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This chapter explores the ways that monetary and non-monetary forms of investment can generate widespread wellbeing. It shows how wealth, broadly defined, can be stored, safeguarded and directed in ways that might benefit people and the planet now and into the future.

This chapter explores different types of businesses. It shows how the surplus generated by businesses (whether capitalist, cooperative or community-oriented) can be directed towards people and planetary wellbeing. And it shows how a variety of people can play in role in making decisions about the uses of surplus.

This chapter explores the variety of ways that people secure the goods and services they need to survive. It shows how markets are being reshaped to address the wellbeing of producers and environments across the globe, and it shows how alternative markets closer to home are also addressing similar concerns.

This chapter explores the ways that different types of property are being transformed into commons that provide for people and planetary wellbeing. It shows how relations of care and responsibility are being applied to biophysical, social, cultural and knowledge resources so that access, use and benefit is widely distributed.

Instead of presenting the economy as a machine-like entity, this chapter reframes the economy as the outcome of everyday human actions. Using examples from New York and northern India it shows how people are recreating economies through their actions, and it discusses the ethical choices that are guiding these actions.

Mutual aid and coming together has been a way of life for the African diaspora since enslavement and the legacy of it that continues in everyday life. The Black diaspora, and especially Black women, contend with vile forms of racism and exclusion in business and society, but this is not what defines Blacks in the Americas. This chapter focuses on Caribbean women who organize rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs), which are cooperative banking systems embedded in social relationships. This work draws on J. K. Gibson-Graham’s community economies theory, as well as Caribbean and Black liberation theories, to understand the business exclusion of Black women. The empirical interviews with hundreds of Black Caribbean women in Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and Haiti show the purposeful way in which they organize ROSCAs to be considerate of people’s social lives in relation to their business needs. These women, in choosing cooperation, are quietly resisting commercial and individualized forms of banking. In this chapter, the author argues that Caribbean women organize Susu, Sol, Partner, and Boxhand, all names for ROSCAs, use banking cooperatives alongside conventional banks as a way to quietly push against commercial and elitist financial institutions.

The conclusion turns to the things that stand in the way of taking back the economy–any time, any place. And it explores how nature might offer inspiration for living with one another equitably, ethically and within earthly bounds.

This chapter explores different ways of working. It shows how an over-emphasis on paid work and consumption is undermining people and planetary wellbeing. Using examples from the minority and majority worlds the chapter shows how people are using diverse forms of work to generate wellbeing.