Dear Colleague,

• Our Learning/Action Lab for Community Wealth Building, developed with the support of the Northwest Area Foundation, gathered May 28-29 on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The Learning/Action Lab brings together five Native American organizations from Minnesota, South Dakota, Oregon, and Washington to develop strategies for their communities that foster ownership of enterprise, increase access to local assets, and create and anchor jobs locally. Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation, one of our hosts on Pine Ridge, and a participant in the Lab, recently released a short documentary film showcasing their work to create jobs and build wealth through the development of a “regenerative community,” which combines ecological sustainability and traditional Lakota values with affordable housing and job training. 

• On May 20, we hosted the National Launch webinar for the Next System Project, moderated by Laura Flanders of GRITtv. We would like to thank Laura and our panelists for the rich dialogue, our co-sponsors for their support, and the Institute for Policy Studies for hosting the event. Read more about the discussion below. We feature webinar panelists Angela Glover Blackwell, founder and CEO of PolicyLink, and Juliet Schor, professor of Sociology at Boston College, in two new videos from the Next System Project. Angela connects the proliferation of police violence to systemic racism and Juliet discusses the imperative to “find a new path that allows us to solve both climate change and economic deprivation.” 

• The Next System Project continues to receive broad press coverage. Waging Nonviolence interviewed Democracy Collaborative Co-Founder Gar Alperovitz on the role of ideology, democratic planning, and the legacy of the Occupy movement. Sustainability media outlet TreeHugger acknowledged the Next System Project for its efforts to develop systemic approaches to address the broad range of sustainability challenges. Research Director Steve Dubb also contributed to this discussion with a piece about the trajectory of the new economy movement in Shelterforce magazine’s Rooflines. In an article for Al Jazeera, Gar discusses the inability of piecemeal policy and regulatory change to address growing economic and ecological problems. He points to the Roosevelt Institute’s most recent report, Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy, written by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, as an important but still partial step in the right direction.

• The Democracy Collaborative is excited to participate in BALLE’s 2015 annual conference in Phoenix, Arizona on June 10-12. Both Research Director Steve Dubb and I will be presenting and we hope you will join us there. Find more information here.