Trade School Coop

09/21/2015

We want to write this book with organizers and alternative educators in New York City, Quito, Glasgow, Indianapolis, Barcelona, Guadalajara, and more. Our collective has been organizing barter-based learning programs since 2008, and we want to make a book of teaching tools about how it works in local contexts across borders. Should we do it? Be honest. To pay for printing and design, we need people to pre-order the book for $25 in the next week: kck.st/1NalCEj

09/09/2015

Our school in Quito translated our Kickstarter campaign video in Spanish! Watch it here:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/OurGoods/barter-with-your-brain-full

09/04/2015

Since the crisis, Trade School has run classes on a barter system in over 30 cities. More than 19,000 students and teachers have taught or attended a Trade School class somewhere in the world! In exchange for these classes, students have traded goods and services with teachers, but money has never exchanged hands. Should we make a book?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/OurGoods/barter-with-your-brain-full

09/02/2015

"Barter with your Brain Full" is a book of teaching tools and stories from alternative learning spaces that run on barter in 30 cities around the world.

Months and months of collaboration have resulted in a beautiful campaign we couldn't be more proud of.

Please support and share this project far and wide! This is a book written by and for the people who are creating the sharing economy by organizing efforts in their city, like Trade School, that place people before profit. We can't do it without you!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/OurGoods/barter-with-your-brain-full

A book of teaching tools and stories from alternative learning spaces that run on barter in 30 cities around the world.

08/10/2015

“The frame of the sharing economy has been destroyed or radically challenged by people who are just trying to maximize their profits as their primary, sole goal,” says Adam Werbach, a former Sierra Club national president, “When I think about the true sharing economy, I see libraries, parks, and common roads.”

In Search of the Anti-Uber

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/uber-sharing-economy-roots/400187/?sf11709811=1

Some say it's gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

07/09/2015

"How can disenfranchised people have access to power? Her provisional answer is: by banding together. Woolard is a co-founder of OurGoods.org, a thriving digital meeting place where the exchange of goods and services can happen independently of the normative, patriarchal structures that determine almost anything we do.

TradeSchool.coop, another collaborative venture, is a place where information (like how to make a dress or how to start a beehive) is exchanged and bartered for other information, an I-can-help-you-and-you-can-help-me scenario that operates outside the mainstream of both commerce and art. Trade School is not just about the content of the education, it’s about the form that education takes, a self-organizing form that ensures its own duration."

Article on New York Organizer & Artist Caroline Woolard | BOMB Magazine

http://bombmagazine.org/article/6367617/caroline-woolard

Installation view of Time Table, 2015, blown and cast glass, abaca paper, archival photographs by Hiram Maristany, paint, wood, light bulb, power cord, foam, fabric, community land trust reading materials, 20 × 40 × 40 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Hunter East Harlem Gallery, New York. Photo by…

07/02/2015

"In Dublin, a venture called Trade School Dublin has devised a different take on the bartering concept where anyone can offer to teach a class in something they are skilled in or knowledgeable about.

To date, there have been classes on growing your own food, household DIY, web design, poetry, journalism, art and painting, writing funding applications, playing the tin whistle, making electronics, knitting, yoga, languages and more."

Sharing the Fruits of Your Neighbours | Trade School Dublin

http://www.independent.ie/business/personal-finance/latest-news/sharing-the-fruits-of-your-neighbours-31334994.html …

The advantages of the fast-growing 'sharing economy' - online platforms that help people share access to property, services, resources and skills - should be obvious enough at a time wh