This week, NEC is starting off the second half of 2015 on stronger grounding than ever with our Annual Meeting and first ever Grantee Gathering in Philadelphia.

While the residents in Northeast Greensboro just wanted to get grocery store, they are doing something much bigger and more important.

Signs of deep economic changes are slowly taking place across the United States, focusing on cooperative/solidarity economics.

We currently face two equally urgent and significant crises: rising inequality and climate change. Rising inequality is not only morally unacceptable; it hinders economic growth. Climate change is occurring at a faster rate than other time in history and is already impacting every part of the country with low-income communities and communities of color getting hit first and most hard.

Reclaiming our Commons requires coming together as a community.

By working together, we can build the next great progressive movement to take back our government and create the kind of just and sustainable economy in which we want to live and work.

Climate change, shifting demographics, and sobering economic realities for a growing number of Americans have sparked increased awareness of the need to re-examine how working class people and communities of color will successfully participate in tomorrow’s economy, the one they will inherit when our nation becomes an ethnic plurality.

In the not-too distant future we can expect to see a rapid increase in structural unemployment as a result of increasing substitution of technology—including sophisticated robots—for human labor. A massive shift to new energy technologies can, in the short run, substitute for many jobs lost in the dirty fuel industries we must, and will, phase out.

We can learn a lot about what it takes to build a new economy by looking into the hidden histories of localism and cooperative economics in our own cities.

In his article entitled “What’s the Role of Race in the New Economy Movement?” author Penn Loh argues that people of color have a foundational role to play in the establishment of a new economy because the very idea of a new economy has arisen from a discontentment with the injustices of the present system, of which people of color have borne a disproportionate share of the burden.