United Diversity

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Co-produce something tangible as a group of equal peers

I <3 the Participatory City [http://www.participatorycity.org/] Foundation’s “ Every One Every Day [https://www.weareeveryone.org/]” initiative. There is so much wisdom baked into their approach, wonderfully summed up as creating as many opportunities as possible for people to: > Co-produce something tangible as a group

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What if... Co-operatives UK had £70 million a year?

This article was originally written for Issue 14 of STIR, the magazine for the new economy and was also published online at Co-operatives UK What if…? blog that fed into the UK National Co-operative Development Strategy. I recently noticed that blog has since gone offline and so have re-posted the

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Open Co-ops: Inspirations, Legal Structure and Tools

this post originally appeared in Stir Magazine [https://www.stirtoaction.com/magazine] illustration by Daksheeta Pattni [https://www.daksheetapattni.com/] In 2002 I described United Diversity [https://uniteddiversity.coop] as “a member owned and stakeholder governed network of mutual advantage.” In truth, it was aspirational. At the time, the flexible

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United Diversity at the London Permaculture Festival

I’m off to Cloud Cuckoo Land Festival [https://uniteddiversity.coop/projects/cloud-cuckoo-land/] now, but thought I’d better whack this presentation I did at the London Permaculture Festival [https://londonpermaculturefestival.com/] up first. I gives a brief history of United Diversity plus details of our exciting plans going forward.

Activism

Josef's Journey to John O'Groats

Since this journey has ended up being a major milestone in the development of United Diversity I though I had better re-post this write up I did for the Brake The Cycle blog here too. Enjoy! Last month I cycled about 1200 miles, from the south-easternmost tip of mainland England

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The Finland Phenomenon - the best education system in the world?

I posted yesterday about the urgent need to change education paradigms [https://uniteddiversity.coop/2013/07/31/changing-education-paradigms/]. As such it feels fitting to final re-post this post from Gloria’s blog [https://gl0ria.co.uk/blog/2012/02/04/the-finland-phenomenon/] here: Have you noticed there’s a lot of

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TOGETHER. How cooperatives show resilience to the crisis

This great new documentary, featuring Mondragon [https://uniteddiversity.coop/2013/07/31/the-mondragon-co-operative-corporation/] and other co-operative [https://uniteddiversity.coop/category/cooperative/] inspirations shows how it is not just financial co-operatives who are more resilient to crisis [https://uniteddiversity.coop/2013/07/30/financial-co-operatives-a-safe-bet-in-a-crisis/] , but all co-ops. The examples are from

Agriculture

Crowd Farming at TEDxSydney 2013

Huge respect to TEDxSydney [https://tedxsydney.com/] for doing thing properly when it comes to food. Watch the video for the inspirational story of how they fed the entire Sydney Opera House audience of 2,200 people at TEDXSydney 2013 with crowd sourced locally grown food. All conferences everywhere should

Agriculture

Pam Warhurst: How we can eat our landscapes

I love Pam Warhust. She is such a inspirational, grounded and powerful woman. This is one of my favourite TED talks, by far. Please, watch and share it now. It is about the inspirational story of Incredible Edible Todmorden [https://www.incredible-edible-todmorden.co.uk/] which has now spawned the Incredible

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97% Owned - documentary about money and economics

Back in May 2003 we started a wiki to ‘discuss monetary reform and democracy [https://web.archive.org/web/20030613112808/https://wiki.uniteddiversity.com/uniteddiversity] ‘, and I just posted Positive Money’s Banking 101 video course [https://uniteddiversity.coop/2013/08/01/banking-101-how-money-and-banking-actually-works/] , probably the best introduction to how money

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Banking 101 - How money and banking actually works

This great little collection of videos is the clearest and most authoritative introduction to exactly how the monetary and banking system in the UK actually works.  It is based on the excellent book ‘Where Does Money Come From [https://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/where-does-money-come-from]?’ published by the Positive Money

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Homes and Hands - Community Land Trusts in Action

We’ll never have a peaceful, just and sustainable world (or, as Charles Eisenstein [https://charleseisenstein.net/] says ‘the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible [https://vimeo.com/66550562]‘) whilst the land that sustains us all is owned and controlled by a tiny minority of the population. We

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Changing Education Paradigms

Over 3 million people have watched Ken Robinson’s 2006 TED Talk about how schools kill creativity [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY]. But when it comes to videos about the need to change education [https://uniteddiversity.coop/category/education/] there are few more famous tham the above RSA

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The Mondragon Co-operative Corporation

The Mondragón Corporation [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation] is an inspiration. The largest cooperative [https://uniteddiversity.coop/category/cooperative/] in the world, they are a federated network of over 250 co-operative businesses who together are the seventh biggest group in Spain. They employ over 80,000 people, have

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Money and Life - a new documentary about money

Have you seen Money and Life [https://moneyandlifemovie.com] yet? It is a great new film all about money that is well worth watching. I’m pleased to say that I helped fund the production of the film by contributing to their crowdfunding campaign. It is not too late to

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Time to replicate WIR Bank?

The WIR Bank [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIR_Bank] in Switzerland has been successfully running for over 60 years. It was started in the 1930s in response to the great economic crises of the time. Studies have shown [https://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Money_and_Economics/Community_Currencies/WIR] that

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Kiran Bir Sethi teaches kids to take charge

As mentioned a few posts ago [https://uniteddiversity.coop/2013/07/30/the-hole-in-the-wall-can-kids-teach-themselves/] , I’m going to be sharing lots of inspirational videos about education [https://uniteddiversity.coop/category/education/].  This time we have educator and design activist Kiran Bir Sethi who says “Hope is not a strategy” and teaches

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Financial co-operatives: A safe bet in a crisis

The Co-opreative News [https://www.thenews.coop/] has reported [https://www.thenews.coop/article/financial-co-operatives-safe-bet-crisis] news about a study by the International Labour Organization [https://www.ilo.org/] calledResilience in a downturn: The power of financial cooperatives [https://www.ilo.org/empent/Publications/WCMS_207768/lang--en/index.htm]. You can

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How Cooperatives and Community Enterprise Will Get Us Out of this Gigantic Mess

I’ve posted this excellent talk by Janelle Orsi [https://janelleorsi.com/] from the brilliant Sustainable Economies Law Center [https://www.theselc.org/] a few times over on our facebook page [https://www.facebook.com/uniteddiversity]. The whole presentation is well worth watching, but I particularly like it when she

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The Hole in the Wall - Can kids teach themselves?

A lot of what we do at United Diversity [https://uniteddiversity.coop] is about education [https://uniteddiversity.coop/category/education/].  And a lot of our plans going forward are about education too.  With that in mind I’m going to whack up a few education related videos that have inspired

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Liquid Democracy is NOT Delegative Democracy

> Liquid Democracy is a fast, decentralized, collaborative question-answering system, which works by enabling chained answer recommendation. It occupies the middle ground somewhere between direct and representative democracy, and is designed to ensure that the things we all hold in common stay properly maintained (by small, stealthy, distributed teams of

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COMING HOME: E.F. Schumacher and the Reinvention of the Local Economy

This is one of the best documentaries about Community Supported Agriculture, Community Land Trusts and Community Currencies. > COMING HOME: E.F. Schumacher and the Reinvention of the Local Economy, is a new 37 minute film that tells the story of a series of revolutionary innovations by the community of

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Top 40 Platforms for Crowdfunding Social Change

I published this on the P2P Foundation blog [https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/top-40-platforms-for-crowdfunding-social-change/2012/11/14] last week, but posting here too for good measure 🙂 Crowdfunding is a new word [https://www.technology-digital.com/web20/-oed-to-consider-adding-this-years-trending-tech-word] for an old idea. The Oxford English dictionary defines [https://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/

Activism

Edible City - Grow the Revolution

Just came across this great film: > Edible City: Grow the Revolution [https://web.archive.org/web/20200116144032/http://www.ediblecitythemovie.com:80/] is a fun, fast-paced, feature-length documentary journey through the local Good Food movement that’s taking root in the San Francisco Bay Area, across the nation and

Banking

Inside Job (with Spanish subtitles, again)

This is a must see film. We’ve posted it a couple [https://uniteddiversity.com/inside-job/] of times [https://uniteddiversity.com/must-see-film-inside-job-with-spanish-subtitles/] before, but those videos have since been removed. Here is is again, again with Spanish subtitles: