The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking

The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking was born of a simple realization: The world we have inherited is no longer working.

The future of the planet and civilization as we know it are threatened, and the cries heard during the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests—“I can’t breathe”—continue to echo. By giving us tools for navigating the transitions ahead, this catalog helps us breathe more deeply.

The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking explains the transformational power of social collaboration by showcasing dozens of pathbreaking projects, books, websites, and activist initiatives. Commoners seek to prioritize people’s needs over market extraction, steward the Earth, relocalize the economy, and build new institutions of empowerment.

The emerging Commonsverse can be seen in relocalized food systems and community land trusts…in racial empowerment through collective action and mutual aid…and in free and open source software, peer production, and platform cooperatives.

Commoning is helping communities to managing scarce water supplies, farmers to develop regenerative agriculture, and artists to reclaim control of their creative lives. Ordinary people are becoming more self-reliant through timebanking and collaborative finance, care collectives and gift economies, and alternative local currencies.       

The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking is an indispensable guide for understanding many profound social transformations now underway. In 25 thematic sections, The Commoner’s Catalog offers a rare collection of tools for navigating the transitions ahead and building a new world. It offers a portrait of the system-change activism that is creating an economics of sufficiency, a politics of fairness, and a culture of belonging.