The new economy conversation includes many aspirational ideas about transforming capital markets; including changing market structures, governance, metrics and incentives, all to redirect investment away from short-term private profit and toward long term public needs. While these ideas are exciting, the more immediate and prosaic problem faced by those of us who are trying to build a new economy is how to access financing now for innovative economic enterprises.

Affordable access to land is a key component of economic justice. Control over resources empowers communities, and ownership enables the building and recycling of wealth. In this workshop, we explore how shared equity models of ownership for land and buildings can spread the benefits of land access and ownership more broadly and equitably.

Exciting New Economy efforts are brewing across Boston neighborhoods. Hear about projects that are modeling democratic alternatives to "business as usual" and are doing it in relation to Boston's grassroots organizing field. Learn about participatory budgeting, community land trusts, green worker co-ops, youth led urban agriculture and local impact investing. Engage with some of Boston's most innovative activists in large panel and breakout formats.

Recent decades have seen a marked decline in union density in the US and Canada due, in large part, to a combination of increased political attacks on unions and the increased mobility of global capital. This panel will highlight several innovative labor organizing models that offer exciting approaches to meeting the unique challenges of our time. The Freelancers Union is the nation's largest group representing the growing independent workforce.

This session will explore the challenges and opportunities of building an inclusive new economy movement. Historically, race has been a critical dividing factor in the economy as well as social movements. Panelists will discuss strategies for building cross-race solidarity, addressing a highly racialized economy, and recognizing the differing forms of leadership and new economy activity across communities.

A new generation of progressives are taking leadership roles in city economic development. This creates a promising opening to advance initiatives in community wealth building – such as using city policies and anchor institution strategies to support locally and broadly owned enterprises such as cooperatives, community land trusts, employee-owned firms, and municipally owned companies.

The purpose of this panel is to share stories of Urban Food Justice movements around the country and explore opportunities for synergies between systems. Across the food supply chain from production to access, communities of color and low-wealth communities are disproportionately, negatively impacted. Community based organizations, Student Groups, Policy Organizations, and Urban Food Security Networks are working to address rights for farm workers and food service employees, and to increase...

This workshop will focus on sharing stories and inviting insights and reflection from grassroots efforts to bring the new economy to life  at the regional level. Many local grassroots groups working for resilience in the new economy are realizing the need to collaborate across communities and municipalities, and even states, as we need to address regional systems of transport, energy, water, food, and challenges of equity between communities.

The US Government is failing to govern at the most fundamental level, let alone to address challenges like record levels of inequality or climate change. Meanwhile, corporate power grows unchecked: big companies freely violate environmental regulations, receive government bailouts and tax breaks, give dizzying executive pay packages, and write trade, internet, and energy policy. What ails our democracy? And how do we fix it?

The first challenge in building any social movement group is to get diverse and new people in the door, literally and figuratively. Recruitment and retention problems are consistent among both working class and middle class groups, and the one dimensional recruitment and retention techniques account for class homogeneity in most activist groups.

The move toward a more sustainable economy is being driven in part by businesses; large and small. While the voluntary efforts of these companies are essential, we also need public policies (e.g. legislation and regulations) to move us forward. Such policies provide clear market signals to companies about the importance of, among other things, reducing their carbon footprint, green buildings, creating better workplaces, safer chemicals and products and creating a sustainable food system .

This workshop is a space for woman-identified, gender non-conforming, and queer-identified people to connect, communicate, and organize. We will ask questions about the role of gender and sexuality in the new economy, cultivate strategies for coalition, and plan steps for moving forward.

The ‘construction sites’ where the New Economy is being built are found at the messy intersections of a volatile and challenging ‘glocal’ (global and local) context, where diverse actors are engaging in resistance and building actions at multiple scales – local to national to international, and in-between.  In these spaces, local and regional actors are often focused on building alternatives and spreading and scaling proven innovations.

Modern day cooperatives are having an ever-growing impact on our local, regional and national economy and this is not by chance. This session will serve as an introduction to the cooperative business model, its history, principals, and unique sectoral permutations.

In order to build a new economy that puts people and the planet first, it is imperative that we first understand how the American public understands how the economy works and the role of the public sector in ensuring our values as a country. Americans are rightly concerned about our economy — growing inequality, the slow pace of recovery and the lack of dignified jobs.

Over the last five years, we have seen the rise of a far-reaching global movement to dethrone GDP and its corresponding economic model of resource-intensive, distribution-blind, and highly-externalizing market growth. This movement is gaining traction in global institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the OECD; among business leaders particularly in the larger emerging economies; and among political leaders in the United States, particularly at the state level.

A large and growing number of people – primarily women – work as domestic workers in the US, providing care for children, the elderly, and disabled and cleaning homes. This work underpins our whole economy, making all other work possible. Despite the essential importance of this work, domestic workers themselves have historically been underpaid and denied basic labor rights. Some of the most exciting organizing and social innovation happening today is being led by domestic workers.

Free Software means Free as in Freedom. Non-free software is inherently designed to restrict control and access to software for huge profits. For nearly 30 years, the Free Software Movement has sought to fight freedom-restricting non-free software. Now that proprietary technology dominates modern life, using Free/Libre software has become essential to providing access and tools for justice movements.

The proliferation of big box stores and chains in cities and towns across America has led to an economic geography that is considerably less interesting, sustainable, equitable, and democratic than most of us would like, but it doesn't have to be that way.  Over the past decade, The American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA) has built a network of Independent Business Alliances whose work to build strong communities and sustainable local economies has created a significant impact.

From neighborhood tool libraries, to municipal bike shares, to multi-billion dollar online platforms like AirBNB, collaborative consumption is on the rise rapidly. Of course, there's nothing new about sharing but new technologies and cultural trends are making it increasingly easy to substitute access for ownership. The sustainability and community-building benefits of this shift, a departure from the culture of wasteful and isolating post-war consumerism, have been widely lauded.