Five Next System Project and Democracy Collaborative leaders will be featured panelists in September at The World Transformed, an international gathering of scholars and activists in Liverpool, England that “is about imagining the world we want to live in and planning how we get there.” The Democracy Collaborative is co-sponsoring this conference, which is in its third year.

On the conference’s first day, September 22, Ted Howard, co-founder and president of The Democracy Collaborative, will be a panelist on “Building Community Wealth in our Towns and Cities.” The panel will discuss how to create “collaborative, sustainable and democratically controlled local economies, rooted in innovative institutional forms, such as cooperatives and community land trusts.” Howard will be joined by Matthew Brown, the Democracy Collaborative’s  Senior Fellow for the Promotion of Community Wealth Building in the UK, and leader of the Preston, UK City Council; Asima Shaikh, Labour Councillor for Finsbury Park and Cabinet Member for Economic Development, and Frances Jones, associate director of the United Kingdom-based Centre for Local Economic Strategies.

“A Movement in Government?” on September 23 will tackle the question of what it would take to bring about a fundamental re-ordering of our economy “for the many, not the few,” as Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn has promised if he succeeds in becoming Britain’s next prime minister. That panel will feature Next System Project executive director Joe Guinan; Christine Berry, fellow of the Next System Project and a trustee of Rethinking Economics and the Finance Innovation Lab; Paul Mason, journalist, author and filmmaker, and Dimitris Tzanakopoulos, Minister of State for Greece and spokesperson for the Syriza political party in Greece..

On September 25, “Taking what’s ours: public ownership from below?” explores what democratic forms of public ownership, with worker and community participation at their heart, might look like. Panelists will include Thomas Hanna, Democracy Collaborative’s research director; Cat Hobbs, founder and director of We Own It; Hilary Wainwright, sociologist, political activist and editor of Red Pepper magazine; Andrew Towers, head of political strategy at the ‎Communication Workers Union in London, and Andrew Cumbers, political economist.

In addition to the website, you can follow The World Transformed conference on its Facebook and Twitter pages.