<p><strong>What is Economic Activism?</strong></p> <p>At the Portland reading for the 2012 anthology that Reality Sandwich published, one of the questions that was asked was how people can curtail or otherwise control the actions of such companies as Monsanto. My own response to that question and a later one, which asked how we can show people who have different ideologies why it's important to adopt our causes, is that we need to focus on more than overt political activism or subversive activism driven toward sabotaging a company or the ideologies of other people. We need to adopt a plan of economic activism.</p> <p>Economic activism focuses on the idea of using one's wealth to represent one's values. For the purposes of this article wealth is represented in two different ways. The first way is the financial resources, savings, stocks, bonds, etc. that a person has. The second way is the resources a person has such as food, trade skills, networking, and other related every day activities which are used to navigate the maze that is called life. Both approaches of economic activism advocate the necessity of collaboration as a form of social responsibility, where people come together and use the influence of shared values and financial capital to exert positive economic changes in the lives of everyone, as opposed to just a few people.</p> <p>Collaboration is an essential element of economic activism, because for people to have an active and powerful presence in economic situations, they necessarily must work together to create that change. This is no different than social or political activism, except that that the emphasis is on creating change through economic actions.</p> <p><strong>Economic Activism through Financial Resources</strong></p> <p>Economic Activism through financial resources occurs through charities and through socially responsible investing. Monetary donations to charity can fund many different projects and can be effective way of representing your ideology. Certainly it can be abused as is the case where rich people will donate to charities in part to avoid paying as much tax, but a charity does provide a person the opportunity to financially support causes that s/he believes in.</p> <p>The other form of economic activism, which is becoming increasingly popular is socially responsible investments. Socially responsible investments involve investing in companies in order to leverage your influence as an investor and push for social changes which emphasize humanistic values, while also making money in the process. Landier and Nair explain this kind of investing in the following quote:</p> <p>As societies become affluent, they experience a migration of values. As constraints on persons' existence are relaxed as a result of economic growth, there appears to be a shift away from 'materialist' values, emphasizing economic and physical security, and toward 'postmaterialist' values, emphasizing self-expression, and quality of life concerns. (2009, p. 12)</p> <p>Readers will undoubtedly gravitate on the word affluent, arguing that this kind of investing is only done by rich upper middle class people. However, this kind of investing can be done by any of us, provided we have money to invest and a desire to influence companies on relevant social issues, which are reflected in the portfolio choices we make. Socially responsible investing is a form of economic activism because it involves investing our money wisely as a way of making money, but also speaking to the values that we feel need to be expressed in the companies we invest in. And any company, even Monsanto, has to respond to investors, because it is to investors that those companies ultimately rely upon in order to be a viable force on the market. Investors can leverage their influence when it comes to social issues, and if enough investors speak up a company does need to change its policies.</p> <p>All this said, we shouldn't just rely on socially responsible investments as a way of making companies change their policies. Socially responsible investments is just one tool among many that need to be used to change the policies of companies such as Monsanto. The value of public protests and other activities is just as important for making visible economic policies which are detrimental to the planet and to each other. To learn more about socially responsible investing, I recommend reading <em>Investing for Change: Profit from Responsible Investment</em> by Augustin Landier and Vinay B. Nair. &nbsp;</p> <p><strong>Economic Activism as a collaborative use of resources</strong></p> <p>Economic activism can also involve a collaborative sharing of resources. Giving away old clothes and other items to charity is one example of economic activism. Instead of letting those resources go to waste, they are donated to charities where those items can then either be bought at a much lower price or given to people who need clothing or other items, but don't have the money or means to get those items. However, while charities are important and should be supported, there is much more we can do to be economic activists within our community.</p> <p>Learning to share resources and barter services is absolutely essential to do in this economy and occurs when we start to network. Networking isn't just professionals suited up, drinking wine, and exchanging business cards. Networking really involves learning who has what skills and matching those people up with people who need their services. Likewise, good networking can involve bartering services or skills that each person has. By learning who has what skill and creating a relationship with that person you create a community, which supports itself by actively reaching out and helping each other when help is needed. <a href="http://SECPpdx.com">Self-Employed Creative Professionals</a> provides an excellent example of sharing collective resources and bartering of services in order to help self-employed professionals successfully create a support network of preferred providers, a community of fellow creatives, an association that actively connects and creates alliances with other local business organizations, and an approach to advocacy that supports and fights for the rights of the self-employed creative. This is exactly what economic activism is: The mutual collaboration and cooperation of people to insure better economic, political, and social conditions for everyone who participates in the collaboration.</p> <p>Sharing resources is probably the highest form of economic activism. By sharing resources we learn that to recognize that resources aren't infinite and that careful stewardship of those resources really involves working together instead of apart from each other. As an example, creating a community garden not only teaches everyone how to garden, but also teaches people to share the resources and foster a relationship with the environment that is healthier, because each person working in that garden recognizes just how s/he is connected to the Earth as well as to each other. The collaboration involved makes the garden something which is sustained by each person involved in working on it. Each person is invested in that garden, and also to some extent in each other, in order to properly take care of the garden.</p> <p>Another form of economic activism can be found in efforts to create local currency. In Portland, for example, there is the <a href="http://www.cascadiahourexchange.com">Cascadia Hourly Exchange</a> where local currency has been created around the exchange of services, with the aim being to support the local economy through the use of the local currency and barter. When businesses use a local currency they emphasize their own commitment to the health of the local economy, while also supporting each other and making their services a bit more affordable to other people involved in using the local currency. Additionally, local currency promotes creativity in the services that are offered, because the emphasis is ultimately on creating a close community, which uses the currency to support itself as much as possible, without having to rely on the national currency nearly as much as people who are only using the national currency.</p> <p><strong>Conclusion</strong></p> <p>Economic activism starts with us. We can't wait for a federal bailout and we shouldn't wait. Nor should we rely on the myth of the rugged individual and assume we can get survive without anyone's help. If we want to manifest positive changes for everyone, as opposed to just for a few, all of us need to make an active effort to be activists in not only the political or environmental sense of the word, but also as economic activists. We need to learn to use our money to leverage our values onto corporations so that those corporation pursue policies that are more people and Earth friendly. Likewise, we need to actively network and collaborate with each other. Whether it's helping someone find a service that person needs or working together to create a garden or share some other resource, it is up to us to create the communities we want to live in. Learning to use and share our resources wisely can help create a community where we actively work to improve the lives of everyone, and learn to collaborate in a way that promotes humanistic values in our culture and on all levels of society.</p> <p>Landier, Augustin, and Nair, Vinay B. (2009). Investing for Change: Profit from Responsible Investment. Oxford, Oxford University Press.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> 2009-04-10T20:01:17Z 2009-04-11T05:48:26Z -9.1793 454 4110 true 4 14192 economic-activism-a-key-to-collaboration-and-social-responsibility-in-businesses 6 2009-04-11T05:46:30Z 2009-04-11T05:48:26Z

What is economic activism? A call for action using economic influence to improve our communities and take care of the people that make business successful.

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