Curriculum for a New Economics

Practical tools for local economic transformation

A new generation is choosing to return home to create jobs that support the landscape, the people, and the community of their region, but they lack many of the tools needed to build thriving, inclusive, and sustainable local economies. A broad range of organizations, including the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, have been working for decades in the field of ‘new economics’ to provide these tools. The Schumacher Center is collaborating with multiple organizations to develop curriculum for individuals and communities seeking to transform their own economies.

While the issues this program addresses are universal in nature, the effects of our current economic system often have the greatest negative impact on communities marginalized by geographic location, wealth, race, ethnicity, or lack of human capital. By sharing our work with all types of communities, we aim to place new economic tools in the hands of the next generation, so that they may help define and shape our collective future.

A Generation Local

A growing number of young people know what must be done to cure our ailing global economy. They are not only protesting a failing system but are also building its replacement. New agrarians are being met by fellow new economists in urban neighborhoods, small towns, and remote villages. They are coming home – a Generation Local. You will find them in farm fields, small-batch manufacturing, local marketplaces, recycling ventures, renewable energy coops, farm-to-table restaurants, and community planning meetings. They are forming the foundation of a green, place-based, face-to-face economy built on democratically structured institutions.

How do we equip this new generation of local economists? How do we train them in the same disciplined way that the sustainable agriculture community has developed apprenticeship programs for future farmers? How do we strengthen their values, align their initiatives, unify their voices, and amplify their impact? How do we bring a movement to scale?

The Local Economy Movement is emerging out of the mutual interest and collaboration of small producers and their local citizens/consumers. Together they are creating the institutional infrastructure that complements the powerful local-food movement:

Community Supported Agriculture farms are linking farmers directly with their customers to share the risk of operating costs.
Community Supported Industry initiatives are growing more jobs through manufacturing focused on import replacement.
Community Land Trusts are offering a way for residents of a region to acquire land and permanently dedicate sites for workforce housing, sustainable farming, or green industry.
Investment clubs are connecting investors with regional small businesses in need of capital.
BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) networks are bringing local businesses together to share resources and market jointly.
Coops are turning workers into owner/managers.

In the Berkshires, a local currency is partnering with community banks to provide low cost loans in a scrip that circulates only in the region, validating the small businesses that make up the backbone of that economy. In North Carolina, Rural Advancement Foundation International is providing grants to area farmers to innovate new products and then shares the plans for that innovation online so other farmers can replicate solutions. In Democracy Collaborative’s Cleveland Model, anchor institutions are contracting with worker-owned businesses to provide needed services and in the process are creating secure, well-paid jobs for a previously disenfranchised population.

No longer unique experiments, these programs are being replicated in cities and towns around the country and around the world, drawing media attention and enthusiastic participation.

Challenge

The challenge to advocates of a just and ecologically sustainable economic system is to:

demonstrate theoretically and by example how these programs connect as complementary components of a whole-systems regional economy;
codify these programs through engaging stories and handbooks of organizational documents, referencing organizations already assembling this material and creating new documentation where needed;
develop effective curriculum, instruction materials, and workshops for training;

A new economy curriculum is a vehicle for organizations to share knowledge, tools, and experiences with a new generation of local economists.

Building Sustainable Economies Reading List

The following reading list is a collection of suggested readings from the Building Sustainable Local Economies Seminars, held by the Schumacher Center annually from 2005 to 2008. See an overview of each of the seminars:

All titles without links are available at the Schumacher Center Library.

General Readings

An Economics of Peace

By E. F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry and Susan Witt
Three essays that sound a clear call for alternative economic systems as a means to a lasting peace the world over.

Cities and the Wealth of Nations

By Jane Jacobs
Article published in The Atlantic Monthly, March 1984

Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age

By Michael Shuman
Routledge, 1998/2000

Home! A Bioregional Reader

Excerpts by Peter Berg, Gary Snyder, and Doug Aberley
New Society Publishers, 1990

Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered – Chapter 3: The Role of Economics and Chapter 5: A Question of Size

By E. F. Schumacher
Blond & Briggs, 1973

Land: The Community Land Trust Model

A New Lease On Farmland: Assuring a Future for Farming in the Northeast

Published by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics
A guide to using the Community Land Trust model to ensure that farmland is used productively and sustainably over the long-term.

Capitalism, the Commons, and Divine Right

By Peter Barnes (2003 Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture)
A look at the potential for expanding the role and the rights of the commons. Barnes suggests that commons should be held in trusts for the benefit of current and future generations, as a way of countering the power of the market and its search for short-term private profits.

Community Partnership Saves Family Farm

By Susan Witt
Published in In Business, March/April 2000

Indian Line Farm Land Use Plan

An example land use plan used to clarify the possible uses, and limits to use, on a piece of land held in a community land trust.

Land: Challenge and Opportunity

By Robert Swann and Susan Witt
Describes various working applications of the community land trust approach to land tenure, including affordable housing, affordable access to land for farmers, ecologically based land use planning, and safe-guarding of traditionally used lands by and for indigenous peoples.

The Wisdom That Builds Community

By Greg Watson (1997 Annual E. F. Schumacher Lecture)
Greg Watson tells the story of the Dudley Street Community Land Trust, which reinvigorated neighborhood pride and now supports hundreds of units of renovated owner-occupied homes, a productive greenhouse, and locally owned businesses.

Capital: Creating Community Financing Systems

Building Sustainable Communities: Tools and Concepts for Self-Reliant Economic Change – Chapter 25: “Building a Community Banking System”

By Robert Swann
Contributors C. George Benello, Robert Swann, Shann Turnbull; edited by Ward Morehouse. (Bootstrap Press, 1989/1997)

Labor: Self-management and Diversification of Wealth

A Direct Stake in Economic Life: Worker-owned Firms

By Gar Alperovitz
An excerpt from America Beyond Capitalism (Wiley, 2005)

Building Sustainable Communities: Tools and Concepts for Self-Reliant Economic Change – Chapter 18: “Building a Community Banking System” and Chapter 19: “Worker-Managed Enterprises: Legal Shells, Structures, and Financing”

By C. George Benello
Contributors C. George Benello, Robert Swann, Shann Turnbull; edited by Ward Morehouse. (Bootstrap Press, 1989/1997)

Additional Readings

Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh

By Helena Norberg-Hodge
Sierra Club Books, 1991

Building Sustainable Communities: Tools and Concepts for Self-Reliant Economic Change

Ward Morehouse, ed.
Bootstrap Press, 1989

Cloning Grameen Bank: Replicating a Poverty Reduction Model in India, Nepal, and Vietnam

Helen Todd, ed.
Intermediate Technology Publications, Ltd. 1996

Creating Alternative Futures

By Hazel Henderson
Kumarian Press, 1996. Includes foreword by E.F. Schumacher

From the Ground Up: Essays on Grassroots & Workplace Democracy – Chapter 8: The Challenge of Mondragon

By George Benello
South End Press, 1992

Good Work

By E.F. Schumacher
Harper & Row, 1979

Let’s Try Barter: the Answer to Inflation and the Tax Collector

By Charles Morrow Wilson
The Devin-Adair Co., 1960

Memoirs of a Revolutionist

By Peter Kropotkin
Grove Press, Inc., 1970

Modern Money Mechanics: A Workbook on Bank Reserves and Deposit Expansion

By Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago (1992)
See pages 1-11

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

By Peter Kropotkin
Extending Horizons Books, 1914

Paths in Utopia

By Martin Buber
Beacon Press, 1949

People, Land, and Community: Collected E. F. Schumacher Society Lectures

Hildegarde Hannum, ed.
Yale University Press, 1997

The Breakdown of Nations

By Leopold Kohr
E.P. Dutton, 1978

The Company We Keep: Reinventing Small Businesses for People, Community, and Place

By John Abrams
Chelsea Green, 2005. See also Abrams’ 2008 lecture on employee ownership

The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work, and a Wiser World

By Bernard Lietaer
Century, 2001

The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time – Chapter 6: The Self-Regulating Market and the Fictitious Commodities: Labor, Land, and Money

By Karl Polanyi
Beacon Press, 1944/2001

The People’s Land: A Reader on Land Reform in the United States

Peter Barnes, ed.
Rodale Press Book Division, 1975

The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

By Wendell Berry
Avon Books, 1977

Who Owns the Sky? Our Common Assets and the Future of Capitalism

By Peter Barnes
Island Press, 2001

Why the Village Movement?

By J.C. Kumarappa
Bhargava Bhushan Press, 1960

World Economy

By Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972

Other Resources

For a brief history of new economic thought, visit our Timeline.