The 10 Principles of Next Economy Enterprises serve as critical guideposts for designing organizations from a socially just and environmentally regenerative perspective. They are emergent and malleable, derived from work with hundreds of social enterprises. Here is an outline of the 10 principles:
10 Principles of Next Economy Enterprises
1. Meet Basic Needs This principle prioritizes providing human-centered essentials like nourishing food, clean water, shelter, and medicine. It directly challenges the Business as Usual (BAU) economy, which is geared toward fulfilling greed rather than human need, by providing essentials without destroying habitat and ecosystems. Enterprises adhering to this principle also look for ways to consider ecosystem repair as an impact outcome of their business functions.
2. Share Ownership Sharing ownership ensures that traditionally underrepresented groups—including people of color, women, and immigrants—benefit from the ownership of their labor and ideas. This principle encourages organizations to confront existing systems of wealth concentration and build cross-racial, multi-gendered, and multicultural models of ownership. This often manifests in structures like worker-owned cooperatives, Employee Ownership Trusts (EOTs), or Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)
3. Democratize Governance This involves creating an explicitly non-hierarchical, democratic, and inclusive culture within the organization. By engaging and trusting staff as “sensors and actors in the system” and involving them directly in decision-making, organizations can achieve greater stability and longevity. When democracy is practiced consistently in the workplace, individuals are empowered, which leads to greater support for implementation of decisions.
4. Support Local Communities This principle aims to build a resilient, locally self-reliant economy by countering the over-centralization and fragility inherent in the BAU economy. Local businesses tend to recirculate assets back into the community at a significantly higher rate than national chains, supporting local economic ecosystems and fostering community wealth (the “multiplier effect”). Moving deposits from large corporate banks to local community banks and credit unions is also a strategy that supports local lending.
5. Integrate Education This principle seeks to reverse overspecialization by empowering so-called consumers to become producers through embedding education on “how to do or make something” into the product or service. By sharing solutions open source, organizations provide people with the knowledge to meet more of their own needs, which allows the enterprise to move on to solving the next set of problems. This gives satisfaction and security to individuals who can provide for themselves and their community.
6. Promote Open Source Open sourcing moves away from leveraging intellectual property for outsized returns (the BAU paradigm), recognizing that valuable solutions can be an intellectual contribution to humanity. Instead of growing one company larger (“rapid