{"id":4833,"date":"2022-12-16T14:34:59","date_gmt":"2022-12-16T12:34:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/?p=4833"},"modified":"2023-01-31T15:37:36","modified_gmt":"2023-01-31T13:37:36","slug":"facing-the-common-challenges-of-life-from-collective-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/en\/facing-the-common-challenges-of-life-from-collective-management\/","title":{"rendered":"Facing the common challenges of life from collective management"},"content":{"rendered":"

Read the article published by the Catalan medium, Cr\u00edtic<\/a>, about the Transitioning Cooperative Activity Group, in femProcomuns, which wants to contribute to working and collectively managing the economy, culture and society. It has been translated into English.<\/p>\n

Ignasi Franch. Cr\u00edtic
\nTranslated into English by: Pelin Dogan. Col\u00b7lectivat.cat<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The cooperative Societat Minera Olesana, the energy community Solbrai or the group that inhabits Can Tonal, in Vallbona, are several initiatives that organize their governance collectively.<\/h4>\n
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femProcomuns team and participants in the session of Transitioning Ecosystem on October 20, 2022 in Lleialtat Santsenca \/ A. Rial \u2013 FEMPROCOMUNS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The capitalism of scarcity and crises continues to recommend finding individual solutions to structural problems. But the magnitude of challenges, like the global warming, recommends that we should rethink our way of life and that we should do it collectively. Worker and consumer multi-stakeholder cooperative femProcomuns puts its grain of sand in this sense with the work they do with Transitioning Cooperativized Activity Group<\/a> (GAC Transitant, in Catalan), which wants to contribute to work and manage economy, culture, and society collectively. The initiative began to implement it in essential areas such as energy, water management or the persistent housing problem.<\/p>\n

The first step in understanding how to work collectively is to know that, for there to be a commons, a community should take care of a resource and set some rules regarding how to do it<\/strong>. This resource will not be under the exclusive control and use of any particular person. Some of these resources are obvious, such as water, even though the commodification of the world has resulted in privatizations of all kinds of natural resources. For David Gomez, a member of femProcomuns, the terminology is not the most important thing: \u201cThere are community solutions that are commoning, but they are not necessarily called or identified as such. It is the people in the academy who give a name to things.\u201d According to M\u00f2nica Garriga, also a member of femProcomuns, \u201cthere are many definitions of what commons are, but above all they are ways of doing things. The commoning begins in the kitchen of each household and does not necessarily have to be linked to a political model.\u201d<\/p>\n

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for there to be a commons, a community should take care of a resource and set some rules regarding how to do it<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Why go for the commons? Garriga considers that \u201cit becomes increasingly necessary not to depend on the capitalist market because we already know where it takes us. To tragic situations of climate, economic, social crisis… That\u2019s why we have to look for models where we work together to self-organize. We must work with public administrations by means of agreements, pacts, and conventions, but through our organizational capacity.\u201d This was the leitmotif that drove Transitioning to work in initiatives like La Comunificadora<\/strong>, a Barcelona Activa programme working as an incubator for social economy initiatives. With that experience in hand, the organization fostered the Transitioning Ecosystem project, through which it called different people and different entities that could share a certain sensitivity around the same topic to start working on the organization and decision-making in a common way.<\/p>\n

Water, a scarce good that can be managed in another way<\/h3>\n

How can we manage an essential and scarce good like water so that it is a collective and democratic management? One of the entities that participated in the Transitioning sessions was Comunitat Minera Olesana<\/strong>, a company with more than 150 years of history, established as a cooperative in the 90s, that provides for Olesa de Montserrat. It maintains relations with local suppliers, some of which are cooperatives. It has an intercooperation relationship with these cooperatives and they formed a second-degree cooperative (Aigua.coop). The increase in the cost of energy has resulted in Comunitat Minera Olesana installing photovoltaic panels.<\/p>\n

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Comunitat Minera Olesana has more than 10,000 members, they created the Consumers Board that acts as liaison with the Board of Directors<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The entity takes on the challenge of tackling energy poverty by ensuring that no one is cut off from water<\/strong>, with a social fund, and the challenge of encouraging participation: there are more than 10,000 members, but about 80 or 100 attend the assemblies. For this reason, they created the Consumers Board, a body that acts as a liaison between the Assembly and the Board of Directors. Joan Ar\u00e9valo i Vil\u00e0, President of the company, says that \u201cit was very enriching to pool water management, to work on its potential for shared social empowerment with other common goods objectives and to promote intercooperation.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Joan Ar\u00e9valo explaining the model of Comunitat Minera Olesana | Water collection and treatment facilities of Comunitat Minera Olesana by the river Llobregat \/ M. GARRIGA \u2013 D. G\u00d3MEZ \u2013 FEMPROCOMUNS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Facing the energy crisis as a community<\/h3>\n

The City Council of Pinell de Brai<\/a> was among the participants of the working group on energy \u2014how it is produced, transported, transformed and used contributes to shaping the type of society and its relationship with the natural environment. The Council, together with the cooperative Azimut 360 and the environmental group GEPEC, drives the cooperative energy community Solbrai<\/a>. The goal is to install photovoltaic panels in various spaces, from the municipal sports centre to private properties, to aspire to energy self-sufficiency and to escape the aggressive model of large wind power generation facilities.<\/p>\n

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PInell de Brai energy community wants the municipal brigade to undertake the maintenance of the facilites.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The mayor of Pinell de Brai, Eva Amposta, says that joint spaces for reflection such as the one promoted by Transitioning allow you to \u201cquestion and improve everything you are doing; and to get out of the mental framework that we have internalized, in which we are energy consumers and we do not consider any other aspect\u201d. Created in Pinell de Brai, Solbrai energy community seeks activity generation in their town.<\/strong> Azimut 360 will carry out trainings so that the maintenance of the facilities is undertaken by local professionals, or, if necessary, by the municipal brigade. The plan is to pool services with other cooperatives. G\u00f3mez, from femProcomuns, highlights entity’s community governance: the City Council will only have one vote in the Assembly. Amposta considers that Transitioning debates have strengthened the idea of proposing \u201can initiative with a total citizen participation nature, disentangled from the models where a single figure can end up controlling the projects\u201d.<\/p>\n

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Albert Calomarde, from Azimut360 cooperative, explaining the model of Solbrai cooperative local energy community | One of the tables of group work at the session \u201cTransitioning Ecosystem: the energy, a commons\u201d \/ M. GARRIGA \u2013 D. JACOVKIS \u2013 FEMPROCOMUNS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Having a home, much more than an individual right<\/h3>\n

Within the Transitioning Ecosystem, work sessions on housing were held, too. Despite being essential for decent living conditions, it is not included as a fundamental right. Thus, self-managed community initiatives are articulated to self-provide housing. Among the participants were members of the community of Can Tonal, in Vallbona<\/strong>, a social project that takes place on an estate that was abandoned, in Baix Montseny. \u201cAbout 70 people share the work, the infrastructure, and the tools. They do a lot of personal growth work. They organize collective work days open to anyone, they work a lot in a self-managed way, they use the gift economy, and they have the idea that everyone contributes according to their possibilities and receives according to their needs,\u201d explains M\u00f2nica Garriga, from femProcomuns.<\/p>\n

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At Can Tonal they look for synergies with other projects that work with the commons to weave complicities<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Participants from Can Tonal highlight that the sessions allowed them to share experiences \u201cwith other projects that work on the commons and also meet very interesting people. They helped us broaden the perspective and realize that many initiatives are being carried out throughout the territory. We may visit some of these initiatives, or we may receive them.\u201d At Transitioning they came together, for example, with the supermarket for vulnerable people developed around the Plataforma d’Afectats per la Hipoteca<\/strong> (PAH; Platform for People Affected by Mortgages) and Sabadell Crisis<\/strong>, which matches the answers to housing problems with problems of access to food. In Can Tonal they consider that the commons can serve as a \u201clink between projects apparently from different fields\u201d<\/strong>. And they express that it is interesting \u201cto weave a revolutionary strategy that would go beyond the State, patriarchy, and capitalism, since it is the only realistic way to be able to have a society based on the commons.<\/p>\n

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\u201dSindara Moreno explaining the experience of Can Tonal | Can Tonal explained according to the sustainability model of the commons \/ M. GARRIGA \u2013 FEMPROCOMUNS<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Community in times of competitiveness<\/h3>\n

The idea to work on ways for more commoning faces a culturally and ideologically adverse climate.<\/strong> Citizens are encouraged to compete, rather than sharing. G\u00f3mez is concerned about this context, which also influences projects that have a certain social and solidarity vocation. \u201cWe work on the community dimension of the projects because we do not see the sense in the start-up model, which is oriented towards many initiatives starting up, competing with each other and only one of them becoming consolidated. It is a whole system that must be dismantled, but it is difficult to enter into the logic of sharing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Garriga believes that the social context will imply changes in the way of organizing: \u201cThe situations of scarcity that we are experiencing can make it easier for us to strengthen the ways of functioning so that we share resources<\/strong>, such as cars, among all.\u201d G\u00f3mez also says that the commons go beyond economic factors, which not only serve to manage a resource in a sustainable way that allows it to remain available for future generations: \u201cThey also mean mutual support, weaving community ties,\u201d he reminds.<\/p>\n

It may be psychologically important to feel less alone, but Garriga dimensions another aspect of community resource management: that the societies in which the knowledge flows are more horizontal and more sovereign. \u201cThe commons also tell us about sharing knowledge so that no individual person is key, or so that we all are. A distributed knowledge allows a distributed governance and, therefore, making of informed decisions<\/strong>.\u201d For G\u00f3mez, both the market model and state management \u201coffer services through professionals framed in a hierarchical structure, and this leaves you in a position of passivity. You do not have to know anything; only receive what is given to you. Distributing knowledge, on the other hand, makes us more resilient societies.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read the article published by the Catalan medium, Cr\u00edtic, about the Transitioning Cooperative Activity Group, in femProcomuns, which wants to contribute to working and collectively managing the economy, culture and society. It has been translated into English. Ignasi Franch. Cr\u00edtic … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4842,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kt_blocks_editor_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[403,40,42,402],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles-en","category-communification-actions","category-events","category-transition"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/article_critic_2_04.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4833"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4851,"href":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4833\/revisions\/4851"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/femprocomuns.coop\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}