Climate change, shifting demographics, and sobering economic realities for a growing number of Americans have sparked increased awareness of the need to re-examine how working class people and communities of color will successfully participate in tomorrow’s economy, the one they will inherit when our nation becomes an ethnic plurality.

In the not-too distant future we can expect to see a rapid increase in structural unemployment as a result of increasing substitution of technology—including sophisticated robots—for human labor. A massive shift to new energy technologies can, in the short run, substitute for many jobs lost in the dirty fuel industries we must, and will, phase out.

We can learn a lot about what it takes to build a new economy by looking into the hidden histories of localism and cooperative economics in our own cities.

In his article entitled “What’s the Role of Race in the New Economy Movement?” author Penn Loh argues that people of color have a foundational role to play in the establishment of a new economy because the very idea of a new economy has arisen from a discontentment with the injustices of the present system, of which people of color have borne a disproportionate share of the burden.

Both in precedent and principle, we should consider rejecting the nomenclature and notion that there is anything truly new about the New Economy movement.

We dedicate CoopEcon this year to Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, the many other victims of police and other racist violence; We honor the heroic people of Ferguson and the countless ordinary people in communities across the country who know a change must come and are willing to participate in creating that change.