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 socialenterprise achieving triple bottom-line results: for society, the environment, and finance.
A blueprint for creating sustainable businesses, emphasizing the power and potential of cooperative models
A blueprint for creating sustainable businesses, emphasizing the power and potential of cooperative models “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.