 Good afternoon. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Wow, what a day. Thank you so much for the setup, Erinche. I hope to be able to deliver on that. So we've been hearing so many great things, important challenges, new ideas. We just heard about social enterprise. We've been talking about democracy, ownership, alternative models of ownership. We've been talking about power. And so I'll be talking about a lot of those things too. So it'll sound familiar. I hope not redundant. And my hope is to try and pull some of these things together and give you some inspiration and some direction for where we're headed. So first, a little bit about myself. My name is Sarah McKinley. And I work for the Democracy Collaborative, a US-based think and do tank that advances models and visions for new economic systems. But so why am I a privileged white woman from the United States, one of the richest countries supposedly in the history of the world, standing here on stage talking about economic system change? So I grew up in a diplomatic family. I spent four years of my young life living in Haiti. And these were very formative years of my life. And though I was too young to really understand what I was seeing or what I was experiencing, even my seven-year-old self was struck by the extreme poverty and both human and ecological degradation that I saw all around me. So on the weekends, my father would take us for hikes through the countryside. And we'd run into villages and people and families like this. And at that time, I didn't understand why I was able to have so much. And I'm not just talking material things. I'm talking about hope, security, a sense of a future. When a young family like this, young Haitians my own age, didn't have any sense of that or any sense that they would even live much longer than their parents currently were. So fast forward, 15 years, and I'm a young university graduate living in Chicago. And I began working for a community development corporation on the south side of the city in a neighborhood where Martin Luther King came and began his tour about economic inequality and was stoned by white supremacists in this community. But now this neighborhood is a predominantly black community ravished by disinvestment, redlining, and decades of deindustrialization and racist practices. Against all odds, the organization I worked for, however, was fighting to create good jobs and build affordable homes, develop social enterprises like we were just hearing about. But they could only get so far before hitting up against the realities of systemic inequality and the regulation and legislation system designed to grow wealth for a few people and hope that it trickles down to the benefits of communities like West Englewood. So you've heard about the war on poverty in the United States. And I'm sorry to tell you that poverty won that war. Doesn't have to be that way, however. And that's why I'm here. And that's why I'm working at a place like the Democracy Collaborative to try and address the systemic failures that make it so that organizations like the one I was working for on the south side of Chicago can actually develop sustainable solutions for their communities. So let's talk about the economic system. We've really been talking about it all day. Everybody in this room knows what's wrong. We feel it, we see it, it affects our lives, it affects our communities. And we've been hearing very strongly this morning about sort of the outcomes of this. We heard it from Claire, we heard it from Miata, right? Quite literally, in short, quite literally, the world is on fire. Look at California, this is California right now in Australia. We're facing climate collapse. The far right is on the rise in Eastern Europe, in Turkey, in Brazil, and yes, very much here in the UK and in the US. Wealth inequality is at actual levels that we've not seen since the Gilden Age. And in fact, some of it's worse than was happening in the 1920s and 30s here. But these are consequences of a system designed to extract wealth and resources from our communities to benefit an elite few at the expense of the rest of us. This is a design that makes it so that places like Haiti are collapsing while the city of London and finance capital are consuming. But against this backdrop of doom and gloom that feels so disempowering and so heavy, there are real solutions and they're out there. System change may sound abstract, but it's already taken place in thousands of different ways and different communities in this country, in my country, and around the world. All we really lack is imagination. We have the models, we have the approaches, we have the solutions. Imagine if you will, a system that produces positive outcomes. Regeneration, good health, hell, maybe even happiness, just by its natural functioning and design. So the key to unlocking all of this is the age-old central question of political economy. Who owns and controls capital and resources? That's the question that's been asked by everyone from Adam Smith, to Karl Marx, to Piketty and beyond. And it's in this old question that we are now finding new answers that we need. What we've been hearing, what we've been building to today in our conversations, we need a revolution in ownership. We've spent too long, as we were just saying, trying to clean up around the edges of a dysfunctional system that places extraordinary power in the hands of a few. We can't have a system that's half plutocratic and half democratic. We see this already. Our plutocratic economy is eating our democratic politics. So we must take democracy outside of just the political realm. We have to democratize our economy. But the good news is, that's already happening. We've already heard about social enterprises. I know many of you already know about cooperatives. They're probably engaged with them. But what about community land trusts? Different forms of employee ownership. On the employee-owned cooperatives, but they're also employee stock ownership funds, inclusive ownership funds, mutual banks, community-owned banks, community-owned energy, different forms of democratic municipal and public enterprise. Today, more Americans own a share in their companies than our members of private sector unions. One in three are members of any form of cooperative, agricultural or otherwise. A quarter of Americans get electricity now from public utilities or cooperatives. And even in conservative states like Texas and Alabama, sovereign wealth funds are being used to help provide goods and services that are so needed to the people living there. These are things that are happening in communities across the political spectrum. And they're showing that new models of ownership work and make a difference. At the Democracy Collaborative, we call this community wealth building. And community wealth building is where our next political economic system begins. So if all of this sounds like a heavy lift and abstract and in the distance and not something that we can tackle, it's actually the work of ordinary people bringing about change in their communities, as is usually the case, right? As I know you know. So let me introduce you to three very different people in very different contexts doing this work and making change in their community. First, meet Chris Brown. Chris lives in Cleveland, Ohio, a post-industrial city in the Midwest of the US that has lost 50% of its population since the 1960s and has an unemployment rate of about 25%. It's now one of America's poorest cities and second only to Detroit. So growing up in Cleveland's African-American neighborhood, which is very segregated, very separate from the suburbs, which are fairly affluent and white. Chris was a one-time drug dealer and he served time in prison. Today, however, Chris is an employee owner at the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, the most ecologically advanced industrial laundry in the Midwest, supplying goods and services directly to the large institutions rooted in the community, like the Cleveland Clinic Hospitals and Case Western University. Evergreen is owned by its employees, the vast majority of whom are, like Chris, returning citizens from the prison system and unemployable in most companies in the United States. But this is employee ownership with a twist. Like Armin was talking about just before lunch, there's also a golden share at the Evergreen Cooperatives owned by a community corporation that prevents the companies from ever being sold without the permission of a community vote. And this is by design. This was built in to the functioning. Chris, he now earns a living wage, receives a share of the profits from the company, can access a home ownership program that helps him to buy a house in his community right next to the cooperatives and is also an acting supervisor of the plant. But if this sounds like it's just a sort of small-scale solution, just this past summer Evergreen actually beat out Sodexo, a large multinational corporation, I'm sure many of you have heard of, for the full laundry contract from the Cleveland Clinic Hospitals. As they did that, they were able to actually buy out the Sodexo plant. They bought the Sodexo plant in Cleveland. And exactly, thank you. And now every single one of those employees who used to be employed by Sodexo now have a living wage, which was a large raise for almost every single one of those employees and are in a fast track to owning a share of that company as well. Not a single job was lost, right? The only thing that was lost in this was a little bit of Sodexo's profits. God help us. So, next let me introduce you to Kay, Kay Johnson. Kay, all right, good, we've got some fans here. Kay grew up in a small farm in Lancashire just outside of Preston, which as I'm sure many of you know is a small post-industrial city in the North, that has really struggled to revive its downtown and develop its downtown in its post-industrial period. Kay spent most of her career as a nutritionist and a chef and has always been involved in local food systems and a sustainable food system. So, she really wanted to be involved in her hometown and making a difference. So, when the city of Preston started to shift its institutional spending intentionally to support local enterprise development and to relocalize their economy, she really wanted to get involved. So, she started a local food cooperative called the Larder in a city-owned building where they cater to local institutions including to the city government, run a training academy for local farmers and return any profits directly into any communities of need right there in Preston. She is part of a movement in Preston, now known by some as the Preston model, that has seen over 75 million pounds return to the local economy and over 4,000 jobs created right at home in Preston. Once listed as one of the most deprived urban areas in Cleveland, now for the second year in a row, Pricewaterhouse Cooper has rated Preston the most improved city in England. So, no results. Finally, let me introduce you to Nick Tilson. Nick Tilson lives on the Pine Ridge, Lakota Indian Reservation in South Dakota and the Western United States. This is an example that is really close to home to me and really inspires me and that I care deeply about. I've worked with Nick and his colleagues and his community for over five years. Pine Ridge Reservation is one of the poorest places in the Western Hemisphere. Sorry, this is not a very good picture, but you get the sense. It has a life expectancy for an adult male of 48 years of age. Let that sink in. This is the worst life expectancy in the Western Hemisphere short of Haiti. And I lived in Haiti and I saw what that looked like every day and I've been on Pine Ridge and I've seen what it looks like there. It's unacceptable. This is not something that we should let happen anywhere and we certainly can't let this happen within the boundaries of the quote unquote richest economy in the history of the world. Nick knows that, but he also knew the beauty and the strength and the resilience of his community. And one day in prayer circle, he describes the experience of his elders speaking to him and they said to him, how long are you going to let other people decide the future for your children? Are you not a warrior? It's time to stop talking and start doing. Don't come from a place of fear, come from a place of hope. And Nick left that prayer circle and along with his peers began an engaged planning process in the community and they started the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation. And it's leading the development of a regenerative community of housing, cultural space, social enterprise development, recreational and farming and local food systems. All built on indigenous methods and using the greenest and most regenerative practices that we know of today. And as they build this community, they're creating a huge amount of economic activity, but they're realizing that it needs to be connected directly to the benefit of the community and the young people on the reservation. So they've launched a training program that upskills young people in these new construction methods and have opened an employee-owned construction company that builds this community from the ground up. But they'll also be developing a wastewater management company, a property management company, a food growth and distribution company all built on these methods and these practices to really benefit the community. So what ties these three stories together? It's the way in which these ordinary people in their community are transforming the basic institutions of their local economy to make them more democratic, more humane and more sustainable. Like Nick on Pine Ridge, we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. Much of this isn't new. These are old forms, but we're bringing them to bear in new settings with new, as new solutions to our growing challenges. Take cooperatives. Humans have been cooperating to meet their basic needs for all of history. But if you build an employee-owned cooperative built on the principles of one person, one boat, not only will the workers share directly in the profits of the enterprise, but they can democratically engage in its operations as well. Anchor institutions like hospitals, universities and local government have long been the centers of most communities, employing and purchasing the most goods in those communities. But instead of buying goods and services from large multi-nationals like Sodexo, as you saw the Cleveland Clinic used to do, whose profits go straight to stockholders and Wall Street and have nothing to do with the community where they reside, institutions can keep wealth circulating locally in their communities by contracting with local enterprises and local community-owned cooperatives. And instead of privatizing our common assets like water, electricity, transportation, communities are at data and they're all sorts of things that communities are exploring new models of, democratic, municipal and public ownership, just like right here in England with Robert Hood Energy. We create these systems, we can change them. Like Nick heard, are we too not warriors? Warriors and service to our communities and to a new democratic economy because as we've seen today, the stakes couldn't be higher. We need a broad popular movement of progressive businesses, activists, community organizers and others pushing these alternatives at scale and replication because if we don't find solutions, others will and they are and they're much darker solutions. We see it every day. Climate change and economic crisis are bringing us all together in a shared common fate but it doesn't have to be that way. We don't have to capitulate to the politics of fear and hate. We know what's on the other side of this hill. We know what our next economy should look like. We've seen examples of it today. Plural, democratic forms of enterprise that allow us to take back control of our local and national economies to create the world that we want to see. I hope all of you will take up this challenge. I know many of you already are and I know it can be very isolating so we need to come together. Building this democratic economy and this next system together. We can buy local food, work to municipalize our local energy systems, move our money to ethical and cooperative banks. If you're an entrepreneur, think about selling a portion or all of your company to your employees or you can practice open book management, participatory budgeting. If you work for a local public sector institution like the NHS or your city authority, push them to think about where and how they're purchasing goods and services. I want to conclude, especially after all we've heard today, talking a little bit about politics. It's really easy to look at this broken system of ours and arrive at an anti-politics, to not want to engage with the politics of the moment. But this is really dangerous, especially against our limited time horizons. One of the most exciting things we've actually seen in the past few years and if you'd asked me this two years ago, I wouldn't have thought it was possible. But it's the flood of ordinary people taking on our politics, taking back control, starting to make the change that we need in our political system. People like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, right? She's now a celebrity but she was a normal person living in the Bronx and she saw that politics were her lever of change. This is our lever of change. This is our moment. So we need to be change warriors for a new economy, just like Nick. So let me leave you with the words of Seamus Heaney. History says don't hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime, the longed for tide of justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme again. Now is our time in history. Let's not blow it.