An Open “Co-op of Co-ops” for Helsinki?

 

Welcome to the PLURIeconomy initiative!

… a call for all non/specialist individuals, groups and audiences from communities and youth-associations in and around Helsinki to join together to co-create a loose “co-operative of co-operatives”!

 

Much has been happening in the world of open/integral cooperatives, alternative currencies, open source communities, solidarity and real-sharing economies. In these times of great changes, all sorts of new models are being proposed to improve the conditions and political participation of everyone - and especially precarious workers - on the local and global scale. In Finland many older and new initiatives are active and developing in this direction. We think it is a good time to develop new ways of working together - to organize ourselves to help each other, and to help newcomers to the field grasp and develop these promising new processes aimed at our common benefit.

 

With this in mind, we are proposing a space for all interested groups and individuals to informally gather to co-create a joint initiative.

 

From the 24th August until the 10th of September we have the opportunity to offer an ‘open door’ at the space at “Viipurinkatu 8” to come and discuss ideas and options for what we are preliminarily calling a “PLURIeconomy”.

 

Could we, should we, create a “co-op of co-ops” in Helsinki/Finland? Should this be modelled on existing experiences in other locations such as the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) or other experiments in “open” or “integral” co-operativism? Together, we look forward to your experimental ideas, concrete models and proposals, alternatives, criticism, networks and hope everyone joins the discussion to co-create a commons.

 

We look forward to open meetings, in-depth workshops and developing collective proposals on new forms of cooperativism and its technologies and methods, with talks by local activists and invited international guests. One of the basic ideas is to plan and co-create a platform to list all co-operatives geographically and to offer tools and advice for those seeking to set one up.

 

The PLURIeconomy initiative is part of an umbrella-initiative entitled PLURIversity:  http://pluriversity.net/.