REconomy practitioners nomination for 2019 Lush Spring Prize
Popping Bubbles for local to global economy redesign, part 4 (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 5)
Yesterday, a small team of three (Jay Tompt, Nenad Maljković and Wouter Extercatte) completed and submitted REconomy practitioners application for Lush Spring Prize 2019 in Established Projects category (we are more after impact than influence, and we don’t do “campaigning or lobbying”, so we figured out we fit best into that category). If we get the award we will have 25,000 British Pounds to work with. If we don’t, currently we are all in 3–6 months long experiment in commoning and community-supported bootstrapping, so we are doing this anyway. Answers for Lush Spring Prize nomination describe well what we are up to —if interested, please read on… :)
…12. Business model / legal status / structure of organisation
Local to global virtual community of practice (CoP) supported as commons by members (individuals) and several organisations registered in different jurisdictions that individual members are associated with, Art of Transition Foundation being one of them.
13. What are the underlying values of your organisation? If a for-profit company, please describe your triple+ bottom line.
At the core, we are guided by permaculture ethics (Earth care, people care, fair share) and Modern Agile principles (make people awesome, make safety a prerequisite, experiment and learn rapidly, deliver value continuously). Our work is focused on being a catalyst for creating alternatives to destructive economic models — alternatives that are community-led, decentralised, bioregionally appropriate, just and inclusive, socially and ecologically regenerative. In how we work as a CoP, we value diversity, respectful listening, democratic, collaborative and inclusive ways of decision making.
…20. Tell us your story.
Local to global virtual community of practice (CoP) of and for regenerative entrepreneurs, enterprise ecosystem builders and community organisers. A beacon for related post-growth, post-capitalist economic models (solidarity economy, coops, social enterprise, commons, community wealth building, etc.) embedded within local/regional communities. Self-organising to provide peer-to-peer support, facilitate social learning and coordinate action on local, translocal, bioregional, transnational and global scale. Spreading social and economic innovations that work as life-affirming alternatives to dominant destructive models. Building global regenerative cultures “movement of movements”. Started in 2011 as REconomy Project, intersection of Transition Town Totnes and Transition Network activities in the UK and transnationally. International project involved Transition Hubs from Belgium (Wallonie), Brazil, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, México, Portugal and the USA, forming International REconomy Group, and REconomy Centre was started in Totnes. Early 2017 the Group transformed into virtual CoP, named REconomy practitioners. See Timeline on our website.
21. What does regeneration mean to your organisation and how do the ideas of regeneration relate to your idea?
In REconomy practitioners CoP and beyond, we are people that consider ‘regeneration’ in the context of local and regional economic systems that are just and inclusive, ecologically wise and socially renewing, resilient and diverse. We use the term ‘regenerative’ or ‘regeneration’ to denote those systems that heal and restore, and create the conditions for healthy reproduction and evolution.
The methods we advocate — such as ‘whole systems thinking’, co-production, community engagement, using concepts like ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘investment’ in ways that bring members into collaborative relationships, shared visions and responsibility — create the conditions for self-reliance and system-level solutions. This allows for repeating and self-reproducing interventions and projects to be held by broad groups of actors, becoming embedded as new cultural norms. These ideas underpin our framework for economic relocalisation and the goal of spreading its adoption through our local to global virtual community of practice.
22. Who benefits from your work?
Our direct beneficiaries are the members of the REconomy practitioners local to global virtual community of practice, who gain knowledge, tools, confidence and collaborative relationships. These include local economy activists, regenerative entrepreneurs, organisers and practitioners; green / social / ethical / local entrepreneurs; local / impact investors, local political actors and ‘anchor institution’ decision-makers.
These active citizens, empowered by their participation in the CoP, bring the tools, ideas, and confidence to initiate new models and relationships in their places — cities, towns, rural areas. These actions, in turn, begin or advance the process of economic transition toward regenerative local and bio-regionally appropriate models.
23. Personal and team wellbeing
Right now, we are somewhere in between very small collective and “team of teams”, working in agile, low-cost / high leverage ways, aiming for big impact. If you “aim to award one prize to a small scale project in this category” — we are both small and large scale!
We practice consent-based decision-making and collectively share the work, where possible. The key roles could be generically named: network weavers, collaboration initiators, team conveners and coordinators and team members. All the roles are temporary and our structures are very dynamic and organically evolving by quickly adapting to change within and without our “ecosystem”. For illustration, see diagram here: https://goo.gl/i8J74s
We have regular meetings on video and we maintain regular communication in between meetings, cultivating mutually supportive and caring culture. It’s very early in the development of this CoP network of collaborators, but we have supporting relationships between members of our core team who come from the UK, USA, Sweden, the Netherlands, France and Croatia, bringing a diversity of skills, cultural perspectives, and knowledge.
24. Describe the broader environment you work in and the key challenges and limiting factors your organisation faces in order to function, sustain itself, improve and evolve?
We are practitioners that simultaneously hold two perspectives. The first is local, where we live and work. We start what we call Transition Enterprises (i.e. regenerative startups) in line with permaculture ethics, triple bottom-line, community resilience and local ecosystem regeneration. We start initiatives to evolve local Transition entrepreneurial culture and enterprise “ecosystems” to support their development. There is a sense of accelerating urgency and the demand for what we are doing in our CoP is growing.
The other is planetary perspective; hence local to global virtual CoP. We are developing a platform for spreading know-how and creating the conditions for collaborations — locally, translocally or virtually — with purpose of spreading regenerative economic models: innovations that are working to create greater resilience, ecological sustainability, inclusion and fairness, and social cohesion in localities and regions where our practitioners are. The key limiting factor for the growth and development of our network is the lack of resources that would allow for paid work in developing and facilitating more peer-to-peer support, learning, funding and action programmes.
25. How will / does your organisation directly support the regeneration of the natural resources it depends on?
Our members do that locally, where they live, holding two perspectives explained in previous answer. Our community of practice provides peer-to-peer support and self-organising opportunities.
When individual or group sees an opportunity to make a change or to try something out or if they feel that they can initiate an action, our community of practice provides a way for them to find diverse others from our network to join with them or to collaborate and experiment with small actions and access resources they need to act. In that we pay attention to what is happening, debriefing, learning from the experience, analyzing what was done (to enable better next step) and then sharing what we learned with the larger network. For example, in Totnes, we have helped drive financial investment and community support towards two local farms, one no till, the other biodynamic, both taking measure to build soil, increase biodiversity, etc. We’re providing coaching for another project that aims to address drought. See www.schoolfarmcsa.org.uk and https://apricotcentre.co.uk.
26. How will / does your organisation support social regeneration?
Social regeneration is probably the most important aspect of what we do. To paraphrase Bill Mollison: “People are problem, people are solution.” One of drivers of social degeneration is extractive economics. Approaches and models we advocate — that rebuild local economies and relationships in their constituent communities — are drivers for social regeneration.
We aim to build relationships in two contexts: in-person and virtual. We “blend” these contexts when doable to reduce commuting and travel footprint. We support development of virtual collaboration skills together with practical techniques and methods that distinguish collaborative culture from dominant culture of conflict. We promote and support self-organising. “Living, emergent, distributed, decentralised, locally attuned teams of people dealing with unceasing transformation without having to align with hierarchies, proxies and control.” — to quote Giles Hutchins. Network weaving is in essence about social regeneration in modern social context and moving from ego-centric to eco-centric networks.
Links to (short) articles that explain this here: https://goo.gl/i8J74s
27. How will / does your organisation support economic regeneration?
We advocate approaches that enable actors in local and regional economies to transition from destructive economic models to local, decentralised, and bioregionally appropriate models that create livelihoods and jobs in ways that are inclusive, socially and ecologically regenerative, fair and resilient. The initiatives we support act at local/regional economic system level, as well as ‘REconomy enterprise’ level. What we call REconomy Enterprise is a financially viable trading entity that fulfills a real community need, delivers social benefits and has beneficial, or at least neutral, environmental impacts.
If economy is seen as local to global system that has function to satisfy human needs, then component parts of that system and their connections and interactions need to be REdesigned to become REgenerative and more REsilient. Hence REconomy, hence our local to global focus.
The most recent study of our approach could be found in Totnes REconomy Impact Report 2012–2017: https://reconomycentre.org/2017/09/21/totnes-reconomy-impact-report-2012-2017/
Collection of REconomy reports (published 2012–2017): http://www.artoftransition.org/en/activities/reconomy/resources
28. How are you transparent about your finances within your community?
We practise transparency in everything we do. We have open books policy in our virtual CoP and we are using Open Collective as crowdfunding platform of choice. This particular platform was developed for Open Source projects and is Open Source based startup. It is “transparent by design” and offers easy access to information about all financial transactions. We make budgeting and spending decisions in teams according to team domains. We support our members in implementing this approach in their local endeavours, locally. We do that by offering skillshares that enable good use of transparency.
29. How is your team or organisation connected to other organisations and/ or wider networks locally and globally?
We are deliberate about connecting and converging actors working in various aspects of wider ‘new economy’ arena, worldwide. Members of our virtual CoP are normally linked with one or more organisations, networks and movements: Transition Hubs Group, Permaculture and ecovillage, ECOLISE, social enterprise networks, Degrowth movement, P2P movement, TEAL movement, network weaving consultants, WEAll — Wellbeing Economy Alliance, NESI Forum, CtrlShift, RIPESS/REAS/Solidarity Economy, New Economy Coalition, Sociocracy and Art of Hosting networks and CoPs… the list is endless.
30. Does your organisation use its experience and learning to help others to replicate your work? If yes, can you tell us how?
Key element of REconomy practitioners virtual CoP purpose is to facilitate peer-to-peer and social learning. We do that primarily by facilitating “conversations that matter”, that lead to collaborations on practical projects. The approach is to define a small project with a clear definition of success that can be done in a relatively short time period. An experiment. Getting that done builds trust and relationships among contributors. Based on that experience, people involved can have more conversations that will lead to more collaborations with the same or different contributors, etc.
31. How would you spend the prize money to overcome your challenges and move towards your goals?
We will form two teams of network weavers organised and coordinated according to time zones, working within intersections of various networks. We will do focused skillshare so that network weavers can improve their virtual collaboration skills, including skills in facilitating conversations that matter, that lead to practical projects in social learning and coordinated local to global action. This process will include one or more workshop retreats that will combine in-person and virtual participation, also organised according to time zones as distributed event (to reduce travel footprint).
32. Are there other kinds of support your organisation would benefit from? For example mentoring, research support, publicity, knowledge sharing with other organisations?
Connecting with individuals that are involved with a local regenerative or new economy projects, and one or more organisations and networks. We enter into conversation with them about building global regenerative cultures “movement of movements” in practical way. Various theories and frameworks are useful, but we are after outcomes in real world, i.e. objective, subjective and intersubjective realities (from “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” by Yuval Noah Harari). Support for this will be well used and appreciated by key people in REconomy practitioners local to global virtual CoP.
Intrigued by what you just read? Here are some ways to get involved:
- if you liked what you just read and you would like to help spread the word, I encourage you to click the 👏 button above and hold down to 20–50 claps as this will help this get more exposure. Also, please share this widely in your social media channels… Thank you in advance! :)
- visit our Open Collective page and set up your recurring monthly donation: to reach our bootstrapping budget of €15,000 per year we need 250 monthly donations of €5 or more; you can start supporting REconomy commons personally or as an organisation (there are other ways to contribute, of course, but what we need now is regular monthly income)
- if you have not done that already, join REconomy practitioners on online platform of your choice and meet with us on video soon, see here. Our video calls are meant to be shared experience that we don’t record (we don’t want to make a “content” to be “consumed” later… normally never).
- Join us on Thursday, 6 December 2018 at 5pm GMT / 18:00 CET for 2-hour online workshop on Regenerative Cultures: Living the Questions Together with Daniel Christian Wahl. Attending our video conferences is the best way to connect and meet with REconomistas and Transitioners worldwide.
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