Chapter Ten - “Community Alternatives: Living the Change”

This is a chapter where Judy explores several organizations who are developing alternative ways of doing things and even alternative systems within the current system. From Food Share in Toronto, part of a growing global alternative food distribution system to the Exodus movement in Britain that has pioneered community led social housing to the massive landless movement in Brazil that is creating a whole new society on the land they seize and develop to the social entrepreneurs in North America, Judy looks at different economic and social models already being created.

“Glenn Jenkins, the British working-class activist introduced in the previous chapter, has pioneered a new kind of activism in which people who have been displaced by poverty, unemployment, deindustrialization, injury, or anything else get together to build or rebuild their communities.

“They build an industry on the back of every social problem,” he told me in an interview. “It happens in development and it happens here. All the good things that are supposed to be going to the ground are sucked up by the layer of providers. It’s like vampires. You get a middle-class layer of administrators and service providers who become the beneficiaries of the services. They usurp much of the money, the training, and so on. I’m part of a natural reaction to that and the non-commercial, flat-managed development of autonomous community activity. What’s happening is the emergence of a participatory democracy that comes into conflict with the top-down administration. It needs to change, and it’s going to take a battle.”

Related Links:

Relevant Blog Entries:
http://transformingpower.ca/en/category/book-chapters/chapter-ten

Achbar, Mark
www.thecorporation.com

Bullfog Power
http://www.bullfrogpower.com/

Corporation, The (film)
http://www.thecorporation.com/

FoodShare
http://www.foodshare.net/

Greater London Council
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London_Council

Hollyhock Centre
http://www.hollyhock.ca/

IBASE
http://www.ibase.br/

Jenkins, Glenn
http://www.marshfarmoutreach.org.uk/

Marsh Farm Community Development Trust
http://www.marshfarmoutreach.org.uk/

MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra [Landless Workers' Movement])
http://www.mstbrazil.org/

Solomon, Joel
http://www.renewalpartners.com/

Van City
https://www.vancity.com/

World Social Forum (WSF)
http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/,
http://www.fsm2009amazonia.org.br/?set_language=en