Nine Action Clusters
Our work is segmented into nine interrelated action clusters:
Effective action will shift the economic system’s defining value from money to life, its locus of decision making from global to local, its favored dynamic from competition to cooperation, its defining ethic from externalizing costs to embracing responsibility, and its primary purpose from growing individual financial fortunes for a few to building living community wealth to enhance the health and well-being of everyone. We humans face an epic choice between the certain outcome of continuing business as usual and the possible future it is within our means to create through conscious collective action.
Articulate and popularize a new cultural story of the possibility and potential of living economies that support a healthy biosphere, a prosperous and meaningful life for all people, and vibrant, democratic communities of place. We humans live by the stories that shape our shared understanding of our human possibilities. To change the human future, change stories that frame our collective action. What's Your Story? (read more)
Replace GDP, stock indices, and other purely financial indicators by which we currently evaluate economic performance with indicators of human health, social well-being, and ecological integrity. Concurrently identify and eliminate system characteristics that create an imperative for endless economic expansion. We get what we measure, so measure what we want. (read more)
Democratize the money system to root the power to create and allocate money in people and democratically governed communities of place. Money is an accounting chit that shapes the resource allocation decisions of human societies. Those who control its creation and allocation control the society, so place that power in the hands of those who have a natural interest in using it to link underutilized resources with priority needs to create living community wealth. (read more)
Promote public values and policies that support an equitable distribution of money and real wealth to meet the needs of all. We all enjoy greater health, happiness, and security when we share resources equitably. (read more)
Promote a public culture and policies that favor locally owned, human-scale enterprises that are rooted in communities of place, work in harmony with natural systems, support vibrant community life, provide meaningful living-wage jobs, treat profit as a means rather than an end, and cooperate with like-minded businesses to create community wealth for all stakeholders. The purpose of business is to serve. The more fully an enterprise is rooted in the place where its owners, managers, employees, and customers live, the greater the natural incentive to create rather than to expropriate community wealth. (read more)
Change the rules of the electoral system to replace the current political and economic plutocracy (one-dollar, one-vote rule by wealthy persons and powerful corporations) with a real democracy (one-person, one-vote rule by real living persons). Real democracy secures the right of all people, irrespective of financial means, to a voice in determining the rules that shape their lives. (read more)
Encourage and support local efforts to develop regionally self-reliant, energy efficient living economies that function as subsystems of their local and regional ecosystems. People with a sense of attachment to a living community of place have a natural interest in optimizing the long-term health and well-being of that community and its local ecosystem. As each community of place moves toward a balanced relationship with its local ecosystem, it contributes to moving the global economy toward a balanced relationship with Earth’s biosphere. (read more)
Support a transition to a global system of rules and institutions designed to act at the global level to ensure universal rights and protect the integrity of the biosphere and act at all levels to ensure that decisions are taken at the most local level feasible and that the rights of regions to pursue diverse paths are protected.
Renounce war as an instrument of foreign policy, strive for regional and national self-reliance, and reallocate resources from maintaining instruments of war to meeting needs of all in ways that eliminate root causes of the violent competition for resources. In a world of scarce resources, war is unaffordable. When national economies are substantially self-reliant in their control and use of natural resources, it is unnecessary.