Prosperity in the Fossil-Free Economy: Cooperatives and the Design of Sustainable Businesses

Drawing on both her extensive experience founding and directing social enterprises and her interviews with sustainability leaders, Melissa Scanlan provides a legal blueprint for creating alternate corporate business models that mitigate climate change, pay living wages, and act as responsible community members, including Certified B Corps and benefit corporations. With an emphasis on cooperatives, this book reveals the power and potential of cooperating as a unifying concept around which to design social enterprise for triple bottom-line results: for society, the environment, and finance.

"If we are going to transform our energy systems at the pace physics requires, nothing could be more important than replacing turbo-charged hyper-individualistic capitalism with some of the cooperative schemes explored in this revealing book."--Bill McKibben, author Deep Economy

"Combining a critique of current business law with her deep understanding of environmental law, Melissa Scanlan successfully argues that cooperative business structures can and should be looked to as a route for social entrepreneurs."--Dana Brakman Reiser, Brooklyn Law School

Drawing on both her extensive experience founding and directing social enterprises and her interviews with sustainability leaders, Melissa Scanlan provides a legal blueprint for creating alternate corporate business models that mitigate climate change, pay living wages, and act as responsible community members, including Certified B Corps and benefit corporations. With an emphasis on cooperatives, this book reveals the power and potential of cooperating as a unifying concept around which to design social enterprise achieving triple bottom-line results: for society, the environment, and finance.

" An] important take on achieving a cleaner and safer world. . . . Scanlan] envisions a future where green policies go hand-in-hand with worker empowerment, and provides a detailed blueprint for how to get there. . . . Her book offers essential hope that we can yet save ourselves . . . from ourselves."--Bill Lueders, The Progressive, "Favorite Books of 2021"

Drawing on both her extensive experience founding and directing social enterprises and her interviews with sustainability leaders, Melissa Scanlan provides a legal blueprint for creating alternate corporate business models that mitigate climate change, pay living wages, and act as responsible community members, including Certified B Corps and benefit corporations. With an emphasis on cooperatives, this book reveals the power and potential of cooperating as a unifying concept around which to design social enterprise achieving triple bottom-line results: for society, the environment, and finance.