The US’s New Economy network seizes the small-is-beautiful idea, and makes it a network of 200+ organisations

Front page of the New Economy Coalition website

Again, as in the Los Higueros CAN we profiled at the beginning of this week, it’s exciting to see some of the forms of self-determination and socio-political/economic empowerment we’ve been charting emerge, in a synchronous way, over long distances. If not quite emerging from the darkness.

A great example - and new to us - is the American project the New Economy Coalition. As they outline their ambitions:

We envision a world where our lives are no longer dominated or determined by capitalism nor any other extractive system. We envision a world in which everyone has what they need, where people have collective agency and self-determination. 

To get there, we must be interconnected and powerful together. In our vision, global economic transformation is built and led by regional solidarity economy ecosystems. 

A solidarity economy ecosystem is an environment in which all of the things a community needs — like housing, schools, farms and food production, local governance, art and culture, healthcare, and transportation — are controlled and governed by the people, led by those most marginalized by our current economy, and building strong community roots.

Regions can be defined ecologically by land, climate, or watershed, politically through borders and voting boundaries, economically by markets and shared material conditions, or culturally, by our traditions, ethnicities, and migration pathways.

From New Economy website

They are very much a network of networks—though they began in 2012 as a think-tank, emulating the UK’s New Economics Foundation, but also attaching to their own American traditions of pursuing Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful economics.

They have a rich, well-categorised members archive, where you can explore the over 200 organisations across the US, that have signed up to their vision of a “solidarity economy”.

We’re wondering what relationship they have to the Democracy Collaborative in the US - whose model of community wealth-building has been globally inspirational. Maybe they can tell us below!