The Plan:

Sadly, there is no manual for Zion-building.

However, we do have hints from scripture, gobs of apostolic quotes from the 1850s through the 1880s, and some remarkable precedents.  In this way, we’ve been taught correct principles and now choose to govern ourselves economically.

Our plan is to follow Apostle Lorenzo Snow’s method of achieving economic unity, adjusted for today’s Internet Age.

Here are the steps as they currently stand:

  1. Use our affiliate links to Amazon and eBay to raise a few funds to take Step Two (and to incorporate the co-op).
  2. Create a central marketing co-op online (you are there now), selling products we all already buy.
  3. Use the profits to set up Saints in manufacturing and service co-ops, selling their goods and services through the main co-op.
  4. Rinse and repeat.

Throughout steps 1-4, we will work toward achieving greater and greater self-sufficiency in the group by focusing on the basic human needs of food, clothing, shelter, and energy.

Then, maybe eventually, we’ll consider taking up Brigham Young’s challenge when he stated in the October 1878 General Conference:

“We want to see a community organized in which every person will be industrious, faithful and prudent…. But if such a community could be organized, to show the Latter-day Saints how to build up the kingdom of heaven on the earth, I would be glad to see it—would not you?
If this could be done I want to say to the Latter-day Saints, that I have a splendid place, large enough for about five hundred or a thousand persons to settle upon, and I would like to be the one to make a donation of it, with a good deal more, to start the business, to see if we can actually accomplish the affair, and show the Latter-day Saints how to build up Zion.”

Wouldn’t THAT be something?

So, that’s the plan at the moment, simply a modern application of Lorenzo Snow’s approach with Brigham City.

Question: “But how does this help build Zion?”

Answer:
The purpose of using the affiliate links to Amazon and eBay are to raise funds for the plan to follow Lorenzo Snow’s example.

Elder Snow first created a marketing co-operative in Brigham City that sold locally-produced products. Instead of the profits going to the co-op’s founder, they went to creating worker-owned cooperatives.  Those co-ops would then sell their products through the initial marketing co-op. Then those profits would again be used to create even more manufacturing co-ops.  This was repeated over and over again, until everyone in Brigham City who worked, did so for one of 40+ co-ops.  Here’s a link to the story:  http://buildingzion.org/pdf/brigham-city.pdf
Multiple prophets and apostles during the mid 1800s in Utah stated that these cooperatives were a “stepping stone to the Order of Enoch”.  They saw co-ops as a means to accomplish (at least) two things:
  1. Get the Saints used to working together for their mutual benefit (instead of Babylon’s “every man for himself” mentality.
  2. Help their community become economically independent from Babylon.  It was reported that Brigham City achieved “85%” self-reliance.
Here’s a link to some of those quotes:  http://buildingzion.org/category/zion-quotes/cooperatives/
 
Raising funds through these affiliate links will allow us to follow Elder Snow’s methods, but we’re doing it online instead of in a single (isolated) community.  The funds will cover the costs of incorporating and creating and expanding an e-commerce website to begin selling products everyone already buys somewhere else.  Eventually, the profits will be sufficient to launch our first manufacturing co-op, just like in Brigham City well over a century ago.