Resource Sharing – VillageLab https://www.villagelab.net Community design Thu, 07 Dec 2017 05:46:19 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.6.2 https://www.villagelab.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/cropped-VillageLab-Logo-3-e1590913054758-32x32.png Resource Sharing – VillageLab https://www.villagelab.net 32 32 Community Economic System Design https://www.villagelab.net/community-economic-system-design/ Tue, 05 Dec 2017 17:18:23 +0000 http://www.villagelab.net/?p=3062
“Emergence of community dynamics is an essential ingredient for doing business. Deeply inter-networked economic actors involved in local and productive communities that combined with digital reproduction and the increasingly ‘socialized’ production of value, makes the individual and corporate privatization of ‘intellectual’ property if not untenable, then certainly more difficult , and in all likelihood, ultimately unproductive”. -David Bollier
Community Economic System Design
  • Asset Mapping and Wealth Acknowledgement
  • Ownership and Equity
  • Value Generation and Resource Sharing
  • Deep Wealth Design
The subject of economics does not give most people butterflies. It’s often portrayed as dense, complex, ill-defined, and vaguely threatening. Is this really the case, for an ancient science of the lifeblood of societies and communities? Could we try a different approach?
Economics and wealth management can be a tremendous pain point for newly establishing communities of intent. Current economic frameworks are designed around the trap of scarcity, setting up all the fears and conflict that go along with it. This is the legacy of destructive market-based systems, which attempt to reduce value to a single monetary figure – and all the contests that arise from that. 
What we are seeing at the leading edges of new economic systems design is a shift to holistic views of wealth and the appropriate currency systems which nurture and spread it. VillageLab expertise in designing and implementing systems for community economics takes this fresh approach to recognizing the true abundance and potential at the heart of all living systems. Our work affirms the life-giving currents that enhance the entire community organism and beyond.
A whole-systems approach to economics recognizes that we are all connected and interdependent – we are much more than a collection of parts and pieces and property and purchasing power. Communities of intent are taking a bold step beyond the dominant cultural paradigm of separation and competition, to grow and create together. This does not mean isolation and self-sufficiency – in fact there is a tremendous movement underway in this direction now, a community of communities, and we as participants have much to offer and exchange with one another at all scales.
VillageLab is developing a community economic system design tool to help integrate the financing, ownership,   equity, income generation and resource sharing systems of a community with the mission, vision and culture that is wanting to emerge. We have begun to identify and map the spectrum of possibilities so that we can offer this menu to new communities with guidance on matching design with  social agreements, values and culture.
Successful communities are able to bridge between the old and new economic models, keeping a foot in both worlds in order to increase the flow of energy, people, ideas, and resources forward into the future we choose. VillageLab serves as a distributed laboratory for this transition process in different settings, bringing together resources and expertise to assist communities in establishing regenerative wealth systems at the core of their economic infrastructure.
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