Cooperative Journal Media is a source for remembering through storytelling, visualizing, and practicing a collectivized economy. We are gathering the stories that expand the edges of our imagination of what is possible - where money is just one form of capital, workers are the owners, neighbors are meeting each other’s needs, and local communities are reclaiming their power to cultivate regenerative systems.

                                                                        Art by Robin Bean Crane

What would it look like to treat our art and storytelling work as gifts in the commons? To step towards gift economics and away from commodification? To be exchanging multiple forms of capital to meet our needs, decentering the role of finance? We are experimenting with these questions through:

The money we gather through OCF will serve as a common pool we use to pay the artists we collaborate with. This is an experiment, so if it starts feeling exploitative, transactional, or unreciprocal we will adjust, trusting in relational feedback loops (aka we are so open to hearing your suggestions and responses!) 

We will compensate our core collective members first - a social media engagement designer, a podcast audio editor, and a website designer. We will be in conversation with them about what amount of money feels good each month based on how much is in this pool, their monetary needs, and honoring how much time they want to put in. 

Here’s the breakdown of how we plan to distribute:

Ways to plug in beyond money - fill out this form for folks who want to contribute in ways beyond donations here (like time, skills, collaborations, etc), we honor multiple forms of wealth.