 As I was listening to the last two speakers, it occurred to me, looking around the room as well, that the way to begin this talk is to say, fellow revolutionaries, I'm delighted to be with you. And I mean that in a very fundamental way. I think we are talking about transforming the largest economy in the history of the world and a world economy that is in great difficulty. There are great economic difficulties, ecological problems. We all know that. I don't know that we all get how deep it is. So I want to talk to you just a bit about something called the New Economy Movement and then give you some ideas about going to scale that are beginning to dawn on people when they face the depth of the problem that we all face. So just to begin, I've been traveling around the country lately and the so-called New Economy Movement includes you all. It includes co-ops, worker-owned companies, land trusts. There are 140 million Americans who are members of co-ops. Most people don't know that. There are 10 million Americans who are members of worker-owned companies, some 11,000 of them. 3,000 more people involved in worker-owned companies than there are members of unions in the private sector. Very strange things going on. And they're beginning to, there are neighborhood corporations, four or five thousand, several thousand social enterprises of various kinds. You folks are more familiar, I'm sure, with the social enterprise movement. But there's a movement of building that cuts across many, many parts of the spectrum and indeed it's calling itself the New Economy Movement for lack of better terms. The thing I think is important about it and why it could be transformative, including the direction that is represented by this cutting edge part of the movement, is it in fact is asking itself, are we up to really what it would take to transform an economic system? Not just doing projects isolated, but projects that build up and begin to ask that big, big question together in a strategic way, not simply a tactical way. So I'm going to come back at the end of this brief talk to talk about a few cities, but let me just give you a hint of what I mean. We've been working, our group, the Democracy Collaborative, Ted Howard is the executive director here in the city of Cleveland. Now it's gone from about 900,000 people to 400,000 people over the last 30 years. Where did all the people go? They disappeared, they were scattered. Something strange is happening when a whole city, we are throwing away cities. Think of not only the human cost, but the capital cost of schools, houses, roads, hospitals, everything in place for that population, and then had to be rebuilt someplace else again at same huge capital cost and also huge carbon cost. Secondly, when you destabilize whole cities and throw them away, and this is part of what's being addressed at this other level, you cannot do serious sustainability planning. You can't do mass transit planning and you can't do high density housing planning. And it's hard even to keep the economic base available for smaller projects of various kinds when you undermine whole cities. If you've been to Detroit recently, they lost a million people and they went someplace else. Nobody pays attention to the human costs and the capital costs and the carbon costs and what happens in terms of climate change if you can't do the kind of things we're talking about. So I want to open up that level of scale as well in our conversation. So I don't think we here are talking about projects alone. I don't think we're talking only about entrepreneurship. I don't think we're talking only about impact investing. I think we are talking, and I sometimes wear a historian's hat, I think we are talking about laying down the foundations, the foundations in ideas, people, projects, experiments, difficult new things. We are establishing the prehistory in this work step by step of the possible great transformation. So I'm talking to you about identity, who we are in the matter. Are we doing projects? Are we doing investing? Are we doing great programs? I'm talking to the person in your chair. Or are we seeing ourselves as part of this larger historic process of transforming an entire economy and indeed the world economy by implication, our projects there. But if we can do it here, we will offer leadership I think in a time of great, great crisis. So that's what used to be called, I'm a little older than some folks here, that used to be called a heavy rap. That is something that if we take ourselves deeply, seriously, we might get to. So to use the term that's popular here, that's the lens that I'd like you to think about as we go into some of this. So the second way to think about it is this. Can we begin to think of scale and ownership in a different way? Ownership. I mentioned those 10,000 companies that are worker owned. Most people don't know about it because the press doesn't cover it, 11 million people. I mentioned 140,000 people in co-ops, 130 million people in co-ops. Most people don't know about that. But how do we take that idea to scale? And how do we talk about ownership in a different way? The number that keeps ringing in my ears when I think about this, very strange number. I didn't believe this number, and this number has to do with democracy, 400 people, people, not percentage, 400 individual people now in the United States have more wealth than the bottom 180 million people taken together. That is literally a medieval number. I don't mean that rhetorically, that's how medieval society was organized. And if you want to step up to our revolutionary problem, can we have a democratic society if we don't democratize ownership in a different way so that people have a very different stake in what they're doing, and have ownership in a meaningful way that takes it all across the society? So what does that mean? So that's what those co-ops are about, they're in these worker owned companies and trying to actually get a practical idea, entrepreneurs individually are part of this, building up a different way and different sense of ownership as well as an experience of ownership. Most of what we're talking about so far is at a scale that doesn't yet get us to where we want to go. That's what I meant about the prehistory, the developmental period. Most of the programs that became the New Deal in the 1930s came from people like people here in this room in the laboratories of democracy who then move things to scale when the time was right. And I think that's also what you're beginning to see. But there are also some really interesting examples building up that begin to ask how do we address Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, those bigger problems in many cities throughout the country, and also the distribution of income and wealth in a different way. We're not getting there on the tax front. Changing ownership is part of the answer most people think, and we're almost certain to see a lot more of it. And I wanted to give you just a feel, a beginning feel of some of the possibilities that push us to that revolutionary scale just a little bit. Some of you may know about the Mondragon Corporation out in the Basque country of Spain. It is a cooperative, worker-owned cooperative. There it is, one of the buildings. Here's what it looks like inside, another one. This is going to scale, 85,000 people. It is a huge operation. Does everything from sales to high tech to construction to medical instruments to aerospace. And it is entirely worker-owned as a cooperative. Strange, not your little garden variety of cooperative, a way to think about the future. Not only that, the ratio internally of top to bottom, if we want to think about the equity lens to look at this, six to one. Think about that, worker-owned, high tech, 85,000 people, top to bottom, ratio six to one, and it is penetrating markets all over the world, and it is thriving in not only Spain, but also as an example, in some part of the larger sector, they realized they had to change the pay ratios slightly because they were much bigger, eight to one is the max. Here top to pay to bottom pay, big corporations, commonly 250 to one, 300 to one. They're demonstrating there, and this is becoming an idea I think whose time will come in the United States, that you can do things you didn't think you could do through democratic ownership. So that's one example, just the flavor of it there. Here's another place. This is the Emilia-Romana area of Spain. It's happening around the world, and the light bulb is how we're beginning in the new economy movement to ask the same questions. 15,000 linked worker cooperatives, and again, high tech, it's taken the poorest region of Italy to one of the richest region over 30 years, in all of Europe, in a very, very carefully interlinked structure of worker-owned co-ops that are high tech, well-managed, and working. In fact, it's the subject of new studies by MIT political scientists. As a way to move to the future, you get both decentralization, you get change of ownership, you get high tech, and you get real impact at large scale in whole regions. Think of Cleveland, think of St. Louis, think of Detroit, think of what we're not addressing, and think of us moving over time to different scale. There's another one in Japan, the same thing happening at large scale, which I won't have time to go into, given the time available. What I do want to tell you about is one of the most fascinating and powerful experiments going on in the United States in Cleveland, where there are a series of worker-owned cooperatives linked together by a revolving fund and a non-profit corporation, odd structure. It is a community-building structure that has worker ownership in it, but the revolving fund allows expansion over time of this structure and allows you to build community as well. This is one of them. This is the Evergreen Cooperative, and it is the largest, it's the largest in the United States greenhouse in the urban area, capable, these are not little co-ops, capable of producing 3 million heads of lettuce a year. That's one of the linked cooperatives in this area, and it's an area of 40,000 people whose average income is 18,000. Here's another one, that's the Solar Institute, another solar co-op, one of the linked ones. That will be putting in more installation than exists in all the state of Ohio over the next three years. It will have twice as much put in, and here's the third, the most advanced industrial scale laundry in the Midwest and the greenest as well, very high-tech. Now, here's what the cities look like. And that's the scale of what is beginning to be possible. Atlanta is now moving in the same direction, trying to apply this cooperative worker bottle and its impact linked together to build out from there. They're also using the purchasing power of large-scale anchor institutions, hospitals, universities, $3 billion of purchases in that area of Cleveland, none of which went to that area. So, they're beginning to leverage that, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., several other cities, Milwaukee, Chicago are now considering it, Amarillo, Texas is doing it. There is something happening that is beginning to take transforming ownership, building community, and this direction as part of the larger new economy movement we all share together forward. It is a very interesting moment in history. We are not simply doing projects, we're not simply doing great things. We are, I think, maybe laying down this groundwork. And I suspect there are people in this room, possibly the person, again, sitting in your chair, who will take this larger direction, this larger movement we all share, and make it the next great American revolution together. Thank you very much.