REconomistas Community of Practice

REconomistas Community of Practice is a trans-local network providing peer-to-peer support to entrepreneurs and enterprise ecosystem builders that are reimagining how we can meet our needs, create livelihoods and jobs in ways that are inclusive, socially and ecologically regenerative, fair and resilient. 

A REconomy Enterprise is a financially viable trading entity that fulfils a real community need, delivers social benefits and has beneficial, or at least neutral, environmental impacts.

We are closely linked with Transition movement. We practice Permaculture Ethics and follow Modern Agile principles in the way we work: 

We want our basic activities to be independent on grant-maker's willingness or ability to support what we do, so we self-organise in pooling our resources, money included. We are building our worldwide virtual community of practice by developing resources for social learning, social organizing and peer-to-peer support through open collaboration. Contributions are welcome in form of work, products, services and money. 

We have open books policy, our finances are shared above, under Budget. 

For more information follow us on LinkedIn, our Facebook group and page, or on Twitter. We also post videos of some of our events, on our YouTube channel.  Send us messages here or on any of our social media channels. Our legacy website is here: http://reconomy.org.

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We’re ordinary people called to apply whatever skills and privileges we might possess to the work of bringing into being economic systems that affirm life. We know that root causes of global heating, biosphere destruction, inequality, social injustice and other daunting challenges can be found in the economic systems that dominate our societies. And so we think that these dominant systems must be transformed. This is our work, big or small, at whatever scale, supporting one another with ideas, knowhow, and collaborative energy. We’re guided by a belief that by working together we can amplify our positive impacts. 

Building our community. Our international community of practice has been going since 2015 in one form or another. It sprung from the Transition Network and holds with close affection those who work in the Transition movement, as well as permaculture, social and solidarity economy, among other grassroots movements working for positive economic change. We’re about economic relocalisation of the kind that’s just and inclusive, ecologically wise, convivial, and resilient. So, our community is a place to share knowledge and knowhow, meet and connect with others, and support one another with the practical work of bringing into being the change we’d like to see.

Inspirations. We’re inspired by what works, by initiatives that move people to action, by collective actions that result in positive change in communities, by models grounded in the real, that can be adapted, spread, and built upon. We love the innovative and new as well as the boring but effective. Commons, coops, green and social enterprise, ‘new municipalism’ and ‘community wealth building’, regenerative agriculture, community energy, ecofeminism and bioregionalism, open source and peer to peer - these and many other threads contribute to the fabric of a new and better society we’d like to bring into being.

Analyses. We’re well aware of the interrelated global crises we face. We know our societies, most especially in the Global North, must dramatically reduce carbon emissions, biospheric harm, exploitation and inequality, for example. But not at the expense of the wellbeing of those in the Global South. We think ‘green growth’ is a harmful distraction and Degrowth is a destination full of possibility. Governments must change to act with urgency with wise policy, while some governments must first be changed in their entirety. Corporates must radically change, too, and some must be hospiced. Government and corporate actions are necessary but insufficient. We all must act now, at appropriate territorial scales, to reconfigure economic systems toward regenerative patterns of provisioning and consumption, and to prioritize care for people and ecosystems.

Approaches.  Entrepreneurship and citizen participation represent important pathways for economic change. The kind of entrepreneurship we need in this historical moment is transition-oriented, regenerative, ecological, just, caring. We support creating new definitions and new models of this role in our societies, just as we support the creation of wider cultures of such entrepreneurialism, including new roles for investors, co-founders, supporters, and customers. This implies other important practices that invite wider and deeper community participation in the processes of economic transition, including governance, reciprocity and imagination. 

Theories of change.  Change in our social and economic systems can happen in many ways where we might or might not have agency. We focus on where we have agency. We think that by acting in places where we live, mobilizing members of our communities in collective acts, bringing into being new economic models, we make a better future tangible, accessible, convivial and alive. We’re about bottom-up change that rises up to meet the ‘top down’, reaches out to meet the ‘side to side’. 

Mycelium and diffusion. And so our little manifesto closes the loop by returning to the main idea of our community of practice. We’d like to build our translocal network so that the knowledge and knowhow of what’s working can be shared from community to community and across borders with energetic entrepreneurs and meta-entrepreneurs, cluster brokers and community organizers, local government economic development officers and university lecturers, investors and workers - and with you! Through online (and maybe sometimes in person) meetings, speaker events, workshops, we can share what works and how to do it, provide encouragement and solidarity, and enjoy developing caring, reciprocal relationships with interesting people all over the world.