Community Economies in Action – A practice Retreat in Europe

From 11 to 19 July 2023, Bianca, Flora and Kate Rich brought together 30 people for the first Community Economies Practice Retreat to explore how to press forward with ways of enacting postcapitalist worlds. 

 

The Community Economies in Action Practice Retreat brought together practitioners from diverse fields (e.g., agroecology, art and design, urbanism, food transformation, crafts, pedagogy, co-housing) as well
as practice oriented PhD students and researchers with a participatory, activist approach.

 

Participants learned from each other, mobilise situated knowledge,
and shared the beauties and blind spots of their projects, initiatives and research. They forged new alliances, and explored ways of doing, feeling and knowing that value collectivity and interdependence.

 

The Retreat took place in the Lagarina valley in the Italian Alps,
a place ridden with opportunities and tensions around how local livelihoods are sustained. By engaging with key concepts and tools associated with community economies work it provided a forum for stimulating discussions and debates around the following questions:

 

How do our practices contribute to the exciting proliferation
of economic experimentation and commons?

 

How can we experiment with community economies friendly rituals,
habits and ways of doing in our daily modes of organizing our work
and livelihoods – including potentially tricky areas like money and administration?

 

What practices do we use to activate community economies, what theories do we draw on, and what hurdles and possibilities emerge
from these theory- practice interweavings?

 

The Retreat was designed as a flexible, lively and partly emergent programme of activities and encounters in which participants’ practices took a central role. It was offered by the Community Economies Institute.

Flora Mammana 

 

To share some of the thinking produced during the Retreat, on the last day the group collectiveley produced a zine, which you can dowload here: Zine_PracticeRetreat_2023_07_digital.pdf

 

    

 

 

And here you can tune into the music we danced to during the retreat:
Our Community Economies in Action playlist

 

      

Photo credit: Johannes Reisigl