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People in Commons CIC; Manifesto for change
Visions and Values
We believe that community, with its focus on connection, solidarity, reciprocity, kinship, and commonality, is the direction we must take for true reparation. Society has become divided by a competitive narrative that values power hierarchies, entrenching fixed views and beliefs. This has led to a worldview in which others are blamed for our disconnected and detached lives. It is this same mantra-that competition and growth are the only way forward-that lies behind the breakdown of our ecological systems. We now find ourselves in the sixth mass extinction, with species disappearing at a rate 1,000 times the natural baseline. Unless we move away from this monocultural perspective towards a more pluralistic one, we fail to recognise the inherent diversity that sustained us through the most stable geological period in Earth’s history: the Holocene.
Context
We are living through a period of multiple systems collapse. Our biosphere can no longer support the diversity of organisms that evolved during the Holocene. Intertwined with this ecological crisis are socially constructed systems now recognised as the cause of this meta-crisis. The dominant socioeconomic culture of capitalism is reaching its self-proclaimed point of destruction. At this moment, by understanding and witnessing the impact of ecological breakdown, we have the opportunity to create a new story-one focused on our species’ survival-knowing that human activity can support ecosystem regeneration, rather than accelerating its collapse.
How Have We Got Here?
Those with the greatest power bear the greatest responsibility, yet the effects of climate breakdown are only just beginning to impact the power elite. Cities, largely dependent on imported food, continue to demand cheaper produce, while people are forced to spend an increasing proportion of their income on rent or mortgages. This pressure forces agriculture to produce more with less, using greater quantities of chemicals to ‘protect’ crops from insects, drought, and soil degradation. These chemicals-pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides-are washed into ecosystems, destroying species across the animal, fungal, and bacterial kingdoms, with the smallest organisms suffering first from toxicity overload. The permitted levels of these chemicals are often considered only in terms of their potential to harm humans, which is flawed, as the indirect and long-term consequences, as well as the combined effects of multiple chemicals, are rarely understood.
What Do We Need Now?
At this time, we must build new systems and models that enable us all to embrace the regenerative practices and processes required to live harmoniously with our environment. To move beyond this destructive culture, we must first understand it-stand back, observe it in operation, and see its influence on our everyday lives. Only then can we build an effective response.
The affordability of housing must be considered alongside environmental destruction and the collapse of our food systems-not as separate issues. The commodification of money, with complex profit-driven companies controlling the price of most of our food, alongside 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 exacerbating the crisis further.
Building New Structures Together: Outreach and Care Work
Recognising our current situation, People in Commons CIC will support communities to develop new structures and systems that enable a transition from extraction to regeneration.
To achieve this, we must radically shift the dominant mindset towards one that is more nuanced, interconnected, supportive, reciprocal, and regenerative.
Our outreach work will focus on bringing together organisations, groups, and individuals so they can reflect on their own journeys, become students of the cultural practices they inhabit, and develop critiques that move beyond linear business models.
Care Work
Care work focuses on the internal support mechanisms that organisations require to operate effectively. We explore the levers, concerns, worries, stresses, and tensions within the communities of individuals that form organisations, and how external issues are addressed. Current organisational structures, by their very design and mission, have limits in providing adequate support networks. Our focus is to ensure that the organisations we support can meet these needs, thereby enabling people to operate and live well.
Services to the Community
As we provide services to the wider community, the CIC will further engage with those who use each service, providing insight into how we might collaborate and build a supportive framework. We aim to create an alternative economy, one that works on the principles of ecosystems-flowing resources to where they are needed, when they are needed. By bringing the community into a research and learning network, we enable participation and embed governance frameworks within the development of new services that look beyond the simplistic notion of money as the only means of exchange.
Messaging and Education
To achieve this, it is important for us to create the right messaging, and it is through education that we can begin to bring organisations and individuals into this new economic structure. Articulating our work needs to be framed around a concept that is easily understood. Alternative economic systems already exist, and are best explained through the analogy 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 cared for another, how much food someone ate, or how much they slept, played, or helped out during their day together. Instead, we have an internal, distributed ledger-our collective thinking about those people we spend time with. We ask ourselves why we might want to spend time with them, or why we might choose not to. This economy-literally meaning “to keep home” in Greek-shows us that various structures operate at the hyper-local level. Here, we focus our attention, supporting internal care work and valuing the contributions individuals make to the functioning of the home.
The analogy of the DisCo (Distributed Cooperative) becomes clear: if we consider a dance floor, we might ask how it came to be, who created it, why, and for what purpose. If we, as a collective, create a space to dance, we might ask how we can support others to join 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
Building our own dance floors and inviting others to participate is at the heart of the DisCo ecosystem. Dancers need to be in control of their space, not told constantly where, when, and how to dance. Dancers are not puppets, and neither are people. We are not puppets in the show of ‘who has the most money’; we are agentic, creative, and passionate beings, and it is important that we enable this in each other, rather than control one another. This is not equitable, fair, or just.
A Message to Employers
Our Regenerative Economic Consultancy aims to transition us all away from top-down control towards a model where everyone can choose and have agency over what they do and how they do it. Cooperative operations, where the needs of everyone involved are placed at the forefront, are rare, and this is where we focus our work.
One of the main concerns many organisations have is a perceived lack of direction or focus if power dynamics are removed from current structures. However, it is clear that organisations which operate open and supportive practices for all are among the most creative environments we can imagine.
We should not be appointing from the top down, as this simply maintains a power dynamic. Instead, we might appoint people to positions based on what they wish to do and what they are good at. This is how we reclaim agency in our spaces: we choose to appoint great managers to oversee wellbeing, and individuals to people-facing services because they excel in social interactions.
One of the unfortunate mechanisms dominant in our current economic model is the conflation of money and power. The prevailing system assumes that those who make decisions should have the most money. This is flawed, as every enterprise is comprised of people making decisions all the time. How we interact with each other, and whether we take pride in our roles, all shape the culture of an organisation. The failure of organisations to meet the needs of their collective group is a significant limitation of the current economic model. But what if we could change this? What if organisations recognised that not everyone has the same needs? Once we begin to consider meeting these individual needs, we can begin to create life-affirming practices, rather than limiting models.
Where Do We Begin?
Individual ownership has become the overarching problem that must be addressed in our new economic model. Car ownership, business ownership, land ownership, and property ownership all serve to inflate access costs, and this must change.
We begin by moving ownership into the commons and increasing access, as this will reduce individual costs and, most importantly, save time. Currently, everyone faces a huge amount of life admin: paying energy and water companies, filing accounts, accessing universal credit, preparing food, paying insurance, getting the car fixed-the list is endless, and these tasks are duplicated in every household. Not only is this incredibly inefficient, but it also feeds a system designed to extract as much as possible from us. We all pay separately for broadband because it is the most profitable model for providers. We all buy food for our homes to cook and eat, which increases appliance sales, energy usage, and resource consumption.
Consultancy
Our aim is to bring organisations and communities together into a research learning network, beginning our outreach to organisations and individuals in 2025.
Travel in Commons
This service will move vehicle ownership away from individuals and into the CIC. Vehicle use and ownership have become increasingly problematic, with individuals having to navigate their journeys without adequate infrastructure. We aim to change this by enabling collective fleet management for all CIC members.
As vehicles are transferred into the CIC, they will become available for collective use. Radical self-reliance will mean that individuals, with support if required, develop their agency and responsibility for this need. This will not be centrally managed, with vehicles booked out without other members knowing who is using each vehicle. Members will be required to manage access to these vehicles, much like neighbours might negotiate the use of a car.
Each vehicle will be monitored by the membership. Insurance, tax, and roadworthiness will be managed through collective funds raised from membership. Each time a vehicle is used, it will be the user’s responsibility to ensure it is fit for its next journey. If involved in an accident, the user will be responsible for resolving the issue, with access to all necessary information, knowing it is a fleet vehicle owned by the CIC and 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.
The Pantry operates a wide membership model, enabling members to access producers directly. The name itself denotes our purpose: a collective pantry. Traditionally, this would have been a storeroom within a house, where food was kept until needed. In modern times, this concept has moved out of the home and into shops, or, as they are still called in some communities with a lineage of 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 become another way to capitalise and drive profit from providing a service.
The Pantry is the antidote to this model. It is how stores should work-not focusing wealth on the storeholder or shareholders, but meeting the needs of those who use it: the community.
Holistic Health Care
Supporting the community to access holistic health services is an essential and integral part of our ecosystem design. Without access to this care, the ecosystem breaks down. This is evident in the current UK healthcare system, which is either underfunded and increasingly inaccessible, or private and only available to those who can afford it.
This is where the integration of holistic health and education becomes vital. A broader understanding of maintaining health is fundamental to any ecosystem. Allowing systems to reach the point where they rely on intervention due to a lack of education is both reckless and negligent.
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