Home Pad for the May 22nd Conversation

Produced by the Post Carbon Institute and the +Conversation Collaborative, in collaboration with the New Economy Coalition and the CommonBound 2014 conference.

Back to +Home Pad for the Weaving the New Economy Movement Conversations

Welcome to the hackpads for our group conversation on May 22 2014, from 12-1:30pm PT / 3-4:30pm ET.

All are welcome to share their thoughts on our topic via the Breakout Group hackpads below, whether or not you are joining the call.

Call Flow

Welcome and check-in

Overview

Tech notes

Invocation

BRIEF check-ins from each participant

The context for this conversation

What is +"the adjacent possible?"

Five areas of inquiry

Shared narrative/vision

Communications network infrastructure

Shifting capital and resources

Connecting & supporting grass roots efforts

Social justice

Breakout group discussions

Full group harvest

Next Steps/Closing

Invocation

"I don't often talk about this in detail, but my passion and my actions stem from my spiritual commitments as a Christian. I had a dramatic and utterly unexpected reawakening of my faith when I was about 20. This tradition has offered up many examples of brilliant and brave leaders who stood for equality, justice, and compassion. And it has something to say about unity in diversity. Paul in his letter to the Corinthians asked the question of how foolish it would be if, in one body, the different parts spent their time fighting. He riffs on that quite extensively. He wrote that "The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I don’t need you!' And the head cannot say to the feet, 'I don’t need you!'" We often interpret diversity as division when in fact it's strength. When I feel alive is when people break out of their division, their suspicion, when people are really saying it's incredible that these other people are doing something different from me because that frees me to do what I'm doing better. I think we still have a long way to go in this issue. " Bob Massie (from +Jan 2014 Interview)

Check-In Notes

Reflections from reading and/or participating in the interviews:

The visioning of success and what that looked like was valuable

The sense of possibility for some of the NE ideas--very exciting and inspiring to see like minds

So many cool things going on--the strong call for collaborative action popped out

The visioning of wild success is often missing in our work--thank you for that!

Appreciated being asked to be an interviewee--recognizing all the energy going into thinking about what is really needed to move forward

Impressed by the depth of thinking and honest questions raised in the first weaving call last week

Struck by intersection of the peace, climate movements, and NE movements, based on the last call.

The idea of understanding the current system and envisioning the future is good work!

Breakout Group Pads

+Shared+ narrative/vision

+Communications +network infrastructure (no group on call)

+Shifting capital and resources

+Connecting & supporting local efforts

+Social justice

Notes for Full Group Harvest

Please help us take notes together below!

Just wondering how we get in contact with each other. My contact is Marco Vangelisti info@ek4t.com

Kelley: "stop bullshitting us!" (re framing of a new narrative)

In thinking about how to move forward with Social Justice and the NE, articulating that our current economy was built on and perpetuates structural violence and racism

Would like to see more discussion on new currencies that create new financial systems. An example from Brazil that was fascinating.

How do we move large amounts of money out of the old decadent decrepit economy into the NE

What do we want to grow in our economy? We hear so much about growth. And we also need de-growth. What do we need to ACCELERATE (i.e. business 'accelerators ans a key term). I.e.

biomimicry

sharing

local resilience

I hope people will engage in this opportunity - the Climate Justice movement has shamed many institutions into divesting - so there is this wonderful opportunity to move large sums of dirty money. And is so much potential in using local, alternative currencies. What are all the different incentivization systems we can set up so that people don't think they've won the game if they end up with a big stack of money at the end - but rather if everything they touch continues to circulate.

We have to be careful about adopting the language of the mainstream language. When we talk about acceleration and the impact investing space, when we talk about scale - those are code words for returning capital to the venture cap speculators. But we're hitting limits, so those returns aren't going to be there.

What we need is more diverse, appropriate scale, slow growth, and more diversity.

I would like to see a discussion about divestment from the extractive economy.

Anchor institutions: hospitals, universities, etc, have huge endowments - potential for them to use both their endowments and their purchasing power to support thriving, local, resilient economies.

Bring back the joy, value, and purpose of what work represents in our life. Bring into the discussion the "regular" folks who are working. Activate people toward looking at the workplace in addition to the parallel discussion of a new economy. Bring in the voice of the younger generations as well.

Post -Call Reflections

In many ways, humanity has been here before. Growth is the meme of empire building. Unequal wealth distribution is the pattern for several thousand years. So the more helpful narrative and framing is based on the larger history of humanity on planet Earth, and an evolutionary impulse (if there is one). Then perhaps, this is the only place we could be, and we're all in this together. And we think about what is wanting to show up from the future.

In the local food hub project I'm working on, it's a way of approaching developing something that's unfamiliar to most of the players. Having a story or narrative that addresses the existing common ground feels very important. And I'm experimenting with that, learning as I go. So we need a better articulated historical context so people can relax around this moment and say oh, we've been through this before."