STRENGTHENING OTHER ECONOMY(S): Guide for self-managing organizations
We launched a guide that offers steps and tools for self-managed organizations and enterprises to review their internal management processes and implement good practices with a view to achieving economic sustainability, from the sustainability of life approach.
Below, we offer a google translate version of the original article in Spanish. This translation may not be accurate but serves as a general presentation of the article. For more accurate information, please switch to the Spanish version of the website. In addition, feel free to directly contact in English the person mentioned at the bottom of this article with regards to this topic.
The Feminist Economy, together with the Ecological, Popular, Social and Solidarity Economy (the so-called Other economies) allow us to account for the unsustainability of the logics of inequality and looting that characterize the dominant capitalist and heterocis-patriarchal model. Also, it provides us with tools to identify, make visible and strengthen those that are committed to the sustainability of life.
Based on this position, during the year 2021, together with the Latin American Feminist Incubator and with the support of the Heinrich Böll Cono Sur Foundation, we carried out organizational and economic strengthening work aimed at 7 self-managed organizations and ventures from the Other economies of the province of Cordoba.
The goal was to help strengthen various self-managed experiences in our province through the design, implementation and collective evaluation of strategies and tools for economic sustainability. And thus promote the productive and reproductive processes and activities that they carry out and that aim, in a broader sense, at the sustainability of life.
In the different stages of this strengthening process, we used tools for the diagnosis, planning and management of resources (money, goods, services, time, contacts and networks, etc.) that could be adapted to the needs and forms of organization, and be useful for the evaluation and improvement of the management processes of self-managed organizations. Throughout this experience, we not only tested the proposed strategies and tools, but we were also able to identify interests and needs that require attention.
From this place we reaffirm our commitment to the transformation of situations of inequality through the strengthening of the various self-managed experiences made up mostly of femininity and dissidence and that are part of the Other Economies, in this case, providing resources for that purpose.
We have prepared this guide with tools aimed at self-managed spaces in Other Economies, so that they can review their forms of organization and internal management processes in order to achieve economic sustainability from the perspective of a Feminist Economy that is committed to the sustainability of life. . This material is proposed as a second booklet of resources that we have been making since 2020 in order to strengthen practices and reflections on the Other economies.
The guide is a proposal, a working hypothesis, not an imposition or a rigid structure. They are tools made available for each space to discuss, transform and adapt to their own needs.
An integral and sequenced process was thought of, although not necessarily linear. This allows each organization to choose where to start and what steps to follow, to advance in what they consider relevant or more adjusted to their needs.
We hope it will serve you.
More information:
To access the first issue with administrative, tax and legal resources for self-managed organizations, read: Tools for self-management from a perspective of the sustainability of life.
Report “Other economies: self-management from a Life Sustainability perspective”.
Cycle Virtual meetings on Feminist Economy.
Audiovisual short films on Feminist Economy and Self-management.
Contact
Cecilia Bustos Moreschi, cecilia.bustos.moreschi@fundeps.org
