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Building and Strengthening Economic Alternatives and the Social/Solidarity Economy at the U.S. Social Forum 2007
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Social/Solidarity Economy Program
Solidarity Economy Organization in the U.S. Context:
A Think-Paper Towards First Steps
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Building a Solidarity Economy Fom Real World Practices |
| Emily Kawano, director of the Center for Popular Economics, and Ethan Miller, a member of Grassroots Economic Organizing and the Data Commons Project, outline the structure of the workshop |
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Audience members participate in a theater exercise; creating a “living machine” that dramatizes the neo-liberal model. |
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Emily breaks down the term “neo-liberalism”, describes the work of her organization in exposing the flaws of neo-liberalism and only recently beginning to explore alternatives, and then introduces a stepping stones group exercise to look at examples of the solidarity economy. |
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Groups of audience members talk about the real world practices from the stepping stones exercise that they liked best. |
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Groups of audience members talk about more real world practices. |
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An audience member talks about Parecon (Participatory Economics), and also gives the example of Gavitoas. |
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| Ethan introduces the second part of the exercise, where groups enumerate the values and principles that apply to these real world processes. The groups then report on the five principles that they brainstormed. |
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| Emily summarizes the results of the group exercise, a tangent ensues about humans’ relationship to primates, and then a more general discussion follows about the solidarity economy and the connection between theory and practice. |
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| Ethan wraps up the workshop, describing the potential linking and unifying power of the solidarity economy, and its ability to identify common values while respecting diversity. Emily offers concrete resources for other Solidarity economy networks, and describes the current state of international organizing. A discussion ensues about the connection between solidarity and consuming less. |
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