Schumacher Center for a New Economics

🎧 Frontiers of Commoning, Episode 77

Taking Co-Living Seriously in Architecture & Design

In this month’s Frontiers of Commoning podcast, David Bollier speaks with architects Neeraj Bhatia and Antje Steinmüller, whose research explores how co-living can help address the growing affordability crisis in housing. As real estate markets increasingly cater to upscale buyers, they argue that co-housing, housing cooperatives, intentional communities, communes, and other shared living arrangements deserve far greater attention from architects, policymakers, and the public. Together, they discuss how thoughtful design, commoning, and municipal policy can set the stage for more affordable, resilient, and socially connected ways of living.

Listen to Frontiers of Commoning on your favorite podcast platform, or go to the link in our bio!

It is with great sadness that we share the passing of Richard Heinberg in July.

Over the course of his life, Richard became one of the clearest and steadiest voices addressing fossil-fuel dependence, ecological limits, and the cultural changes required to build a more resilient world.

Richard also delivered his lecture “Fifty Million Farmers” at the 26th Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture. Delivered in October 2006, his lecture was framed by the peak oil debates of the early 2000s, calling attention to the prevailing food system’s vulnerable state in light of cheap energy, mechanization, long-distance transport, and centralization. Richard identified four converging pressures on that system: fossil-fuel depletion, the declining number of farmers, freshwater scarcity, and an increasingly unstable climate.

We invite you to read our recent newsletter exploring the key takeaways from Richard’s lecture: https://centerforneweconomics.org/newsletters/in-memoriam-richard-heinberg/

The Schumacher Center was pleased to host the First Envisioning Workshop for a Hudson-Berkshires Bioregional Financing Facility last week, bringing together leaders in the bioregionalism movement to explore how capital can better serve the long-term health of communities and ecosystems.

The first day of this two-day workshop was held at the Schumacher Center library, co-hosted by Tyler Wakefield, Samantha Power, Alex Forrester, Susan Witt, and Sarah Davidson. 30 participants from across the Hudson-Berkshire region convened over collaborative dialogue and interactive exercises exploring what a bioregional financing facility in this region may look like.

Key discussion points included identifying gaps in the current financing ecosystem, considering how a bioregional financing entity could be designed to strengthen the commons and direct financial gains to the community, exploring practical first steps that could turn this vision into a reality, and examining current projects and initiatives in the region that could benefit from access to appropriate capital.

We look forward to seeing how these conversations evolve in the months ahead and bring about a more just, sustainable, and regenerative financing system in our own region.

A Tour of the Commons – Finance & Money💰

What does commoning look like with respect to the most fundamental economic tool— money? Swipe to discover projects that are reimagining banking, exchange, and community finance.

COOPERATIVE FINANCE: A broad category of financial institutions owned by its members or despositors, such as credit unions and mutual banks, enabling greater community control over lending and orienting priorities toward community needs.

PUBLIC BANKS: Government-owned financial institutions that are legally obligated to operate in the interest of the public, where investment decisions are focused on growing the real, wealth-producing local economy.

COMMUNITY CURRENCIES: An alternative medium of exchange designed to fortify local economies and community bonds while advancing social and environmental objectives.

TIME BANKING: An alternative exchange system using time as a medium of exchange, allowing people to earn time credits by performing services, which can be spent on goods/services with other members.

The 1980s: Mapping the Local Economy Movement

⭐️ 1980: The Schumacher Center for a New Economics was founded to envision a just and regenerative economy, apply the concepts locally, and then share the results for broad replication. (Source: https://buff.ly/eapqSdp)

⭐️ 1985: Robyn Van En introduced the first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm in the U.S. at Indian Line Farm in South Egremont, Massachusetts. Despite her untimely death soon after, the CSA movement has led to the adoption of the model for over 13,000 farms in North America alone. (Source: https://buff.ly/WupuGrt)

⭐️ 1987: Margrit Kennedy published “Interest and Inflation Free Money: Creating an Exchange Medium That Works for Everybody and Protects the Earth,” which has been translated into over 20 languages. In 2011, Kennedy led the initiative for the ‘Occupy Money’ movement. (Source: https://buff.ly/ymDyVNs)

⭐️ 1989: Slow Food International was founded by Carlo Petrini in response to the opening of a fast food restaurant in Rome, Italy. It has evolved into a global movement to ensure that everyone has access to good, clean, and fair food. (Source: https://buff.ly/XNkHYvS)

In 1994, Wendell Berry delivered a talk at the 23rd annual meeting of the Northern Plains Resource Council. Included in his remarks was a list of enduring principles for communities seeking “to cohere, to flourish, and to last.” Rooted in care for the land, our neighbors, local culture, and common wealth, these seventeen tenets paint a picture of what a truly sustainable economy requires.

His words remain deeply relevant to the Schumacher Center’s guiding principles and our work of building thriving and resilient local economies.

⬇️ Check out Berry’s 17 tenets for a local economy below

1. Always ask of any proposed change or innovation: What will this do to our community? How will this affect our common wealth?

2. Always include local nature – the land, the water, the air, the native creatures – within the membership of the community.

3. Always ask how local needs might be supplied from local sources, including the mutual help of neighbors.

4. Always supply local needs first (and only then think of exporting products – first to nearby cities, then to others).

5. Understand the ultimate unsoundness of the industrial doctrine of ‘labor saving’ if that implies poor work, unemployment, or any kind of pollution or contamination.

6. Develop properly scaled value-adding industries for local products to ensure that the community does not become merely a colony of national or global economy.

7. Develop small-scale industries and businesses to support the local farm and/or forest economy.

8. Strive to supply as much of the community’s own energy as possible.

9. Strive to increase earnings (in whatever form) within the community for as long as possible before they are paid out.

10. Make sure that money paid into the local economy circulates within the community and decrease expenditures outside the community.

11. Make the community able to invest in itself by maintaining its properties, keeping itself clean (without dirtying some other place), caring for its old people, and teaching its children.

12. See that the old and young take care of one another. The young must learn from the old, not necessarily, and not always in school. There must be no institutionalised childcare and no homes for the aged. The community knows and remembers itself by the association of old and young.

13. Account for costs now conventionally hidden or externalised. Whenever possible, these must be debited against monetary income.

14. Look into the possible uses of local currency, community-funded loan programs, systems of barter, and the like.

15. Always be aware of the economic value of neighborly acts. In our time, the costs of living are greatly increased by the loss of neighborhood, which leaves people to face their calamities alone.

16. A rural community should always be acquainted and interconnected with community-minded people in nearby towns and cities.

17. A sustainable rural economy will depend on urban consumers loyal to local products. Therefore, we are talking about an economy that will always be more cooperative than competitive.

How do indigenous cultures and traditions interact with the commons? Swipe through to discover some projects shaping the indigenous and traditional commons!

EARTH JURISPRUDENCE: An international movement to secure formal legal rights for nature in the workings of government and courts to counter unchecked environmental abuses by corporations and markets.

TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE DATABASES: Shared databases that prevent multinational corporations from patenting genes, plants and knowledge that have been long shared by indigenous peoples.

SEED SHARING: A diverse movement of farmers, plant breeders, indigenous peoples and others seeking to protect the legal sharing of seeds in light of companies promoting crop monocultures and proprietary seed.

BUEN VIVIR: Literally “good living,” Buen Virir describes the worldview and spirituality of indigenous communities in the Americas and their ancient relationships of living together and with nature.

Want to learn more about the commons? Check out the Schumacher Center's "Reinventing the Commons" program here: https://centerforneweconomics.org/apply/the-commons-program/

🎧 Frontiers of Commoning, Episode 76

Leah Gordon’s Stunning Visual History of Radical English Commoners

In this month’s Frontiers of Commoning Podcast, David Bollier speaks with Leah Gordon, a British photographer and filmmaker who has produced a gloriously eccentric and sumptuous folk history of land rights, enclosure and resistance among English commoners. Working alongside collaborators Stephen Ellcock and Annabel Edwards, their book “Common People” (Watkins, 2025) features stunning historical paintings, etchings, and folk relics from local cultures of commoning, as well as contemporary photographs of commoners who continue these traditions as Ramblers, Gypsies, travelers, squatters, festival-goers, ravers, antinuclear protesters, and nature lovers. The visual imagery is augmented by a series of insightful essays about “vanquished peasants,” vagabonds, rural rebels, and folk traditions, revealing how historical memory about the commons is still very much alive in England.

Listen to Frontiers of Commoning on your favorite podcast platform, or click the link: https://david-bollier.simplecast.com/episodes/leah-gordons-stunning-visual-history-of-radical-english-commoners

How do commoners approach Earth’s most fundamental natural resources — land and water? Swipe through to check out some projects shaping land and water commons.

COMMUNITY LAND TRUSTS: A socio-legal innovation that enables a community to act as permanent stewards of land held in trust for affordable housing, farming, community gardens, and other community needs

COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE: A form of farming and food distribution that enlists community members to purchase in advance of the harvest from a farm, providing the farm with low-cost capital that gets repaid in crops and products, not interest-bearing installments.

PUBLIC TRUST DOCTRINE: A legal principle that, while not a commons initiative on its own, requires governments to manage certain natural resources, like navigable waters, wetlands, and harbors, as trustees on behalf of the public.

AGROECOLOGY/PERMACULTURE: Regenerative approaches to agriculture that protect healthy, seasonal, and sustainably grown local food. They are commonly employed by commons-based farms, community gardens, and other initiatives centered on the shared care of land and ecosystems.

Want to learn more about the commons? Check out the Schumacher Center's "Reinventing the Commons" program here: https://centerforneweconomics.org/apply/the-commons-program/

We are pleased to share a newly published lecture by economist James K. Boyce, introduced by entrepreneur, author, and environmentalist Peter Barnes. The lecture was delivered on the occasion of Boyce receiving the inaugural Common Wealth Prize, established by Barnes to recognize thinkers who are developing practical ways to protect our shared inheritance.

Boyce begins his lecture with an insight from E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. Schumacher was critical not only of concentrated private ownership, but also of overcentralized state ownership. Drawing on the historian R. H. Tawney, he proposed another possibility: “the decentralized ownership of public property.”

Boyce asks whether this principle might allow us to imagine forms of property that are large in scope but widely and equally owned. He argues that what is commonly called the “tragedy of the commons” is more accurately understood as a tragedy of open access. As our very own David Bollier’s expansive work has long demonstrated, commons themselves can be governed carefully and successfully. The real danger arises when no meaningful structure of rights and responsibilities governs access to a shared resource.

This produces two connected tragedies. Nature is overused, and those with the greatest wealth capture a disproportionate share of its benefits.

What examples of this dilemma do we see today? How might we tackle them?

We invite you to read the full introduction and lecture at the link below. You may also watch the live recording of the lecture on our YouTube channel!
https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/common-wealth-for-all-caring-for-the-planet-and-each-other/