The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead

The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking was born of a simple realization: The world we have inherited is no longer working.

The future of the planet and civilization as we know it are threatened, and the cries heard during the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests--"I can't breathe"--continue to echo. By giving us tools for navigating the transitions ahead, this catalog helps us breathe more deeply.

The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking explains the transformational power of social collaboration by showcasing dozens of pathbreaking projects, books, websites, and activist initiatives. Commoners seek to prioritize people's needs over market extraction, steward the Earth, relocalize the economy, and build new institutions of empowerment.

The emerging Commonsverse can be seen in relocalized food systems and community land trusts...in racial empowerment through collective action and mutual aid...and in free and open source software, peer production, and platform cooperatives.

Commoning is helping communities to managing scarce water supplies, farmers to develop regenerative agriculture, and artists to reclaim control of their creative lives. Ordinary people are becoming more self-reliant through timebanking and collaborative finance, care collectives and gift economies, and alternative local currencies.

The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking is an indispensable guide for understanding many profound social transformations now underway. In 25 thematic sections, The Commoner's Catalog offers a rare collection of tools for navigating the transitions ahead and building a new world. It offers a portrait of the system-change activism that is creating an economics of sufficiency, a politics of fairness, and a culture of belonging.

David Bollier is an American activist, scholar, and blogger who explores the commons as a powerful paradigm for re-imagining economics, politics, and culture. He pursues this work as Director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, and as cofounder of the Commons Strategies Group, an international advocacy project.

Bollier has been an author or editor of ten books on the commons over the past twenty years, including Think Like a Commoner, now translated into six languages, and Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (with coauthor Silke Helfrich). Bollier's blog, Bollier.org, is a widely read source of news and commentary about the commons, along with his monthly podcast Frontiers of Commoning. He co-organizes international conferences and strategy workshops, and consults regularly with diverse activists and policy experts in the US and Europe. Bollier lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.