A cooperative is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-controlled enterprise". Cooperatives are democratically controlled by their members, with each member having one vote in electing the board of directors. They differ from collectives in that they are generally built from the bottom-up, rather than the top-down. Cooperatives may include:
Citizen's dividend is a proposed policy based upon the Georgist principle that the natural world is the common property of all people. It is proposed that all citizens receive regular payments (dividends) from revenue raised by leasing or taxing the monopoly of valuable land and other natural resources.
David C. Korten is an American author, former professor of the Harvard Business School, political activist, prominent critic of corporate globalization, and "by training and inclination a student of psychology and behavioral systems". His best-known publication is When Corporations Rule the World. In 2011, he was named an Utne Reader visionary.
Thomas Carl Hartmann is an American radio personality, author, businessman, and progressive political commentator. Hartmann has been hosting a nationally syndicated radio show, The Thom Hartmann Program, since 2003 and hosted a nightly television show, The Big Picture, between 2010 and 2017.
Media democracy is a democratic approach to media studies that advocates for the reform of mass media to strengthen public service broadcasting and develop participation in alternative media and citizen journalism in order to create a mass media system that informs and empowers all members of society and enhances democratic values.
The stakeholder theory is a theory of organizational management and business ethics that accounts for multiple constituencies impacted by business entities like employees, suppliers, local communities, creditors, and others. It addresses morals and values in managing an organization, such as those related to corporate social responsibility, market economy, and social contract theory.
The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can also be defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.
Jean Hazel Henderson was a British American futurist and environmental activist. As an autodidact in her twenties, having only a British high-school formal education, in the U.S. she gradually advanced, by virtue of groundbreaking citizen activism, into the roles of university lecturer and chair-holder, as well as that of advisor to corporations and government agencies. She authored several books including Building a Win-Win World, Beyond Globalization, Planetary Citizenship, and Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy.
Gar Alperovitz is an American historian and political economist. Alperovitz served as a fellow of King's College, Cambridge; a founding fellow of the Harvard Institute of Politics; a founding Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies; a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution; and the Lionel R. Bauman Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland Department of Government and Politics from 1999 to 2015. He also served as a legislative director in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate and as a special assistant in the US Department of State. Alperovitz is a distinguished lecturer with the American Historical Society, co-founded the Democracy Collaborative and co-chairs its Next System Project with James Gustav Speth.
The term "sustainable communities" has various definitions, but in essence refers to communities planned, built, or modified to promote sustainable living. Sustainable communities tend to focus on environmental and economic sustainability, urban infrastructure, social equity, and municipal government. The term is sometimes used synonymously with "green cities," "eco-communities," "livable cities" and "sustainable cities."
Cooperativeeconomics is a field of economics that incorporates cooperative studies and political economy toward the study and management of cooperatives.
The Center for Sustainable Enterprise (CSE) is one of four academic and research centers at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Stuart School of Business (SSB) in the city of Chicago. The CSE has created a platform to convene the many disciplinary facets of the IIT colleges with business, community and government stakeholders in focused initiatives dedicated to making Chicago a sustainable city.
Ted Nace is an American writer, publisher, and environmentalist, known for his criticisms of corporate personhood and his support of a fossil fuel phase out. In 2009, he was described as "one of the amazing brains and strategists behind the anti-coal movement."
The digital commons are a form of commons involving the distribution and communal ownership of informational resources and technology. Resources are typically designed to be used by the community by which they are created.
The global citizens movement is a constellation of organized and overlapping citizens' groups seeking to foster global solidarity in policy and consciousness. The term is often used synonymously with the anti-globalization movement or the global justice movement.
Economic democracy is a socioeconomic philosophy that proposes to shift ownership and decision-making power from corporate shareholders and corporate managers to a larger group of public stakeholders that includes workers, consumers, suppliers, communities and the broader public. No single definition or approach encompasses economic democracy, but most proponents claim that modern property relations externalize costs, subordinate the general well-being to private profit and deny the polity a democratic voice in economic policy decisions. In addition to these moral concerns, economic democracy makes practical claims, such as that it can compensate for capitalism's inherent effective demand gap.
Energy democracy is a concept developed within the environmental justice movement that pairs the renewable energy transition with efforts to democratize the production and management of energy resources— including the social ownership of energy infrastructure, decentralization of energy systems, and expansion of public participation in energy-related policymaking. Energy democracy calls for greater participation in transitions and is being used in literature to describe an overall ongoing democratic transition. Energy democracy and climate justice are increasingly associated. Rather than view decarbonization as a purely technological challenge, energy democracy identifies the renewable energy transition as an opportunity to redistribute political and economic power toward egalitarian ends.
A platform cooperative, or platform co-op, is a cooperatively owned, democratically governed business that establishes a two-sided market via a computing platform, website, mobile app or a protocol to facilitate the sale of goods and services. Platform cooperatives are an alternative to venture capital-funded platforms insofar as they are owned and governed by those who depend on them most—workers, users, and other relevant stakeholders.
Matthew Bruenig is an American lawyer, blogger, policy analyst, commentator, and founder of the left-leaning think tank People's Policy Project. He was a blogger for the American think tank Demos covering politics and public policy, and has written on issues including income distribution, taxation, welfare, elections, the Nordic model, and funds socialism. Bruenig advocates for mass unionization and socialization of wealth within an universalist welfare state.
Community wealth building is a term which covers a range of approaches which "...aim at improving the ability of communities and individuals to increase asset ownership, anchor jobs locally by broadening ownership over capital, help achieve key environmental goals, expand the provision of public services and ensure local economic stability”. The original model, the Cleveland Model, was developed in Cleveland, United States, however the Cleveland Model has also been developed and applied with the creation of the "Preston Model", in Preston, Lancashire. It is a form of municipal socialism which utilises "anchor institutions", living wage expansion, community banking, public pension investment, worker ownership and municipal enterprise tied to a procurement strategy at the municipal level.
