— Naryan

Mycelium matters!

— Naryan

Less stuff, more joy!

— Naryan

A better economy sounds like a beautiful song sung by joyful people, on regenerative land honouring Indigenous knowledge.

— May

— Naryan

This Festival centres Canada. We welcome other voices from around the world to join us!

— Naryan

— Rose

The writing is on the wall...

— Rose

We need a different economy as the current one drives us to loneliness, despair, and apathy. We can choose conservation over consumption, cooperation over competition, and meaning over money. ~ Joyce

— Joyce

Decarbonizing the use of energy by businesses, industry and transportation.

— Ian

— Heather

Flowing, pooling, evolving, cycling.

— Heather

— Rose

Distributed Intelligence (image from The insane biology of the Octopus : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFP_AjJeP-M)

— Rose

Re-integrating the digital-virtual space with 3D public community spaces so we realize our OWN purposes in our social networks and not those of algorithmic profiteers.

— Johanna

Festival for Re-imagining the Economy

Two weeks online & local · co-created by everyone who joins

The economy is a story.
It's time we wrote a new one.

Across Canada, people are already building something different — rooted in wellbeing, not extraction. The festival is where we bring it all together: pooling research, frameworks, and lived experience into a shared, evolving picture.

📅 2 weeks, August 12–26🪶 Pay-what-you-can, $0 option always available🌱 Every voice shapes the program

Make this festival your own

This festival comes alive when participants become co-creators, animating the two weeks with offerings that are as meaningful for the hosts as they are for the collective. This website is an example of this — once registered, you can add your own thoughts, doodles, and images to shape this festival publicly.

Plus — join our weekly ‘co-creation sessions’ ahead of the festival to meet the others who are already making the festival what it might become.

Prologue

One story we made up — and can rewrite

The economy isn't a law of nature. It's a story we agreed to live inside: profit first, growth always, consequences later. The cracks are showing — in wellbeing data, in inequality, in the places we live.

For decades, people across the country have been writing a different story — through research, cooperatives, land trusts, and communities that already live the alternative. This festival is where those threads meet.

The shift is fractal: it shows up in how one person thinks, how an organization defines its purpose, and in the policies that shape us all.

ExtractiveRegenerative

Profit-firstWellbeing-first

Short-termLong-term

Isolated effortsCollective insight

This shift happens at every scale: in how you think, in how your organization works, and in the rules that govern us all. The festival makes room to work on all three, together.

How it works

This festival is what we make of it

There's no fixed agenda from above. The program comes from sessions that participants propose — conversations, workshops, practices, and stories that fill the shared calendar everyone explores.

You bring it

Create Session

Host a dialogue, workshop, story circle, or practice — on anything that moves us toward a better economy. You pick the title, format, and capacity.

It's shared

It joins the calendar

Your session appears on the shared schedule alongside everyone else's. Participants browse, RSVP, and build their own path through the festival.

We gather

Meet with curiosity

Sessions are transcribed and summarized. Reflections afterward ("harvest") pull out what was learned — for hosts and for the wider festival.

It compounds

It enters the Commons

Recordings, harvests, and insights go into a shared library — a growing picture of what a better economy actually looks like.

Many lenses, one shift

Whatever you call it — there's room for it here

No single framework has it all figured out. The festival is a meeting place for the movements, models, and vocabularies already pointing the same direction.

This is a starting point, not a boundary. If your work points toward wellbeing and shared flourishing — it belongs here.

Once we're underway

Watch the program take shape, in real time

As people propose sessions, a live feed appears here — and as they join, a map of the community grows alongside it.

Recently proposed sessions

Updates live during the festival

Dialogueadded 2d ago

Downtown to Uptown and Back: Making a Wandering Third Place

Let's gather for a mobility break in Waterloo Region. Join a local urbanism nerd and be a sidewalk tourist in your hometown (or a nearby one) for an hour or for part of a day. Consider this part Jane's Walk, part Shop Hop, part LRT field trip. There is no agenda, nor an exact map or timeline planned. A Signal Messenger group will be opened for recombobulating the group on-the-hoof, if/as needed. We will meet up mid-morning at Smile Tiger Coffee, which is at the Kitchener GO/VIA platform and is thus closest to the connection point between Grand River Transit and inter-regional transit services. This also gives us the opportunity to include folk from outside of KW who might find their way here by Saturday morning. Optionally caffeinated or with snacks onboard, we will pick an un-direction vaguely towards Downtown Kitchener while we collaborate on our intentions and interests for the following 2-3+ hours. At some mid-point of everyone's endurance, we will hop on the ION* and find our way towards Uptown Waterloo. Plus-ones, joiners, departers, breakoff wanderers and redirection suggestions are welcome at any point. This is, organizationally speaking, just a gathering of friends/neighbours in public, exploring what interesting public spaces and Third Places are discovered, or created, in a mindful wandering of the cityscape. ACCESSIBILITY NOTES: Expect to be walking, or rolling if you are so enabled, at a casual pace, possibly up to 2 km/30 minutes at a stretch. Needs for shorter stretches or breaks off our feet will be accommodated. ION is KW's LRT, it has step-free boarding and accommodates mobility devices at all stops. The non-discounted fare is $4 for a ticket that allows 2 hours of all-direction travel, but once we know who is gathered and for how long, we can discuss purchasing day/group passes. Session host will sponsor a suitable ticket for those in need.

Dialogueadded 2d ago

Festival Care Commons

A space for the care team to convene, and for festival participants to come by for care or discuss care as needed and desired. Care Commons will be hosted throughout the festival. Breakout rooms will be available if needed for 1:1 conversations. --- Festival care statement developed by care team: Experiences along any transformational pathway often involve conflict, differences of perspective, uncertainty, and many forms of grief. Yet it is often by moving through these experiences together that greater coherence emerges. We hope to create a Festival—and a co-creation process—where, whenever we notice someone, including ourselves, struggling, we offer a "caring hand": a spirit of presence, empathy, and support. We also recognize the difference between care and care-taking. Rather than trying to fix or carry another person's experience, we invite ourselves to pause and ask, "Whose problem am I solving?" From that place, we can offer support that empowers rather than rescues. --- A note on this space: Care Commons is a volunteer-run space that offers care and support as human beings during the festival. These sessions are not meant to be licensed therapy, counselling, or crisis support. If you're looking for ongoing support, please reach out to a licensed mental health professional. If you need immediate help, please reach out to crisis support (call/text 988 in Canada) or emergency services (call 911). --- Festival AI Notetaker will not be joining Care Commons. We encourage participants to share their reflections after the sessions to build the care knowledge commons together.

Dialogueadded 2d ago

FediUrbanism: (re)Connecting Third Places

There is rising concern today about the effect that "social media" is having on our personal social networks, cognitive skills, organizations and our global schemas of justice, order and democracy. Tools that started as powerful enablers of connection and community have been corrupted by profit-taking corporations and politically-motivated, algorithmic intercessions in the human connections we are trying to make. The result is more time spent on the scroll, with less information found and retained - while our public spaces , urban environments and 3-dimensional venues are languishing for lack of attendance and activation. This discussion will start with a short presentation of a social hypothesis on how we might re-integrate our digital communications with more meaningful, realspace community activity, followed by brief on-screen demonstrations of some prototypes evolving RIGHT NOW in Open Social Web ("The Fediverse") developer spaces. If you would like a preview, here's a hint: look at what is going on in front of your eyeballs right now. Re-imagine Festival exists in one of these rearchtected social platforms. The majority of the session time will be a very subtly guided discussion space for participants to imagine, explore and ask questions about how pivoting to co-creative digital social tools can flip the script on "social networking" to put the social first, with the platforms created and owned by communities to serve communities' own purposes. There will be opportunity and some support for those who might like to try a little hands-on digital venturing out into "The Fediverse" with an experienced navigator of that particular digital landscape.

Dialogueadded 3d ago

More Beautiful Comms ~ Asking with More Love, Less Shock

As a large-scale systems architect, I care deeply about love. Drawing on crossdisciplinary studies from social neuroscience to care economies and beyond, I invite you into new structures to guide your audience on a delicious emotional journey without relying on the Hero's Journey or other conflict-based narrative structures. This can be used for fundraising, marketing and other comms. This will be a warm, heart-led experience exploring practical strategies, tactics and tools: Feel deeply rooted and confident as you write and share; write from your deepest intuition; structure your talk for beauty and inspiration, not just excitement; edit your points to transmit your energy, not just your ideas; invite tears of recognition and change whole lives. ~ About The Oooooze School: The Oooooze School is a business school and consultancy for visionaries, artists, founder, executives and healers who are stepping into next economies now. We develop cocreative strategies, tactics and tools for small and medium businesses to evolve past capitalism into sumptuous, antifragile nodes of abundance economies. We work from your immediate business needs, such as strategy, public speaking, cocreative process + structure, product design, ethical metrics, fundraising story and personal antifragility; cultivating organizational resilience as we invite abundant futures. Join us for our weekly-ish Moonset and Moonrise rituals at Pluto or online: luma.com/ooooozenet

Dialogueadded 4d ago

Governance for a Living Economy: Sociocracy 101

We keep saying the economy is a story we can rewrite. But every story needs a way of deciding what happens next — and most of our organizations are still governed by the same extractive playbook we're trying to leave behind: one voice at the top, information flowing one way, feedback arriving too late to matter. Sociocracy is one of the oldest, best-tested alternatives — a governance model built on interlinked circles, decisions made without unresolved objections, and structures that keep learning instead of calcifying. It's popular in intentional communities, land trusts, and worker co-ops for a reason: it's built for exactly the kind of collective, high-trust work this festival is about. In 15 minutes, we'll open with two images — an octopus and a tensegrity structure — to reframe what "distributed power" can actually look like in practice, then walk through sociocracy's core moves and where it fits alongside the other models already circulating here. This is an introduction, not a training — come curious, leave with a thread to pull on. Time at the end for questions and discussion.

The growing community

Anonymized

Join the festival to see the full map, get to know the others, and watch as the shape of us emerges.

Why gather like this

From many ideas of a better economy, one complex picture

"Difference is a catalyst for learning, not a problem to solve."

We're not here to agree on one model. We're here to see how degrowth, cooperatives, doughnut economics, and a dozen other lenses fit together — and where they disagree in useful ways.

"The work itself is where we find wellbeing."

This isn't a festival about wellbeing held at arm's length. The pace, format, and facilitation are meant to feel like what we're working toward.

"A movement grows because it's felt, not just argued."

Every session, harvest, and connection goes into a shared Commons — proof, for anyone who finds it later, that a better story is already being lived.

Real people, real work

The story is already being written

This festival is for the people and groups who are already working to transform our economy and society. A space to bring your live questions and share what you've learned over the years. It is also for folks who do not yet see themselves in the work, to discover how your experience and skills might contribute to the larger picture. This is a movement that will reach every Canadian, and each of us has a chance to bring the conversation into new places.

And should our union with the future become harvest
Should the tree we've planted
In whose shade we will never live to sit
Bear bountiful generations in her branches
It will be because
We mingled

— excerpt from Putting It All Together, by Kevin Sutton

Participants laying out blankets and mats in a circle under a large tree — Open space

A harvest board covered in colourful sticky notes from opening ceremonies — Collective wisdom

A small group of facilitators in a close huddle on a wooden floor — Real relationships

Your seat is waiting

Come help write the next chapter

Registration is pay-what-you-can — including $0 — because this story belongs to everyone. A short survey on arrival helps us connect you with your people and your sessions.

The economy is a story.It's time we wrote a new one.

Make this festival your own

One story we made up — and can rewrite

This festival is what we make of it

Create Session

It joins the calendar

Meet with curiosity

It enters the Commons

Whatever you call it — there's room for it here

Watch the program take shape, in real time

Recently proposed sessions

Downtown to Uptown and Back: Making a Wandering Third Place

Festival Care Commons

FediUrbanism: (re)Connecting Third Places

More Beautiful Comms ~ Asking with More Love, Less Shock

Governance for a Living Economy: Sociocracy 101

The growing community

From many ideas of a better economy, one complex picture

The story is already being written

Come help write the next chapter

The economy is a story.
It's time we wrote a new one.