Description

In 2013 we woke up and realized that when we paid our apartment rent, our car payments and our health insurance, our money was going to increase profits for big corporations. It was big real estate conglomerates, banks, car dealerships, and health insurance companies that were benefiting from our hard work. We did not know our neighbors, even though we lived in a beautiful apartment complex.  It was a lonely treadmill, and we knew that we were not the only ones whose lives had been shaped by an economic system that values profit over people. 

The impact of this new clarity led us to make a bold decision to change our lifestyle, leave all that behind and use our filmmaking to advocate a new approach, to inspire vision and create change.   

THE DREAM WE CHOOSE includes accounts of communities we have found that are transforming their economies, building community wealth, changing the nature of work from survival to contribution, and creating a new and joyful culture.  

• • • • A very small town almost disappears from the map and then its people step forward and bring it back to life.
        
      • In the crowded streets of a big city where concrete has taken over 70% of the landscape, people are reclaiming patches of land to grow vegetables and build relationships.
      • Residents of a city neighborhood are overcoming a food desert by developing local leaders, growing community food systems, and building community-owned wealth.
      • The mayor of a rural township takes on a never-before-attempted economic strategy based on Contributionism to prove that the community can look after its own needs.

This documentary film tells the stories of communities rural and urban, large and small, that are gathering investors, residents and resources and showing us what it takes to co-create sustainable communities and an economy where people are more important than profits. 

Taking our economic future into our own hands one neighborhood at a time.