Where Are Our Dream Blueprints?
We're not thinking big enough--so we're not planning big enough.
In a recent call, my friend and colleague in solidarity economy work Julia Martins Rodrigues mentioned the MacArthur Foundation’s “100&Change” program. Here’s a description:
“A competition for a $100 million grant [my emphasis] to fund a single proposal that promises real and measurable progress in solving a critical problem of our time.”
I’d not heard of the program but the size of the award made my eyes water. Julia then asked a fascinating question: “What would we (meaning not just us but practically everybody we know) do with a $100 million?”
The answer, disappointingly, is: we have no idea—or most of us don’t, anyway. In our small universe of worker co-ops, land trusts, CSAs and peoples’ assemblies, only a few of our projects come anywhere near a $1 million budget.
Consider: After more than a century of agitation and some success with worker co-ops, we still have fewer than 1,000 in operation in this country today. The average worker co-op generates less than $500,000 in annual revenue. As a very rough guess, the entire capitalization of the 700-800 worker co-ops in business today is less than $500 million.
Thus for every example of several million dollars in assets represented in a Boston Impact Initiative or East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative, there are thousands of small projects locked in a day-to-day struggle for economic survival.
Back in 2020-2022, I co-edited a newsletter with Julia called Ownership Matters sponsored by Felipe Witchger. By allowing us to do dozens of interviews with practitioners, we got an informal overview of the economic landscape. And I had a number of surprising revelations.
One of them was that, contrary to what I might have imagined, the funding issue for most of our solidarity economy (SE) projects isn’t really due to a lack of interested capital providers. On the contrary, quite a number of the impact investing folks—especially the ones trying to “deploy” what they call catalytic capital—want to support SE work, as I heard on numerous occasions.
The problem is largely about making a fit. Given the amounts of capital these funders work with—i.e., millions of dollars at a time—they need to find SE enterprises that can take in cash amounts at that scale. Looking at an SE project which barely generates $500,000 in annual revenue, they feel it’s impractical to spend time on it.
Here’s an analogy: It’s as though we SE people are all eager to have the big jumbo jets set down at our airports but unfortunately our landing strips are still way too small.
We do have a magical power we can use to change this situation—the same one used in places like Italy or Quebec or South Korea to streamline investment into their SE work.
Quite simply, we can use the power of association and collaboration in order to build ecosystems of support around our enterprises. Across our landscape of “many small utopias”, this is what we sorely lack.
This missing infrastructure can only become real if we plan for it, especially by drawing up our million-dollar dream blueprints and having them ready at short notice.
It’s exactly like the beneficial effects of creating a simple business plan. Just the process of sketching out a vision of transformative change brings it closer to being realized.
If we begin to think on a bigger scale, much could change for us. Instead living like cargo cults wishing and waiting for the big planes to land bringing us trinkets, we can create our own national air freight company, making stops all over the country.
See you next time—peace.
So appreciate this. I'm a big believer in the power of starting small, and building trust and learnings along the way.
Thanks for prompting more good thinking—this time about municipalism in contrast to solidarity economy (SE) projects.
As you know better than I do, municipalism works within existing political structures—city councils, local governments, public budgets—with the aim of decentralizing and democratizing power. Because it operates through institutions already in place, it tends to be seen as more realistic when it comes to policy implementation, voter engagement, and electoral traction. A leading example is Spain's Barcelona en Comú , the citizen platform.
SE projects, by contrast, often seek to bypass market capitalism altogether and slight political investment, building cooperative, commons-based, and non-exploitative systems. While many of these thrive at the local level, they face serious challenges when scaling up or integrating with dominant economic systems. That’s why SE can strike some policymakers—and politically engaged citizens like me—as more idealistic than feasible--granted the slow success of municipalism as well.
I'm just thinking out loud here, but I wonder if SE activists are “thinking big enough” in terms of political reality, not just the scale of their projects. Maybe the missing infrastructure isn’t just financial—it’s political. Legitimacy, influence, and even the dream of creating something like a “national air freight cooperative” with its own airports would depend on that political scaffolding.
I appreciate how seriously you engage these issues. Thanks again.