SundRoot
The big picture
Money and resources circulate locally: businesses share services, the association keeps it democratic, the non-profit keeps it on a sound course, and the funds invest in the community.
SundRoot builds holistic solutions for local community economies. This plan describes how the system works, who does what, and how it becomes self-sustaining over time — so that more and more people take part in an economic cooperation that benefits the businesses, the residents, and the local community alike.
SundRoot works for fair business. We promote the democratic economy, and we work to form ecosystems of businesses that help each other and become more resilient — while contributing to shared funds for broad societal prosperity.
SundRoot is part of organising the cooperative network in the Malmö region. We have worked proactively with groups and opportunities to start up new cooperatives, and we want to spread the economic association model among locally rooted small and medium-sized businesses and industries.
Our goal is to create fair community economic systems that offer holistic solutions to many of today’s challenges. Systems that provide:
Our aim is to deliver mutually beneficial services to fair, locally rooted small and medium-sized businesses and industries that join a shared economic association. Members gain access to bookkeeping, administration, IT systems, joint procurement, resource exchange in the network, sales, marketing, PR, legal help — and anything else entrepreneurs may need.
The services are offered at a favourable price, because costs shrink when many share them. This becomes resource optimisation. The businesses also form closer connections with each other, which supports them on their entrepreneurial journey — and this becomes the foundation for mutually beneficial models.
The idea is proven. In Switzerland, the WIR system enables direct trade and exchange between businesses within its own system, easing circulation even when regular currency is scarce. In Sweden, we can work with the Svensk Barter trade association to set up local nodes.
Ideally, businesses pay according to their size and profits for the holistic offering. The economic association has democracy built in: one member has one vote, regardless of the size of the business. Services can be delivered by the cooperative network, which at the same time strengthens and spreads the democratic economy.
One member in the whole is a locally rooted non-profit association that represents the local community: residents, local infrastructure, sustainability, future generations, ecology, nature, culture, and fair conditions.
The non-profit association gives the local economy a sound, ethical, and sustainable direction that benefits everyone — including the businesses themselves. It makes sure the neighbourhood is safe and attractive, that more people want to come and live there, and it invests in community, education, and the incubation of new cooperative businesses that in turn further develop the local economy.
Part of the economic association’s pooled capital goes, beyond shared services, to shared infrastructure, the surrounding environment, and the local community that makes the businesses’ opportunities possible.
Part of the network’s profits flows through built-in service fees into local funds. The funds are governed by the non-profit association with a holistic perspective, using different roles that represent different fields.
One idea ties much of this together: when housing, energy, food, and transport are organised together, the cost of living goes down. This frees up time and makes people less dependent on a skewed labour market. It is a good direction for what the local fund can invest in over time: education, civil society organisations, places for creation and invention, cooperative entrepreneurship, culture, and basic services that lower living costs. All without depending on external agendas, short-term project funding, and actors that extract value from local communities.
SundRoot cooperates with different providers to create and develop the holistic solution — both on the business-services side and in facilitating democratic and local-economy innovation. With frameworks, tools, and digital solutions, we facilitate the establishment of processes and structures, so that collective intelligence can emerge.
SundRoot receives a reasonable share for its contribution from the system itself, and funding also can come from collaboration partners such as the municipality, the business office, Coompanion, savings bank foundations, property companies, and more. We promote fair business, local economic development, a more resilient economy where actors help each other in the ecosystem, job creation, clusters of businesses to procure from — and safer, healthier, more sustainable neighbourhoods.
SundRoot’s incentive lies in establishing more and more well-functioning local community economic systems. Our largest reward comes at the establishment, via establishment agreements, and is phased out afterwards — once SundRoot is no longer needed and the whole system runs by itself. All supporting partners and SundRoot receive their fair share for the value they create.
Given that such systems create good results, the contract should state that well-functioning examples spread to more neighbourhoods and lift more and more people — which benefits us all. Funding for the spreading work is built into the system: part of the money goes to actors who spread working models further, so that more and more switch to new, sound systems. This also benefits the current actors in the system, as more people arrive to trade and exchange services.
For the first years, it is agreed that SundRoot specifically takes that role. After that, local communities choose themselves which actor does that work — and in this way, the system also stimulates more actors working to spread cooperative and considerate community economic systems.
From the grassroots and up, neighbourhoods can form larger constellations, networks, and funds that can do more and more for the world over time. Over time, this gives us a completely different ecosystem to invest and save our money in — one that benefits the world while giving us sound returns and pensions.
This allows us to create a platform where we can implement social innovations that have proven successful around the world.
Grassroots Economics — economic methods that lift communities through complementary ways of exchanging services, so that value can circulate, take root, and develop the community locally.
WIR in Switzerland — a well-functioning system that enables direct trade and exchange between businesses within its own system, easing circulation and exchange even when regular currency is scarce.
Emilia Romagna in Italy — a region that builds cohesion and prosperity based on the democratic economy, and which is considered to have high prosperity indices in the EU.
Mondragon in the Basque region, Spain — reinvestment mechanisms in education and new cooperatives have made the network so successful that it consists of over 100 cooperatives turning over billions, with its own university, its own bank, and its own safety net. The system’s goal is to take care of people: if a cooperative fails, its workers are absorbed by the other cooperatives.
SundRoot is in its start-up phase and is looking for suitable local communities and clusters of businesses and industries to begin implementing this in. We are open to collaborations. We want to promote the implementation of such holistic solutions for considerate systems across the world, local and global — and we want to be part of initiatives that unlock and free more and more of our resources to flow into such systems.
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SundRoot is looking for local communities and clusters of businesses to start with. Partners, funders and collaborators are welcome.
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