Author

Pamela Boyce Simms is an evolutionary culture designer and a veteran of thirty years of nonprofit leadership and movement-building. She is a Buddhist-Quaker thought leader, Executive Coach, and writer. Boyce Simms is a proponent of perpetual self-transformation as the true engine of authentic social change, especially as systems disruptions accelerate. She is the principal of Singularity Botanicals and convenes the Community Supported Enlightenment (CSE) Network: an international community of practitioners who synthesize ancient wisdom tradition practices sharpened by cutting edge techniques drawn from neuroscience to resolve complex challenges. Boyce Simms holds degrees from Georgetown University, the Université de Dakar, in Sénégal, West Africa, and is certified as a Leadership Coach, Neurolinguistics Master Practitioner and Kagyu Buddhist Meditation Instructor.

Rob Brown wrote this article for New Economy Week, a collaboration between the New Economy Coalition and YES! Magazine. Rob is a Cooperative Development Specialist and the Director of the Cooperative Development Institute’s Business Ownership Solutions (BOS) program. Formerly, he was the Maine Housing Program Specialist in CDI’s NEROC program.  He has a background in community organizing, communications, non-profit and for-profit business development, and public policy development and advocacy.

The Laura Flanders Show is a TV and radio program that seeks to raise radical spirits by interviewing forward-thinking people who have real experience of shifting power, from the few to the many, in the worlds of arts, entrepreneurship and politics.

Amanda Huron is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Sciences at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C. Her research interests are in urban geography, city planning, housing, the urban commons, community mapping, and Washington, D.C. She has published on her research into D.C.'s limited-equity cooperatives and the urban commons in the journals Washington History (2014) and Antipode (2015), and has published a piece on relationships built between housing organizers in Washington, D.C. and Johannesburg in the edited volume Capital Dilemma: Growth and Inequality in Washington, D.C. (2015). Amanda is a native of Washington's Ward 1, and lives there today.

Synapse 1 is the first of a series of OMONOIA events or ‘synapses’ running over the next two years. The aim of Synapse 1 is to consider the common ground between groups of scholars, activists, self-managed organisations, cultural producers and other civic subjects involved in urban practices of commoning, solidarity, urban welfare and participatory democracy. Synapse 1 asks participants to imagine how these urban experiments developed in times of crisis may become permanent and sustainable alternatives to the dominant economic and political model. Synapse 1 also asks to imagine the grassroot economic and political practices developed in Greece and Europe’s South as new common ground for an alternative European project.

Video Production: Dimitris Diakoumopoulos
Graphics: Studio Christos Lialios
Video Editing: Georgia Nikologianni
#AB5to6 Documentation & Communication Teams