Manifesto for change

Visions and values

We believe that community and the focus upon connection, solidarity, reciprocity, kinship and commonality is the direction of travel necessary in order for reparation. We have become divided by a competitive narrative that places value upon power hierarchies, entrenching views and beliefs, which has led to a worldly view that other people are to blames for our disconnected and detached lives that we find ourselves living. It is this same mantra, that competition and growth is the only way, that is behind the breakdown of our ecological systems. We find ourselves in the 6th largest extinction period, at 1000 times the based rate of species extinction, and unless we move away from this mono-cultural view towards a more pluralistic one, we fail to recognise the inherent diversity that led us through the most stable geological period of earth’s history; the Holocene.

Context:

We find ourselves at a time of multiple systems collapse, our biosphere is no longer able to support the diversity of organisms that have evolved within the Holocene. Entwined, our socially constructed systems are now recognised as the cause of this meta crisis. The dominant socioeconomic culture of capitalism is reaching its ultimate self professed destruction. It is at this point in time, understanding and seeing the impact of this ecological breakdown, that we create our new story, one of our species survival, knowing that it is possible for human activity to support the regeneration of the ecosystem, opposed to speeding up the breakdown.

How have we got here?

It is those with the greatest power that have the greatest responsibility and yet the rippling effect of the climate’s breakdown is only just beginning to impact the power elite. As our food systems collapse, with soil no longer able to sustain plants to grow, mass famines will take hold of the areas that have no access to grow, our cities, largely dependent upon imports of food, continuing to demand cheaper produce as people are forced to use larger proportions of their income on rent or mortgages, are forcing agriculture to produce more with less, using greater amounts of chemicals to ‘protect’ crops from insects, drought and lack of nutrition from the soil. These chemicals; pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides, washed into the ecosystem, destroy species within the animal, fungi and bacteria kingdoms, with the smallest being overloaded by the toxicity first. The amount permitted to spray upon these crops is often only considered against the potential to harm human life. The metric is flawed because the indirect consequence and the long term implications, together with the impact of the combination of chemicals is rarely understood.

It is this affordability of housing that must be conflated with this destruction of our environment, of our food systems. Along with this, the commodification of money, with complex profit companies now in charge of the price of the majority of our food, profit, ownership, materialism, individualism and hierarchy, all constructs of our dominant culture, are forcing production costs down, oppressing those at the bottom of the hierarchy and exacerbate the crisis further.

What do we need now?

It is therefore imperative that we build new systems and models that enable us all to embrace the regenerative practices and processes we require to live harmoniously with our environment. To move out of this destructive culture, we first have to understand it, to stand back and observe it in operation, to see it in the whole context, how it pervades our everyday lives. It is only then that we might be able to build a response.

Outreach and carework

Recognising the position we find ourselves in, People in Commons CIC will work to support community to develop new structures and systems that will enable a transition away from an extraction mechanism, into a regenerative one.

In order to do this we need to radically consider how the dominant mindset, hierarchy, individualism, materialism and rationality is shifted to becoming more nuanced, interconnected, supportive, reciprocal and regenerative.

Our outreach work will be to begin to interconnect, to bring together organisaitons, groups and individuals so that they might critique their own journeys, become students of the cultural practices that they find themselves within and develop critiques for moving beyond the linear approach to business operations.

Our carework is focused upon the internal support mechanisms that organisaitons require in order to operate. What are the levers, concerns, worries, stresses and tensions held within the community of individuals that form organisaitons and how are those ‘external’ issues addressed. Within our current organisation structures, and because of their very structure and mission, there are limits to how they might provide a support network. It is here that we focus, ensuring that needs are met by the organisaiton, that we support each other to operate, to live.

Services to the community

As we provide to the wider community, the CIC will develop and engage further with those who use each of the services, providing insight into how we might begin to collaborate and build this supportive framework. We aim to create an alternative economy, a Regenerative Alternative Value Economy (RAVE). Bringing together the community into a research learning network, enabling participation and community governance frameworks to be embedded within the development of new services that look beyond the simplistic notion of money as being the only way in which we can operate.

In order to do this it is important for us to create the right messaging and it is this process of education, that we can begin to bring organisations and individuals into this economic structure. Articulating our work needs framing around a concept that can be easily understood. There are, and we do operate alternative economic systems, and it is best explained through the idea of family, friends and ownership. Families and friends do not charge each other for their time together, there is no record of how many hours someone looked after someone else, there is no record of how much food someone ate or how much they slept, played or helped out during their day spent together. What we do have, our internal distributed ledger, is our collective thinking about those people who we spend time with. We ask ourselves why we might want to spend time with them, or why we might choose not to. It is this economy, the literal meaning from the Greek, to keep home, that we begin to recognise that there are various structures at play at the hyper local level.

It is here that we might mike to focus our attention and look to support this notion of internal care work and valuing the contributions that individuals make to the functioning of the home. It is here that the analogy of the DisCo becomes clear. If we consider a dance floor, we might like to understand how it got to be there.. who created it, why, how, what is its purpose? If we, as a collective create a space to dance, we might ask how we can support others to come and dance with us, how we can interact with them and how we might recognise if someone is trying to take the dance floor away from us.

Building our own dance floors and inviting others to participate is something that the DisCo ecosystem is driven to do. Dancers need to be in control of their space, not told where, when and how constantly, dancers are not puppets on strings and people should not be seen as that either. We are not puppets in the show of ‘ who has the most money’, we are agentic, creative and passionate people and it is important that we can all look to enable this in each other, not control each other to do the thing that those in power can do. This is not equitable nor fair, nor just.

A message to employers;

Our Regenerative Economic Consultancy aims to transition us all away from a top down control approach to one where we can all chose and have agency about what we do and how we do it. Cooperative operations where the needs of everyone involved are placed at the forefront of operations are few and far between and it is here that we focus our work.

One of the main concerns that many organisations have is around a lack of direction or focus if we remove a power dynamic from the structures we currently have. However, it is clear that organisations who operate open and supportive practices for all who work within them are amongst the most creative places we can vision.

We should not be appointing down through our systems, this just keep a power dynamic, we might be appointing people to positions based upon what they wish to do and what they good at. This is how we take back some agency of our spaces, we decide that we can appoint great managers to manage people’s wellbeing, we decide to appoint individuals to people facing services because they are great with social interactions.

One of the unfortunate mechanisms that is dominant in our current economic modeling is one of control and money. Money are power have been conflated, those who make the decisions should have the most money, is the current system thinking. It is flawed by the fact that every enterprise is comprised of people making decisions all the time. How we interact with each other, how we take pride in the role that we do, or not as the case maybe, all has a bearing on the overall culture of an organisation. Why organisations do not work to meet the needs of their collective group seems to be a real limiting factor within our current economic model. But what if we could change this? What if organisaitons recognised that not everybody needs the same? Once we begin to consider meeting these individual needs, then we begin to become a life affirming practice, opposed to a limiting model.

So, where do we begin?:

Individual ownership has become the one overarching problem that must be addressed through our new economic model. Car ownership, Business ownership, Land ownership, Property ownership all work to inflate a cost to access and this needs to change.

So, we begin by moving ownership into the commons and increase access because, firstly, it will reduce individual cost and most importantly time. Everyone currently has a huge amount of life admin to undertake, paying energy companies, water companies, filing accounts, accessing universal credits, thinking about how to get food prepared for the day, paying the insurance, getting the car fixed.. there are no end of admin tasks that are duplicated in every household, everywhere. Not only is the incredibly inefficient for our time but it just feeds into a system set up to extract as much out of us as it possibly can. We all pay separately for broadband because it is the best way for the provider to take as much as they can from us. We all take food into our homes to cook and eat because it is the best way for the system to sell us multiple appliances, increase our energy usage and resources.

Travel in Commons:

This service will move ownership away from the individual and into the CIC. Vehicle use and ownership has become an ever increasing problem and individuals have to consider how they are are to navigate their journeys without the support of any infrastructure. We aim to change this by enabling a collective fleet management for all members of the CIC.

As we transfer vehicles into the CIC they will become available to use by the collective. Radical self reliance will mean that individuals, with support if required, develop their agency and avocation of this need. This will not be centrally managed with vehicles booked out without other members knowing who has the use of each vehicle. Members will be required to manage access to these vehicles, much like neighbors might negotiate the use of a vehicle.

Each vehicle will enter into the fleet and will be monitored by the membership. Insurance and tax, road worthy will be managed through the collective funds created through the membership. Each time a vehicle is used, it will be the responsobility of the user to ensure that it is fit for purpose for its next journey. If it is involved within an accident, the user will have to sort that out, knowing that they have access to all the details they need, that it is a fleet vehicle and owned by the CIC, insured through our cooperative insurance.

The Pantry:

The pantry is a simple cooperative concept, operating as a single platform where goods are ordered and distributed from.

The pantry operates a wide membership model that enables members to directly access producers. The name itself denotes the exact purpose of what we are working to achieve; a collective pantry. Traditionally this would have been a store room within a house, where food was stored until it was required. In our modern day lives, this concept has moved out of the individual home and into shops, or, as they are still remembered and refereed to in some communities that retain the lineage to community living, stores.

In theory this works brilliantly, a collective store that everyone can access, as and when they require goods. in practice however, it has simply become another way to capitalise and drive profit from providing a service.

The pantry is the antidote to this model. It is the way that stores should work, not focusing wealth to the store holder or the share holders, but working to meet the needs of those who use it, the community. The interesting concept

Holistic Health Care:

Supporting the community to access holistic health services is an essential and integral part of our ecosystem design. Without the ability to access this care, the ecosystem breaks down. This is ever apparent in the current system of health care that is provided across the UK, it is either underfunded and become increasingly inaccessible or it is private and only available for those who can afford to gain access.

This is where the integration of holistic health and education come to the fore. The wider understanding of maintaining health is fundamental to any and all ecosystems. Allowing them to develop to the point where they are reliant upon intervention due to a lack of education is both reckless and negligent.

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