About FREE

FREE is a network of people working to understand the economic and social systems that shape our lives and to build new ones rooted in care.

The name stands for Forum for Real Economic Emancipation. The “forum” part is deliberate. FREE is a place where people come together to ask hard questions about power, wealth, and justice, and to do something about what they find. Economics is not a distant abstraction. It is rent, wages, healthcare, schools, neighborhoods, food, land, debt. The economy is us, and the work of FREE is to make that visible and to organize around it.

How We Work

FREE organizes through local assemblies. An assembly is a recurring open meeting where members of a community deliberate, decide, and act on local conditions. The assembly form is participatory rather than representative. Decisions are made by the people who show up. The first FREE assembly began in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2025, and operates as the pilot from which most of the practices in this wiki were developed.

Around each assembly, smaller working groups, called Circles, handle the operational work between meetings. Circles are accountable to the assembly. Members rotate through coordination roles, called Stewards, on ninety-day cycles. The structure is designed to distribute power, prevent burnout, and surface new leadership rather than concentrate it.

FREE chapters are now forming across multiple countries. Each chapter is sovereign in its local work, choosing its own focus, its own campaigns, and its own pace. The connective tissue across chapters is shared values, shared documentation practices, and a shared frame about the global system we are organizing within. FREE Foundation provides the infrastructure that supports chapters and connects them to each other.

Who Is Behind This

Clara Mattei, an economic historian and author, serves as FREE’s founder and president. Her work on the history of austerity and the political economy of capitalism shapes much of FREE’s intellectual frame, and her public-facing role helps connect the work to broader audiences. Operational direction is held by Integrated Ops, and the Tulsa pilot assembly contributes leadership through its elected Stewards and Circles.

FREE Foundation is incorporated as a nonprofit in the United States, with global federation infrastructure under development. We are in active conversation with chapters in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas about how that federation will work as the network grows.

What FREE Is Building Toward

The longer vision is a federated network of local assemblies and cooperative enterprises that together demonstrate what an economy organized around care rather than extraction could look like. The work is in early stages. Most of what FREE does today is education, organizing, and assembly-building. The cooperative and federation dimensions are being designed now, with infrastructure expected to mature over the next two to three years.

This wiki holds the documents that support that work as it scales.

Learn More

The FREE website is at freefreeforum.org. The newsletter, on Substack, publishes regular reflections and announcements. Clara Mattei’s books, including The Capital Order and Operation Austerity, give a deeper account of the economic frame FREE works within.

For practical paths into the work, see How to Engage with FREE.