Racism’s been getting worse. We’re on a trajectory where things are getting worse, and so to really turn things around, it’s gonna take a lot. A lot of people really focusing on making that change.” “I think the nonprofit sector will grow and that it should grow and that there should be a diversity of organizations working in the same sector. A lot of people say, ‘don’t just duplicate efforts’. But I think we should duplicate efforts. We need a lot of people doing the same kind of work, but doing it in their unique communities, in their unique ways, trying innovative things. And so I think a plurality and diversity and multiplicity of nonprofits emerging in coming years I think will be important. And I think the highly participatory leadership structure is gonna be really critical to that in order to create that leaderful society.” “I just think the passion and the dedication and the intrinsic motivation of nonprofit workers is perhaps the most valuable resource that we have for social change. That it’s the workers themselves and the drive and the motivation that we bring. That’s what’s really going to make change. And then in order to tap into that drive and into that motivation, we have to be thinking about our organizational structures and our organizational culture. So it could really come down to that. Maybe this is my way of saying that nonprofits that aren’t really thinking deeply about their structure and their culture right now are missing an opportunity to tap into that incredibly valuable resource.” 

Questions Answered on this Episode

• What is shareable leadership?
• Why do you think it is beneficial in the nonprofit sector?
• What issues or opportunities do you see in traditional structures of leadership?
• Cooperatives and shared economy models are seeing a surge in popularity. In many ways, cooperatives, in particular, are creating new economic opportunities for people who may have been previously counted out. How do we invest in those leaders and groups to prepare them as their organizations grow?
• How would you describe your leadership style?
• What has been the overall response to the concept of shareable leadership?
• Are there specific conditions under which the model will thrive or fail?
• What response does “shareable leadership” get from funders? Have they embraced the concept?
• Our current political climate has birthed leaders that haven’t followed the typical trajectory but felt the need to lead in order to create something better. Do you have any predictions about leadership structures and what we may see in the next 5 or 10 years?

The post Legal Rebel, Janelle Orsi, Transforms the Way We Think About Leadership appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Nonprofit Democracy Network is a community of practice and peer support network for organizations working to make their organizations – and the broader nonprofit sector – more liberatory and transformative. We want the nonprofit sector to be more effective at creating a just, joyful, and sustainable world. We want our organizations to be living examples of the equitable, caring, and effective communities that we know are possible. And we know that there is a rich field of experimentation and practice of democratic self-governance from which we can learn and which we can help grow by building and sharing with one another.

We launched the network at our inaugural gathering in fall of 2017 (read more about it here). At our second gathering, March 27-29, 2019, we’ll dive into the nuts and bolts of co-creating forms of collective self-governance, taking on topics like compensation, inclusive decision-making, the impact of identity and culture on participation, coordination and accountability, and collective budgeting of time and money.

Participants in the inaugural Nonprofit Democracy Network gathering

Are you part of an organization experimenting with any of these areas? We would love for you to join us! This is an opportunity to learn about the state of the field, connect with fellow practitioners, learn from groups at the forefront of experimentation, and deepen your own organization’s practice.

We’re looking for organizations that are:

• Committed to undoing dynamics of racism, patriarchy, and other forms of structural oppression;
• Playing with more democratic internal structures, regardless of how far advanced; and
• Interested in being part of an ongoing network to deepen this work.

More details:

Format:This three day gathering will include education, conversation, and co-creation around common themes of collective leadership. The first day will focus on frameworks for organizational design and how those relate to systems change, identity, and liberation. On the second day, participants will break into smaller groups to dive deeper into specific issues and growing edges (e.g. staff/board structure, compensation policies). The third day will focus on identifying next steps and how to integrate learnings into your organizations.

Cost: Sliding scale from $400 – $1500 based on organization’s annual operating budget. We want participation in this cohort to be as accessible and community-driven as possible. We also want to justly compensate our facilitators, organizers, and other vendors. (Cost includes venue, facilitation, and meals over three days for 2 org representatives.) More information on cost included in the application form.

Organized and facilitated by: Participants in the 2017 Nonprofit Democracy Network, including staff from Sustainable Economies Law Center, Community Development Project, 350 Seattle, Reflex Design Collective, and more.

For more information and to apply: Fill out this Application by December 5th, and we will get back to you by the end of December.

WHEN
March 27, 2019 at 9am – March 30, 2019
WHERE
Exact venue TBD
Oakland, CA 94612
United States
CONTACT
Chris Tittle · [email protected]

Photo by CIFOR

The post Tools for Collective Self-Governance: A Nonprofit Democracy Network Gathering appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Nobody gets to vote on the decisions made in the workplace, on who their boss is, on what they’re company produces or how it’s distributed. When it comes to democracy in modern society, economic control is notably absent. The Sustainable Economies Law Center is an organization based out of Oakland, California, that puts economic democracy front and center in its mission to support community resilience and grassroots economic empowerment. The organization provides legal tools, such as education, research, advice, and advocacy with the aim cultivating a new legal landscape that supports economic democracy in the broadest sense.

Robert Raymond spoke with Ricardo Nunez (Cooperatives Program Director) and Chris Tittle (Director of Organizational Resilience) of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) about the organization’s work and the broader context within which it exists.

Robert Raymond, Shareable: What are the goals of the Sustainable Economies Law Center?

Chris Tittle, Sustainable Economies Law Center: The Sustainable Economies Law Center exists to cultivate a new legal landscape that supports communities to create and control their own sustainable sources of food, housing, farmland, water, renewable energy production, livelihoods — all the things that communities need to live thriving, resilient lives. We work at the intersection of economic, legal, and cultural change, and position ourselves at that sweet spot, realizing that the economy and legal system are mutually causative — that they are highly interrelated and that we actually can’t change one without changing both. And that ultimately, beneath both of those are cultural norms and values that are deeply tied to the type of world that we want to see. So we work to create equitable economies, cooperative cultures, and popular law and policy making. Everything we do is about enabling people in communities to come together and meet their own needs in ways that are just and that build local wealth and resilience.

Can you talk about the idea of economic democracy as it relates to the goals you just outlined? And what role do worker cooperatives play in this vision?

Ricardo Nuñez: Currently we live in a system where capital uses labor as a tool — labor as a mechanism to be exploited and to extract as much capital out of as possible. It’s holdover of a feudal perspective of how we should treat people — you know, this vestige of the corporation is basically a feudal system that continues into our democratic age. And so really figuring out a way to invert that, where instead of capital using labor as a tool, labor is using capital as a tool. I remember going to a lot of protests and marches when I was in college, and everybody was saying, you know, “People over profit.” It’s a great slogan. At the time I didn’t really know how we were going to actualize that, and so, that’s where cooperatives fit in. They are a structure, a tool that actually puts labor above capital in a real way. And so that’s what I believe economic democracy is, it’s really putting the economy back in the hands of the people to meet the needs of individuals and communities as opposed to what is legally mandated,which is if you’re a shareholder of a company the company’s legal obligation is to maximize your financial return. It’s not to protect the environment. It’s not to build wealth for communities. It’s to extract as much capital as possible from the people that you’re exploiting.

Something that underlines a lot of the work that the Sustainable Economies Law Center does is to think about the economy in the terms of the commons. And that not only are natural resources common pool resources for us to collectively manage, but that workplaces are too. Workplaces are commons of the community, and so we should figure out different ways to think about that. So, when we talk about worker cooperatives and worker ownership, you know, that’s something that I think a lot of people can understand. People understand generally what that means. But hopefully what we can move towards is stewardship, so that the workers are stewards within their workplaces. That they steward it not only for themselves but also for the people who are going to come after them. And so it’s that type of thinking that I think underlines a lot of the work that we do at the law center.

How is SELC plugged in to a broader national or even international movement?

Chris Tittle: It’s kind of an exciting moment in this broader movement of movements, that include things like the solidarity economy and the new economy, but also the Movement for Black Lives and Indigenous sovereignty movements. There’s sort of been, I think, over the last couple of years particularly, since the financial collapse, this blossoming of a thousand flowers. People are really open to rethinking some of the most foundational assumptions that the current society is based on. And with that there’s a lot of ways of thinking and framing and talking about it. As an organization we don’t necessarily subscribe to one framing around this. Certainly our organization has been associated with the sharing economy,back before that term was used by Uber and Airbnb in some of its more capitalist formations. But I think what we’re really interested in is a world in which all people and the ecosystems that they depend on are equitable, self-determined, resilient in the face of change, and free from oppression.

Personally, I think increasingly for our organization we’ve really been inspired and are taking leadership from frontline communities — the people who have sort of been under the boot of empire for a long time and who therefore actually know the solutions that need to come about in a much deeper and personal way. And so whether we call it the Solidarity Economy, or the Just Transition, or the Movement for Black Lives, think we all share some common commitments to justice and to democracy. Those two things inform all of the work that we do with transforming legal and economic structures. As Ricardo was saying, cooperatives are one way of embedding democracy into the workplace, and our organization tries to embody that too even as a nonprofit organization. To quote Richard Wolff, the Marxist economist, “If we want the economy to work for people, we have to put people in charge of the economy.” So that’s what we’re committed to at SELC. There’s a lot of different pathways to that vision and this is a particularly transitional moment in history. The end goal is something different than what we’re actually seeing right now and there’s going to be a lot of different pathways to get there.

What are your ultimate hopes for the work that you do? What is the transition that you are looking to be a part of?

Ricardo Nuñez: My day to day life is trying to figure out: How do we move away from that system that is fundamentally not reformable? That we need a different type of relationship with each other, and with ourselves. We might not have all the answers right now, but we have to do something better than what we have right now. We are not looking at climate change, for example, as something that’s going to be happening in a hundred years.We are in the midst of a climate catastrophe that is already affecting communities, and because of our privileged positions we might not feel it as much as others, but it’s real and it’s profound. And so I think there is a global context to remember and to think about, but also to really be living those values, to be figuring out different systems in our day to day experience to transform this system. And also to take people where they’re at and to realize that this isn’t something that everybody is going to jump on board with. There’s going to be different ways that people are going to engage with it, and the goal is really to understand where people are and how to get them to understand why it’s necessary to fundamentally transform how we live, how we work, how we relate to each other.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header image of Ricardo Nuñez and Chris Tittle by Robert Raymond.

This article was originally published by Shareable.

The post Workplaces are commons: a conversation with Sustainable Economies Law Center’s Ricardo Nuñez and Chris Tittle appeared first on P2P Foundation.

At the Sustainable Economies Law Center, we support creativity and innovation in many ways, one of which is to uplift homemade food enterprises. So, it wasn’t easy to come to our decision to not support AB 626. AB 626 is a bill that was drafted at the behest of tech company executives and lobbyists to prioritize their interests above the interests of home cooks and consumers. After being stalled for several months, the bill passed a vote of the full Assembly in January and will soon be up for a vote in the Senate Health Committee.

The media has been reporting a lot lately on “the dark side of the tech revolution” (KQED) as you may have noticed. The New York Times Magazine described typical strategy among tech start-ups as striving to “metastasize from transaction enablers to, with sufficient success, participation gatekeepers.” An example of this is food-delivery apps like Seamless which tout convenient ways for customers to get food delivered from local restaurants, but in some cities the app has become so pervasive that “its customer base becomes too big to ignore, even for restaurants that struggle to afford its steep commissions” so a consumer-friendly app becomes just another means for consolidated corporate control of the food system.

We recognize that the fundamental paradigm of Big Tech is a problem: this paradigm which revolves around extremely rapid growth, monopolization, exploitation of workers and user data, disregard for important public safety and worker protection laws, and inhumane and unsustainable profit maximization.

So what’s the solution?

Our friends and allies have repeatedly called for a new revolution in tech that would make tech platforms democratically owned and controlled by users, proposing to make Facebook a regulated utility or a platform cooperative and proposals to buy Twitter to make it a cooperative. People have wondered: what if Uber were owned by the Uber drivers? Spoiler alert: venture capitalists, business executives, and absentee shareholders who own and control these tech giants tend to disapprove of such proposals so while they are exciting visionary ideas that stimulate important conversations, they are not likely to be realized in the near future.

But while an established tech giant becoming a user-owned cooperative seems far fetched, we’ve been engaged in another opportunity to change the paradigm of Big Tech and support the creation of more community-owned tech platforms. That brings us back to AB 626, the California bill that proposes to dramatically change the regulation of homemade food sales to be much more permissive; a bill that would represent a major shift in food safety regulations and likely set new precedent around the country.

The bill is backed by tech companies, including Airbnb and executives of the soon-to-be retired tech start-up Josephine, among other venture capital backed tech companies. There are numerous reasons to support the general concept of the bill: legalizing an industry that’s already active, creating more opportunities for small business ownership, supporting local food systems, and more. One reason we’ve historically supported legalizing homemade food enterprises is that this provides opportunities to challenge concentrated corporate control of the food system.

However, tech company executives and lobbyists have been making the decisions on the direction of this bill. The bill has been amended several times and more amendments could be on the way, but each version of the bill has failed to place serious responsibilities on the tech companies involved in transacting sales of homemade food and each version has failed to ensure adequate worker protections. We fear the imminent Uberization of homemade food if nothing is done to change course.

We have proposed a policy that would allow more sales of fresh homemade foods made in home kitchens with reasonable food safety requirements (such as safe food handling training, kitchen inspections, sanitary standards) and with the important condition that only certain types of legal entities could operate a web application or web platform that promotes sales of homemade food and takes a cut of each transaction. This is very similar to how California law has restricted certified farmers’ markets for decades: only certified farmers, nonprofits, and local governments may manage farmers’ markets (for-profit non-farm enterprises such as Walmart and Whole Foods cannot operate a farmers’ market) which helps protect the integrity of the farmers’ market as supporting farmers by providing a venue for direct producer to consumer sales of fresh agricultural products.

This is an opportunity to change the paradigm of tech: if this alternative vision were incorporated into California’s next expansion of homemade food legislation it could set a huge precedent in tech across sectors and around the globe.

We need your help! Forms of support needed range from simple letter writing to more active participation in a working group, community outreach, and more.

Read our much more detailed policy paper here.

Read more about the evolving political landscape of homemade food in California here.

Photo by siwiaszczyk

The post Supporting new cooperative tech paradigms to protect the homemade food economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Nithin Coca: Loconomics is a platform cooperative that allows service professionals working in areas like dog walking, home care, child care, massage therapy, and tutoring to connect and offer their services on a platform that they own. Founded by Joshua Danielson in 2012, Loconomics, which is based in San Francisco, California, aims to provide an alternative to investor-owned platforms such as Wagg (dog walking), Taskrabbit (gig work), or Handy (home cleaning). The company also just announced a collaboration with Doing What MATTERS for Jobs and the Economy, a program by California Community Colleges. The Loconomics platform will be used as part of a course on the gig economy, which will help bringing cooperative economic principles to students. We spoke with Danielson and Kyra Harrington, Loconomics’ Brand Marketing Manager, to learn more about Loconomics’ vision, their new partnership, and how a platform cooperative could empower service professionals and serve as a tool for economic empowerment.

Nithin Coca, Shareable: Where did the idea for Loconomics come from — and why did you feel it was necessary?

Joshua Danielson, Loconomics: In my 20s, I spent a lot of my money on services and I knew that the platforms, back then mostly temp agencies, often take 30-40 percent of people’s pay. Local services were something I believed in. The world’s full of products, while services are sustainable and personable. They enrich people’s lives in a way that products don’t. Ethos behind it is to do something that doesn’t increase wealth inequality. This is what many traditional businesses [with venture capital] end up doing.

We – Joshua and I – first met more than two years ago, and even then, Loconomics had been around for some time. Can you tell me about your progress, and the challenges you’ve faced in getting the platform cooperative set up?

Joshua Danielson: It’s taken much longer than expected, which is not atypical for any first-time entrepreneur. I started out neither having been a project manager nor having the technical expertise to move quickly. I’ve acquired a lot of those skills since then, and we’re able to execute things in a fraction of the time it used to take.

Loconomics started out as a benefit corporation, and our first round was a desktop version launched in 2012. It was bad timing. No one knew what a benefit corp was, nor did they care. It wasn’t true ownership, it wasn’t that differentiated from other platforms, and we didn’t have a mobile app. I began to wonder how this would look as a cooperative, but as most service professionals are freelancers, I didn’t know how that would work. I met Janelle Orsi with the Sustainable Economies Law Center, and she had been speaking out about the sharing economy/platform economy.

The conversion to a platform cooperative took a lot longer than expected because we wanted to do it right. The bylaws alone took over a year to write. Janelle has a lot of expertise and is in the cooperative movement. I let her lead, and I made sure to bring a healthy dose of business strategy to it, to ensure it was a sustainable platform, and we’d have staff that would want to work here.

What was the cooperative structure you ended up deciding on, and how does it work in practice?

Joshua Danielson: We officially converted in June 2014 to a California cooperative. We were a patronage based co-op at that point, with no shareholders. That means Loconomics is owned by workers and nobody else. We felt that keeping our focus on local services, and creating a platform that works for service professionals and clients has a lot potential to shift wealth inequality, so that gradually services can be booked without the middlemen.

Our revenue model is that service professionals will pay $20-40 for our ownership plans. With the $20 a month plan, they gain access to dividends, vote, can run for board, and get access to our sister platform where they can communicate, gain support, and have networking opportunities.

For $40, they also get access to scheduling software and new project management tools, in addition to being part of the cooperative. When there are profits leftover, they are entitled to dividends based on what they have paid into the platform. There are no commissions, and they elect the board, so they oversee the platform. Staff, like myself and Kyra, will be doing day to day activities — we are entrusted with the mission on their behalf. We’ve removed the traditional incentives and are self managed, have capped salaries, and  don’t have a bonus system. Staff elect one board member, two are nonprofit appointed, and six members are elected by service professionals. We get dividends based on how many hours we work, but this will roughly end up being the same as a service professional member who paid their dues.

So, can Shareable readers find services on the platform right now?

Kyra Harrington: Right now we’re focusing on recruiting on service professionals. Just over the last year, we’ve found there are a lot of challenges they are coming up against. They are often by themselves and face challenges on their own. That’s why we’re trying to build community through our sister platform — Loconomomics.coop — where service professionals can congregate. There are a lot of professional advantages they get from joining coop.

Service professionals have created nearly 600 listings on the site so far — and as we transition out of beta and going to do a full push this winter to onboard new members.

Service professionals can be a huge category. Any specific fields or sectors you are focusing your outreach on?

Joshua Danielson: Currently we’re focused on handful of services that include self-care professionals, such as massage therapists, acupuncture, cleaning professionals, handymen, and also dog walkers, pet sitters, child care, and tutors. Existing platforms for dog walking and cleaning take commissions up to 40 percent. They also proved that service professionals are looking at these platforms to get services booked, so that shows demand.

Kyra Harrington: When you start talking about co-ops, people often have not heard about it. To focus our messaging, we’re focusing on what’s in it for them as a service professional. Our focus is on tangible benefits: software, marketing, community, and no commissions. No one is getting rich of your back. And we’re a platform co-op, so you have a voice in our future.

Joshua Danielson: Most platform workers don’t feel like they’re being taken advantage of. Not many people have done the math. We want to have the numbers to say that, for example, dog walkers on Loconomics earn X more than on Wagg. That works better than telling them they are being taken advantage of.

That definitely sounds like a stronger message. So, what are your goals further ahead — where do you hope to see Loconomics in the near and medium term?

Joshua Danielson: First goal is to reach financial sustainability, and that we can achieve with 2,000 member service professionals. That would give resources to hire staff, and ability to scale and build partnerships across the world. Scaling helps everybody through increased bargaining power and network effects.

Kyra Harrington: It’s about helping each other versus fighting each other for business. The co-op element allows members to get to know each other — and you are more likely to refer your clients to others via a trusted referral network. Loconomics also allows members to market their services collectively versus paying a platform to compete against each other.

Joshua Danielson: The power of the marketplace is that you can book different services with Loconomics. You might first find your dog walker, but when you are also looking for a massage, you can find that on Loconomics too. It’s another value proposition to any service professional: They’re likely to get clients from other professionals. Our cooperative business model lends itself to members helping each other in ways that other platforms cannot.

It may have taken longer than I thought it would, but we’re excited to get to that point. The financials back it up, and there’s a place for Loconomics in the market. We need to reach a critical mass to get the ball rolling faster, so we’d love for people to check us out and refer professionals who could benefit from the power of a co-op. We’re committed to reducing wealth inequality, and we feel ownership is the way to do that — ownership over the tools you use and the way that you access work.

Nithin Coca: I’d also love to hear more about your new partnership with California Community Colleges?

Joshua Danielson: Under the Doing What Matters for Jobs and the Economy Small Business Sector program, twenty-four colleges are participating in a Self-employment Pathways in the Gig Economy project starting February 2018. Students will create job listings as part of this program, and Loconomics will assist them in finding work opportunities, tracking their earnings, and supporting them in transitioning into the independent workforce as small business owners. This group of students is going to be introduced to cooperative platform ownership as an alternative to traditional gig economy platforms.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. Header image courtesy of Loconomics. 

The post Loconomics Gives Gig Workers an Alternative to Investor-Owned Platforms appeared first on P2P Foundation.

If you’re like most people, you’ve had a mix of emotions since Election Day. Some combination of “Nooooo,” “Aaaaaaaaugh,” and “Ok, let’s get to work” seems to sum up a lot of what I’ve been hearing.

It may seem like we face problems of unfathomable dimensions in a sharply divided political climate, but here’s an important reminder: Most solutions are local in dimension and practical in nature. Across the political spectrum, communities want to look around and see thriving local farms, vibrant small businesses, good workplaces, and stable housing. It hardly feels political, because it’s just practical!

The election results prompted a good deal of reflection at Sustainable Economies Law Center, and now we are more driven than ever to make our vision of more just and resilient local economies a reality across the country. If we search for the root of extremism, racism, and other -isms exaggerated in our recent election, I believe we would find feelings of powerlessness and fear. The Law Center’s work gets to that root by building power at the community level and creating stable local economies that provide for people in the long-term. We are:

1. Localizing livelihoods: We work to give everyone control over their own livelihoods. In 2017, our Law Center will work to legalize homemade meal businesses and small compost enterprises. We are also helping protect small businesses across the U.S. by supporting their conversion to worker cooperatives as aging owners retire.

2. Creating permanent housing, farmland, and energy: In our quest for stable futures, many people are drawn to the concept of “permanence.” While nothing is truly permanent, the Law Center is using innovative legal structures to protect important community assets – housing, farmland, and renewable energy – to ensure that everyone has access in the long-term.

3. Bringing our money home: The Law Center is helping channel that money out of extractive Wall Street investments and into local enterprises, farms, and housing. We are advocating for policies and supporting new community-based financial organizations to make this possible.

4. Building power for everyone: We want every person to have power to shape their own workplaces, neighborhoods, and communities. The Law Center is spreading models and resources for workplace democracy and we are training everyday people to shape public policy. True democracy means that everyone is a policymaker!

This is a pivotal moment in history. When things seem to fall apart, people are also motivated to come together. You have supported our vision in the past. Will you help us deepen our work across the country by making another contribution today? Our work is only possible with your support!

We need to raise $20,000 this December to close a budget shortfall and continue our work in 2017. If every one of our supporters gave $3.60 right now, we’d reach our goal!

Photo by chrisyakimov

The post When things fall apart, we come together. Help us create #PeoplePoweredEconomies now! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Sadly, this is real: Improving the livability of a previously disinvested neighborhood creates opportunities for speculators, landlords, and developers to increase rents and drive up the cost of property, often causing displacement of the very people who made the neighborhood livable to begin with.

It’s paralyzing to realize that the positive changes we make in our communities can do more harm than good. We eventually arrive at the most difficult-to-answer question: What will stop the pattern of displacement of low- to moderate-income communities and communities of color?

I believe that only one solution will make a true and long-term difference, and you rarely hear anyone utter it, because it so radically challenges everything we’ve been told to do as responsible adults pursuing the “American Dream.” So brace yourself…

We have to stop profiting from property. We have to treat homes as homes, not as investment vehicles that we hope to later sell to the highest bidders. If the privilege of property ownership determines who builds wealth, then the wealthy will build wealth more quickly than everyone else, white people will build wealth much faster than black people, and we’ll continually deepen inequality and racism in this country.

This reality has settled in to the point where I’m ready to declare: I can never, with a clear conscience, buy a house and feel entitled to the capital gains generated by the housing market. I wouldn’t feel proud if my method of building wealth is to participate in the pricing out of lower income families. But I do not want to remain a renter and be victimized by the same dynamic. So, now what?

Now I believe that the most important thing the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) – and everyone else, for that matter – can work on is creating and spreading a different model of property ownership.

This is where the Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (PREC) comes in. “Permanent Real Estate Cooperative” is the name SELC has given to a model we have been working on for land and housing acquisition, management, and ownership. The PREC model employs similar tools to those used by limited equity housing cooperatives (LEHCs) and community land trusts (CLTs): Residents buy homes and feel much like homeowners, but the equity that they can build in a property is limited to what they put in (purchase price and improvements) plus a strictly limited rate of return, usually tied to inflation rates or a consumer price index. Capping the resale value and putting land into community control helps ensure that it won’t be sold back into the speculative marketplace.

In addition, the PREC model brings multiple innovations:

1. It’s for everyone

Unlike most affordable housing developments and 501(c)(3) community land trusts (CLTs), which are often limited (by tax exemption or their funding sources) to providing housing to low-income households, the PREC is a cooperative corporation spreading the notion that everyone – high-income and low-income – should stop profiting from property and live in limited equity housing.

2. It’s self-help

PRECs are platforms for mutual aid and self-help, not charitable assistance. Charities can create a disempowering divide between the helpers and the helped. The cooperative structure transforms the relationship to create groups of people working together to provide for their own long-term housing needs. That can make it motivating and empowering, and it sets the stage for communities to engage in mutual support in many forms beyond housing.

3. It’s self-organizing and scalable

Our vision is to design the governance of PRECs to enable bottom-up organizing by hundreds or thousands of members, rather than top-down management by a board and staff. A household or group of people can self-organize, find financing, and identify a property to shepherd into the cooperative. The cooperative will serve as a container to hold title to land and enforce limited equity. The cooperative Board and staff support members in this process, but generally do not drive decisions about what properties to buy and who will live in them. Because all members will be responsible for organizing to acquire properties, we believe that a PREC can grow quickly to involve many people and homes.

There is much more to say about the PREC model, how properties are financed, how governance works, how to ensure permanence of affordability, how we can grow a movement of PRECs, how PREC members build economic security outside of the conventional housing market, and so on. SELC has put a lot of thought and research into it, and we feel satisfied that this is a viable and powerful path forward.

So, while a blog post cannot do it justice, a SELC project to pilot PRECs in the Bay Area will hopefully illuminate a way out of the gentrification and displacement trap. Stay tuned as we develop this model, and let us know if you recommend any resources or potential support for our work. Note: We have not received funding to do this particular work, and we are just beginning the process of fundraising while we use unrestricted funds to lay the groundwork. Stay tuned, and let us know if you have suggestions.

Cross-posted from theselc.org

Photo by ralky

The post Homeownership is Dead. Long Live the Permanent Real Estate Cooperative appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The evolution of STRs is a success story for the many STR platforms that broker transactions between STR hosts and guests, but for cities and communities dealing with the adverse social and economic impacts of the activity, STRs pose a unique new challenge.

On the one hand, STRs have a strong contingent of proponents, including the well-resourced STR platforms themselves and property owners who benefit from the flexibility and economic opportunity STRs afford them. On the other hand, unbridled STR activity has caused renters and tenants’ rights advocates to argue that profit incentives and lack of regulation have led many property owners to evict tenants and convert long-term residential rentals into STRs — removing bedrooms and entire units from the rental market and displacing and driving up housing costs for local residents.

Renters are not the only stakeholders with concerns. Hotel interests argue that unregulated STRs unfairly compete with established hotels, local regulators contend that STRs reduce local business and hotel tax revenues, and neighbors complain that a constant turnover of transient STR guests adversely impacts neighborhood quality and cohesion.

Now that the peer-to-peer economy has collided with housing, cities are being called upon to find solutions that protect public interests and meet the needs of all residents in a climate where some criticize governments for failing to adequately regulate STRs, while others criticize government for failing to embrace them.

How can cities regulate STRs in ways that generate inclusive opportunities for local wealth-creation, while still balancing the needs of all members of the community? SELC has some suggestions.

This guidebook will equip cities to respond to STRs in ways that protect public interests — including housing affordability, health and safety, neighborhood quality, and municipal revenues — while retaining reasonable latitude for city residents to host and earn money from short-term guests.  identifies key issue areas, incorporates references to sample STR ordinances from around the U.S., and provides SELC’s recommendations for best practices.

Because there is no one-size-fits all ordinance for STRs, we strongly encourage community stakeholder participation in the formation of any STR policy so that it accurately reflects local circumstances. Please share this guidebook widely: with neighbors, with community organizations, with city council members, and with mayors. We created this guidebook for people like you.

For questions or press inquiries, contact Yassi Eskandari-Qajar: [email protected]

Photo by Mechanoid Dolly

The post New SELC Report: How to Equitably Regulate Airbnb-style Short-term Rentals appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Reposted from our friends at Shareable, please share the following article, written by Cat Johnson, as widely as possible.

Neil Thapar first encountered seed issues in law school when he worked with the Center for Food Safety against genetically-modified food. But it was a season spent working on an organic farm in Santa Cruz, California when he began to understand, first-hand, the importance of seeds as a foundation of our agricultural system. He explains, “When I came off the farm I said, ‘If I’m going to be a lawyer, I’m going to be a lawyer doing things that I think are making a positive difference.’”

Thapar is now the point person for Save Seed Sharing, an advocacy and education campaign to protect and promote seed sharing in the U.S. He’s leading the campaign for the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC)—where he’s a staff attorney—and campaign partner Shareable.

At the heart of the seed issue, which started in June when agriculture officials in Pennsylvania cracked down on the Joseph T. Simpson public library’s seed library, is that a number of states are now applying laws meant for big, commercial seed producers to small, citizen-run seed libraries. According to SELC, “in order to give out member-donated seeds, the Simpson Seed Library would have to put around 400 seeds of each variety through impractical seed testing procedures in order to determine quality, germination rate, and so on.” The concern among seed activists is that seed libraries (about 300 in the U.S.) will be regulated out of existence if this trend continues.

“The goal [of seed sharing],” says Thapar, “is to preserve and promote genetic diversity by having people grow tons of different plants all over the place rather than having one single crop being grown on a massive scale that becomes more and more susceptible to a shock to the system and it will be harder and harder to recover from.” He adds, “It represents a strategy that we have to follow if we want to develop a more resilient agricultural system.”

For the Save Seed Sharing campaign, SELC is partnering with Shareable, Richmond Grows, several other organizations including Seed Matters, SeedSavers Exchange, and concerned citizens. The campaign is designed to educate people about seed sharing issues, support seed sharing communities, and reform overzealous seed laws. The campaign goals are:

• Educate stakeholders about how seed laws apply to seed sharing through seed libraries.
• Build public awareness and grassroots support for seed libraries.
• Empower local stakeholders to engage in policy advocacy to support seed sharing.
• Remove legal barriers to seed sharing through seed libraries.
• Support seed libraries that face regulation under seed laws.

The tactics to be taken for the campaign are as follows:

• Research and publish analysis of 50 state seed laws.
• Create an online petition campaign directed to state agriculture departments to raise awareness and support for changing seed laws as they apply to seed libraries.
• Publish articles and engage with the media on issues related to seed sharing.
• Organize state coalitions of the seed advocates to work on policy changes to support seed libraries.
• Create policy recommendations, including sample legislation, for changing seed laws to create clear legal space for seed libraries and seed sharing.
• Create legal resources and offer legal advice to seed libraries who face regulation under state seed laws.
• Offer educational materials on how seed laws apply to seed sharing.
• Attend meetings with regulators to negotiate alternatives to regulating seed libraries under seed laws.

Key resources for the campaign are an online petition urging state officials to protect seed libraries from inappropriate regulation; an in-the-works guide to seed libraries that will include best practices, how to start a seed library, how to introduce people to the concept of seed libraries, and how to train seed librarians and library users; and a set of policy recommendations for people to use to change seed laws and engage city and state officials in supporting seed libraries.

For Thapar, the best case scenario for the campaign is to gather 10,000 signatures on the Save Seed Sharing petition; pass laws in at least two states this year that amend the seed law to support seed libraries and explicitly exempt seed libraries from seed laws; and that other states look to those laws as models and incorporate the changes into their state seed laws. Ultimately, what he would like is that this becomes the new standard for what a seed law is and that the amended draft gets put into the Revised Seed Law, a model bill that the Association of American Seed Control Officials creates.

“If we could get an explicit exemption in there,” says Thapar, “that would really have a lot of effect in terms of protection and the stability that seed sharing would have moving forward.”

Please sign the petition today to help protect seed sharing in the U.S.

The post SELC and Shareable Kickoff Campaign to Save Seed Sharing in the U.S. appeared first on P2P Foundation.