Counting on Women: Inside Mondragón with Georgia Kelly
As some feminist epistemologists (Gilligan, Belenky et al.) have taught us, seeing and seeking connections seems to be women’s ways of knowing. Our economics is lived in real complex communities. Our goal is to model how women can talk together and learn together about traditionally male territory still new to most women.
Our Counting on Women series empowers women to share their knowledge and expertise through conversations with one another — flipping the script on a racist, sexist economy. Now every “last Monday of the Month” you can count on an AEOO event — first, the introduction of a subject in a Zoom of Our Own, followed the next month by a more in depth and intimate conversation as part of our Counting on Women series with someone who knows the details.
The first, recorded live, was a follow-up to our Zoom of Our Own on worker-owned co-ops in March. Georgia Kelly joined us to tell us much more about Mondragón in Spain, the largest worker-owned cooperative corporation in the world, and her remarkable partnership with them, bringing Americans to the Basque region to learn more in her seminars. Georgia has developed an educational seminar tour at the Mondragón Cooperatives in Spain — and from her experience at Mondragón, has focused on cooperatives as an ethical and socially just economic model for the 21st century. She is also the author of The Mondragón Report, a profile of twenty-two participants from various Praxis-Mondragon seminars, which demonstrates how they have used their newly acquired knowledge in creating economic alternatives in the U.S.
She was in conversation with Rickey Gard Diamond — author of Screwnomics: How Our Economy Works Against Women and Real Ways to Make Lasting Change and the “Women Unscrewing Screwnomics” column at Ms. magazine, and founder of AEOO.
If you’ve wondered what on Earth Mondragón is, tune in! There is probably not another American more knowledgeable about the world’s biggest worker-owned ecosystem of cooperatives, and how the region that was once Spain’s poorest, now really operates as an economic democracy. Imagine!
