Our history
People’s Economy was founded in 2016 (under our original name ‘Economy’) as an offshoot of Rethinking Economics. Rethinking Economics is an international network of students, academics and professionals which campaigns for improvements to how economics is taught in classrooms and society at large.
In 2015, Rethinking Economics appeared in Boom Bust Boom, an economic documentary directed by the late Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame). That led to the producers – Cardano Insights – agreeing to provide the seed funding for a new charitable venture with a mission to provide accessible economics on a larger scale. That venture became Economy.
Since then, we’ve grown and evolved into a community of our own.
At the start of 2023 we launched our strategy for the next five years which reiterates our focus on building power among communities experiencing economic injustice. To support this direction, we updated our branding and our name.
We now have eight staff, over fifty trained volunteer facilitators, hundreds of graduates from our courses and workshops, 25 000 monthly readers of ecnmy.org, and many partners across community development, media, policymaking, the new economy movement and academia.
A big thank you to all of our previous funders: Cardano, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Garfield Weston, Nesta Future News Pilot Fund, Institute of Chartered Accounts in England and Wales, BlackRock Philanthropy, Allen & Overy Foundation, Golden Bottle Trust and the Manchester Statistical Society.