As the 50th anniversary of Small is Beautiful, 2023 is an opportunity to advance solutions to today’s social, economic, and environmental challenges that build on Schumacher’s original vision.

To meet this calling, the Schumacher Center is convening a monthly series featuring New Economic thinkers, builders and activists from a range of fields. “Schumacher Conversations: Envisioning the Next 50 Years” brings together change-makers whose work today is actively shaping a ‘small is beautiful’ future, organized around 12 key themes and fields of activism.

May’s theme is Activating Stagnant Capital to Catalyze Local Transformation. Register here.

Small is Beautiful advocated “production from local resources, for local needs” as a key organizing principle of a just, ecologically-balanced economics. But a web of flourishing regional economies, producing first for local needs, is possible only when resources and finances are in local control.

With soaring inequality and the pressing need to transition out of old, extractive systems, accumulated wealth cannot remain stagnant. Either it will be captured and reallocated centrally via taxes, or released as free gifts and interest-free investments for placed-based transformation of social, economic and cultural life. May’s panelists are those advancing innovative approaches to the catalytic redistribution of wealth. This group of participants advocate radical steps—encouraging foundations to spend down their funds, land gifting rather than land-hoarding, and total divestment from Wall Street—calling on people and institutions to commit to transformation here and now.

PANELISTS:

• Chuck Collins, is Program Director for Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he co-edits Inequality.org. He is an expert on U.S. inequality and the racial wealth divide and author of over ten books.
• Alfa Demmellash is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Rising Tide Capital, a non-profit organization providing underserved entrepreneurs with resources to launch and grow successful businesses.
• Kate Poole is an anticapitalist investment advisor and co-founder of Chordata Capital, which supports investors in moving money off of Wall Street into community investments that center racial and economic justice—helping clients in redistributing, rather than continuing to accumulate, wealth.

Each panelist is invited to reflect on themes in Small Is Beautiful that connect with their own thinking and activism. These reflections are intended to open up a broader conversation on the topic of localizing production.

An audience Q&A will follow moderated by our host, Nwamaka Agbo of the Kataly Foundation.

Register here.