Dan Apfel, SEN Coordinating Committee
(February, 28, 2009 – Washington, DC) This past weekend I attended Power Shift '09, a gathering of over 12,000 youth leaders from around the country working for clean energy and climate change. Seeing all the energy and excitement was awe-inspiring.
More amazing though, was the workshop I led with Elandria Williams, a fellow member of the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network coordinating committee, and the general interest and demand for economic change. We even heard Ralph Nader speak, suggesting a new economy is possible and within reach—and that it can be built on models that already exist like credit unions and cooperatives.
When told that we were accepted for the workshop, I was thrilled: an opportunity to speak in a relatively intimate setting to youth leaders from around the country and bring them into the solidarity economy fold. Let them know that this movement needs to be taken further than climate and clean jobs, to a new economy that prizes people and the environment over profits. I thought, at most, we’d have sixty people in our workshop. The conference publicity called them small and intimate.
Additionally, I was thrilled to work with Elandria, who works with young people at Highlander Institute, one of the key training institutions behind the civil rights movement. Elandria is a rock star. She speaks her mind and then some, but even when angry with the system manages to get her message across to her audience and be a great facilitator.
Set to start at 3:00, our room was filled by 2:30 and we moved to a bigger room. To our disbelief and joy, the room filled up: by 3:00, all 250 seats were filled and people lined the sides and the back of the room. We led almost 300 people in a workshop about the solidarity economy.
Our plan was to use one of the regular solidarity economy training models, but we had to adapt it for the group. Starting out by taking examples of economic activity we heard many ‘green’ examples, even some models of the solidarity economy; but, many kinds of “social sector” activity—barter, home work, etc, were not mentioned.
During the next activity, we used ‘stepping stones’ workshop cards, a tool designed to share examples of the solidarity economy from different areas, sectors and countries. Groups of eight each received two cards—and then traded. Some of the most discussed ideas included Slum Dwellers International, a group created by people living in slums that works to provide sanitation and other necessities that some of the world’s poorest people would not otherwise have, and the factory takeovers in Argentina, where workers took over factories and continued to operate them as cooperatives.
Groups, prompted, even discussed and offered us ideas of activities going on in their communities, including a community supported agriculture for grain purchases in Belchertown, MA, where community members buy a share of the harvest in advance, and can then take the grain they receive to a bakery where they grind it at a reduced price. We also heard about a time-dollars program in Maryland where people trade services using an accepted alternative ‘currency.’
By the end, attendees were excited about the different economic models they had heard, and after coming in knowing that the economy had to change, heard people speak with a sense of how to build a new economy on the basis of what exists already. We gathered a list of over fifty names of people who wanted more information, and will reach out to them as we continue to mobilize our movement.
