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This case study profiles Verde, an innovative nonprofit organization based in the highly diverse, low- income Cully neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Verde’s mission is to pursue environmental wealth through social enterprise, outreach, and advocacy. It fulfills its mission through operating three social enterprises, developing Living Cully, a neighborhood-wide coalition to fight displacement of low-income residents and residents of color due to gentrification, and advocating for preferential hiring and contracting policies for low-income people and people of color, across public and private sectors. 

The purpose of this framework is to provide a coherent structure for analyzing economic innovations. The framework encourages researchers to adopt a mixed-methods approach that involves both careful, qualitative descriptions of the structure, functions and activities of the innovation, as well as quantitative analysis of the innovation’s impacts on both its stakeholders and the larger community in which it is located. 

This case study evaluates the economic, social, and environmental effects of three online platforms. Craigslist provides an online market for local secondhand goods such as vehicles, furniture, appliances, and electronics. Couchsurfing matches travelers with hosts around the world who welcome guests into their homes. NeighborGoods helps people borrow and lend household goods free of charge. Together these case studies provide an overview of the role of online platforms as future economy initiatives. 

Over the last 50 years, every U.S. president has worked, in some fashion, to address healthcare spending while improving the fundamental healthcare conditions for those in need. As healthcare leaders we often think in terms of three- to ve-year plans. But if we think about the next 50 years, it brings into question ‘what’ and ‘how’ the investments we’re making now in our communities — whether new facilities, programs or initiatives — will impact the public by 2064. 

Diversity is becoming a key word in health care. Hospitals and health care systems are focusing on providing care that addresses the diversity of their patient populations. To better care for diverse patient populations, hospitals are working to increase the diversity of their leadership team, board and staff. And many hospital teams are building a culture of diversity and inclusion, to better engage all employees and provide high-quality, equitable care for all patients. 

Two centuries of explosive economic growth have radically altered our material and ideological worlds. With human activity now the major driver of geological change, the industrial era has come to be called the Anthropocene. This inquiry instead adopts the term Econocene, underscoring its ideological foundation: economism. The concept of economism, the reduction of all social relations to market logic, often appears in critiques of political movements and neoliberal economics. Our concern here is with economism as a widely held system of faith. This modern “religion” is essential for the maintenance of the global market economy, for justifying personal decisions, and for explaining and rationalizing the cosmos we have created. This uncritical economic creed has colonized other disciplines, including ecology, as ecologists increasingly rely on economistic logic to rationalize the protection of ecosystems. More broadly, economism often works syncretically with the world’s religions even though it violates so many of their basic tenets. A Great Transition is needed to replace economism with an equally powerful and pervasive belief system that embraces the values of solidarity, sustainability, and well-being for all.