What ideas, skills, practices, relationships and strategies will build a future economy that ensures the wellbeing of all workers, communities, and ecosystems?
How can community and city move from the pressing needs and pervasive harm we see today to building the structures that will foster an economy in which everyone belongs?
How can solutions be responsive to a particular place while also aligning with global goals for a healthy planet?
Our Future Economy workshops and events focus on these questions and more to support the public in co-creating knowledge, making connections, and sharing resources. This series is part of a larger laboratory integrating arts and cultural strategy with participatory research to create space for radical imagination and community building in this immensely challenging time, to ensure that we are centering the voices, needs, and expertise of those most impacted by both economic and environmental harms.
The realities of concentrated wealth and vast material needs, human-made disasters, and persistent racial and gendered hierarchies continue to generate poverty, trauma, health crises, and displacement. The ongoing existential crisis of who we are as humans - and who we must become to have a viable future - haunts anyone aware of the stakes. The need to reimagine and redesign local, regional, and transnational economies is more pressing than ever.
Our Future Economy is rooted in Richmond and North Richmond, California - and the series is being co-created with community members who live on the fenceline of the fossil fuel economy and on the growing edge of progressive change. Richmond is already transforming itself for a more just and resilient future with polluter-pays tax revenue, a local food system anchored by an urban farm, a new youth commons, city jobs programs, solar energy production, union and community alliances, progressive tax policies, and more. To meet community needs and advance a just transition of the local economy requires new ideas, relationships, structures, and capacities that movements and communities are developing. Arts and cultural strategy is key to developing these and to accessing the seeds of these ideas, relationships, structures, and capacities that are already present in the memories, ancestral lineages, cultural practices, and creative imaginations of Richmond and North Richmond community members.
OBI and local community-based organizations are co-creating workshops for residents to share their visions of the future and explore the co-creation of a more just economy in Richmond and North Richmond, and beyond. Public events are free and open to all, and support the participation of those most harmed and marginalized by the current economy. These events center Richmond and North Richmond organizers, artists, and cultural workers, and include offerings such as live music, dance, applied theater, speakers from the local community, small and large group dialogue, and time to socialize.
The goals of the series are to:
- Amplify Richmond voices, lived experiences, community visions, values, and frameworks, exemplary place-based efforts, and the related plans and policies that can help to facilitate a just transition.
- Facilitate interactive discussion and practices that apply this knowledge to Richmond and generate ideas for projects and initiatives that both meet community needs and transform the economy away from dependence on fossil fuels.
- Hold space through arts and cultural strategy for community members to access radical imagination, reflect on already existing cultural practices, and reclaim ancestral wisdom as they envision a future economy.
- Create much-needed space for coalition building, thought partnering, and resource sharing between our Richmond-based partner organizations.
- Share ideas, examples, goals, and strategies put forth by national and global movements and values-aligned scholar practitioners.
Collaborating organizations have included Cooperation Richmond, East Bay Center for Performing Arts, Full Spectrum Labs, Healthy Richmond, North Richmond CHDC, Richmond Community Foundation, Rising Juntos, RYSE, Safe Return Project, San Francisco Foundation, Sojourner Truth Presbyterian Church, Sustainable Economies Law Center, Urban Habitat, and Urban Tilth.
