“Transition to Co-operative Commonwealth: Pathways to a new political economy”

This July 10 – 21, 2017 the Synergia Institute will gather in Tuscany, Italy for an intensive program exploring practical pathways to social change.

The first course of it’s kind developed by Synergia offers a unique opportunity bringing together tutors to share their experience in implementing a range of approaches inspired by movements for social change including P2P, Commons, Solidarity Economy, Municipalism.

Places on the Synergia Summer Institute’s 2 week intensive program are now open. For details download the course brochure. You can also follow Synergia Institute on Twitter and Facebook.

As a partner in the upcoming Synergia Summer Institute the P2P Foundation will over the coming month feature a series of interviews, articles and videos by the course’s tutors on key themes that inform the program.

Today we feature an interview with Mike Lewis Executive Director, Canadian Centre for Community Renewal; Co Author, The Resilience Imperative.

“Anybody that is asking you for road maps, well, forget it! You gotta build the road as you travel it. That’s the reality,” he said. “My personal motto is ‘make hope more concrete and despair less convincing.'”

Lewis concedes he’s often mistaken for an academic, but his expertise in economic resiliency wasn’t distilled in an ivory tower or a lab. Rather, it developed over four decades of work in the “trenches” of community work. He got his first taste of organizing at 17, when he was hired by the United Church at $100 a month to work in Alert, B.C. The small island community, way up Vancouver Island’s inner coast, is “half white and half Indian,” he said. “That was sort of my opening.”

Continue to read the full article – http://thetyee.ca/Books/2012/07/13/Resilience-Imperative/