Do we have to live in a world of competing suppliers to attract clients?

This post is also available in: Català (Catalan) Español (Spanish)

We can find models that could serve to strengthen the community fabric in the face of the crises of the capitalism, and don’t have to use business models that divide us between clients and suppliers.

We published an article about the Commons Sustainability Model, a counter-model for working on projects that have the community and its self-organization at the center, in the Catalan medium Critic. It has been translated it into English.

Mònica Garriga and David Gómez
Translated into English by: Pelin Dogan. Col·lectivat.cat

The aggressiveness of extractivist capitalism has made all strata of life permeable, giving rise to ecological emergence, job precariousness, and the threat of a systemic collapse. One of the ways to counteract this impact is the creating and strengthening community structures from self-organization and self-management that would allow people and ecosystems to be sustained with cooperation and solidarity.

When we want to create new community structures, we systematically come across tools and methodologies to promote entrepreneurship, designed with the perspective of the capitalist market, such as the well-known Business Model Canvas, which reduces business in a single sheet schema with nine separate modules between the clients’ side and the supplier company’s side. These tools promote an economic model based on the maximization of profit, competition between projects, individualization of work and growth of consumption; which are the strategies that do not serve us, because they are the ones that lead to the very collapse that we want to avoid.

Are there other conceptual and methodological tools to work on projects in which the community and its self-organization are at the centre, instead of the transaction and the profit?

Several variants of Business Model Canvas have been created, among which are the different versions of the Social Canvas or Social Business Model Canvas. These versions add “mission” or “purpose of transformation” and “social impact” to the existing modules of this model. They differentiate between “social value” and “customer value”, and between “beneficiaries” (who receives the product or service) and “clients” (who pays for them). But the logic of the binary division between “the supplier” and “the clientele” remains. Either we are given an active role as entrepreneurs (often self-employed without the rights of workers or worker-shareholders of a startup seeking to be bought) or we must be passive as receiving clients.

The commons sustainability model, a counter-model

At the worker and consumer multi-stakeholder cooperative femProcomuns, we put the commons sustainability model into practice, via support programs, trainings, workshops, and participatory sessions in Catalonia. The model and its methodologies have been applied to dozens of existing initiatives to rethink them, strengthen them, and delve into their community dimension. It also served to facilitate and accompany the creation and promotion of new projects that seek to respond to needs and challenges from self-organization.

The model starts from a conception of economy as a way of collectively solving the needs of people (from the commons ground, but also strengthening the social solidarity market and public structures to guarantee fundamental rights). Without forgetting that we are still in a capitalist environment, the model breaks with the binary vision that gives us a role on one side of a border or the other (supplier/client, boss/worker, volunteer/beneficiary), and tries to identify who has which role in different dimensions of the project.

This is why the model works with five interconnected dimensions, which can be explained as five pillars in their graphic representation. The community is at the central pillar, and there are two axes crossing between the pillars of resources and co-production, and the pillars of sharing and co-governance. It is a guide to make a diagnosis of the project, to be able to evaluate what dependencies it has on the capitalist market and how to gradually break free from it in order to build practices more focused on the commons.

Process of definition and elaboration of the model, contributions and uses

The model has been developed while being used in accompanying projects in programmes, workshops, and courses, especially in the Platform Cooperativism Course and in the facilitation of five editions of La Comunificadora support and promotion programme, both in the context of Barcelona Activa (the economic promotion agency of the City of Barcelona); and it was applied to different projects that shared their processes with each other. The starting point was an Open Business Model Canvas that the Free Knowledge Institute had devised to understand free knowledge reference projects.

Members of femProcomuns and LabCoop cooperative, with key contributions from other people and members of projects such as the Dimmons research group, LliureTIC, Coopdevs or Som Mobilitat, had been evolving it to work on the accompanied projects.

The result is the model, and the accompanying visual materials and written manual, published with free and open licenses, understood as a support resource to mobilize a set of methodological, legal, and economic tools, derived from the social sciences, co-creation processes, and the experience accumulated in the commons field over the last decades. They allow us to go further, analyse what is there, and develop the potential of initiatives according to their contexts and environments. By working together with these tools in the same territory or in the same area, actors can deploy new ways to cooperate and better manage the purpose of their projects.

Knowledge transfer

It’s been a while now since femProcomuns has started a transfer process in Catalonia with Transitioning Ecosystem, and outside Catalonia with the Working Group for a Commons Ecosystem, participating with Remix the Commons (France), Solidarius (Italy), B. A. Balex (France), and Projet Collectif (Quebec).

Transitioning Ecosystem

In 2022, with funding from the Generalitat de Catalunya (The Catalan Government), femProcomuns wanted to put a commons view on the Catalan agenda on different key aspects of the economy and the society, through the Transitioning Ecosystem. The project consisted in identifying entities, organizations, and institutions with shared sensitivities, through a mapping and survey process, and co-organizing eight thematic sessions with them.

We saw the energy, and local energy communities, at Espai Tarragona Impulsa, in Tarragona; analysed the methodologies of the commons, at Ateneu Coma Cros, in Salt; studied the role of volunteering, at Can Fugarolas, in Mataró; talked about the territory, at the Casal La Llavor, in El Prat de Llobregat; examined the housing, at Núria Social, in Olot; addressed the care, at Casa Flors Sirera, in Manresa; the food, in the Espai Pomezia, in Hospitalet de Llobregat; and the water, in Olesa de Montserrat.

More than fifty projects participated in sessions, which have been analysed with the commons sustainability model canvas, in order to understand their operating keys and to identify challenges and valuable aspects to be maintained or lacking aspects to be solved. In each session, shared elements between projects were detected and made visible, as well as the need to join forces and find ways to work together in each sector or theme. And a descriptive report of the session was prepared and openly published.

We highlight one participant from each sector: Solbrai, the energy community of Pinell de Brai; Can Fugarolas, a workshop on social and sustainable repairs in Mataró; Salvem l’Olla del Rei, platform for the protection of an important natural area for the diversity of Castelldefels; Can Tonal, in Vallbona, a social and community project in Baix Montseny; Cuidem Lluçanès, a care cooperative; Súper Coopera, the solidarity and cooperative supermarket of Sabadell; and Comunitat Minera Olesana, the water supply cooperative of Olesa.

Working Group for a Commons Ecosystem

If the local dimension is paramount for community projects, their network with initiatives elsewhere in the world is crucial to make systemic change possible. For years, at femProcomuns, we have been trying to network, seek synergies and find ways to do things in common. We found these spaces in the commons confluence of the World Social Forum on Transformative Economies (WSFTE) in 2019, the CommonsCamp of Marseille 2020, the online meetings of Common Horizons in 2021. A confluence that was already inherited from the work done in other environments, the European Commons Assembly, the Procomuns Collaborative Economies Days, organized by Dimmons in Barcelona in 2016 and 2017, and by many other initiatives that would be impossible to list here.

Now, within the framework of the Working Group for a Commons Ecosystem, internal trainings have been held on the commons sustainability model, it has begun to be applied in projects, and workshops have been held in La Chapelle neighbourhood (Paris).

An international session was also held online on 4th of October, where several projects were presented around the methodologies of the commons and a meeting on 14th and 15th of November, in Mondeggi, the community of Tuscany (Italy) that links the rural experience of a “commons farm” with the surrounding urban ecosystem.

There were projects like the participants of Transitioning Ecosystem that are inspired by the commoning forms that often arise in emergencies or disasters. History tells us that some traditional commons were eradicated in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries with the closure of fields or the Spanish confiscations, and gave way to capitalist accumulation and the Industrial Revolution, and that this eradication or marginalisation of the commons spread to the new territories that the European empires and emerging states were colonising.

This process is not over. To this day, the commons self-management models are being closed down or privatised through mining, agricultural deforestation or technological giants. But the commons, resources, and processes (the collective wealth, of nature, civil infrastructure, cultural works, traditions, knowledge…) are around us, and to preserve them (from a social and environmental perspective), today we seek answers (as our ancestors did) in the self-organization of people, in grass-roots organizations and in the revitalization and reinvention of cooperativism, as proposed by the open cooperativism.

Changing the tools to change the state of things

Civil rights activist Audre Lorde said that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” This statement is valid for many contexts (organizational tools, technological tools, economic tools…), it is also valid for the methodological tools we use to think and rethink transformative projects. The hacker movement has taught us to appropriate and subvert the “master’s tools”. However, in order to do this, we need to understand well how they work as socio-economic modellers, and turn them around to obtain other models.

The commons sustainability model is a contribution to make this possible. It is an effort to have alternative tools and also to leave them open and transform them, if necessary, through trial-and-error or by applying them to different contexts. This model is not the only tool, rather a complementary one to the others proposed by transformative community practices.