UEP Colloquium: Building New Economies From the Ground Up

This session features Aaron Tanaka and Juan Leyton, both Visiting Practitioners with the Tufts Urban & Environmental Policy and Planning Department. They will share their visions and lessons learned from community-driven efforts to build more democratic, sustainable and just economies in Boston and Mondragon, Spain. Aaron is former founding director of Boston Workers Alliance and now staffing the Center for Economic Democracy and the Boston Impact Initiative. While at BWA, he supported members to start up Roxbury Green Power (a microenterprise collecting vegetable oil waste to process into biodiesel fuel), promote participatory budgeting in Boston, and most recently launch the CERO workers cooperative (Cooperative Energy, Recycling, and Organics). Juan is former director of Massachusetts Neighbor to Neighbor. He has deep experience in community organizing, community development, and policy advocacy. He recently returned from a second trip to Mondragon, Spain, where he has been developing relationships between the Mondragon cooperative complex and U.S. based community and labor organizations.