A Sampling of Commons Projects All Over

From Bangkok to Grand Rapids to London

The projects profiled below represent a wide array of individuals and organizations working to build community and create a better future for all. With a focus on co-creation and developing a sense of belonging within communities at the local level, these initiatives showcase the commitment and creativity required for establishing a commons-based society. Read on to learn about The Rapidian, a community-driven, hy- perlocal news source located in Grand Rapids, Michigan; 350.org, a global, grassroots movement dedicated to solving the climate crisis; and more.

The Oregon Commons, a volunteer-driven nonprofit organization, inspires appreciation, stewardship and advocacy for the Oregon commons—“the gifts of nature and civilization shared across generations.”

City Repair Project, also based in Oregon, employs artistic and ecologically oriented place making strategies. City Repair inspires people to understand themselves as part of a larger community, participate in decision-making that shapes their future, and realize their creative potential.

Down the cost in Point Reyes Station, California, West Marin Commons aims to enhance, protect, and illuminate our shared environment. The organization creates space for spontaneous sociability and community activities, including sharing rides, garden produce, tools, and “household stuff.”

The Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, based in Gloucester, Mas- sachusetts, works to restore enduring marine systems. If we truly care about the health of our oceans, does it matter how, where, and when we fish? NAMA strongly believes it does.

Across the Atlantic, The London Orchard Project plants community orchards in London’s unused spaces. The initiative has many local benefits, including the promotion of fruit production within communities, the greening of London’s urban environment, the creation of wildlife habitats, increased biodiversity within city limits, and improved food security. It also helps Londoners rediscover the simple pleasure of eating organic fruit grown close to home.

[editor: Hard to believe Commons Magazine consistently omits mention of the cultural miracle that is the Transition Movement - a real leader worldwide and the group that initiated nut and fruit tree planting.]

350.org, founded by author Bill McKibben, is a global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. 350.org is well known for its online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions—all of which are led from the bottom up by thousands of volunteer organizers in over 188 countries.

On the hyperlocal level, The Rapidian is a news source powered and published by citizen journalists in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It provides tools, training, platforms, and support to empower neighborhood residents to report community news from the inside out. The Rapidian promotes inclusiveness, civility, and ethical reporting as the foundation for increasing civic engagement.

The School of Commoning utilizes the global communication and information sharing capacities of the Internet. As an online resource for people who want to learn about the commons, the School offers a bank of resources and educational programs to commoners around the world.

Located in Sacramento, California, the Sol Collective provides arts, cultural, and education programming that supports social justice and empowers youth. The Collective maintains a brick and mortar center, which often hosts art exhibitions, multimedia workshops, apprentice/ mentorship programs, and community forums.

Occupy Sandy illustrates the power of commons solutions—without the burden of bureaucratic red tape—in times of crisis. An impressive, nimble, and well-coordinated relief effort to distribute resources and volunteers to help neighborhoods affected by Hurricane Sandy, Occupy Sandy is a grassroots emergency management response formed by a co- alition of individuals from Occupy Wall Street, 350.org, recovers.org, and interoccupy.net.

In Detroit, Michigan, there is another locus of commoning in re- sponse to crisis. The People’s Water Board maintains that “water is life” and a human right. The Board advocates that all people should have ac- cess to clean and affordable water.

The Greening of Detroit’s Openspace program is another Detroit-based effort that aims to transform some of the 100,000 vacant lots in the city into places that contribute to the fabric of the community. The program helps residents turn lots into community gardens, fruit orchards, market gardens, pocket parks, and native plant gardens.

The local arts community is yet another key group making a commons-based contribution in Detroit. The projects are numerous and inspiring and include Detroit Artists Market, 555 Creative Community, and Community Arts Partnerships Detroit, to name but a few.

Restore/Restory, is an interactive story map that gives a people’s history of the Cache Creek Nature Preserve in Woodland, California. The project tells the diverse stories of California’s peoples, traditions, and re- lationship to the land.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, the Vital Aging Network promotes self-determination, civic engagement, and personal growth for people as they age through education, leadership development, and opportunities for connection.

CoCo Coworking, also based in the Twin Cities, is a place where independent workers, small businesses and corporate workgroups can gather to share ideas, team up on projects and get work done.

The Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance provides innovative strategies, working models and timely information to support environmentally sound and equitable community development. Don’t miss their recent TEDx Talk: Why We Can’t Shop Our Way to a Better Economy.

And in an effort to engage thinkers around the world in conversation about economics and the commons, the Commons Strategies group, the Heinrich Böll Foundation and Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation are hosting three Commons Deep Dive workshops—two of which already took place during October and November—in Mexico City, a city near Paris, and Bangkok. These Deep Dives will serve as preparatory events for a major international conference called “The Economics of the Commons” to be held in Berlin next May.

– ON THE COMMONS TEAM

Editor: This is the final chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine presented each Sunday at EYNU.

One Town’s Unexpected Economic Renaissance

                            COMMONER                             

Hardwick, Vermont embraced agricultural projects based on sharing

Here is a small town that thrives on a kind of agriculture where scale matters, stakeholders collaborate, and, in most cases, ownership has more to do with stewardship than it does with possession. Community members know each other by name and value civic engagement. Young people who moved away for bigger and “better” opportunities now flock home, seeking jobs and dedicating themselves to community improvement. This town, Hardwick, Vermont, embodies the spirit of the commons in so many ways—but it wouldn’t be that way without the vision and drive of Tom Stearns, an ardent commons advocate and the founder of High Mowing Organic Seeds.

Over his years working in the seed business, Stearns has come to understand that, even more so than the land he works, the seeds themselves are a special kind of commons. The vegetable seeds we have now, he says, are vastly different than the seeds that existed one hundred years ago, and today’s seeds will assume new qualities in the future. That’s partly why privatization and commodification have become commonplace in the seed industry. Corporate giants have denied public access to information about our seed resource because “when you control seeds, you control a lot,” says Stearns.

But the High Mowing team engages and interacts with everyone who uses seeds, including farmers and gardeners, plant breeders at universities, other seed companies, and soil scientists. They do this in an effort to bring the seed community’s collective wisdom to bear on how to develop new seed varieties, how to make seeds available to consumers, and how to promote them as a critical element in building healthy food systems. By encouraging this knowledge sharing, High Mowing empowers the whole community to engage in a ten-thousand year old practice of food provision that is vital for the future. They are framing seed saving as a commons‐based solution.

Stearns is also a co-founder of the Center for an Agricultural Economy, a Hardwick‐based nonprofit that coordinates regional food system activity. Among many other contributions to the community, the non-profit just purchased the old town common. Until recently, no one had hope that Hardwick, an aging granite-mining center, would ever recover from the mining industry collapse. The town common had been neglected since the thirties, but members of the Center for an Agricultural Economy saw its potential and purchased the sixteen acres in the heart of Hardwick. Today, Stearns describes all kinds of activity planned for the property, including an educational farm and community garden.

The combined effect of these many assorted commons solutions is a small town renaissance no one could have expected in Hardwick. Stearns describes countless new economic opportunities growing up around healthy food, ecological awareness, and value‐added agriculture. There are new jobs—good jobs—at High Mowing and elsewhere.

The rural “brain drain” is reversing in this area, as smart young people who moved away are coming home. People are once again running for town select boards and school boards. “People are actually competing [for those positions] because they want to have a voice,” Stearns says.

“It’s really cool.” When asked about the secrets to this success, Stearns speculates that Vermont’s size has something to do with it. Towns operate on a “human-scale,” and political figures are readily accessible (you might event spot the governor walking down the street, he says). As a result, people sense their ability to make an impact—they are not just one among millions. To Stearns’s mind, the hopelessness that comes from feeling inconsequential is one of the main obstacles to creating commons-based societies in other places today.

—JESSICA CONRAD

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.

How Indigenous Forms of Governance Can Improve Our Modern World

Ardoch Algonquin Chief Robert Lovelace helps us re-imagine society’s relationship to nature

Indigenous cultures are complex knowledge systems that utilize energy, food security, transportation and communications in balance with natural systems. Understanding how indigenous economies, as well as social and cultural systems work can help bend the curve against the prospects of social, environmental and economic failure.

Present governance structures conform little to environmental or ecosystem realities. For the most part, political boundaries were created to serve colonial settlement, resource extraction and industrial manufacturing while denaturing ecosystems and limiting environmentally appropriate governance. Faced with overexploitation of resources, ecosystem degradation, contamination of soils and water and climate change, the people of North America need to re-imagine how we connect to the earth. Ecosystem appropriate governance is a step in the right direction. We also need to ensure economic, social and cultural practices work with natural replenishment cycles rather than against them.

Language is the “signature” of culture. How we speak to one another, how we describe and discuss the world in which we live, determines our success in relating to the world. Indigenous knowledge systems are reflections of empirical interaction with the earth, rational discovery, symbolic imagery and social reinforcement, directed toward a deep understanding of the local. Indigenous languages are verb-based rather than using nouns as the foundation for communication as we do in English. If we simply want to acquire “things,” then the structure of our present language works fine. If we want to relate with the world, make appropriate ecological choices, and rebuild collapsing environments then we need to learn, think and create in action words. We need to live within dynamic eco-natural processes to live well together.

– ROBERT LOVELACE

Professor Robert Lovelace, retired Chief of the Ardoch Algonquin First Nation, has decoded elements of aboriginal governance that are key to re-indigenizing the commons. Lovelace presented part of his work at the Great Lakes Commons Gathering. Excerpted from “Kosmos magazine.”

Editor: Another chapter in Celebrating the Commons: People Stories and Ideas for the New Year from Commons Magazine being presented each Sunday at EYNU.