 Our exchange Portland empowers individuals, organizations, and businesses to help each other meet their needs through cash-free, one-to-one exchanges of services. Recently, our exchange and USM Student Sociology Association sponsored a panel discussing how cooperatives and time banks revalue labor and community. Our first speaker will be Ed Colum. He's a professor of sociology at the University of Southern Maine. And our second speaker will be Heather Blurrsch, who is an alum from our department as well as one of the worker owners here at Local Sprouts. Next we'll have Jonah Furtig, and we'll wrap it up with Orion Breen, who's from our exchange Portland. Grassroots activists have become increasingly creative in building solutions to contemporary social problems. Many of these stem from the shortcomings of two dominant social institutions, the state and the economy. Citizens and post-industrial societies have struggled to maintain an adequate standard of living as poverty, unemployment, and underemployment are persistent and growing problems under global capitalism. Yet as Zach De La Rocha of Rage Against the Machine saying at the eve of the new millennium, hungry people don't stay hungry for long. People have become less reliant upon mainstream social institutions and are creating local alternatives to complement or counter the capitalist economy and state. Policymakers need to be convinced to support these forms of economic democracy. Co-ops and time banks empower participants by giving them voice in the economy and can increase their standard of living. Not only can they immediately serve citizens now, their expansion can help avoid some larger social problems in the future. Thank you. My experience within the food service system seemed that there was always a choice between corporate food service with a clear corporate structure and agenda, which was basically to make money serving poor quality food, or small locally owned companies that often lacked healthcare, sick days, vacation benefits. Seeing my time valued in a new way and focused on learning in addition to teaching. And I think that's really important is that it's one of the things that this cooperative has showed me that I have a lot to learn and not just to teach. We have 17 year old workers that could go to college or go on to different jobs that will be able to put business ownership on their resume. And building that and the integrity of our product here means more to me than making money. How can we create alternatives? How can we create solutions that present a different way of being, a different way of working, of being community than exploited capitalism and the destruction of the environment? Worker co-ops are really a way to bring democracy into the workplace and provide a place where all workers can have a voice. All workers can live and share their values and really work with a conscious where they feel, yeah, this business, I'm a part of this and this represents me. And this is what I want to be doing in this world. When most people talk about the economy, they're talking about half of the economy. There's the market economy that most people are talking about, but economists also have another name for the other half of the economy, which is the non-market economy. The non-fiction economy or real economy or non-market economy, as the economists call it, doesn't do much. All it does is it raises healthy children, it cares for the elderly, it makes safe neighborhoods, it makes democracy work. None of the things that's measured by the GDP so it must not be important. Our exchange Portland is this idea that the most valuable community assets we have are people. The idea that, hey, what if I could mow an elderly woman's lawn and I could get a massage? What if I could help somebody in the garden and in exchange someone could help build me a website? Or what if I could get a ticket to the show and I could help somebody paint their living room? And this is all happening in our exchange Portland. And it's about reciprocity. And reciprocity is this idea, if you do something good for somebody else, it creates a good beyond just that one exchange between two people. It creates a good in the community. Our exchange Portland is one of those things that you can put your time and your energy into. This positive and worker-owned cooperatives are this positive force of democracy, of equality, of reciprocity, of respect, of redefining work, of redefining value, of what is valuable in our communities. You can go to our website, www.ourexchangeportland.org, H-O-U-R, exchangeportland.org. Thank you all so much.