---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: <[email protected]> Date: Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 4:55 PM Subject: [cc_research] Fw: Strategies for a New Economy/Registration Open To: [email protected] Complementary Currency Resource Center www.complementarycurrency.org -----Original Message----- From: New Economics <[email protected]> Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2012 16:02:52 To: <[email protected]> Subject: Strategies for a New Economy/Registration Open Dear Stephen DeMeulenaere We are at a turning point in history. Rising temperatures are now recognized as a sign of a planet in crisis. Inequities between rich and poor, North and South, grow ever deeper. The global economy has failed in its promise to produce and deliver basic goods in an efficient manner for an expanding population, leaving increasing numbers in abject poverty. The environmental crisis, the equity crisis, and the crisis of distributed production, all have their roots in the current economic system with implications for our culture, our society, and for our health and well-being. What would an economy built on principles of fairness and sustainability look like? How do we model it; where is it emerging; how do we collectively strategize to fully implement it? These are the pressing questions of our time. In response, the New Economics Institute is convening "Strategies for a New Economy," a conference June 8-10th at Bard College on the Hudson River in New York State. It will gather together what are often diverse and scattered efforts to reshape our economic system, place them under one tent, and raise the flag to announce that transitioning to a new economy will mean engaging politicians, researchers, media, educators, citizen activists, business leaders, financial experts, scientists, union workers, cultural leaders, advocates for the disenfranchised, and youth -- all working together to achieve a common goal. The three-day conference will include over 60 workshops, plenary gatherings, and participatory strategizing sessions organized in 10 theme areas (see below). "Strategies for a New Economy" will highlight best research and best practice under each theme and ultimately demonstrate that a decentralized, sustainable, cooperative economy is already taking shape, offering a strategy for action. Registration is now open. http://www.neweconomicsinstitute.org/conference We invite you to be part of the dialogue. Best wishes, Susan Witt on behalf of the staff and board of directors of New Economics Institute www.neweconomicsinstitute.org Strategies for a New Economy Conference Themes 1. Visioning and Modeling the New Economy: Shared Prosperity within Planetary Limits What will a new/green/resilient/just/sustainable economy look like and how do we get there from here? That is the question addressed under this theme, providing a framework, a long view on the subject. Workshops will cover historic examples, systems thinking approaches, economic modeling tools, grass roots community planning, and leadership training for a new economy. 2. Banking and Financing a New Economy: Scale, Criteria, Innovation The current global banking and financing system has failed us, creating havoc with national and regional economies, and leading to real life personal tragedies in lost jobs and lost homes. How might an alternative system be structured that promotes long-term sustainable development rather than short-term value? Presentations will include talks on public, cooperative and community banking, citizen-organized community financing programs, radical impact investing, and the role of government in financial reform. 3. Measuring Well Being: Alternative Indicators of Wealth and Progress Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has long been used by economists to measure wealth and progress, but is it really a measure of our well-being? The presenters on this theme will argue that other factors must be considered to account for ecological health, quality of life, and well being. The workshops will showcase some of the popular alternative indicators, consider how these have been applied at the policy level, and give specific examples of putting these new measures into practice. 4. Messaging the New Economy: Education, Media, Public Campaigns A new economics will require the development of new curriculum material both in content and presentation. It will be multi-disciplined, acknowledging that the transition to a new economy will involve a complex cultural change. It will draw on both the theoretical and practical application. It will be a distributed learning, relying on social media, informal learning circles, and peer education. Where is this new economics training emerging? And relatedly, how best to bring the story of this emerging movement to attention of media and build public campaigns that lead change? 5. Rebuilding Local Economies: Engines for Resilience The Local Economy Movement is considered by many to be the engine of the new economy. Vibrant, energetic, self-empowered, it is driven by citizen activists not waiting for governments to solve problems, but building now the kind of economy they would like for their future. Blossoming out of the local food movement, these local initiatives are supporting multiple kinds of local production to meet local needs. Shaped by local skills and local resources they differ in form from region to region -- but all are characterized by the vision, creativity, and community spirit of its core groups who dare to take risk and try what has not been done before. 6. Reimagining Ownership and Work: Coops, Stakeholders, Corporate Structure When business is owned by capital instead of by workers and stakeholders, an uneven distribution of wealth inevitably occurs. Workshop presenters have both research and practical experience with new ownership models including consumer and producer coops, the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain, the Northern Italian flexible manufacturing networks, Employee Stock Ownership Plans, and multiple stakeholder ownership models, demonstrating how these have contributed to social justice, economic development, secure and fulfilling jobs, and sound management of the commons. 7. Responsive Government for a New Economy: Politics as if People and Planet Mattered Some have said that the biggest hindrance to transitioning to a fair and sustainable new economy is the impasse in our political system, the bickering, the corruption, the cost of campaigns. Panelists in the Responsive Government theme will discuss the forms of governance, participation and action‹at local, national and global levels‹necessary to support the transition to a new economy. Speakers will move from an initial focus on reforming our current government institutions to discussion about deliberative democracy and alternative models of participation and decision-making. 8. Sharing the Commons: Identifying, Allocating, Restoring What is the appropriate place of land and natural resources in a just and sustainable economy? Should land be a commodity traded on the market to the highest bidder, allowing those with ownership to benefit from our common need and common heritage? If not via market, how might land and natural resources be otherwise allocated. 9. Sustainable Production and Consumption: Simplicity, Sufficiency, Abundance While much of the focus of transitioning to a new economy is on changes in government policy, business structure, banking, and financing, there remains a considerable role for individuals and households in this transition. How can we develop mutual support systems that replace our dependence on acquiring more stuff? The elegance of simplicity, the richness of community, living within the bounds of our bioregion, shorter work weeks -- these are all elements of a new American Dream. TimeBanks, meta-currencies, asset-based community accounting, resilience circles -- are all tools for facilitating what will be a social and cultural shift as well as economic. In the process new local forms of production emerge, involving producer and consumer working in association. 10. Transforming Money: Structuring, Issuing and Valuing New Mediums of Exchange Though the tool of money is a social construct, the very form and nature of its current method of issue is rarely questioned when addressing the need to transform our economy to one that is more just and sustainable. What might be sound principles for monetary issue in a new economy? How might the process be more democratized? These are some of the questions discussed under this theme from both a theoretical and applied point of view. Panels will examine the nature of money, its origins, its status as a commodity, and its place in social relationship and language. Other panels will examine specific contemporary examples of regional currencies including BerkShares, WIR, and Chimgauer, and the potential offered by community based electronic platforms to work alongside present currency systems. * * * * * * * To be removed from this eNewsletter list, simply write ³unsubscribe² in the subject line of a return email. _______________________________________________ cc_research mailing list [email protected] http://complementarycurrency.org/mailman/listinfo/cc_research_complementaryc...