On May 9-11, 2018, CJA held our second Just Transition Finance Training at the Voluntown Peace Trust near Providence, Rhode Island. 38 people representing 18 CJA member organizations and staff spent three days grappling with the question of how to concretely finance, support and build the local economies we need for our communities and for our planet.
Members shared stories about their work, unpacked our relationships to money finance and debt, and created space to imagine and plan for a world where communities collectively control and retain wealth, rather than the wealthy controlling and extracting from our communities. Most importantly, we continued to build meaningful relationships across communities that inspire us and feed us in our work to transform our economies and create a Just Transition.
From the training, we identified several groups interested in creating local loan funds and gathered information about specific just transition enterprises folks are building. We also identified potential leaders who we could invite to join the loan fund & incubator committee.