Latest Updates
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Turn It Off And On Again?
If only it were that simple. It never really is, of course. But it’s the idea that this extraordinary moment creates the opportunity to reset our politics that inspired the Reset Reading Group, the first round of which came to a close with our webinar last week. The Reading Group sprang from the idea that,…
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Ideas For A Just Future
One of the fantastic projects that sprung up thanks to this extraordinary moment, and that the Green Institute has been delighted to be involved with, is the Reset Reading Group. Launched by our friends at the Commons Social Change Library, this brought together six of us to curate fortnightly sets of readings around ideas for…
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Sharing, Caring, Co-creating, Co-governing
We had a fabulous conversation last week with Julie Miller Markoff from Bendigo’s bHive and Nat Defriend from London’s Participatory City, taking us through their work to build better, healthier, happier, greener communities from the grassroots up. In the 6th webinar in our Covid Democracy Series “Community-building From Bendigo To London”, we learned about how,…
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Community-building How To
Following last week’s inspiring conversation about cooperatives as a path to democratic economic recovery, next week we have the opportunity to dig a little deeper into how communities can take the lead and just do it for themselves. Join us for a discussion about Community Building from London to Bendigo. I was so inspired, in…
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Talking Cooperatives For A Democratic Covid Recovery
The economic recovery that governments across Australia and the world are mostly planning is all about snapping back to an economy controlled by the few, extracting wealth and value from the many. But that’s not the only way of doing this. We could use this moment to make our economy more democratic, and cooperatives are…
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Sow The Seeds Of Ecological Democracy
As we hit the halfway mark of this most extraordinary, challenging, terrifying and occasionally actually inspiring year, I need to ask for your support. Like everybody else, The Green Institute had to drastically change plans for the last few months, and I’m proud of what we’ve managed to do. Instead of the in-person participatory democracy…
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Cooperative COVID Economic Recovery
As we begin the vital work of economic reconstruction, do we have to leave our democracy at the workplace door? As we seek to create job opportunities for people, does it have to be done by handing wads of cash to big, often heavily polluting, corporations to employ grateful workers? There are, of course, alternatives.…
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Facing Up To Catastrophic Risks
Just as Australia started to lock down, I was privileged to be invited to take part in a full day roundtable conversation on Zoom hosted by the Commission for the Human Future, to discuss the array of immense, in some cases existential risks humanity is bringing upon ourselves, and call for the development of a…
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Agency In A Time Of Ecological Crisis
In this time of intersecting crises, of fire and smoke, pandemic and spiralling economic inequity, with a spotlight being shone on racial injustice and the blatant abuse of power, it’s hard to know what to do that can possibly have a real impact. With Greta Thunberg telling world leaders “you are stealing our future”, with George Floyd…
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Catastrophe, Cooperatives, And Community-building
As we start to emerge from lock-down, thankfully with remarkably low health impacts compared to much of the rest of the world, the economic, social and political impacts of the Covid pandemic will only get more stark. As we’ve already been seeing, the divergent possibilities opened up by this moment, for good and for ill,…
