Cooperative Innovation Hubs (Community Wealth Building)
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● Description:
These are businesses that are community owned through a “community shares” programme providing economic opportunity and regeneration.● Features:
○ Most enterprises need capital to start, to grow, and to be sustainable. This finance has to come from somewhere, and Community Shares enables this investment to come from the very community which an enterprise intends to benefit. These community shareholders, ordinary people, invest in local enterprises to provide goods and services to meet local needs and only expect a fair and modest return on their investment, if any.
○ Crowdsourcing of ideas
○ Crowdfunding of businesses
○ Focus on high quality goods and services to community members
○ Commonification of public services, universal basic services systems, contributory economy, public-commons partnerships, finance mechanisms for commons-oriented projects
○ Neighborhood centers where you can re-/co-define “work” or community tasks in dynamic portfolios of activities throughout a given day, week, month, year, etc., in the context of a community-led redefinition of work or labour, to include reproductive, voluntary forms of labour, and so on (i.e. a ‘balanced job complex’) (access to co-defining work, to skill development and skill-sharing, developing new cooperatives around social and ecological issues; again, with a package of unconditional ‘basic’ community-led services as backbone)
● Examples in Belfast: Cooperative Alternative
● Global Inspirations:
○ Enspiral
○ Gitlab
○ Co-Tech
○ Verbeterdebuurt (“improve the neighbourhood”) (Netherlands)
○ FixMyStreet (UK)
○ Il quartiere bene comune (Neighbourhood as a commons) program
○ Collaboratorio Reggio Emilla (Collaboratory)
