Welcome

Inspired by the New Economy movement (see: NewEconomy.net), we are organizing our community to cultivate local resilience and implement strategies that invest in regional self-sufficiency while disinvesting from corporate extraction and exploitation.

Our Mission:

Cooperation Eugene collaborates with people, organizations, and networks to cultivate a thriving, local regenerative economy.

We envision:

  • A world of local regenerative economies in which people cooperatively produce abundance, value people and the rest of the natural world over profit, and actively steward their bioregions.
  • People empowered to participate actively and creatively in rising to the challenges we face by mobilizing our individual and collective resources.
  • Communities empowered to say “no” to extraction and exploitation. All members, especially those who have been marginalized by the systems we are transcending, are actively engaged and uplifted in governance of the commons.

Lane Service Sharing Network (Time Bank)

We are currently working to create the Lane Service Sharing Network (LSSN), which will be a concrete manifestation of caring community. It will be a way for people to give and receive valuable skills outside the monetary economy along the model of a “neighbors helping neighbors” Time Bank or Hours Exchange.

In this type of system 1 hour always equals 1 hour, no matter the service being exchanged. You give your time and skills to someone in the network and receive time credits which you can then trade to anyone else in the network for a service they provide.

LSSN will allow us to ask the questions, “How can I serve?” and “What do I need?” rather than “Can I afford it?” and “Does it pay enough?”. It gives us a structure to get our needs met through community, even if the economic system crumbles.

Make sure to subscribe to our email newsletter or join our Facebook page to stay up to date as we work toward launching this service! Send us a message if you would like to help create it.

Asset Mapping & Resources Directory

Eugene values the community commons and has a rich history of cooperatives, local food systems, and local culture such as the Oregon Country Fair. Cooperation Eugene is compiling a directory of organizations, resources and other efforts that contribute to the community commons.

We want to support cooperation among these organizations for collective impact and offer resources from the wider New Economy movement to support local development. By mapping the work being done we hope to contribute an analysis of leverage points that can be developed to increase the capacity of the whole.

This searchable directory can be found here. Please let us know if you would like to help!

Future Projects

We have a number of ideas for future projects we would like to pursue. We are also open to proposals. The New Economy movement is ripe with possibility and there are so many great things going on all over the world that serve as inspiration. Here are a few of our ideas:

Community Development Financial Institution – We want to offer people a way to invest their money locally. This may start on a smaller scale of peer to peer lending and/or organized crowd sourcing. We hope to support purchases of land and start-ups of worker cooperatives.

Community Land Trusts – We have already had folks in our community talk to us about how to transform their private property to community assets. Some neighbors want to take land out of the speculative market and develop it for affordable housing. Creative models for this kind of community housing solution are in the works by other Eugene organizations. Let’s collaborate!

Cooperative Enterprise Incubation – There are many creative people in this community that want to put their ideas into action. Let’s build businesses that meet local needs, provide good paying and meaningful work, and give stakeholders ownership.