Linking Opposition & Alternatives

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.

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.

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.

10 years after the death of Comandante Hugo Chávez Frías, “commune or nothing” remains the battle cry of the Venezuelan people advancing in the Bolivarian revolution

Relive the excitement of a packed Community Assembly!

Many countries in the Global North use the term “social economy”—also known as the third sector—to describe economies run by citizens rather than by state or business actors. Over the years, many Black feminist scholars that we have worked with also share the view that the concept of the “social economy” is limited to a European understanding. It fails to acknowledge those actors in the third sector who are excluded from interacting with the government or private sector. There is an assumption that the social economy is “socially inclined” and that it is a sector able to “interact” with the state and capitalist firms. What happens when certain groups of people cannot interact with the state or private sectors due to systemic exclusion? We argue that to transform literature on the social economy, we must use the term solidarity economy. Rejecting the sanitized language of the social economy, we use critical discourse and case study analyses to show the worldwide use of the term solidarity. Our work draws on theories of community economy intentional community to argue that the solidarity economy is a site of contestation and a way to push for social change.

A Venezuelan cooperative network that recently received the “Alternative Nobel Prize” tells its story.

Max is joined by Jeff and Eric, 2 of 7 worker-owners of a therapist worker cooperative in Minneapolis, Minnesota called Phoenix Mental Health.

Canadian members of the African diaspora make use of traditional forms of group savings, known as susu, to overcome financial and cultural exclusion in the mainstream system.