Developing Community Asset Vouchers and Rotational Labor Associations in Jackson, MS

Cooperation Jackson was honored to host Grassroots Economics in Jackson, MS from Monday, March 10th  through Thursday, March 14th. The purpose of this encounter was to set up our own Mutual Exchange and Rotational Labor Association (ROLA) system in Jackson. 

In the course of our 4 day training, we focused on the development of our long term vision and our short term vision for the adoption of this system. 

Our long-term vision: Turn every yard into a farm and every garage into a factory, and through community collaboration and planning meet our collective needs.”

Our year-long vision: 

- Turn 50 yards into productive farms

- Turn 20 community spaces into maker-spaces, 

- Train 100 Community Ambassadors

- Bring 150 community members into the Rotational Labor Association (ROLA) pool

- 5 more pools created in the community

- Meet 50% of community & social needs of members

- Seed $500k USD worth of value in the pool

- Exchange (10% of pool value) 50k USD worth of value Monthly through the pool.

We also started to create our own community asset vouchers and voucher wallets utilizing the Sarafu Network system. We did some voucher swaps and created a test pool for the organization. We also learned about how to manage and develop aspects of the technological back end and interface. 

We are now cemented in our vision and developed the core elements of an action plan to bring community asset vouchers and rotational labor associations to Jackson (and beyond) to foster the development of comprehensive mutual exchange system that will enable us to meet our material needs without having to be totally reliant on the dollar or commodity exchange relations.