Preston Model: Community Wealth Generation and a Local Cooperative Economy

After the financial crisis of 2007/8, the city of Preston in Lancashire, UK, lost half of its government grants and nearly a billion pounds (US$1.3 billon) in private investments. In what has become known as the Preston Model , the city responded by creating a community wealth project. In partnership with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, the project centred on several large anchor institutions (e.g. the local hospital) shifting their procurement practices from external to more local sources. Simultaneously, the project developed worker cooperatives to address gaps in local supply capacity and support a local cooperative economy. Preston continues to explore alternative ways of bringing wealth to the community, such as a windfarm for local energy generation and redirection of pension investments to the regional economy.Open Society Foundation

Participatory Guarantee Systems in Tanzania: Locally Focused Quality Assurance Systems

Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGSs) are alternative certification schemes for organic products, built on trust and social networks, and intended for local markets. In contrast to third party export-oriented certification schemes, farmers working with PGSs are directly involved in the implementation of the system. Farmer-to-farmer peer-review is also an essential feature, built on equality and knowledge-sharing between the inspector and the inspected. The Maendeleo Group was one of the first organisation of farmers in Tanzania to implement a PGS and receive permission to use the East Africa Organic Mark on their produce.Open Society Foundation

ASMARE: Informal Waste Workers Engaging in Municipal Policy-Making

ASMARE is an association of informal waste workers ( catadores ) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Founded in 1990, it was the first step of involving catadores as a part of the city’s waste collection scheme. With ASMARE, the catadores moved from working in the streets with no organisation to semi-formality; able to voice their own demands. The change supported empowerment, improvements in working and living conditions, and greater self-esteem, which became foundations for later developments including a formal role in policymaking and ownership of recycling facilities.Open Society Foundation

PUMA: Solidarity Economy in Pumarejo, Spain

The Community Exchange Scheme in the Pumarejo neighbourhood of Seville is one of many examples of solidarity economies rooted in alternative forms of exchange. Based on an alternative social currency, the Puma, the scheme supports collective decision-making, localised consumption, and the redeployment of under-utilised skills and competencies. Since no interest is paid on 'Pumas', the system encourages exchange rather than accumulation and wealth maximisation.Open Society Foundation

Jubilee Debt Campaign: Civil Society Voice in Global Debt Governance

Jubilee 2000 was a highly successful global campaign to bring about debt relief for developing countries, which galvanised activists into a shared global project and brought them into negotiations with creditors. The Jubilee campaign lodged the concept of odious debt in the public consciousness. Its successes proved that debt relief was not only economically and politically feasible, but also could lead to desirable social outcomes.Open Society Foundation

The RSA Citizens’ Economic Council: Citizen Contributions to Policy Making Highlights

The RSA’s Citizen Economic Council was a two-year programme (2016-2018) in which 59 citizens conducted their own enquiry into economic policy in the United Kingdom and worked and deliberated with policymakers to co-create economic policy recommendations. The four goals of the Citizen Economic Council were to improve economic literacy and accessibility, increase transparency, improve democratic accountability, and create space for innovative economic alternatives. Through a series of workshops, seminars, the development of a toolkit, public crowdsourcing, and stakeholder engagement, the programme reached over a thousand UK citizens to co-generate creative economic policy recommendations for the UK context.Open Society Foundation

Up & Go: A Platform for Fair Work and Liveable Wages

Up & Go is an online platform which brings together several cooperatively owned cleaning businesses for fair work conditions and liveable wages in a sector usually characterised by informal, precarious, and low-paid work. It is a sharing economy platform owned by its workers. Together they set prices, and 95 percent of the profits go to supporting the cooperatively owned businesses. The remaining 5 per cent is invested in Up & Go for advancing the platform’s technology and providing customer service. Furthermore, through business meetings, Up & Go builds capacity, shares ideas, and delivers training to its worker-owners. During these meetings the members of the cooperative set up the rules and structures for making decisions about how to run their business, discuss their rates, and establish their standards of service.Open Society Foundation

'Empresas Recuperadas': Argentina's Recovered Factory Movement

The ‘empresas recuperadas' or worker-recovered enterprise movement in Argentina emerged as a response to the country's sovereign debt crisis of 2001, with workers fighting for their right to run abandoned factories. Central to the movement is an ethos of solidarity, with worker-owned enterprises based on horizontal authority, collective decision-making and shared returns from the business.Open Society Foundation

IBEKA: Community-owned and Managed Mini Grids in Indonesia

Institut Bisnis dan Ekonomi Kerakyatan (IBEKA), or People Centred Economic and Business Institute, supports rural electrification by installing small-scale hydro or wind mini grids and setting up village-based organisations to own, maintain and operate the systems. Elements that support participation include community ownership of energy infrastructure (mini grid) alongside community-managed enterprises to run them. Revenue generated from the mini-grids are shared through a community fund and spent based on collective decision-making.Open Society Foundation

RSF Social Finance: Transforming the Way the World Works with Money

Business and Financing Models that Enable ParticipationRSF Social Finance is a public benefit financial services organisation dedicated to transforming the way the world works with money. RSF offers investing, lending, and giving services to individuals and enterprises committed to improving society and the environment. The example of RSF provides valuable lessons of how to facilitate meaningful and direct relationships across sectors and among diverse stakeholders within a structure of disciplined investment practice. It is unique in that it holds quarterly pricing meetings for its borrowers and investors to discuss and influence interest and spread rates, rather than use the commonly-accepted LIBOR rates. Together the group gains insight into each other’s financial needs, priorities, and plans. Introduction.Open Society Foundation