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Core Economy
The monetary economy of corporations, private companies, and governments works on principles of contract, specialization and agreement.
There is another overlooked and "invisible" economy that exists of family, neighborhood and community. It operates on different principles: sharing, loyalty, love, and pitching in.
This community economy - or Core Economy - is energized by exchanges based on mutuality and reciprocity, not contracts.
These two economies, operating on entirely different principles, are interdependent. While the monetary economy needs family and community, the core economy needs the monetary economy for the goods and services that it so effectively produces.
The problem is that the monetary economy picks and chooses the people, the communities, and the specialized skills that it wants.
Those people who have neither money nor marketable skills - the poor, the frail, the uneducated, the elderly, and the children and adults without money to be consumers - are rejected and discarded.
When individuals and communities become depleted by such disinvestment, the social fabric tears apart. Human services programs are inserted to repair the damage, but they, too, function in the specialized mode of the monetary economy.
Co-Production does something different. It aims to reconfigure the interaction between the core and monetarized economies. It calls for action that rebuilds the core economy, thereby leading to genuine system change.