Yana Ludwig: Moving Toward Cooperative Culture

The United States has a culture that is individualistic, competitive, and materialistic. To move forward to a less oppressive environment we need to radically shift our values and learn to work together.

Here to discuss these important topics today is Yana Ludwig, cooperative culture pioneer, intentional community advocate, and oppression activist.

Yana is the author of Together Resilient and The Cooperative Culture Handbook.  We explore the ways that she is confronting power, oppression, privilege, and individualism in her writing and intentional actions.

We talk about the focus on local community-based responses to climate destruction in Together Resilient and how the themes of culture and group process work in that book grew into The Cooperative Culture Handbook.

A few of the themes Yana discusses in her book are around how our culture thinks about security and listening, and the effects that disintegration has on us psychologically.

Part of the work she tries to do is reframe these concepts so they can underlie a more equitable cultural value system or drive a behavior change.

Our conversation also explores the difficult terrain of oppressor cultures confronting their privilege, cultural appropriation and Yana’s decision to change her name multiple times, and a few organizations that are pushing the needle forward as far as cooperative culture.

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