Hazel Sheffield is a British multimedia journalist living in London. In 2016 she founded farnearer.org, funded by the Friends Provident Foundation and Power To Change, which documents communities experimenting with alternative economies during austerity and Brexit. In 2019, Far Nearer was highly commended in the Georgina Henry Award for Innovation at the Society Of Editors’ Press Awards.
Volunteering in the time of the climate crisis is no longer a hobby — it is a crucial part of the solution. It must become more effective, tangible, and fun!
Community solar is hugely popular and successful, but the local co-operative model has hit a wall with the withdrawal of subsidies. We are building a UK-wide movement which matches economies of scale with a network of mutual aid.
In this session Jon will be sharing the Big Solar Co-op project vision to share learnings from ten years in the community energy movement. He'll also invite others to contribute, to include insights from other branches of the new economy.
Jon Halle is co-founder and director of Sharenergy Co-operative which helps people to set up and run community-owned renewable energy across the UK. He is currently working on the Big Solar Coop project which aims to revitalise community solar as a UK-wide volunteer movement using Big Organising techniques.
COVID-19 has seen communities rally to support each other in an unprecedented manner, with thousands of Mutual Aid Networks have springing up around the country, offering shopping and prescriptions delivery, hot food provision, peer-to-peer mental health support, and a host of other services.
With the initial crisis now giving way to "the new normal", many are looking for models of continuing sustainable community support.
Co-operative thinking has never been more prevalent: it's time the New Economy did some serious outreach.
Amardeep Dhillion is an editor for Red Pepper magazine, and a bartender/Branch Secretary at the Ivy House Union.
Everyone seems to be claiming they are community-led, or that they support community leadership, or telling others they ought to do it. But what does being community-led actually look like on the ground? How do you make it work? What are the pitfalls and contradictions? How do you sustain it? Is it more of a frame of mind or must it be a formal process? Is it, indeed, always desirable?
Building on the past 18 months of similar sessions, as well as the themes emerging from our recently launched Secret Community Leader column, Bob will host an honest ‘warts and all’ conversation that cuts through the rhetoric so we can help each other deal with the practical challenges of making community leadership work.
Bob Thust is the co-founder of Practical Governance providing hands-on governance support to organisations with a social purpose. He is a former Responsible Business Director at Deloitte UK and former Director of Programmes at Power to Change.
Session description coming soon.
Imandeep Kaur is a British social and civil activist, and the co-founder and director at Civic Square based in Birmingham, which takes a bold approach to visioning, building and investing in civic infrastructure for neighbourhoods of the future.
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Moneyless trading means that small businesses can survive when there's no money around and brings control of our exchange medium into our communities and away from banks.
Clubs can be hosted by local authorities, by social enterprise or business networks, by accountants or by any interested group. Clubs can be federated, and businesses in different clubs can trade with each other seamlessly in a national and ultimately a global network.
During this session we will explain mutual credit, and how clubs can support communities.
Dave Darby founded Lowimpact.org in 2001, and Noncorporate.org in 2018. He was a director of the Ecological Land Co-operative from 2015 to 2018. He’s interested in developing co-operative economic institutions that build community resilience and prevent the wealth extraction and concentration that is so damaging to democracy.
The sale of US craft brewery New Belgium Brewing to a division of the Kirin Holdings Company by its worker owners has provoked an outbreak of soul-searching among people who believe employee ownership is central to a new, more equitable economy.
It has also reignited old debates about the difference between common ownership worker co-operatives and shares-based models in the US, UK and Canada, and has led to new calls for legislation on ‘indivisible reserves’ for worker-owned enterprises – a proxy for common ownership.
Join a discussion around different ownership philosophies in worker co-ops, and how they play out in the real world.
Siôn Whellens works at Calverts, a print & design co-op, is a cofounder of Solid Fund, and a member of Principle Six.
Over two thirds of local authorities across the UK have declared a climate emergency. This is the new normal. But what does it actually mean? There is no clear pathway to follow, and a real risk that we are continuing a reliance on structures of power which will not bring the rapid change we need.
How do we ensure that declarations lead to transformational action instead of inertia? How can councils find their place in a wider response to climate breakdown? Join this discussion to hear perspectives from inside councils and from those aiming to hold them to account, and share your own thoughts and questions.
Peter Lefort is the Carbon Neutral Cornwall Sector and Partnerships Lead at Cornwall Council.
Lizzie Boyle is a town councillor for Frome. She runs her own environmental consultancy, and wants bring her experience as a sustainability expert and small business owner to improve Frome's future for both residents and employers.
What can we learn from COVID-19 and what do we desperately need to retain?
This session with Independent for Frome's Peter MacFadyen will explore how we can take back the power and look local at every opportunity, from economics to politics to the climate.
Peter Macfadyen has worked in areas of social justice for 40 years. He founded Sustainable Frome and is a Director of Frome’s Renewable Energy Co-op, which led to his role in initiating Independents for Frome (IfF), the group of individuals whose take over of Frome Town Council is the focus of Flatpack Democracy. Flatpack Democracy offers a way to build an alternative, at local level, that empowers people to help their communities to thrive and prosper.
As we hospice the fossil fuel economy we need to common the green economy.
Common ownership means creating ways for communities to take direct control of their local assets - from woodland to farming to renewable energy and heating. As we address climate change, we need to focus not just on shifting the carbon load, but on who owns, controls and benefits from the new assets in the green economy. This is how we build agency and ensure a just transition.
Join us to explore how the climate community can better become builders of the new economy while creating political mandate for stronger national action.
Lucy Stone leads Our Common Climate, a collective that amplifies, nurtures and advocates for commoning solutions to climate change. Lucy
has set up climate initiatives at global, national, and local levels.
We've come to associate community wealth building with Labour-Left and with the Preston model, but after the election defeat in December and in the current COVID-19 recovery period, community wealth building is now more important than ever and needs to move quickly from the fringes to the mainstream. Places as diverse as Bristol, North Ayrshire in Scotland, and the Welsh Government are taking up community wealth building to rebuild and rebuild better.
In this panel we will discuss the challenges and the opportunities from community wealth building in this moment and what can be done to truly change our system starting in our communities.
Sarah McKinley is the Director for European Programs for The Democracy Collaborative and the European Representative for the Next System Project, working out of her home-office in Brussels, Belgium.
Jules Peck is a Founder Director of Avon Mutual, a Community Bank, Founding Partner at strategy consulting firm Jericho Chambers, and a Research Fellow at the Democracy Collaborative's Next System Project.
Join journalist Hazel Sheffield for a round-up of articles about the new economy in the press, an opportunity to look at how the movement is being communicated in the media, involving panellists and participants in an informal discussion.
Hazel Sheffield is a British multimedia journalist living in London. In 2016 she founded farnearer.org, funded by the Friends Provident Foundation and Power To Change, which documents communities experimenting with alternative economies during austerity and Brexit. In 2019, Far Nearer was highly commended in the Georgina Henry Award for Innovation at the Society Of Editors’ Press Awards.
Family farms and the value they bring to food systems are often not meeting local people’s needs, especially the food security need increasingly met by food banks.
This session will unpack challenges facing family businesses, hear from a pioneer in democratic land ownership and meaningful ‘exits’ for family farms, and share creative succession approaches for family farms and how this contributes to land reform.
The session will also gather ideas for tools to enable simple transfer of farms to democratically owned ventures that can improve farms’ role in food security.
Charlotte Hollins is from Fordhall Organic Farm in north Shropshire, England’s first community-owned farm, following a high profile campaign in 2006. Fordhall Community Land Initiative Now is a wonderful example of community spirit and real organic farming.
Sebastian Parsons is a founder of Stockwood Community Benefit Society - a former family-owned farm that has used investment from the public to enable both community ownership of Rush Farm and a successful succession of the family business.
Tom Carman is a member of the Real Farming Trust and business development professional with expertise developing projects, programmes, and new business for social enterprises, charities and co-operatives, particularly those working in areas of food and farming and land-based enterprise.
Join Semble, the community action champions, for a practical guide to harnessing the power of storytelling.
Expect an interactive session of clear steps, tips and tricks to help you inspire your audiences and make change happen.
Lorna believes in the power of storytelling to inspire real change; and spends her days devising wonderful ways to celebrate community action. She brought previous experience in international development and journalism to the Semble team. When not at her desk she can be found wild swimming or with her nose in a book.
Elinor Ostrom was a groundbreaking scholar: the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in economics, with appeal across disciplines and political boundaries. She proved that communities can self-govern without the need for state management or market forces.
So why is her legacy so poorly understood in the UK, one of the most centralised countries in the world?
In this session, we will explore and discuss the findings of NLGN's Ostrom Project, an effort to find examples of Ostromian self-governance in the UK and argue for approaches and policies to help our communities flourish.
Dr.Simon Kaye is a Senior Policy Researcher at the NLGN think tank, working on polycentricity, self-governance, common-pool resources, and public service reform.
Heard about the Cleveland Model?
This session will explore a two-pronged approach to increasing Employee Ownership by outlining economic development strategies rooted in anchor partnerships, how we can impact investing to acquire small and medium sized companies, convert them to employee-owned and then support them in Cleveland's Evergreen network, and how to create policy frameworks that encourage public and private sector spending with employee-owned companies.
Brett N Jones is the Executive Vice President of the Evergreen Co-operatives in Cleveland, Ohio.
How good is your organisation at getting people to participate? What could you achieve if you had larger and more active support? And why do so many democratic businesses and organisations struggle to do participation well?
This practical workshop will introduce the “Seven Modes of Everyday Participation”: a simple tool to help you find ways for people to get closer and contribute to your work and mission in small but meaningful ways, on an everyday basis. You’ll leave with an enriched view of what participation can look like for your organisation, as well as a prototype idea to trial.
Oliver Holtaway is a senior strategist at New Citizenship Project, a think tank and consultancy committed to building a more participatory society and economy. Oliver is also involved in the community ownership movement through his involvement with Bath City FC.
Even before COVID-19 put the childcare sector into freefall, over 500 nurseries and childminders have been closing every month. Together with cuts to local authority budgets, stagnant wages, and rising costs of living, many parents are forced into working less or leaving their jobs.
However, there is another way. Parents and the community can come together to reopen nurseries from the bottom-up. Co-operative models means childcare is driven by families and staff, not shareholder profit.
This session will explore examples of co-operative and community-led nurseries and offer advice to take action.
Labour & Co-operative councillor in Thurlow and Lambeth lead on private renting. Anna's day job is doing policy at the Co-operative Party.
More acts and speakers to be announced soon. We will be sharing updates via the site and through our newsletter as we proceed with organising the festival. Watch this space!
In this session with Land in our Names and Shared Assets, we'll explore the relationship between land and race in the UK.
In particular, it will focus on how colonialism, displacement, and migration have shaped our land system, and how those histories impact on land access, ownership, food inequalities, health outcomes, and environmental connection, and what needs to change in the land system to help deliver racial justice.
Josina Calliste is a co-founder of Land In Our Names, aiming to disrupt oppressive land dynamics relating to BPOC communities in Britain.
Mark Walton is a co-founder of Shared Assets, a think and do tank that supports the development of new models of managing land for the common good.
Join us to launch Stir to Action's Open Strategy, which focuses on directly connecting the lack of democratic ownership – co-operative, community, and employee-owned businesses – in the UK’s workplaces and communities with systemic challenges, from the climate emergency to the mental health crisis to economic inequality.
Simon Borkin is a consultant, practitioner, and researcher for Commonly, Co-operatives UK, and Stretford Public Hall.
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