Weaving a Web of Liberation

How Bozeman Is Building a Wellbeing Economy

Image Credit: Gallatin Valley Food Bank

In early spring sunlight, the air around the Story Mill Learning Garden held a scent of damp earth and possibility. It was 9 a.m. and volunteers—students, elders, growers—tended rows of kale and medicinal herbs. This ¼‑acre garden is part of the Gallatin Valley Food Bank project, created for open harvest, ecological learning, and destigmatizing food access in Bozeman. Its roots spread across sectors—food justice, cultural resurgence, communal healing.

Through projects like this, Bozeman is quietly weaving something new: the living fabric of a wellbeing economy. It is not theory. It is a mesh of networks, formed by people altering ownership and access, dissolving profit-first assumptions, and embedding equity, solidarity, and ecological regeneration into everyday conduct.

This is Bozeman beyond capitalism.

Land and Housing

Near the heart of the city, Bozeman Tenants United rose in 2022 to amplify renter rights. Co-founder Patrick Finegan calls it a solidarity movement. He says, “We are not here to fight landlords. We are here to change the system.” The union helped ban short‑term rentals in residential zones in June 2023, potentially freeing 900 homes for long‑term residents. The city is now exploring a tenant Right to Counsel program, a plan that would channel public funds into legal aid so tenants need not face eviction alone. Data from May 2025 confirms that in 2024, only four tenants had legal representation in court while landlords almost always had attorneys.

This is not charity. It is structural justice in progress.

Across town, community land stewardship takes shape in the form of cooperative experiments guided by the Montana Cooperative Development Center. Founded in 1998, MCDC educates, incubates, and networks co‑ops committed to democratic member control and inter‑cooperation. Its workshops and consultations help people design housing cooperatives, farm co‑ops, and worker co‑ops rooted in shared ownership and care.

Those ideas meet soil at Broken Ground Permaculture. Led by certified designer Kareen Erbe, Broken Ground offers permaculture design for suburban and farm‑scale land. Kareen calls her mission “earth care, people care, fair share,” asking participants to see land not as a market but as mutual flourishing. She says, “Permaculture design is about reconnecting humans to the systems that hold them.”

Food and Resource Sharing

In Story Mill Park, the Indigenous gardens grow under the guidance of the Buffalo Nations Food System Initiative at MSU. Jill Falcon Mackin explains that the gardens help “predispose us to health.” They restore ancestral foodways and rebuild reciprocal relationships with the land. Students learn not just to harvest, but to remember.

Nearby, the Food Bank’s open harvest model operates with low barriers and collective volunteering. People do not have to prove hardship to garden. Kids learn to sow seeds. Adults meet neighbors. Access becomes shared, not transactional.

Permaculture practice also blossoms at Paradise Permaculture’s food forest project north of Bozeman. Using swales, fruit trees, and perennial guilds, the forest is being assembled to regenerate soil, water, and community—even during Montana winters. Produce from the half-acre project flows into local markets and educational events. The design is ecological, yes, but also deeply communal.

Work and Ownership

Bozeman hosts a handful of B Corporations. Among them is OnSite Energy Inc., a solar installer and energy co‑op operating in Missoula and Bozeman. They claim certification for responsible governance, worker welfare, and ecological purpose. Their Amicus Solar Cooperative helps nonprofits and schools access solar projects at lower cost. Here, collective ownership means shared stakes in clean energy, not shareholder profit.

Out in the valley, Border Farm is emerging as a regenerative farm project producing vegetables, meat, dairy, and eggs using climate‑resilient practices. Behind it are farmers practicing ecological regeneration as livelihood, not extraction. Their social mission quietly underlines values of reciprocity and bioregional resilience.

Finance

Anchoring all this is community‑based finance. Bozeman is served by three cooperative credit unions: Rocky Mountain Credit Union, Clearwater Credit Union, and smaller Sky Federal Credit Union. Rocky Mountain CU puts community first, partnering with nonprofits like the Bozeman Symphony and Holter Museum. Clearwater foregrounds transparency and environmental sustainability, and even includes a land acknowledgment at its branch. These institutions channel deposits into low‑interest loans for local homeowners, cooperative enterprises, and ecological projects, resisting predatory finance.

Ecological Regeneration

Permaculture is alive in Bozeman, not just as backyard gardens but as an ethos. Broken Ground, Paradise Permaculture, and Orion Farmstead’s design practicums (north of Bozeman) connect people to regenerative land design, water harvest, biodiversity, and community care. They teach that a patch of earth is a node in an interspecies network.

Together these projects cultivate a new soil beneath the feet of the economy.

Technology and Infrastructure

Digital solidarity grows too, quietly. Citizen‑led broadband discussions and platform‑co‑op interest groups meet under the aegis of MCDC’s cooperative education. While still nascent, local advocates push for civic tech to be governed like commons, not platforms extracting data. They suggest that municipal broadband and community‑owned networks can stabilize small business, reduce reliance on global platforms, and support digital justice in ways aligned with wellbeing economy values.

Interconnections Across Sectors

One day last summer, volunteers from Broken Ground and the Food Bank met at Border Farm to share seedlings. The permaculture designers advised on soil swales. The Food Bank staff organized seed‑starting materials. Credit union representatives came to talk co‑op financing. Tenant activists spoke about equitable land access. Conversations spark collaboration.

Each initiative stays rooted in its purpose, whether it is food justice, housing rights, or ecological regeneration, but awareness blooms when people convene across those lines.

Toward a Post‑Capitalist Mosaic

Bozeman’s wellbeing economy is clear, but incomplete. Gaps persist. Tenant legal aid is still under fund‑raising. Cooperative housing remains rare. Indigenous sovereignty is not fully reclaimed in land governance. Digital commons remain aspirational.

Still, coherence emerges in the interwoven networks. Each node reduces dependence on profit‑centric structures. Each shared garden, permaculture training, tenant win, or co‑op loan is a stitch in a burgeoning web of post-capitalism; not utopia, but practice; not theory, but living story.

A Call to Action

If you stand for alternatives, Bozeman offers pathways. Join a garden volunteer day at Story Mill. Attend a permaculture workshop with Broken Ground. Open an account at a credit union. Support Bozeman Tenants United. Talk to MCDC about launching or joining a cooperative. Help seed civic broadband co‑ops.

You can visit. You can ask to join. You can seed.

Bozeman’s wellbeing economy is a living tapestry. It is patchwork, perpetual, experimental, resilient, and relational. It is not a revolution shouted. It is a revolution lived.

And if Bozeman’s quiet weave can spread, it might offer a model for commons, care, and community in a world that demands more than growth.