Rebuild the Dream (32 page)

Additionally, Caring Across Generations brings together aging, disability rights, labor, and family caregivers—groups that have historically been pitting against one another, in one effort to transform care to recognize everyone's human dignity. The campaign is building local committees called “Care Councils” that bring people together across race, generation, and experience to work together to realize this vision. The campaign represents a powerful solution to a number of our most pressing social issues, and a powerful new kind of labor organizing—working in our most intimate spheres—with respect and love at its core. Poo often says, “We are moving at the speed of love.”

Because the work of caregivers touches every American family, this campaign could emerge as the moral core and beating heart of the 99% movement.

With the help of many allies, Rebuild the Dream is helping to coordinate more than one hundred grassroots and national organizations as partners in the fight back. Our allied groups extend from
Moveon.org
to the Center for Community Change, from Faithful America to Planned Parenthood, from the National Domestic Workers Alliance to the Sierra Club and Campaign for America's Future. We christened this new powerhouse the American Dream network. The technological platform that supports the American Dream network is called Rebuild the Dream, which was originally powered by
MoveOn.org
.

On the weekend of July 16, 2011, the American Dream forces hosted 1,597 house meetings—at least one in every congressional district. Attendees totaled more than twenty-five thousand people. As we have discussed, the American Dream network used the best and most popular ideas from the crowd-sourcing process to fashion our very own “Contract for the American Dream.”

During August 2011, the American Dream network worked with the SEIU to support thousands of “Jobs, Not Cuts” rallies, coast to coast. In October, the network joined forces with the Campaign for America's Future and conducted a conference of two thousand people that was called “Take Back the American Dream.” Throughout the fall, it supported the protests inspired by Occupy Wall Street.

In 2012, Rebuild the Dream will help to “electionize” some of the themes from the Contract for the American Dream and from the 99% movement. Our six hundred thousand members will be looking for the best and most appropriate ways to support those candidates and ballot measures that advance the interests of the vast majority of Americans, including making the wealthy pay
higher taxes, purge big money from our political system, and focus on good jobs and infrastructure.

The one development that could best super-charge the power of the 99% movement would be a rebirth of America's labor movement. In 1945, more than one-third of all American workers were union workers. Today just under 12 percent are. Our grandparents respected unions, even when they did not join them. They knew that giving a voice to working folks was key to having an economy that could maximize profit without minimizing people. By forcing employers to bargain fairly with a section of the working class, our grandparents helped to bid up wages and ensure better treatment for all workers. The middle class itself is largely the outcome of the pay raises and benefits that the labor movement fought for so valiantly in the twentieth century.

The labor movement is not perfect; it has had to battle, for instance, racism and sexism within its ranks. And, yet, unions are the backbone of a secure middle class—in the United States and around the world. Labor unions are perhaps the Democratic Party's strongest pillar. They were key to Obama's victory in 2008, and they supported Occupy Wall Street in 2011.

That is why unions are under such furious assault by the forces that back the 1%. Fearing the power of organized labor to counterbalance the power of big money, the 1 Percenters want to defund, de-legitimate, and destroy the heavyweight champions of working families. These attacks met with initial success in the industrial
heartland of this country—in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Indiana. This is cause for alarm.

There are also some signs of hope. Over the past decade, the Service Employees' International Union (SEIU) was reengineered to respond to the many challenges that labor faces. The SEIU and its allies repositioned themselves to spearhead organizing drives for new members and support political campaigns for better policies. Now led by Mary Kay Henry, the SEIU's “Fight for a Fair Economy” and “Justice for Janitors” are examples of innovation and determination within the labor movement.

So is Working America, the creative, community affiliate of the AFL-CIO, which is the United State's largest labor federation. In the words of one of labor's most important leaders, AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka: “The American Dream is not that a few of us will get to be rich, but that all of us will have a fair portion of the good things in life.”

The entire 99% movement should dedicate itself to supporting the labor unions as they fight to survive. Unions have never stopped fighting for the American Dream. And they are one key to a thriving middle class.

Somehow we have forgotten that. But our grandparents never did.

As the 99% movement pulls in more members of the economic casualty groups mentioned above, its composition will include even more people who are bleeding economically and cannot wait for Washington to fix their problems. As they did during the encampment phase, the 99 Percenters must be able to respond to immediate, material needs in the here and now.

As important as the political and policy fights are, we need to open up a new front. The 99% can do more than just lead protests and teach-ins. It can also help people meet their daily needs together. By so doing, it can begin to rebuild and renew the economy from the bottom up—“walking the talk,” and not just demanding that government or corporations fix our economy.

In some ways, this approach may be the only practical response to the inevitable challenges of organizing among people whose lives are in free fall. Many people may not be able to get involved in long-term movement-building unless and until the movement can help them meet some of their basic, material needs. If the movement can devise a strategy to meet this challenge, it may enjoy another round of significant growth.

Part of the Outside Game should be connecting people to some out-of-the-box solutions that will help 99 Percenters earn and save more money, while also building community. Many inspiring and effective approaches are growing out of what is being called “collaborative consumption” in the “shareable economy.” Danielle Sacks wrote about the phenomenon in an April 18, 2011,
Fast Company
article:

The central conceit of collaborative consumption is simple: Access to goods and skills is more important than ownership of them. [Rachel] Botsman [author of one of the main books on the phenomenon,
What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption
] divides this world into three neat buckets: first, product-service systems that facilitate the sharing or renting of a product (i.e., car sharing); second, redistribution markets, which enable the re-ownership of a product (i.e., Craigslist); and third, collaborative lifestyles in which assets and skills can be shared (i.e., coworking spaces). The benefits are
hard to argue—lower costs, less waste, and the creation of global communities with neighborly values.

The earliest of these marketplaces, like Freecycle and Couch-Surfing, encouraged the exchange of goods among peers for free. But the latest sharing platforms are anchored in commerce. They have the potential to amass a new ecosystem of entrepreneurs, just as eBay once aggregated fragmented buyers and sellers into a global online marketplace. Gartner Group researchers estimate that the peer-to-peer financial-lending market will reach $5 billion by 2013. Frost and Sullivan projects that car-sharing revenues in North America alone will hit $3.3 billion by 2016. And Botsman says the consumer peer-to-peer rental market will become a $26 billion sector, and believes the sharing economy, in toto, is a $110 billion-plus market.

The shareable economy is home to some of the economy's most inspiring practices and promising tools. But the shareable economy's share of the total economy is still very small—greatly below its vast potential. The 99% can help to scale and popularize “shareable economy” tools to drive sustainable and collaborative consumption. Hundreds of thousands of 99 Percenters could work together to facilitate innovation, entrepreneurship, and build distribution systems to tackle their economic and financial problems together. They could be encouraged to act together in their own economic self-interest, such as driving Zipcar, shopping at farmers' markets, living in cohousing, buying goods from Etsy, and sharing tools instead of purchasing them.

The shareable economy includes technologies and practices that center on barter, gift, direct exchange, and peer-to-peer loans. These include high-tech solutions such as Kickstarter and Kiva, platforms that support crowd-sourced funding and people-powered finance. It
also includes “high-touch” solutions such as “resilience circles,” which are small, face-to-face support groups. Members of resilience circles help each other meet unmet needs by offering each other their skills, talents, resources, and unused time. Such circles enable people to achieve their American Dreams by helping one another.

There are countless sources of inspiration, from the success of farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture (CSAs) to the peer-to-peer marketplaces like Etsy (for handmade goods), Airbnb (for accommodations), and even peer-to-peer lending services such as Prosper, Lending Club, and Zopa. Through Airbnb, anyone with a spare room can now earn extra money by renting out their space. Through Kiva, the poorest of the poor can now have access to the capital needed to start a small business. Through Culture Kitchen, immigrant women can now earn an income by teaching others to cook in the style of their homeland. Having discovered that the average American uses her or his car just 8 percent of the time, new platforms like Getaround, RelayRides, and Zimride have sprung up to enable the sharing of autos owned by individuals. Some users of RelayRides make enough to offset their car payment each month. The shareable economy has been launched on the resource-full
shareable.net
. The local living economy is championed by Business Alliance of Local Living Economies (BALLE) and its sister organization, the Social Venture Network (SVN).

Cooperative economics can be a cornerstone for building community power. The Movement Vision Lab's Sally Kohn wrote about a successful effort in a June 2011 edition of the
Nation
:

One prime example [of a viable economic alternative model] is the $80 million “community economy” created by the Alliance to Develop Power, in western Massachusetts. ADP is a membership
organization comprising roughly ten thousand mostly low-income African American and Latino leaders. Traditionally, ADP does what most community-organizing groups do—address issues that negatively affect their members, agitate for change and build their base for the next fight. But in its twenty-two-year history, ADP has done things a bit differently. “At the end of every issue campaign, our goal is to create an institution that our members control,” says outgoing executive director Caroline Murray. ADP members don't want to continually fight those who own the economy. “We want to own stuff, too,” says Murray.

It all started with housing. ADP was organizing public housing residents to demand that basic safety and repair standards be met. In 1995 some leaders realized that the law allowed nonprofits to buy federal properties to keep them affordable. Today ADP owns twelve hundred units of housing, structured as tenant-run cooperatives. Meanwhile, in 1997, when going over the budget for its first housing cooperative, ADP member Terry Allen was shocked by the sizable line item for landscaping. “Why don't we mow the lawn ourselves?” he asked. So ADP started a member-run landscaping business, a worker center for immigrant day laborers and several food co-ops. Today, 106 people are employed in ADP's community economy and, perhaps most notably, their economy continued to grow even when the national economy contracted. This year there will be fifteen new jobs for ADP members to fill, weatherizing homes with money secured from the local utility company through an organizing campaign.

There are other smaller, local initiatives that are also promising. In the Boston area, activist Chuck Collins has pioneered Common
Security Clubs, which are small group gatherings focused on learning, mutual aid, and social action. Rather than DIY (do it yourself), this approach might be called DIT (do it together).

We know that the American Dream needs to be reinvented. The emerging shareable economy has the potential to create a new American model—one in which everyday Americans have access to additional sources of revenue, savings, and new career opportunities. Collectively, we could call these shareable solutions: “American Dream 2.0” solutions. The old American Dream promoted individual consumption; the new one could be based on collaborative consumption. Essentially, the shareable economy is about taking an old-fashioned “barn raising,” social approach to the problems that we face, bringing people together to solve problems collectively, as a “nation of neighbors.” By deliberately birthing “friend and favor” economies at the local level, the 99% can help to reinvent the American Dream itself.