By Tom Braford
Are there things about the current world you would like to change?
Anthropologist Margaret Mead is often quoted as saying, “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
Both were predated by Father José María Arizmendiarrieta who would prove them right in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and World War II when he founded the Mondragon co-op movement. Over the last 75 years, it has become the world’s largest and most successful conglomerate of community based cooperative businesses and has taken the people of the Basque Country of Spain from one of the lowest standards of living to one of the highest in Europe with the least disparity of income. It now accounts for 10% of the Spanish economy.
Twelve years ago, the United Steelworkers Union partnered with Mondragon to bring the 1worker1vote movement to America. It became so successful during Covid that it jumped back across the pond and is now inspiring a similar movement in Britain, the birthplace of the original cooperative movement.
It was started in part by English reformer Robert Owens who was also a founder of the American Intentional Communities movement at New Harmony Indiana. That began when Owens purchased the whole town from a religious based intentional community called the Rappites, after founder Johann Georg Rapp. Owens assembled the Boatload of Knowledge that steamed its way down the Ohio and Wabash rivers from Philadelphia with several noted co-founders on board.
Therefore, we invite you to bring your boatload of knowledge to the founding of a conglomerate of Arizmendi Ecovillage worker-owned co-ops whose primary business interest is to create a more just green circular economy focused on building and living in networks of Negative Carbon Reconciliation & Regeneration Ecovillage communities and making that opportunity available to an ever-widening circle of people and communities.
If you have interest, skills or other resources that you would like to add to this endeavor, please contact us.
Contact us at:
braford@sbcglobal.net
www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com