THE EVERGREEN COOPERATIVES
REGENERATIVE QUALITIES OF THE EVERGREEN COOPERATIVES
Empowered Participation / Edge Effect Abundance / Wealth Viewed Holistically
Empowered Participation / Edge Effect Abundance / Wealth Viewed Holistically
"Often you need to go to the most damaged part of a city, and by rebuilding there you actually do the most healing."
— Stuart Cowan, co-author of Ecological Design
— Stuart Cowan, co-author of Ecological Design
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THE EVERGREEN COOPERATIVES STORY CONTINUES
Investing in a resilient economy means investing “upstream,” into projects such as the Evergreen Cooperatives.
Capital does not naturally flow upstream, but like the nutrient-restoring activities of the salmon teach us, investing upstream is essential to restore and retain system health. After 200 years of pressing for greater and greater efficiency, it is time we initiate a strategic shift on a massive scale, to investing in resiliency . Like the Mondragon coops in Spain before them, the Evergreen Cooperatives and their current and future capital sponsors are boldly leading the way. The great challenge before us is to unlock the human creative potential for hundreds of place-based Evergreens to flourish.
FROM THE FIRST EVERGREEN COOPERATIVES FIELD GUIDE STUDY May 2011–It is surely a case of poetic justice that one of the most promising models of locally-based wealth building is incubating in an impoverished rustbelt community ravaged and abandoned by the global economy. Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives have indeed become a beacon of hope for civic leaders around the country searching for grassroots solutions to the crisis of poverty and hopelessness that has taken down their inner cities. Evergreen is now high on the radar screens of several U.S. government departments and has been extolled in numerous articles in the national business press. Ron Sims, Deputy Secretary of HUD, has called Evergreen’s wealth building strategy “brilliant” and the leaders of the venerable Mondragon Cooperatives of Spain now call Evergreen the “point of reference for all cooperative development in North America.” The Evergreen Cooperative initiative can be described as a remarkable experiment in worker-ownership, anchor-institution-based “green” job creation, and wealth building in a city experiencing the collateral damage of globalization, the foreclosure crisis, and the lingering legacies of racial injustice. But it deserves to be viewed through a much wider lens. If the Evergreen model succeeds in Cleveland could it not be replicated in more affluent suburban or urban enclaves experiencing a different kind of impoverishment, of spirit rather than of purse, or in rural “single employer” towns where agribusiness has otherwise decimated the local economy? Can we see in Evergreen a way forward for a great diversity of communities to build resiliency and to redefine wealth through hands-on ownership of capital, a more creative and productive use of internal assets, and through shared purpose and respect for the limits of the earth’s regenerative capacities? We hope you will read this story of Evergreen--which describes both its great promise and its real challenges -- with an openness to imagining all these possibilities. As Evergreen cooperative enterprises multiply and take root in Cleveland’s University Circle, we look forward to their seeds scattering farther afield, fostering the emergence of a vibrant, highly collaborative, and far-reaching network of place-based economies that will build the local resilience for a healthy engagement with the larger global economic system. |
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