Ventures Policy Agenda: Increasing Access, Reducing Barriers
Will von Geldern is Director of Advocacy and Communications at Ventures and is a People’s Economy Lab Leader Earlier this year, we wrote about our work to build an economy that is truly…
Will von Geldern is Director of Advocacy and Communications at Ventures and is a People’s Economy Lab Leader Earlier this year, we wrote about our work to build an economy that is truly…
The first federal level bipartisan legislation that highlights worker cooperatives, the Main Street Employee Ownership Act was signed into law in August 2018.
An economic system should provide a social foundation of well-being, and that no one should fall below that baseline. It also sets a ceiling of ecological damage to our planet that we should not cross. Between the two lies the doughnut itself, a safe and just space for all.
Locally based financing helps local economies thrive by keeping dollars flowing in the local economy and maintaining aligned incentives for community value creation. Community Sourced Capital, a crowd-sourced zero-interest lending platform, developed a system of financing loans under $50,000 for neighborhood businesses
Mo! grew up in a community of social justice organizers in Chicago. Her first experience with a People’s Economy came when she moved out of her Mom’s house at age eighteen and into the Stone Soup Cooperative. Living at Stone Soup she witnessed a highly effective, democratically run organization that provided affordable, communal places to live. She began to learn about other cooperative enterprises like worker cooperatives and consumer cooperatives, and has pursued that interest ever since.
To build an economy that is truly inclusive, we have to look at all aspects of economic development. This is particularly true in the Puget Sound region, where the recent influx of wealth has not resulted in economic prosperity for everyone.
A new report shows that people largely don’t understand the economy and believe its a force of nature rather than something we created and can change. But all hope is not lost, tapping into key concerns can like inequality, power, and fulfillment and using promising frames like reprogramming or laying new tracks can open up space for reframing the economy as a human creation that we can make better.