Networking & Collaboration

Macro-transformation does not happen from individual initiatives acting alone: large shifts become possible when a critical mass of movements for radical resistance and constructive alternatives is able to coalesce through horizontal networks.

I delivered the following remarks last week at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, in Oxford, England, on January 5, 2024. It was part of a session in the Oxford Town Hall with the noted British activist-scholar-commoner Guy Standing, entitled, "Commons and Commoning: A Progressive Vision of a Good Society." 

Healthcare-based interventions addressing social needs such as food and housing generally fail to impact the upstream wealth and power inequities underlying those needs. However, a small number of US healthcare organizations have begun addressing these upstream inequities by partnering with community wealth building initiatives. These initiatives include community land trusts, resident-owned communities, and worker cooperatives, which provide local residents ownership and control over their housing and workplaces. While these partnerships represent a novel, upstream approach to the social determinants of health, no research has yet evaluated them.

This week we are joined by David Cobb, Lydia Lopez, Jyoung Carolyn Park, Kali Akuno, and Petula Hanley to hear about how to use/influence public policy advance individual policies as part of a coherent strategy to democratize the entire economy.

Equal Care Coop and Clapton Commons are mapping a local landscape of care and support in Clapton Common, Upper Clapton. Using KUMU, a powerful system mapping platform, we are creating an interactive map that makes the often invisible grassroots networks of care and support more visible and accessible to people giving and receiving care.

At the June 2023 meeting of the USFWC's Union Co-ops Council, Jonny Sopotiuk presented on the Union Cooperative Initiative (UCI), an exciting project out of Vancouver, BC founded in 2021. Jonny shares about the history of the UCI, its co-ops and prospects, their strategies, and how the union co-op model is proving successful.

An online panel facilitated by co-op researcher-practitioner Emi Do that brings together presenters from several such projects: CoTech, Exit to Community Collective, Platform Cooperativism Consortium, SPACE4, Start.coop, UnFound Accelerator, and Union Cooperative Initiative. These projects advance democratic business formation and co-op theory-building, and they offer valuable lessons on the promises and challenges of accelerating worker ownership today.

In different parts of Mesopotamia environmental movements have been feverishly nurturing the emergence of the grassroots institution of the ecology council for the preservation of communal livelihoods.

Equal Care's pilot in Commons-based care in Hackney builds on five years of work developing and delivering a ‘teams model’ of home care in Calderdale, Yorkshire.

Can studying cooperative housing in Sweden teach the U.S. how to overcome the moderate-income family housing crisis?