Beautiful Solutions

Our problems are global and interconnected, and our solutions must be too. With over seventy contributors, Beautiful Solution spotlights the collective wisdom that reminds us that another world is not only possible, it’s already under construction.

Everything we need to transform our communities already exists. From food sovereignty to debt abolition, from folk schools to energy democracy — and from Argentina to Zimbabwe. If you long for a more beautiful, more just, and more livable world — and want to know how to get there — this book is for you.

Eli Feghali is an Arab immigrant from Beirut, Lebanon whose parents, Romy and Bernard, fled their homeland when he was two to escape civil war. Eli organized in Tennessee in the migrant justice movement, then on the streets of Boston during the Occupy Wall Street uprising. It was on those streets that he was introduced to cooperatives and the idea of the solidarity economy. For more than a decade, Eli has worked with the New Economy Coalition (NEC), a network building the power of the solidarity economy movement in the US. Through his roles at NEC, Beautiful Solutions, and the board of YES! Magazine, Eli works to tell the story of another world under construction.

Rachel Plattus is an edge dancer, web tender, and tunnel dweller. She’s been a facilitator, organizer and educator in early childhood classrooms, local electoral campaigns, communities of Jewish mystics and healers, rooms of white folks unlearning whiteness, retreat centers, resistance in the streets; in multiracial campaigns for climate, racial and economic justice; and at New Economy Coalition, PeoplesHub, Nuns & Nones, Taproot, Tzedek Lab, the Retreat Center Collaboration, and the Movement Sustainability Commons, among others. Rachel comes from people who gather people, who know that no problem is too big for a kitchen table, who pray in the woods and the water and watching the winged ones, who shape change on the side of life in the face of cultures of death. Rachel and Eli live in Cambridge, MA in a house full of organizers, healers, beekeepers, builders, and meditators with their favorite person, Maya Silver.

Nathan Schneider is a writer, scholar, and teacher; a descendant of war-deserters, stitchers, settlers, amateur musicians, public servants, a rocket scientist, and the director of a national co-op. He grew up in Virginia, visiting relatives in Colorado, only to return as a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads the Media Economies Design Lab. He has written books about God, Occupy Wall Street, the cooperative movement, and online politics. He has co-founded an accelerator for co-ops, Start.coop, and Waging Nonviolence, a news platform on resistance movements around the world. As a teenager he became a Catholic and a follower of radical workers, nuns, and priests in the church. He learns every day from his wife Claire and their two kids.

Elandria Williams was a fierce organizer, popular educator, and spiritual and community leader. E’s life and work spanned so many arenas and roles. Most recently, E was executive director of PeoplesHub, a co-moderator of the Unitarian Universalist Association, and spent 11 years working at the Highlander Research and Education Center. Elandria was a firm believer in the power of communities to govern themselves and the importance of our relationships over projects. E’s life’s work was an embodiment of those beliefs—from mentoring youth leaders to being a voice for disability justice, from supporting progressive campaigns to working on projects like Beautiful Solutions. Elandria lived in Knoxville, Tennessee and was the daughter of Elnora and Ervin Williams, twin of Frederick, devoted aunt to Shawn, Nia, and Nevin, and beloved friend, teacher, and comrade to countless others.