NEWGroup functions as an informal alliance of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) as an initial policy think tank partner, YES! magazine as an initial media partner, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) as an initial business network partner, and the PCDForum as an initial system design partner. The NEWGroup is co-chaired by John Cavanagh, IPS executive director, and David Korten, PCDForum president, YES! co-founder and board chair, BALLE board member, and IPS Associate Fellow. IPS serves as secretariat. Noel Ortega is the NEWGroup coordinator.

The NEWGroup Core Team consist of members from IPS: Sarah Anderson, Fellow, Global Economy; Chuck Collins, Senior Scholar, Inequality and the Common Good; John Cavanagh, Director; Erik Leaver, Research Fellow, Foreign Policy In Focus; Miriam Pemberton, Research Fellow, Foreign Policy In Focus; and from YES! Magazine: Susan Gleason, Media and Outreach Manager; Fran Korten, Executive Director and Publisher; Sarah van Gelder, Co-founder and Editor; and from PCDForum: Kat Gjovik, Outreach and Communication; David Korten, President, and from BALLE: Alissa Barron, Communications and Network Services Director, and James Gustave Speth, Distinguished Senior Fellow, Demos.

We have created NEWGroup as a forum in which to freely explore possibilities unbounded by established ideologies and conventional wisdom. The views and positions we support as NEWGroup do not necessarily represent the positions of individual participants or partner organizations.

Institute for Policy Studies

As Washington's first progressive multi-issue "think tank," IPS has served as a policy and research resource for visionary social justice movements for over four decades: from the anti-war and civil rights movements in the 1960s to the peace and global justice movements of the last decade. Rooted in social movements, IPS public scholars turn ideas into action for peace, justice and the environment. These movements include the hundreds of peace groups that make up United for Peace and Justice, grassroots networks like Jobs with Justice and Grassroots Global Justice, and the many groups that make up the U.S. and global "climate justice" movements. They also serve as a think thank resource for the 77-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, and for progressive local elected officials. IPS public scholars run a school for activists, and produce a steady stream of books, reports, popular education materials, and resource lists (see www.ips-dc.org). The IPS specialty is changing the rules.

YES! Magazine

YES! Magazine is a communications organization founded in 1996 to advance powerful ideas and practical actions for building a vibrant, fair, and healthy world. Through its print publication and website, it has become an influential voice within the progressive movement with its distinctive focus on framing the emerging new economic, political, and cultural mainstream. It is an essential resource for those working for economic and social transformation (see www.yesmagazine.org). The YES! Magazine specialty is changing the cultural stories that frame our individual and collective sense of the possible.

Business Alliance for Local Living Economies

The Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) is North America's fastest growing network of socially responsible businesses, comprised of over 80 community networks representing over 21,000 business members across the U.S. and Canada. BALLE networks create local living economies through the building blocks of independent retail, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, green building, local zero-waste manufacturing, and community capital. Founded in 2001, BALLE's mission is to catalyze, strengthen and connect networks of locally owned, independent businesses that are working cooperatively to transform their communities from the inside out. We work to foster vibrant communities, a healthy natural environment, and prosperity for all. (see www.livingeconomies.org).

PCDForum

The PCDForum (People-Centered Development Forum) was founded in 1990 as a global network of activist-intellectuals working to expose the destructive fallacies of the conventional growth-centered economic development paradigm and reframe the development debate. It contributed to articulating the framing stories of the global resistance against corporate globalization and to framing and mobilizing the local living economies movement in the United States (see www.pcdf.org). The PCDForum specialty is identifying and articulating large-scale system design options.

The work of NEWGroup builds explicitly from the framework set forth in three books by members of the NEWGroup core team. John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander (eds), Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World Is Possible, a report of the International Forum on Globalization originally published in 2002 and expanded and updated in 2004; David Korten, Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth, released in early 2009; and James Gustave Speth, The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability, first published in 2008. The framework and living examples of people implementing it are featured in the Summer 2009 "New Economy" issue of YES! Magazine.

The production of working papers, articles, and books is a necessary part of the NEWGroup process. These are only inputs, however, to the work of communications outreach and political movement building through an ever-expanding alliance of organizations and networks.