Tickets for the Festival of Commoning are now on sale.

Festival website

More on the Commons Economy and Commoning

Stroud Commons

Dil Green of Mutual Credit Services explains more:

The Festival of Commoning is live!

The energy and commitment and creativity of the work in Stroud around Commons, the way the word Commons catches people, feels positive, potential, sparked an idea late last year – that we should try to stage a Festival.

As soon as the idea was in the air, it began to grow.

But there was a problem. None of us were Festival organisers – how would we? How even could we? But, looong story short, WE ARE LIVE!

The Festival of Commoning

Will take place in Stroud, Gloucestershire, September 13 and 14

AND WE WOULD LOVE YOU TO BE THERE!

(and your favourite community project, and your friends – please do share this around!)

Two days, and a fantastic line-up, including:

Friday 13th with a more conference-y vibe around community projects and the people that make them thrive, a Ceilidh and acoustic party, and a contemporary art/music/dance night,

Saturday 14th more public, with talks, exhibitions, workshops, author events, and the fantastic Mark Thomas heading the bill as we stage the Comedy of the Commons.

Who is the Festival for?

It’s for everyone! 

Commons – in the sense of the basics of life – is where we all live. 

Making it better, locally controlled, for the benefit of local people, on the basis of a healthy local environment is the work of Commoning

If any of this makes sense to you, the Festival will have much to offer; inspiring projects, committed and caring practitioners, engaging workshops, authors and thinkers, music, dance, comedy, arts. 

All in the beautiful and inspiring town of Stroud (birthplace of XR, among many other things).

We’ve made the tickets as cheap as we dare, and we have a little money for bursaries for community groups, if your group is strapped for cash (get in touch here to apply). PLEASE, DO COME ALONG!

A little more about the Festival

Getting here has been quite a journey (to use a tired cliché). To be honest, it wasn’t even that much of a ‘we’ at the beginning – the idea was popular, but everyone was busy on more core projects.

That’s exactly the reason we need a Festival, though – because local projects tend to be so busy addressing the enormous issues each of them takes on, always with stretched resources, that they have little time to connect, to learn, to share. Something big and shiny, like a Festival is needed to bring people together, and, perhaps, just perhaps, seed a movement of Commoning.

That’s right ‘Commoning’. A Festival of Commoning, not of ‘the Commons’. Why?

For a few reasons; first, because the word Commons brings up all sorts of ideas (including the false story with the label ‘tragedy’), second, and perhaps more importantly, because not everyone who is working in community, on community infrastructure, is calling themselves a Commons. We don’t want to try and define the word, and we don’t want to label people or projects but we do want to be able to talk about the work that all these project do, and so we call that ‘Commoning’.

So I’d like to propose a working definition:

Commoning 

From Middle English comoner, comyner, cumuner, equivalent to common +‎ -ing.

Acting, together with others, to develop, sustain and augment any kind of resource to which all have some access, and all have some stake in.  

Why a ‘movement’?

There are, already, large numbers of projects which the word commoning would apply to – all over the country, all over the world. It’s the most natural thing in the world for humans to do – to group together to improve the shared conditions of their lives.

This doesn’t need a movement – people just do it.

But we have to recognise that, all across the world, the extractive economy is dismantling these efforts, undermining them, reducing the amount of time and resources available to them. Why? Because they don’t provide profits. Simple as that. Capitalism doesn’t have an evil plan to delete community, but it does have a financial driver to do so. And a power driver, too – community is always the basis of successful resistance to extraction.

This means that, if we leave Commoning efforts to themselves, we will see them continually hollowed out, diminished, weakened, defunded, privatised, stagnating. And, just as bad, we will see the willingness of people to contribute to such work taken advantage of again and again, and those who are lynch-pins of communal efforts forced to overcommit, and often then burning out.

This is what animates the groups around Stroud Commons – the idea that, if we can bring in some new tools, around finance and governance and engagement, we can build a Commoning movement that can work together to bring financial viability, resilience and vigour. So that projects can pay key workers, can meet ambitious aims, can foster new and even more ambitious projects.

And there’s another reason, too – which is what Lowimpact is all about – bringing people together in what I call ‘material interdependence’ is the best possible preparation for the multiple impacts of the ‘Omni-crisis’. Weather, economy, water, food, housing, biodiversity – all these are in crisis, with increasing turbulence building.

Commoning – working together with others, building shared access to the basics of life – is the best way to build capacity for all of this.

So, please, do come to the Festival, and tell your friends and your community groups, too! We look forward to welcoming you to Stroud, and to the amazing connections which are already guaranteed.