Jason Nardi

Bio

"An activist for social justice, ethical finance and communication rights, Jason Nardi is coordinator of the Social Watch Italian Coalition (socialwatch.org) and member of the RIPESS International board of directors, where he represents the Solidarity Economy Europe coordination committee (ripess.org / ripess.eu). He is an active member of the International Council of the World Social Forum, an organiser for Terra Futura, annual fair on sustainability and good practices and has created Zoes.org – the first Italian social network for social solidarity economy. Recently he's worked on the PRICE project (Promoting Responsible Investments and Commers in Europe), on an app to map European fair / ethical initiatives (Go-fair.eu) and on a game on Ethical Banking ("The Banks' games"). Jason is currently on the board of the Italian development Ngo COSPE (cospe.org) and of an organic-fair catering cooperative (zenzerocooperativa.it).

With a background on Communication and media (Princeton University, USA and a Master’s degree on Communication and mass media – Political science at the University of Florence), he has been director of the Italian center of Oneworld.net – Unimondo (www.unimondo.org), speaker for the CRIS-Communication Rights Campaign, as well as teacher of citizen journalism with the satellite and web television Arcoiris.tv and in MED - Media education. As a journalist, he contributes to several Italian civil society magazines and websites, among which Valori, Mani Tese, Ucodep-Oxfam Italy, Carta, Altreconomia, Huffington Post. He’s also a trainer on Ethical Finance and Fair Trade topics and co-founded Solidarius in Italy (solidarius.it), a research-consulting firm to help develop solidarity economy networks, part of a Brasilian based international network (Solidarius.net). With Solidarius, Jason has been working also on alternative currency interchange systems and on a solidarity copyleft license, comparing approaches with Free Software Foundation and P2P Foundation people.

As an activist Jason has promoted several national and international campaigns with NGOs and civil society networks, ranging from anti-discrimination/migration rights, water rights and commons, participatory budgeting, finance for (local) development, financial transaction tax, etc. He's also been amongst the main organizers of the first European Social Forum (Florence, 2002), the anti-war global demonstration on 15 Feb 2003, and the Firenze 10+10 convergence forum (Florence 2012). In the last 3 years he's been concentrating efforts on bringing together different "alter-globalization" movements, mainly at the European level."