study guide: 

MApping the Local economy for the Common Good
Giving Communities Tools to Strengthen Self Governance and Control Corporate Power

The story we are taught in school and by the media is that the United States is a democracy, with policies set by We the People. 
In reality ​the United States is the leading nation state of a global corporate empire instituting public policies that benefit that global corporate empire. ​​

MAPPing the local economy for
the common good
Table of contents
INTRODUCTORY MATERIAL

Introduction                                                                                                      1

Course Overview                                                                                            4

WORKSHOP STUDY GUIDES

Workshop 1:   Introductions                                                                        6                                              

Workshop 2:  Defining the Economy for the Common Good        9               

 Workshop 3: Identifying Nominated Organizations                        11

Workshop 4: Creating the Tools for Data Collection                        14

Workshop 5: Getting the Story                                                                   16

 Workshop 6: Understanding the Map/Database Interaction      19

 Workshop 7: Discussing Essential Questions                                      22

 Workshop 8: Celebrating your accomplishments                              24

Carrying On:  Club for the Common Good                                              26
INTRODUCTION: Mapping The Economy for the Common Good
All around us, many organizations are working to confront problems that our present economic and political system cannot solve and in many cases makes worse. These problems are threatening the future of life on this planet, as we know it. Climate change, resource depletion, species die-off, human alienation, global pollution and so many more devastating consequences of our current economic and political system have to be brought back into a sustainable balance with the natural systems of our planet. In every community there are farmers, non-profits, small businesses, co-ops, public agencies, and social and political action groups that are working to build this new economy on their own. We can help all of these organizations and bolster their solutions by recognizing and supporting them as members of the Economy for the Common. Several years ago, the United States Solidarity Economy Network (USSEN) started mapping these organizations that make up a national Solidarity Economy. This is an economy built on cooperation and solidarity of purpose in confronting climate change, income inequality, resource depletion, social alienation, Wall Street titans, and the privatization of our commons. By bringing all these organizations of the local economy for the common good together, we make them all stronger, with a broader reach, creating a synergistic impact, speeding up the transition from the old, extractive, monopolistic, money as power political and economic system into the new healthy, sustainable, cooperative political and economic system for our common good.

Our existing economic, political and cultural paradigm so captivates the popular narrative that any true rise of an Economy for the Common Good will require a vast cultural change, and creating a new popular narrative. This cultural change is largely about changing our relationships with nature, production, consumption and our fellow humans, and is evident in the organizations that the US Social Solidarity Economy Network (USSEN) has brought together nationally. You can find the change in your local community as you map the organizations that make up your local Economy for the Common Good. Your effort to identify and organize the Economy for the Common Good in your community is an important part of this global change.
In this process, we talk about “economy” in the original sense of the Greek word oikonomia: management of our home. We speak of “home” in its universal concept that includes the environment, society, and all of the animals and landscapes of the natural world. Building an Economy for the Common Good means that we are creating economic, political and environmental systems that will solve our most vexing problems and that all of the organizations within that economy share a mutual relationship and concern about these problems and support each group’s efforts to solve those problems.

We created this course of workshops to give communities, towns, cities, counties, etc., a mechanism to identify, support and expand the Economy for the Common Good that already exists in their region. The workshops bring together a group of committed citizens who identify their community’s most pressing problems, consider the causes of those problems; postulate solutions to those problems and then go out and mobilize the community to take action.

There are two aspects of mapping the Economy for the Common Good. First there is the actual product, the map. Second, there is the process of people working together to create the map.

One of the underlying goals for creating the map is to construct a different vantage point to view the economics of the community. We eschew the traditional criteria of profit and money to measure the success of the local economy. We want to rearrange the context, the framing, to reflect the values that honor and value people and nature. We are striving to present a view of the local economy based on the common good.
 
Challenges
You need to engage the collective imagination of the course participants to:
• Create situations where the students can explore new ideas together; build trust; work together; guide the conversations toward the future and solutions;
• Create opportunities to have conversations about the open-ended questions embedded in the project;
• Decide the criteria for identifying organizations that will be on the map;
• Consider the facts and try to separate strong feelings from empirical findings;
• Identify and focus on the values you want to practice;
• See where these values are manifested in the community, as it exists;
• Work together to imagine other possible avenues for expression of these values;
• Examine the organizations, the values, the people and how they are interrelated;
• Divide the organizations by sectors that allows you to see groups of people working towards similar goals, with similar underlying values.
               
Questions
You have to look at each organization and ask:
• What problems of the existing money-as-power system is the organization addressing and how are they doing it?
• What is the essence of the cultural change they are creating?
• What relationships are changing that move the economy towards the common good?
• How can these new relationships be enhanced, cultivated, and replicated?
• How can all these organizations be connected to public consciousness?
• What kind of public consciousness do they make possible?
 
Culmination
In the end you have to:
• Celebrate the common ground.
• Think about what else can be learned
• Understand what you have learned about yourself
• Realize where it is best to focus your energy
• Choose the aspect of cultural change you want to work on.
• Identify which kinds of organizations have to be created to fill out your Economy for the Common Good.
 
Continually listen to and monitor the conversations to focus on reforming our cultural mindset. Find ways to model and practice the values and relationships we claim to embrace. Within the practice, mistakes will be made. Find ways to learn from the mistakes. Acknowledge when you make mistakes. When you fall down, you have to get up. Develop this ability in as many ways as possible with the group. Embrace the process.

At the heart of the project is the gathering of information and values of each organization. The people representing the organizations on the map have to be given an opportunity to express how they are manifesting the values and relationships that underlie their work. It may be good to create a video that demonstrates recording this aspect of the mapping process. Most of all: celebrate what we have in common; focus on and highlight what is, and share it in new, creative ways.

              There are four over-arching questions to confront as you undertake this project:
1. What are you trying to accomplish by mapping the local Economy for the Common Good? If you just want to add your local organizations on to the USSEN map, you can collect the data, communicate with USSEN about the format they want your database set up in and then send them the data. Conversely, if you want to make your own local Economy for the Common Good map because you want to network all of the local organizations, or you want to create an informational piece for consumers, community organizers, or others who are interested in the reality that the new economy is already emerging from the old, then you will go down a different path and use one of many mapping programs to develop your own map.

2. What physical region do you want to include in your map? One key is to choose an area that already self defines as a community. This can be a political region, like a city, county or state. Or it could be a geographically defined region like a watershed, a coastal plain, or a mountain range.

Another key in choosing the area of your map will be the number of organizations that will qualify as being part of your Economy for the Common Good. If there are not many organizations already working to create an Economy for the Common Good in your community, maybe your first project is to start creating them. Or enlarge your area so you can bring more organizations into the mix.

3. Can you engage enough people to help carry out the project? Local knowledge is critical to find and build the Economy for the Common Good in any community. Locals have the knowledge to find the various organizations doing the important work of the Economy for the Common Good and they have the energy to go out and do the work to build an Economy for the Common Good for their future. Finally you have to decide if the size of the area you are mapping can realistically get done in a way that is inclusive of all the organizations in the area.

Our initial project has been to map the solidarity economy spread across 3500 square miles of Mendocino County in Northern California. It takes an hour and a half to drive from the Coast to the county seat. It takes three hours to drive to the far corners of the County. Coastal and Inland Mendocino County are often thought of as two different worlds. We brought those two worlds together in one map by holding workshops both on the Coast and Inland. Over the past two years we engaged over 50 people and identified over 200 organizations that are part of the Economy for the Common Good in the county.

4. Where do you want to present these workshops? We present our workshops as Community Extension classes at our local community college, Mendocino College. Community extension classes are a great venue because they include an academic atmosphere as well as fully equipped classrooms with audiovisual equipment. Mendocino College also has several campuses that we have been able to use across the county. These workshops could also be presented at community centers, churches, libraries or private homes.

Our motto for this first venture in mapping an Economy for the Common Good has been that “we are building the bicycle as we are riding it.” Fortunately, this study guide presents the rudimentary bicycle that we have already built and it is quite rideable. This is a journey that needs to carry on far into the future. After two years, we are just reaching the point of making our map public. We will let you know what happens in the future.
COurse orientation
Building an Economy for the Common Good
Mapping Community Organizations
Building an Equitable and Sustainable Future
Course Orientation
Purpose: This section of the study guide orients the facilitators to the purposes of the course and important preparations to make the course a success.

Paradigm: In this age where our economic and political systems are unable to solve our most vexing problems, common citizens must come together to identify actions toward solutions for creating a just, equitable and sustainable future.
 
Context: Since the spring of 2015, the Grassroots Institute has facilitated classes and workshops to address the systemic problems of our social, economic, political and environmental systems. In the Fall of 2017 we went from talking to action with two series of workshops where participants identified organizations that were already working to create an Economy for the Common Good, and then went into the community to gather information on those entities. We did this course in a series of eight, two-hour workshops. This study guide follows that model although it can also be used to design your own process for mapping your Economy for the Common Good.
 
Preparation: We have found that it takes at least two facilitators to make the workshops work well for multiple reasons. On a conceptual level, multiple facilitators model the cooperation we are looking for in the Economy for the Common Good. On a functional level, multiple minds and bodies are needed to carry out the many tasks of this project, which should have a significant, positive impact on your community.

We have had groups of participants that vary between six and twenty-five people. More than 25 participants is probably too many to handle. To successfully carry out this project you need a core group of ten to fifteen people.
You have to decide how long each of your workshops should be and how often they will meet. Our initial mapping workshops were three-hours long. Much of that time was taken up with the “bicycle-designing and building process.” The second series of workshops were two hours long and that was fine. We also found that it helped to have a five-minute break in the middle of each workshop. At the end of the workshop about ten minutes was allowed for community announcements.

We held workshops every other week. This gave people time to do the necessary work of the mapping project. This is a participatory workshop that requires everyone to work on it outside of the workshops. Participants spend considerable time collecting information on the organizations that make up the local Economy for the Common Good. We also discovered that it is important for the facilitators to meet at least once between workshops to both prepare materials for the next workshop and to organize the flow of each workshop.

We held these workshops at 10 AM on Saturday mornings and often went out to lunch afterward to assess how the whole project was going. Saturday seemed best, because it allowed working people to be part of the process. We have often held classes in the evening, but we personally function better in the mornings. You decide what will work best for you and your group.

We attracted course participants in many ways. Interviews and public service announcements on local radio and TV and in local papers provided good results. Here is a sample of a newspaper article, which you could modify as an email appeal or a public service announcement. Access to extensive local email lists is very helpful; check with allied groups to see if you can use their email list or if you can place an article in their newsletter. We also promoted the course with extensive use of posters. Here is a sample poster we used. We can supply this poster as an InDesign file for you to modify. Another good way to get participants is through personal phone calls or word of mouth. Depending on how tech savvy your participants are, social media is also a good way to spread the word and attract participants

A week before the first workshop, send all participants a welcoming email, a pdf of the issue of Justice Rising on Building an Economy for People and Nature, and an article on your own Economy for the Common Good if you can find one. The day before the first workshop, send a reminder about the time, location and other pertinent information about the workshop.

Workshop members choose the parameters of your local Economy for the Common Good and the organizations that will be included in your map, along with the specific information you will gather on those organizations. They will have input on how to create the map, identify the organizations, publicize the results, and help build relationships among all of the organizations.

In this study guide we provide all the materials you need to produce these series of workshops including:
• Educational material on economies for the common good
• Lists of videos;
• Reading materials;
• A sample cover letter and survey form for collecting data;
• Outlines for spreadsheet data collection;
• Suggestions on how to do the mapping;
• Suggested plans for each workshop.

These workshops are set up to cover the processes involved with putting the map together. They appear in the order they would logically happen. This is mainly for the ease of presenting the material. You may want to introduce all of these aspects at the beginning workshops and get people working on them all right away. These will be your workshops and you should modify, change, and create the course as you see fit. Feel free to contact us if you need support or have any questions or comments on the workshops. Our contact information is on the title page of this study guide.

Facilitators of the course should review all the reading material and prepare a plan for each workshop with a specific timeline to keep the workshop moving along. If you have never facilitated workshops before, it is important to understand that to some degree you are the entertainment. Our experience is that everyone has a performance persona that comes to the fore once the workshop begins. Embrace that aspect of your persona. You can do it easily. Just make sure you have fun!

Also you will have to be a timekeeper and umpire. Some people have too much of a performance persona and will over-load the network. And others are shy and will need some respectful coaching to enter into the discussion.
Guide: Grassroots Solutions & Corporate Power
By Jim Tarbell


Grassroots Institute
15168 Caspar Road, #14
Caspar, CA 95420
rtp@mcn.org
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Grassroots Institute

15168 Caspar Road, #14 |
Caspar, CA 95420
rtp@mcn.org

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