NoVASEN (NoVA Solidarity Economy Network) hosted an educational potluck on November 20th 2025.
The event was about networking and education with about 30 attendees from across the DMV who are all either actively involved in solidarity economy work (work for a co-op, community wealth building, etc.) or interested in learning more. The event included educational tables on co-ops, mutual aid, climate/environmental action, and affordable housing. Attendees flipped between eating and touring the tables throughout the event.
It was successful in boosting NoVASEN team morale and bonding; we unanimously agreed it was a success and enjoyed ourselves. Success for us also meant people signing up for the NoVASEN Decidim and we had multiple quality signups.
Decidim is a tool used by the Richmond City Government for participatory budgeting as well as in Barcelona, where it was developed as an open source tool. It’s a tool to aid in digital participation and democracy, whether for a local government or organizing. NoVASEN is testing the hypothesis that it will be useful for a small group as we try to organize the solidarity economy in the DMV. This matters partly because it takes significant monetary investment to create a custom instance of the application, even though it’s open source. This is because we’re paying a third party software development cooperative, octree, to help us launch and customize the NoVASEN instance in addition to paying Nova Web Development engineers and consultants to help NoVASEN to with successful implementation.
To that end, it would be great if interested folks would sign up to keep an eye on what we’re up to and to help us organize the solidarity economy. You can create an account in less than a minute here: https://novasen.org/
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