If we agree the community economy holds great promise for Canada’s future, what else might be done to make it more real and visible?

With news like that of the heightened risk of inflation and even more jobs on the line as Target announces its plans to pull out of the country, the sense that Canada’s economy is skating onto increasingly brittle ice can leave one feeling a need to do one or both of two things: fret or hunker down and work even more feverishly at what’s still left on one’s desk to get done.

I had a feeling of being privy to an historic moment as I listened in on a call this week about designing a new ecology of practices to make more visible, connected and alive Canada’s community economy, new economy or whatever the most apt term might be.

There’s a pretty good chance those of us joining a call about the new economy this week had all the knowledge to instantly trigger a wholesale jump to the new economy
— if knowledge was all it took.

After more than a decade of shaping what we’ve come to call Generative Journalism, something new is clearly calling to be born. The energy here at Axiom News is a swirl of that excitement and anxiety that characterizes any kind of birthing.

Some pockets of local government, journalism and urban planning/engineering are running parallel tracks of transformation, I’ve been fascinated to observe recently.

On one of my last evenings in Barcelona a few of us gathered at a cozy shop in an old part of the city called La Villa de Gracias (the Village of Gratitude) to talk over mango milkshakes and crepes.

About a dozen people from about half-a-dozen countries gather in the coastal city of Barcelona, Spain this weekend to talk about the future of an effort they are all dedicated to — enabling local, strengths-based responses to community issues. I am honoured to join them at their invitation as a member of the Axiom News team.

For more than 13 years Axiom News has been able to interview and story many cutting-edge workplaces while at the same time trying out some of the ideas we run across in our own space. We’ve been especially interested in people who are playing around with creating an ecology for work that, at the risk of over-simplifying, “embraces our humanity.”

A fitful journey at Axiom News this past year has created just the sort of anxiety-ridden conditions for provoking new revelations. One of the most recent for me was that these could be some of the most exciting and painful times for knowledge workers yet.

In a recent video interview with the Canadian collaborative, Social Innovation Generation, John McKnight tells the story of the origins of asset-based community development and how it emerged out of his anger at the predominant research then being conducted on neighbourhoods, especially low-income neighbourhoods.