Taking back the economy at the St Barnabas Table Top Sale
Helen Graham
Next weekend we are co-organising a Table Top Sale with St Barnabas Church. The Table Top Sales are wonderful events that bring together crafters, people with pre-loved items to sell, local bread and cake makers with the Holgate Ward Councillors surgery.
St Barnabas Church ran a few Table Top Sales at the end of 2023 and YoCo had had a stall. Phil and I ran YoCo’s stall and had a great time chatting about everything from YoCo’s intentions on York Central to the workings of the Hydraulic Power House on Leeman Road. So I had been asking about when the sales might start up again and to help make them possible I volunteered to pitch in with the organising.
One of the powerful things about the Table Top Sale is that it is – in a very everyday way – ‘taking back the economy’, in the words of feminist economists J.K. Gibson-Graham with Jenny Cameron and Stephen Healy. J.K. Gibson-Graham have long argued that while we too often accept ‘the economy’ as this external force that we have no control over, it is more useful to think of ‘our economy [as] the outcome of the decisions we make and the actions we take (Gibson-Graham et al, 2013, p. xiii). The hope Gibson-Graham’s work offers is that if we start to see the economy as something that we make through our everyday choices then we can take ‘economic matters into [our]… own hands to help create worlds that are socially and environmentally just’ (Gibson-Graham et al, 2013, p. xiii).
Part of taking back the economy is really noticing the economies that are at work in our neighbourhoods. J.K. Gibson-Graham call these ‘community economies’ and they include all the ways in which we exchange things to make our lives possible and enriched, whether with money or without.
One way J.K. Gibson-Graham have communicated this is as an iceberg where the very traditional way we think of economy – such waged labour, capitalist enterprises – is the part of the iceberg that can be easily seen above the water and the other ways we exchange are below.
Diverse Economies Iceberg by Community Economies Collective is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License."
The powerful idea here resonates very strongly one of the 8 My York Central Big Ideas – ‘A Community Made Through Exchange’. The idea of a ‘Community Made Through Exchange’ continues to power YoCo where we are currently concretely identifying how we can enable forever affordable homes precisely through expanding what counts as a ‘contribution’ beyond the only monetary.
It is through the enactment of a ‘community made through exchange’ that the Table Top Sale – so brilliantly kicked off by St Barnabas’ David Maby – connects to the economic design we’re working on for the co-owned neighbourhood. The Table Top Sale is both and at the same time bric-a-brac and how we start changing our local economy…see you there!