I <3 the Participatory City Foundation's "Every One Every Day" initiative. There is so much wisdom baked into their approach, wonderfully summed up as creating as many opportunities as possible for people to: Co-produce something tangible as a group of equal peers. Thereby creating a participatory culture. Please watch the below video, take the time to study their Illustrated Guide and delve into their Designed to Scale report. And if you work in central or local Government, be sure to … [Read more...]
What if… Co-operatives UK had £70 million a year?
This article was originally written for Issue 14 of STIR, the magazine for the new economy and was also published online at Co-operatives UK What if...? blog that fed into the UK National Co-operative Development Strategy. I recently noticed that blog has since gone offline and so have re-posted the article here so I'm able to share it with people. The first in a four-part series looking at 1) the scale and success of co-ops funding co-ops internationally, 2) existing examples and recent … [Read more...]
Open Co-ops: Inspirations, Legal Structure and Tools
this post originally appeared in Stir Magazine illustration by Daksheeta Pattni In 2002 I described United Diversity as “a member owned and stakeholder governed network of mutual advantage.” In truth, it was aspirational. At the time, the flexible off-the-shelf legal structures and open source tools needed to make such a network a reality simply didn’t exist. Now they do. Co-ops that combine best practices from the international co-operative movement with best practices from the open source … [Read more...]
United Diversity at the London Permaculture Festival
I'm off to Cloud Cuckoo Land Festival now, but thought I'd better whack this presentation I did at the London Permaculture Festival up first. I gives a brief history of United Diversity plus details of our exciting plans going forward. The sound isn't too good so when I get the time I'll do a full transcript with links any everything, but for now, enjoy! … [Read more...]
Josef’s Journey to John O’Groats
Since this journey has ended up being a major milestone in the development of United Diversity I though I had better re-post this write up I did for the Brake The Cycle blog here too. Enjoy! (note: click on images to enlarge) Last month I cycled about 1200 miles, from the south-easternmost tip of mainland England (Land's End) up to the north-westernmost tip of mainland Scotland (John O'Groats). I thus completed one half of the Brake the Cycle End to End challenge! :) It was the UK's coldest … [Read more...]
The Finland Phenomenon – the best education system in the world?
I posted yesterday about the urgent need to change education paradigms. As such it feels fitting to final re-post this post from Gloria's blog here: Have you noticed there's a lot of hullabaloo about Finland's education system lately? I've been paying attention to what the Finns have been doing for a couple years now, but it is only after reading an essay by Sam Abrams I've thought to pay attention to Finland's neighbour Norway. Norway and Finland have some similarities. They are neighbouring … [Read more...]
TOGETHER. How cooperatives show resilience to the crisis
This great new documentary, featuring Mondragon and other co-operative inspirations shows how it is not just financial co-operatives who are more resilient to crisis, but all co-ops. The examples are from around Europe, but the same is true in the UK. The UK co-operative economy is performing significantly better than the UK economy as a whole with things like Community-owned Village Shops proving to have much higher survival rates than others. … [Read more...]
Crowd Farming at TEDxSydney 2013
Huge respect to TEDxSydney for doing thing properly when it comes to food. Watch the video for the inspirational story of how they fed the entire Sydney Opera House audience of 2,200 people at TEDXSydney 2013 with crowd sourced locally grown food. All conferences everywhere should do this. … [Read more...]
Pam Warhurst: How we can eat our landscapes
I love Pam Warhust. She is such a inspirational, grounded and powerful woman. This is one of my favourite TED talks, by far. Please, watch and share it now. It is about the inspirational story of Incredible Edible Todmorden which has now spawned the Incredible Edible Network. But, as she hints at so powerfully towards the end of the talk, this is about so much more than food. It is about community empowerment. This is about sharing and investing in kindness It is about Community, … [Read more...]
97% Owned – documentary about money and economics
Back in May 2003 we started a wiki to 'discuss monetary reform and democracy', and I just posted Positive Money's Banking 101 video course, probably the best introduction to how money and banking actually works. For a long time Money as Debt was best and only documentary film about these issues. Later, the Zeitgeist films (despite their many failings) thankfully managed to get the word out to many more people. Most recently we've had Money and Life cover this topic, and before that The Money … [Read more...]
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