This report is about the ways that arts and culture grantmakers can engage in systems-change work that addresses root causes rather than symptoms of cultural inequity.
The Ujamaa Hour is a monthly webcast hosted by writer, facilitator, and organizer, Michael Tekhen Strode, exploring the Black social and solidarity economy through intimate, informal conversation. In the fall of 2018, the Ujamaa Hour webcast launched as an ongoing series of interviews with organizers and activists who are building Black-led efforts towards economic justice, community resilience, and Black liberation.
We created this legal resource guide with grassroots mutual aid networks in mind. At the beginning of the pandemic, we started to receive questions from community organizers from across the country. As these operations grew in number and complexity, we noticed a pattern in the types of questions being asked. And so we set out to put together a collective repository of our research in response to the most common questions we received. This resource is in large part directed by you, and reflect actual questions you’ve submitted to us over the last few months.
This guide lays out processes and templates for how you can establish a self-governing organization deeply rooted in your values and politics, whatever those values and politics are. It walks you through important conversations about how you will make decisions, balance power between stakeholders, coordinate work, and manage your organization while also ensuring that you are within the bounds of the law and prepared for the kinds of unforeseen events that can create legal liability.
Pathways to a People's Economy was developed by a team of New Economy Coalition member organizations to amplify the new economy policy wins happening on the ground and provide real examples of how to shift our economic conditions from the bottom up. It provides tools for communities and organizations to make concrete policy demands to advance a new economy – an economy for, by, and with the people.
In this episode, we continue our exploration of the exciting and contentious idea of Universal Basic Income.
What role did economic cooperation play in the civil rights movement? As it turns out, a huge one. Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard co-founded the U.S. Federation of Worker Co-ops & helped that organization build lasting ties with prominent civil rights and cooperative organizations.
Civil society organisations, trade unions, and local authorities are crafting new templates for how to expand democratic public ownership to all levels of society and opening up new routes to community-led and climate conscious public services.
The (Re)Building Technology: Vol 2 zine is a compilation of practices and stories from 11 global community technology grantees, including "Community Network Lessons" facilitation exercises, diagrams of the network designs, and more!
A new investment co-op model lets communities own and develop their commercial spaces. Though new, this model holds potential for the many neighborhoods whose business districts are decaying, controlled by distant landlords or faraway retail chains.
In response to the sustained and increasingly visible violence against Black communities in the U.S. and globally, a collective of more than 50 organizations representing thousands of Black people from across the country have come together with renewed energy and purpose to articulate a common vision and agenda.
North Dakota is the only state that has established a publicly owned bank: the Bank of North Dakota. This article looks at the benefits that a public bank has brought to the state.
This webinar covers models for divestment campaigns in cities, tools for individuals and non-profits to move their money, and resources to move capital as an individual or part of a campaign
Report from MIT CoLab on transformative strategies from movement-oriented CLTs and permanent real estate cooperatives.
This report provides an overview of strategies and tools that, as a group, represent an innovative and potentially powerful new approach — one that establishes, in various ways, community control of land and housing.
African Americans have been pioneering co-ops as an economic strategy since the days of slavery. Author Jessica Gordon Nembhard on how centuries-old models can guide our economy today.
An Interview with Professor Jessica Gordon Nembhard
Lack of access to proper retail space was crippling these immigrant businesswomen in the Twin Cities. In forming a commercial real estate cooperative, they’re going far by going together.
Activists say public power would lower bills and expand clean energy. But they face tough opposition from investor-owned utilities.
Pecan Milk Co-op’s rich and creamy alt milks have gained a loyal following in Atlanta. But founder Nijil Jones has a bigger goal: putting power back in the hands of economically marginalized queer and Black people.
The COVID crisis further exposed the social, political and environmental inequities embedded in our society. However, the pandemic created opportunities for communities to organize and practice cooperative solutions to enhance capacity for fundamental system change. Join us to learn about the innovative work of Cooperation Jackson.
Featuring:
Kali Akuno
Co-Founder & Co-Director - Cooperation Jackson
Join us for a panel discussion with African Indigenous Diaspora to learn about the reality of Black-led and women-led intentional communities, as well as an opportunity to respond with collective action. In this 90-,minute panel, you will learn about a variety of global African diasporic intentional communities, and the challenges they face, through the Black people leading them.
An Interview with Earth-Bound Building. Earth-Bound Building (EBB) is a construction cooperative based in southern Maryland. They came together with a mission to provide ecological and affordable construction services to Black and brown farmers with less access to resources. As Climate Justice Alliance’s new Frontline Communications Coordinator, I recently interviewed Dom Hosack, a worker-owner with Earth-Bound Building and CJA’s Regenerative Economy Fellow, to learn more about the Earth-Bound story, its formation, and the support of the Our Power Loan Fund.
In 1969, Mrs. Hamer founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative with a $10,000 donation from Measure for Measure, a charitable organization based in Wisconsin. The former sharecropper purchased 40 acres of prime Delta land. It was her attempt to empower poor Black farmers and sharecroppers, who, for generations, had been at the mercy of the local white landowners. “The time has come now when we are going to have to get what we need ourselves. We may get a little help, here and there, but in the main we’re going to have to do it ourselves,” she explained.
BLCA is our program for New Orleans’ Black workers, organizers, community leaders, entrepreneurs and families to explore cooperative economics as a path toward black liberation in New Orleans and beyond.
Community financing schemes have spread from medieval Ghana and 19th-century Jamaica to contemporary Toronto, where a Black social economy has taken hold. Two years ago, Caroline Shenaz Hossein, convened a meeting of Black women in Toronto who had been organizing self-managed informal cooperatives, known as Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs). These informal financial institution that involves a group of individuals who come together to save and borrow money. Such Black-led mutual aid groups exists all over North America, from Montreal to Miami.
From Los Angeles to the East Bay, major public banking plans are emerging from California cities.
The District’s new street vending regulations allow street vendors to self-govern the sidewalks where they conduct business. Plus, a peek at new developments for street vendors in NYC and California.
Learn more about Black Solidarity Economy history starting with early Black benevolent societies.
Did you know many of them named themselves after Africa and Ethiopia? Groups like the African Union Society have documented correspondence with other Black societies discussing the delicate idea of returning to Africa, a conversation we still have today.
Learn about the histories of Black women like Halena Wilson, Rosina Corrothers-Tucker, Ada Dillon and, Frances Mary Albrier whose labor (formal and informal) held up the organizing of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids.
The #BlackCoopsMatter interview series highlights Black-led or ally cooperative organizations. The purpose of the series is to learn from the challenges faced and overcome by cooperative members as we build momentum in the Black cooperative movement.
Formed in 1970, the Uruguayan Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives is a network of over 500 housing cooperatives, representing more than 90,000 people in Uruguay.
Tierra y Libertad in northern Washington is the first farmworker-owned co-op in the Pacific Northwest; after years of uncertainty, the group is focused on growing a solidarity economy.
Covid-19 has revealed the depths of the nation’s rental housing crisis — but a group of Minneapolis tenants has shown that a different future is possible. The night after tenants of the Corcoran Five apartment buildings in Minneapolis bought the buildings, they removed their landlord’s signs in celebration — their first major act of collective ownership.Credit...
When the Almeda fire displaced thousands of people in September 2020, one affected community came up with an ambitious plan to buy a manufactured home park together. After nearly two years of effort, they're closer than ever to reaching their goal.
After years of experiencing discrimination at work, three trans immigrant women started a trans beauticians' co-op in Queens, New York—and are welcoming others to join. Broadly spoke to them about how they made it happen.
The Freedom Quilting Bee is a quilting cooperative established in 1966 by a group of African American women in the community of Rehoboth, 46 miles from Selma, in Wilcox County. The groups arose during the civil rights movement and is heralded for having spawned a renaissance in the popularity of quilting in American interior décor in the 1960s. The Freedom Quilting Bee has in recent years been confused with the nationally known Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective, a group of quilters who reside in the nearby community of Boykin (formerly Gee’s Bend). Some quilters in the Freedom Quilting Bee have belonged to both groups.
This is the story of the Nadia Echazú Textile Cooperative, the first social enterprise managed by and for travesti and trans people in Argentina.
On Sundays, Edith Alas Ortega travels 20 minutes from her home to a farm field in Henderson County, North Carolina, and takes a deep breath. “There’s a mental and physical healing that happens out here,” she said in Spanish. Ortega is one of five members of Tierra Fértil Coop—“fertile ground” in English—an agricultural, worker-owned cooperative for and by Latinx immigrants. The group—three Salvadoran and three Mexican immigrants—meet every week on their one-acre parcel in Hendersonville that provides vegetables for the families involved as well as enough for resale, with a focus on culturally appropriate ingredients for the Latinx market.
As a nationwide fight to make housing affordable to all intensifies, we talk to Dominique Walker, one of the leaders of Moms 4 Housing, about how her group is working to get a home controlled by a real estate speculator into the hands of a community land trust. Also, Next System Project researcher Juliana Broad gives both a historical and forward-looking perspective on the effort to actualize housing as a human right.
Project Hustle is a Black, queer, hood feminist-led transformative organizing project based in Southeast Louisiana. Project Hustle celebrates how Black women and femmes have made alternatives to job exploitation by building the infrastructure to support one another, get loved ones free from incarceration, and resist in a state perennially ranked the “incarceration capital” of the world.
Women Rising Radio #40 explores the global women’s movement to resist the violence and greed of capitalism. A women-led village in Kurdish Syria establishes democracy, gender equality, religious freedom and sustainability. And in New York city, women-led cooperative businesses are challenging monopoly capitalist enterprise, and winning.
In January in East Oakland, on a small urban farm tucked between the Southern Pacific Railroad and the Nimitz Freeway, the food justice organization Planting Justice gifted a quarter-acre of its 2-acre property to Sogorea Te. “We have always believed that reparations are necessary,” said Gavin Raders, Planting Justice’s executive director. “One way we wanted to do that is to put the land in the Sogorea Te Land Trust.”
In the face of unending economic crises and climate catastrophe, we must consider, what does a dignified life look like? Feminist intellectual and activist Amaia Pérez Orozco powerfully and provocatively outlines a vision for a web of life sustained collectively with care, mutualism, and in balance with our ecological world. That vision is a call to action to subvert the foundational order of racial capitalism, colonial violence, and a heteropatriarchal economy that threatens every form of life.
The Feminist Subversion of the Economy makes the connection between the systems that promise more devastation and destruction of life in the name of profit—and rallies women, LGBTQ+ communities, and movements worldwide to center gender and social reproduction in a vision for a balanced ecology, a just economy, and a free society.
Black, trans, queer, and nonbinary people were harmed by the lack of access to abortion and reproductive healthcare long before Roe v. Wade was overturned — along with anyone who deals with racial, gender, cultural, income-based, and geographic disparities. The reproductive justice workers of the Asheville-based Mountain Area Abortion Doula Collective shared their experiences, priorities, and perspectives with Janet Hurley, a former abortion-rights organizer and mom of one of the co-founders.
Social housing is a public option for housing that is permanently affordable, protected from the
private market, and publicly owned by the government or under democratic community control
by non-profit entities. Around the world, robust social housing programs have successfully ended
affordable housing shortages; expanded democratic accountability and equitable housing access;
The story of Stonewall is familiar to many: following a routine police raid on a mafia-controlled gay bar in the West Village, queers fought back, with thousands rioting over the next four nights. The riots were initiated and led by the most marginalized of New York City’s working-class queers: homeless youth, Black and Puerto Rican trans women, sex workers, and visibly gender-nonconforming people. The riots catalyzed the most radical elements of the queer counterculture, previously rather marginal, and an explosive organizing energy spread across the country. Hundreds joined newly formed chapters of the Gay Liberation Front, and soon its spin-off and splinter groups constituted what became the modern gay rights movement.
Of the many militants who fought at Stonewall, a few names are often highlighted by those looking to challenge the whitewashing, gender-conformity, and political conservatism of contemporary gay politics. Immediately after the riots, in 1969, participants Sylvia Ray Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson cofounded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). STAR was an organizing and mutual aid project of trans sex workers and homeless queer youth. Later, Rivera and Johnson created STAR House, a group apartment and residence for their comrades in the East Village. The two were active in a number of New York’s early gay-liberation organizations.
in 29 of our 50 states, LGBTQ+ people still lack comprehensive legal protections against discrimination in housing, healthcare, and employment. Lack of safe, affordable housing is particularly evident in our country’s queer youth population, who face a risk of homelessness that is 120 times that of their straight counterparts.
Across the country, there are many organizations working tirelessly to transform this stark reality by offering safe spaces, long-term housing, and other resources to LGBTQ+ youth and otherwise marginalized communities. Here are a few you should learn about:
In the historic fight for LGBTQIA+ liberation and in response to rising transphobia across the country, Black trans women have trailblazed social movements and community-building. Violence faced by transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) people is only exacerbated for Black trans women, who have accounted for two-thirds of fatal victims of anti-trans/GNC violence since 2013.
Mariah Moore and Milan Sherry, two Black trans activists, were inspired to found House of Tulip, the first housing refuge for TGNC people in Louisiana, as a response to rising violence against their community. Beyond housing, the nonprofit collective provides financial aid, a community closet, workshops, and community support.
To protect workers from discrimination, the trans women of Mirror Beauty Cooperative are building a business without bosses.
Join our growing list of queer farms around the so-called USA and beyond! Find and be found by your queer farmer kin, and help us grow our interconnected web of queer folks in agriculture.
Changing ownership and wealth distribution, even at a small scale, presents a model for how to ultimately address the climate crisis.
Though different in their focus and approach, both Queer the Land and Humble Hands Harvest are working to defeat the extractive capitalist economy that fuels the climate crisis. In its place, they aim to create a regenerative economy of care. Key to this is taking back the land.
The historical marginalization of queer folks have led to systemic disparities in income and livelihood. For every dollar a typical worker owns, LGBTQ+ workers earn between four and 40 cents less, depending on their race and gender identities. Compared to the national poverty rate of 12 percent in 2015, transgender Americans had a national poverty rate of more than double at 29 percent in 2015. Transgender people of color suffer even worse poverty rates, with 43 percent of Latino, 41 percent of Native American, 40 percent of multiracial, and 38 percent of Black transgender people living in poverty.
“There is a long history of queer people gathering around food and creating spaces of safety,” Sharma told Inequality.org in an interview. “In our work, we’re trying to reject systems of oppression that tell us that we’re supposed to feel or eat a certain way or only give value to certain kinds of foods and people. Being able to have spaces where, regardless of if you know people, can feel safe and want to connect, using queerness as a way of navigating the world. I want to create and protect that as much as possible.”
On December 6th, NEC members the Cooperative Economics Alliance of NYC (CEANYC) and NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives (NYC NoWC) co-hosted an event for New York City co-ops and solidarity economy groups, exploring the connections between the solidarity economy and the growing movement for a Free Palestine.
As we leverage the power of divestment in this moment — working to end U.S. aid to Israel, stop war profiteering, and defund the military industrial complex — we also need to talk about what we do invest in to build economies of care and cooperation. In this event, we heard from two Palestinian cooperators about how Palestinians are investing in themselves and each other through cooperative economics, in spite of ongoing the genocide and oppression. We also heard from two NYC-based organizers involved in the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement about how cooperative movements can be in deeper solidarity with Palestinians.
To achieve a Just Transition, we must queer our movements. Period. As we imagine navigating the large economic and cultural transition with a vision of justice, we must honor queer, trans, and Two-Spirit wisdom and uplift those whose lived experience is one of the struggle for a just transition for their own lives and bodies, against the system of heteropatriarchy. If the crisis of our times is the eradication of biological and cultural diversity, and diversity is our best defense, then in this moment we must embrace queer and trans liberation as a key frontline struggle to advance a radical rejection of conformity and uplift diversity as necessary for our collective survival and liberation
Project Hustle is a Black, queer, hood feminist-led transformative organizing project based in Southeast Louisiana. Project Hustle celebrates how Black women and femmes have made alternatives to job exploitation by building the infrastructure to support one another, get loved ones free from incarceration, and resist in a state perennially ranked the “incarceration capital” of the world.
Organizations like House of Tulip in New Orleans; My Sistah’s House in Memphis; and Atlanta’s Trans Housing Coalition and Trans Housing Program are carrying a multigenerational banner to provide long-term housing solutions to trans people in their cities.
Highlander's Cultural Organizing programming is excited to introduce our brand new Cultural Organizing 101: Train the Trainer toolkit (updated link!) and accompanying video, free and available to download and utilize in your community to skill up with your networks.
Indigenous, Black, and queer farmers are buying land with the aim to restore and nourish nature along with their cultures and communities.
Queer the Land is a collaborative project that seeks to support tqueer, trans, and two-spirit, Black, Indigenous, people of color (QT2BIPOC) on land owned and worked by these communities. The project is QTL’s response to the displacement and gentrification impacting Seattle’s queer and trans communities. In January 2021, QTL acquired a 12-bedroom house in Beacon Hill, Seattle after a long battle with the sellers.
Kalayo Pestaño, Aimée-Josiane Twagirumukiza, and Denechia “Neesha” Powell-Ingabire co-founded QTL in 2016. As organizers in grassroots organizations in Seattle, they saw that queer, trans, and BIPOC folks were especially struggling from the housing crisis.
We put forward a new approach to public budgets and revenues in order to ensure that
resources are raised equitably and follow the needs and fulfil the full human rights of
Black communities.
● To achieve this, we need to integrate human rights into participatory budgeting models.
I’ve spent the last two and half years learning and implementing participatory budgeting in New York City, first from within the New York City Council and now as a staff member of Participatory Budgeting Project.
As members of Black Youth Project 100, I and my colleague Maria Hadden have presented on participatory budgeting as a policy for Black self-determination and liberation on various occasions and to varying audiences.
This week we are talking about deepening democracy in our communities through participatory budgeting and participatory decision making more broadly. We’re joined by three great guests: Shari Davis of the Participatory Budgeting Project, Lorian Ngarambe of the Rochester-Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative, and Yale University Ph.D. student Alexander Kolokotronis.
The city will use participatory budgeting to allocate $30 million to programs that create “true public health and safety.”
Most cities finalized their 2021 budgets last year in the usual way, with mayors, city managers, and council or commission members hashing out the details. But in Seattle, residents will get to decide over the coming months how to spend millions of dollars that would otherwise go to the police department.
PBP has worked directly with community leadrs in dozens of cities and institutions in the US and Canada to plan and run PB processes, and our work has inspired dozens more processes. Click here or see below for a map of where PB is happening and for more detailed profiles of a few key processes.
Ecological justice is the state of balance between human communities and healthy ecosystems based on thriving, mutually beneficial relationships and truly democratic, participatory self-governance. There is no ecological justice in a world in which Palestinians are bombed, starved, displaced from their lands, and have no freedom of movement or agency over their lives. For generations we have seen the British colonial occupation and the subsequent 75-year occupation by the apartheid state of Israel wreak ecological havoc on historic Palestine and its people; these are textbook examples of the extractive economy in full force.
African-Americans have long been at the forefront of collective economics. These cooperatives go against the grain of exploitative capitalism, and many influential Black figures called for making wealth in a different way - together.
There’s a broad conflation within our present day capitalist society between the success of individual members of certain oppressed and marginalized groups and their collective success and liberation. This is particularly true when it comes to Black people and their liberatory struggles. Too often, the successes of individual people — Oprah, or LeBron James, for example — or their rise to certain leadership positions, take Barack Obama — are seen as collective successes, whereas, when it comes to the material conditions of all Black people, these individual successes don’t have a significant impact. What are the dangers of this conflation between individual and collective success? Can Black liberation be achieved through individual successes within capitalism — through Black capitalism? And what would it mean to truly build Black wealth in the United States and beyond? In today’s Conversation, we’ve brought on someone to help unpack these questions. Francisco Pérez is the Executive Director of the Center for Popular Economics and author of the recent piece in Nonprofit Quarterly: How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the Limits of Black Capitalism.
Niki Franco is back to break down what we mean by the term “disaster capitalism” and how communities all over the world — from PR to New Orleans to Hawai’i — have resisted it and built just recovery efforts that return resources and power to the grassroots.
Energy democracy is the fight to shift energy from a resource that has been centralized and commodified by corporations into a shared resource that is decentralized and democratized, resilient and redundant, aligned with the health of local ecosystems, and which meets the needs of workers and communities. It is a key pillar of a larger Just Transition platform.
“Everyone waits in fear of a Wall Street corporation pressing a red button to turn their power on or off,” says Pete Woiwode, co-director of the Reclaim Our Power: Utility Justice Campaign. “What if we flipped that and the folks who make the decisions about whose needs to prioritize—who has access to life-giving energy—are the folks most vulnerable in these scenarios? Energy can be a process by which we upend generations of horrific injustice and put our lives, livelihoods, and ecosystems at the center.”
Immigrant and Indigenous farmworkers in California reclaim the power of their labor.
Just Recovery resists disaster capitalism at every step – from the disaster collectivism that models people-powered, heart-centered, socially just relief to the long-term organizing and actions that reclaim the right of peoples to define their economies and govern their communities. By organizing directly to meet our needs, particularly in these moments, we exercise our rights, demonstrate our resilience, and resist the imposition of neoliberal policies at every level. We are inspired by those asserting Just Recovery as a vision and practice, in the wake of disaster, and who are forging a path we must all learn to travel. We are learning from you. The term Just Recovery has been used from the #JustHarveyRecovery[1] website to the calls for a Just Recovery in Puerto Rico[2].
Based on the principle that no one should be left behind, mutual aid networks are supporting those most in need in New Orleans following Hurricane Ida.
Community land trusts are known for keeping housing affordable and safe, but they’re also becoming a tool to protect residents from being driven out when a hurricane hits and speculators swoop in.
In this episode of the Next City podcast, Executive Director Lucas Grindley talks with Alexandra Applegate about her reporting on “climate gentrification” and the many ways community land trusts are being used to make cities more resilient to the effects of extreme weather disasters.
Look for resources to support you where you're at in relation to a participatory budgeting or participatory democratic process.
The North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship is a seven-month fellowship focused on Black American Cooperative Economics and the history of Black cooperative economic thought and practice. We center the wisdom and experience of those who share the ancestry of Enslaved Africans in the United States and place value on the legacy of Black collective care.
The North Star is a way to start living into a future of Black Wealth: self-governance, spaces for healing, and an abundance of resources, including financial capital. North Star is a place for Black-led cooperatives, collectives, housing, commercial and land trusts.
A worker-owned co-op is a business owned and controlled by its workers. Worker cooperatives are values-driven businesses that put worker and community benefit at the core of their purpose. In contrast to traditional companies, worker members at worker cooperatives participate in the profits, oversight, and often management of the enterprise using democratic practices. Find resources below to learn more about union, worker-owned cooperatives as a strategy for building worker power.
How can we assure that the material resources and tools are available to communities to meet their needs and elevate the quality of life? This panel explores the movement to create democratic sources of financing to enable communities to build a democratic, just and sustainable economy. Leaders discuss the role of finance, fundamentals of non-extractive finance, and principles being used to develop a financial cooperative nationally, in close connection to grassroots front-line communities.The panel will use concrete examples of existing models.
As the online "sharing economy" devolves into poor labor conditions and monopolistic practices, the concept of "platform cooperativism" offers a hopeful vision for a more democratic online economy. This new wave of entrepreneurs, investors, and business developers are merging offline cooperative economics with the Internet in creative ways. In this CommonBound 2016 workshop, leaders discuss how far this emergent movement has come, and explore some of the challenges it faces in the struggle for the future of the online platforms we increasingly depend on.
Speakers:
Mario Liebrenz (Communication Team, FairCoop)
Popular struggles– ranging from earliest modern labor movements in Britain and the US, to the global Black Liberation movement, to Energiewende and other climate justice campaigns in Europe– have all demonstrated that to be successful, “resistance” work must go hand in hand with concrete visionary organizing.
The panel features leaders from across the country sharing how their communities have organized to simultaneously fight back far-right attacks and build powerful bottom-up solutions that model economic democracy, sustainability, and social justice as cornerstones of a new world in waiting.
Panelists include:
Harper Bishop – Open Buffalo
Worker cooperatives, fundamentally centered on the needs of the worker, have quickly pivoted to meet the needs of their communities during the pandemic, implementing collective decision-making, mutual aid, and resilient business planning to save jobs and stabilize their workforce. While they must still face tough decisions during this time, worker-owners make decisions collectively, influencing how impact is shared across the workforce.
The U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives and the Democracy at Work Institute reached out to more than 250 USFWC members between April and July 2020, and received responses from more than 142 organizations.
A New Economy Week 2015 conversation between Ed Whitfield of the Fund For Democratic Communities and Anand Jahi, NEC Program Director.
If ever there was a moment for cultural strategy -- it's now. A global pandemic has magnified the flaws of our capitalist system, but, also, the power art and culture to uplift, disrupt and build community. The Center for Cultural Power offers #NoGoingBack: A COVID-19 Cultural Strategy Activation Guide for Artists and Activists to meet the moment.
Community Development Credit Unions have long been working for racial justice and innovating in economic justice. Part of the larger community development finance institution (CDFI) movement, these institutions are today boldly lending to undocumented immigrants, fighting predatory lending, preserving historic Black and farmworker CUs, financing worker coops and land trusts, and building partnerships to fund the new economy. Part history lesson, part show and tell, and part participatory debate, three practitioners from the field lead a session to engage participants in how they might access, build, challenge and partner with CDFIs in their own geographies to sustain the new economy.
This CommonBound 2014 opening plenary panel explores what it means for our movements to win. Grounding us in a framework of decolonization, community self-determination and sovereignty, we dive deep into why we do this work. Each of the panelists share their perspective on what is unique about this moment in history — from the political and economic level, to the cultural and ecological.
Speakers:
Chrystel Cornelius (First Nations Oweesta Corporation)
The new economy is rich in experiments and examples, but can these various efforts actually build up to challenge, displace, and ultimately replace our current economic system? Three panelists explore ambitious yet pragmatic strategies over the long term for our organizing, activism, and institutional development. Clear, articulated theories of change can better guide the movement to boldly transform corporate capitalism and create a just and sustainable future.
Keane Bhatt (The Democracy Collaborative – Next System Project)
Gar Alperovitz (The Next System Project)
Esteban Kelly (US Federation of Worker Cooperatives)
Bryant and Britt met while incarcerated, as were all five founding worker-owners of ChiFresh Kitchen. On Monday, the worker-owned cooperative delivered its first meals as a business, to Hope House in the nearby North Lawndale neighborhood, as part of COVID-19 relief efforts. Those first deliveries marked the culmination of a year and a half of organizing, business planning, legislative advocacy and fundraising.
This story originally published in May 2020. Not even a year in, ChiFresh Kitchen is prepping 500 meals a day. But that’s not even the half of it: in December 2020, they bought a 6,000-square-foot building that, once renovated, will let them prepare 5,000 meals a day.
This workshop provides an introduction to the practical steps individuals and groups need to take to establish, build, and successfully manage a cooperative enterprise. This introductory workshop attempts to bring forward basic legal and structural questions such as what is a cooperative, what is a legal entity, what rules govern fundraising and financing for cooperatives, and more.
Art and culture have always been central to our freedom struggles. We use art to keep each other alive, organize, live with joy and imagine freedom. How can organizers and artists best work together to harness the power of culture and create a more just world?
A series of student made videos about research into different solidarity economy initiatives across Latin America.
Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard and Carlton Turner share in a panel conversation about the connection between resist and build strategies historically and today, including key insights on the importance of building cooperative models and solidarity economy infrastructure, and strategies rooted in the histories of Black-led cooperatives and organizers like Fannie Lou Hamer.
A compilation of resource about the history and current practices of cooperatives and solidarity economies across latin America.
A compilation of resource about the history and current practices of Black cooperatives.
"From mutual aid societies to freedom farms and credit unions — Black communities have been using cooperative economics as a tool for collective liberation, self-determination, and to resist the violence of racial capitalism for centuries.
This 2-part series takes a deep dive into the movement that is coalescing around worker cooperatives. We explore the idea of workplace and economic democracy — looking at the cooperative movement's vision of strengthening social, racial, and economic justice. We also explore many of the challenges faced by individual cooperatives and the movement as a whole. How do the values of collectivism bump up against those of our dominant capitalist economic system? How do we collectively unlearn the myths of our neoliberal age? And how can cooperatives succeed and thrive within this 21st century sea of global capitalism, where competition and profit-maximization rule? T
The overall purpose of this guide is to offer resources and tools for those supporting worker cooperatives to get off the ground, and for members to know which the necessary steps & considerations are for starting and launching a worker-owned cooperative. Our approach and model has been tailored to immigrant communities in New York City for over twelve years; this guide is reflective of our experience, but we believe most sections can be adapted to other communities and other regions across the United States.
This curriculum explores our economic and governance systems through a participatory community-based process to create knowledge and share solutions that foster community, equity and healthy communities.
The PMA methodology is not the property of any single organization, person, or group. This Organizing Handbook is designed for organizers, educators, activists, and community members who want to use the Peoples Movement Assembly methodology to build power in their community, on their frontline struggle, and in our social movements.
Movement Generation is proud to offer you their new Strategic Framework for a Just Transition Zine! Offered in English and Spanish, it is a 32-page long training tool and offers a framework for a fair shift to an economy that is ecologically sustainable, equitable and just for all its members. It is full of visuals, stand-alone sections, and curriculum ideas.
In 1969 Shirley Sherrod co-founded a collective farm in Lee County, Georgia. At 6,000 acres, it was the largest tract of black-owned land in the United States. What happened to the New Communities land trust they planned? Let's just say they were way, way ahead of their time but their time just might be coming back
The Beautiful Solutions Gallery and Lab is an interactive space for sharing the stories, solutions and big ideas needed to build new institutional power and point the way toward a just, resilient, and democratic future.
The intersecting crises of income and wealth inequality and climate change, driven by systemic white supremacy and gender inequality, has exposed the frailty of the U.S. economy and democracy. This document was prepared during the COVID-19 pandemic which exacerbated these existing crises and underlying conditions.
A history of New Communities Inc and Shirley and Charles Sherrod.
'Co-operativism and solidarity economy is a real alternative, especially for immigrants and undocumented immigrants'
Participatory democracy is what happens when we can all participate in policy-making, budgeting, and other decisions that impact our lives. Community- led decision-making = participatory democracy practices that share decision-making power.
The group called its experiment The Land of Despair Sprouts with Hope, or Ard el-Ya’s in Arabic—Land of Despair for short. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, the name reflects the group’s somber yet determined view of life under occupation and their responsibilities within it: Saffa’s land was under threat of Zionist settlers while their professional prospects vacillated between the Scylla of unemployment and the Charybdis of underpaid wage labor. With Ard el-Ya’s they not only hoped to protect the land and its ecology, but to establish a “resistance economy”—an economy of self-reliance as the basis of a viable Palestinian liberation struggle, and one that offers dignified work opportunities.
Today, Ard el-Ya’s has grown into one of the most successful youth cooperatives and is a catalyst for over twenty similar ones. Its story reflects young people’s recognition of the role of capitalism in the colonization and economic destruction of Palestine as well as their pursuit of alternative economic models. Its perseverance is one of the best examples of what resistance economy in Palestine can accomplish but also highlights its shortcomings. Understanding the potential and limitations of those agricultural experiments is important, not only for the future of Palestine, but also for a world that is suffering from a grave ecological crisis and in need of a path beyond unfettered capitalist growth.
Host Max Rameau talks with leaders of the Cooperation New Orleans Loan Fund: Tamah Yisrael, the Education and outreach coordinator, and Tamara Prosper, the Loan Steward. Together, they discuss unions, capitalism, and organizing for cooperative economics in the deep south.
This is a special report from the Frontlines in collaboration with CJA members from Puerto Rico.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, community groups throughout different parts of Puerto Rico have rescued vacant lands and transformed them into spaces for social and community development.
Puerto Rican mutual aid groups are not only helping people meet basic needs after Hurricane Fiona, but building community power in the face of U.S. imperialism.
Extensive report about the state of comedores sociales (community kitchens) that have emerged as a just recovery strategy in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and Irma.
November 29th marked the International Day of Solidarity with Palestine. As a one-week temporary ceasefire expires in Gaza, we stand with movements around the world calling for a permanent ceasefire and an end to the occupation. NEC has signed on the Rising Majority statement of solidarity with Gaza, and the Black Solidarity Economy Fund working group has signed on to Black for Palestine. We’ve compiled a list of resources and ways to take action, as well as how NEC members are showing their solidarity.
Las luchas por el territorio también tienen lugar en escenarios urbanos.
Esta es la historia de Palo Alto, una cooperativa de vivienda formada por trabajadores de una mina de arena hace casi medio siglo, hoy amenazada por la presión inmobiliaria en una de las zonas más exclusivas de México.
Participatory budgeting has become increasingly popular as a tool to give citizens a way to engage directly in the democratic process. In Mexico City, however, there is no way for ordinary citizens to monitor the decisions made in the participatory budgeting process; as a result, most do not participate. Those with power and influence have used these low participation rates to their advantage — further corrupting an already corrosive political process.
Young people like Aline Yunery Zunzunegui López are trying to change this dynamic. López is the founder and director of LOOP Mexico, an organization that promotes participatory budgeting in schools to encourage a broader swath of Mexican society to engage in the process. She sat down with me to discuss how young people can use participatory budgeting to change the political culture throughout Mexico — by demonstrating the importance of a consensus-driven political approach, shifting the balance of power, and showing the possibility for real change.
The Oaxacan vision of community, indigenous rights, and autonomy from which Telecomunicaciones Indígenas Comunitarias has emerged can be tied to a far more familiar story: that of the Zapatista indigenous rebellion.
Following Mexico’s Supreme Court ruling to decriminalize abortion, feminists in the country continue to help people access care. Their work can serve as a model for U.S. activists navigating the limits of state health services.
Last year, University of Toronto professor Dr. Caroline Shenaz Hossein published an article in the National Review of Black Politics entitled, The Legacy of Cooperatives among the African Diaspora: The Cases of Haiti and Grenada. In it, Hossein reports on 138 interviews of Grenadians and Haitians she carried out between 2008 and 2013. The interviews focused on people’s preference for cooperative lenders, how co-ops developed on the islands, and the relevance of informal cooperative banks in people’s lives.
Catalytic Communities’ newest project has the potential of offering a land tenure security model for informal settlements around the world. We are studying the development of Community Land Trusts (CLTs) in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. This grassroots organizing model allows residents to individually own their houses, while also maintaining a nonprofit that has collective ownership of the land and manages it to provide affordable housing in perpetuity. The model offers the highest level of tenure security possible and simultaneously preserves residents’ right to collectively develop the neighborhood and to individually sell their homes. The tool offers the maximum level of protection from evictions and gentrification.
This video report pays a visit to Quilombo dos Palmares (1605-1695), the greatest symbol of Black resistance in Brazilian history, and its significance for the representation of Black Brazilian people, who have historically been denied knowledge of their roots. The Quilombo dos Palmares Memorial Park can and should be visited year round. We invite you on a virtual visit to Palmares to commemorate Afro-Latin and Caribbean women on their day, July 25. This report was originally published in Portuguese on the 135th anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery in Brazil—a marker that historically covers over centuries of struggle by Africans and Afro-Brazilians, instead celebrating a regent princess. On May 13, 1888, Black Brazilians were granted formal freedom following 388 years of enslavement and resistance.
Efforts to retake the land and rebuild our communities require us to internationalize class and racial struggles, since capitalism and agrobusiness have intensified exploitation and land grabs across borders. That’s why, in July 2023, Hammer & Hope hosted a roundtable discussion with five workers from two Brazilian and two American organizations that struggle for land reform and alternative food systems. Echoing the Occupy the Farm movement, this magazine wants to share successful strategies and initiatives across the hemispheres while building solidarity with rural social movements. In contrast to the rivalry promoted by nation-state capitalism and U.S. imperialism in the Americas, we join forces with grassroots movements reconquering their lands and building alternative food systems.
For nearly 40 years, Brazil's Landless Workers' Movement (MST) has been fighting the concentration of landownership among the country's elite through the direct occupation and settlement of fallow lands. TRNN contributor Michael Fox reports from MST land in the state of Paraná, where landless workers have built their own homes, schools, farms, and cooperatives.
Participatory Budgeting (BP), is a mechanism that allows citizens and professionals to participate directly in the allocation of municipal, regional, or even national public budgets, began in 1987 in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. Created by the socialist Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT), PB spread within Brazil from 1997–2000 and to other countries after 2000. Today, there are more than 11,000 examples of BP around the world. In Brazil alone, there are 436 instances of PB that have allocated several billion (in U.S. dollars) since their inception.
Introductory video and resource list about the legacy of Black cooperative economics.
In our third short, we sit in conversation with NEC member Sol Underground, an abolitionist ecosystem in Atlanta dreaming of a Black and Indigenous liberated world that is resisting colonial systems of oppression. They are actualizing this dream as an autonomous community-led group that is building, joining, and maintaining networks of care.
THINGS THAT YOU’LL LEARN: How Sol Underground’s transformed from an artist collective to supporting the unhoused community through mutual aid. They share some of the models they organize like Sol Below, a pop up tent that provides warmth and food to the homeless when the temperature drops below a certain degree. They paint a beautiful vision for a world when exploitative systems are abolished, offer practical tips for adopting an abolitionist mindset, and how to put theory into practice.
The US is obsessed with the word “democracy” – but what would real, grassroots democracy actually look like?
Hear all about Participatory Democracy in our latest mini teach-in with Niki Franco, and learn how initiatives like peoples budgets, movement assemblies and workplace democracy are putting real decision making power into community hands.
In our first short we talk about LAND LIBERATION, and engage in conversation with NEC member Nuns and Nones, a community of sisters and seekers who connect to explore the themes of justice, spiritual practice, and how to respond to the needs of the times. The Land Justice Project evolved to support these religious communities to reimagine and shift who has ownership and access to the land they are on.
In this episode Ebony Joy of Cooperative Journal Media speaks with Brittany Koteles, the director of Nuns and Nones. She begins with laying a foundation for what land justice is and how the Land Justice Project embodies it through its models and practices. She shares when and why land became commodified, how the aging community of nuns is navigating the mistrust and contradictions that emerge when giving Catholic owned land to Native American and Black people, and ways you can engage in land justice.
On the the anniversary of Stonewall, we’re learning all about the radical roots of Pride Month (hint: Stonewall was an uprising against police brutality) and the importance of building abolition into our movements for queer & trans liberation.
Dig into the reading list below to see the ways queer & trans people continue to build solidarity economies and new systems of care to keep each other safe.
Food security, traditional agriculture, and local self-reliance are key to regenerative societies of the future, say water protectors taking the movement’s lessons forward.
Before launching The Next System Project, we sat down with historian and economic activist Jessica Gordon Nembhard to learn what the tradition of Black cooperative economic development and the long struggle for civil rights could teach us about system change and system models. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.
Many countries in the Global North use the term “social economy”—also known as
the third sector—to describe economies run by citizens rather than by state or business actors. Over the years, many Black feminist scholars that we have worked with
also share the view that the concept of the “social economy” is limited to a European
understanding. It fails to acknowledge those actors in the third sector who are
People’s Movement Assemblies are grassroots, democratic gatherings inspired by the World Social Forum in 2003, where collective decision-making spaces facilitated action plans that sparked international protests, leading to the Global Day of Action that year with millions of people worldwide taking to the streets to speak out against the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. These assemblies are used by communities to collectively assess their problems, determine their strategies, assess who has the power to materially change their conditions, and create grassroots solutions to bring their vision for a life-affirming world into reality. The Southern Movement Assembly, a regional formation that has been seeking to build grassroots democratic power across the South for 10 years with Southern freedom fighters and their communities, is inviting Southern community organizations to utilize People’s Movement Assemblies in their work throughout Summer 2022 to build collective power, community governance and action plans for organizing throughout the Global South.
The documentary is created by a group of enthusiasts from Russia, as a result of 1,5 year of filming in Mexican autonomous communities. The film is composed of the video shot in 2012-2014 in Chiapas in cooperation with other independent filmmakers, Mexican autonomous media and NGOs.
The project is completely non-commercial and the documentary production was completed solely by volunteers too.
As the first attempt to abolish police are under way in the US, meet the communities that have been experimenting with self-organisation, such as Zapatistas in Mexico.
People’s Budgets are having a moment in the United States. From Los Angeles to Nashville, this exciting approach to budget justice has been popping up in frontline communities across the country seeking to advance a care first agenda, divest from harm, policing, and prisons, and invest city resources in services and programs that benefit their communities such as affordable housing, education, public health, and non-police violence intervention.
In an increasingly complex world, that cannot be fully comprehended, there is a need to seek out and develop clear explanations that go to the roots of our problems and propose realistic solutions. This stands opposed to simplistic, uninformed, and highly subjective views that are popular in casual discourse and social media. And it also stands in opposition to academic discourse that is often disconnected from an organic connection to the way people feel and struggle. This essay speaks to the possibility of freedom now -- not off in the distant future. We can build freedom a little bit at a time, rather than waiting for a time to get it all at once. The essay describes the work required to keep sight of the guiding north star and never be satisfied with oppression and exploitation as if it is the best we can do, and as long as we, personally and perhaps additionally our family and friends are relatively privileged. The importance of freedom dreams is addressed along with an analysis of privilege among us. It takes up three views of power and expanding on tools derived from the work of Lloyd Hogan and it talks about the nature and possibilities of building liberated zones.
General Info about Cooperatives in Mesopotamia.
Wondering what kinds of businesses and organizations are part of New York City’s solidarity economy? SolidarityNYC recently finished a series of short films, Portraits of the Solidarity Economy, featuring the stories of solidarity economy leaders and the projects they serve.
This panel features leaders from across NYC sharing stories of communities building powerful bottom-up solutions like worker co-ops, community land trusts, and community development credit unions that model economic democracy, sustainability, and social justice.
This report examines the challenges and opportunities of worker cooperatives in the Chicagoland region.
What will an anti-imperialist, economy look like? What will it take to decolonize economic structures in pursuit of liberation? After introducing frameworks for building a movement for sustainable business, community and worker ownership, workplace democracy, and thriving family businesses, we go local. We hear lessons from Boston, where grassroots organizations, small businesses and investors are working together to model an alternative to the capitalist economy at a local level. Participants learn from leaders of the Boston Ujima Project about their efforts to fight poverty and displacement through the formation of a community capital fund, a Good Business Certification, and an alternative local currency. Participants learn about Boston's unique new economy project and engage in the opportunities and limits of this community development strategy.
This plenary panel from CommonBound 2016 features leaders in Buffalo, NY's vibrant New Economy Movement discussing their work and vision for a just and sustainable city.
Speakers:
Sam Magavern
This was created by members of the Cowry Collective Time Bank to highlight stories of every day people building an economy that works for everyone in St. Louis.
SolidarityNYC's comprehensive map and directory of solidarity economy institutions in the NYC area.
Mississippi, the poorest state in the U.S. with the highest percentage of Black people, a history of vicious racial terror and concurrent Black resistance is the backdrop and context for the drama captured in this collection of essays Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Self-Determination in Jackson Mississippi. Undeterred by the uncertainty, anxiety and fear brought about by the steady deterioration of the neoliberal order over the last few years, the response from Black activists of Jackson, Mississippi has been to organize. Inspired by the rich history of struggle and resistance in Mississippi and committed to the vision of the Jackson-Kush Plan, these activists are building institutions rooted in community power that combine politics and economic development into an alternative model for change, while addressing real, immediate needs of the people. The experiences and analyses in this compelling collection reflect the creative power that is unleashed when political struggle is grounded by a worldview freed from the inherent contradictions and limitations of reform liberalism. As such, Jackson Rising is ultimately a story about a process that is organized and controlled by Black people who are openly declaring that their political project is committed to decolonization and socialism. And within those broad strategic and ethical objectives, Jackson Rising is also a project unapologetically committed to self-determination for people of African descent in Mississippi and the South.
In this clip from the May, 2021 event “Rebuilding with Our Powers Combined”, Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard unpacks the term “Solidarity Economy Ecosystem.” Explaining why that concept is so central to building a people-centered and anti-racist economy, she draws on two concrete examples: the powerful Eastern North Carolina Association of Black Cooperatives of the mid-1930s, and the flourishing coop culture of the present day Emilia-Romagna region in north-central Italy.
Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College at CUNY, and author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice.
Professor Jessica Gordon Nembhard (@JohnJayCollegeCUNY) explores the potential of cooperatives and solidarity economics as pathways towards economic democracy and justice. Drawing on historical examples from the civil rights movement and the Knights of Labor in the 1880s, Nembhard demonstrates how cooperative economics can counteract the exploitation inherent in capitalist systems. She underlines the importance of communal ownership and shared decision-making as mechanisms for wealth redistribution, arguing that such models can liberate communities from economic exploitation. In this alternative approach, power inequities are challenged, and economics becomes a system where everyone can participate and benefit, realizing possibilities through pooled resources and collective action.
Walden Mutual Bank, the first new mutual bank since 1973, offers a model for financing just food systems in New England. Here’s how it works.
Black cooperatives have been having a moment in the spotlight since protests following the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery two years ago forced a racial reckoning in the United States. By mid-2020, corporations en masse had pledged their love for Black people, and Black-led nonprofits, collectives, and mutual aid groups received record-breaking donations and increased media attention.
In our second short, we talk with NEC member Co-op Dayton, an organization that is developing and weaving a network between cooperative businesses that are meeting the needs of their local community. They are using community and worker ownership as a catalyst to transform Dayton’s Black and working class neighborhoods.
In this episode, Ebony of Cooperative Journal Media, speaks with program and co-executive directors – Cherelle Gardner and Amaha Sellassie.
In the past decade, US social movements have slowly embraced the work of growing economic solutions that can displace capitalism and align economic organizations with community ownership, economic democracy, and economic justice. Organizers in many US communities have begun to weave together co-ops, land trusts, credit unions, participatory budgeting, energy democracy, and other community-controlled economic solutions to ensure everyday people can live stable, dignified, and self-determined lives beyond the grips of extractive capitalism. The term most often used in the United States to describe this approach is the “solidarity economy.”
But the US is a latecomer to the solidarity economy. Spain, where solidarity economy organizing is far more advanced, has much to teach us. This led to our recent visit to Spain to learn more.
Organizers and activists in Louisiana and Mississippi are regionally coordinating their relief response in the wake of Hurricane Ida, and linking the immediate survival needs of people with a coherent set of political demands expressed in a petition to lawmakers including President Biden, calling for a humanitarian approach to evacuation and evacuees. Both initiatives draw on lessons learned from past disasters like Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Kali Akuno, co-founder of Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi, and Stephen Bradberry, executive director at the Alliance Institute in New Orleans, have joined forces to mobilize a political force to anticipate and counter any moves from the Shock Doctrine playbook: the process by which alert capitalists move in on vulnerable communities while they’re still reeling from whatever disaster has hit them, as described by Naomi Klein in her 2007 book.
Last updated 2022. Please reach out to solidarityeconomy.ma@gmail.com with new listings and edits.
As we continue to recover from COVID, cooperatives and solidarity economy practices are on the rise in NYC and around the world.
These democratic solutions for how we eat, shelter, work, and bank are essential in the fights for racial, gender and climate justice and can guide us to the post-capitalist future we all need.
Due to its history of struggle, NYC has a uniquely rich cooperative/democratic landscape with more than 2000 distinct, formal entities.
This map is a *partial* snapshot of that landscape today. CEANYC collected this data from the most up-to-date surveys from sectoral networks (Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, Brooklyn Queens Land Trust, Just Food, NYC Network of Worker Cooperatives, Solar One, Inclusiv, New York City Community Land Initiative and more) that closely work with and track these types of organizations specifically. But since these data points are often changing, please forgive us for any errors and help us set things right. (E-mail us with updates at mapcoopnyc@gmail.com.)
Chicago hosts a rich and diverse set of institutions and entities supporting the cooperative and solidarity economies. Over the past 7 years, we have mapped 35 different entity types to identify and connect ourselves. Check your neighborhood out to see what’s happening around you.
In Massachusetts, the number of worker-owned, cooperative businesses has tripled over the past decade. There has been remarkable creativity and resilience by working-class people and communities of color to build these cooperatives, despite structural challenges and precarity.
This report documents the City of Boston's past and current support for worker ownership, and it envisions potential entry points for expanding the City's support for worker ownership in Boston.
Economics for Emancipation (E4E) is a seven-module introductory curriculum with interactive and participatory workshops. It offers a deep critical dive into the current political economic system, exploration of alternative economic systems, and dynamic tools to dream and build the economy that centers care, relationship, and liberation.
Professor Stacey Sutton discusses the Ideology of Black-led Cooperatives and the Solidarity Economy Ecosystem. The discussion focused on discussion will focus on Sutton’s research study "Real Black Utopias," a cooperative city research study, where she examines the infrastructure and ideology of Black-led cooperatives and solidarity economy ecosystem in multiple cities.
In our chat, we cover Amrita's thoughts on what the transition to a better world could look like, and why they are accepting of the slow and iterative process that is necessary for real change. Our guest explains ideas of meeting the demands of the moment, using impact investing to redirect power, and why we have to be very clear when identifying false solutions.
One of the most potent ideas that Amrita shares are our need for long-term strategies devised between the social movements of today, and this message of unity and togetherness is something that Amrita remains steadfastly committed to. Listen in to catch all of these inspiring and illuminating pieces of wisdom from today's important guest.
In this conversation host Deepa Iyer and Julia Ho (Solidarity Economy St. Louis) and Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard (author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice), we explore the solidarity economies.
Just what exactly IS the “solidarity economy,” anyway? Hear all the ways that you’re probably already participating in it, right now! Art.coop co-founders Nati Linares and Caroline Woolard speak about cooperation, and how to deconstruct the systems that convince us that the myth of the starving artist is real – and instead move towards a world in which artists’ work is valued in our economy!
Historically, anticapitalism has been animated by four different logics of resistance: smashing capitalism, taming capitalism, escaping capitalism, and eroding capitalism.
These logics often coexist and intermingle, but they each constitute a distinct way of responding to the harms of capitalism. These four forms of anticapitalism can be thought of as varying along two dimensions.
COVID-19 has made it clearer than ever that the current health care infrastructure is racist, classist, ableist, and criminally inadequate. Frontline communities have a longstanding history of resisting this system by building community-controlled alternatives in its place. Alternatives where frontline, BIPOC communities receive the quality care they need. Alternatives where disabled, chronically ill, and immuno-compromised folks are not disposable, but whose lives are centered and held sacred.
How can we build community-controlled health infrastructure that is safe, free and accessible to all?
Abolition and public health go hand in hand. Organizers are embracing both as they pursue decarceral projects that center everyone’s well-being.
The curriculum is set up to be used either for one 12-week class, or for a four-week class and an eight-week class, and does not assume any previous experience with worker cooperatives.
Weeks 1-4 are an overview of worker cooperatives and why someone might want to start one, including connecting to global movements and the future economy. These sessions are participatory but don’t have a group project. If taught separately, these four weeks are intended to help participants understand worker cooperatives so that they are prepared to work on starting one.
Confederacies, local autonomy and neighborhood democracy: dual power practices have existed across North America from precolonial times to today.
How many of our ‘power-building organizations’ are still paying rent money to their enemies on the first of every month, and every single time they hold a member or staff retreat?
This toolkit offers some resources, responses, and questions to consider such as:
- How do we build shared definitions, values, and practices of safety across neighborhoods and organizations working within a city?
- How do we weave our small, often relatively new community safety projects — ranging from mutual aid formations, to transformative justice practitioners, to neighborhood defense organizations, to community fridges, to violence interruption and crisis response teams operating at hyper-local levels — into robust, palpable neighborhood and city-wide ecosystems of care that people can feel, trust, and rely on more fully to collectively build greater safety and wellbeing?
- How do we relate to state institutions and resources as we are doing so?
Historically, Indigenous and Black folks have been turned against each other by colonizers and enslavers. Now, communities are learning from one another and finding solidarity in efforts to reclaim stolen lands.
"A central tactic of the Land Back movement is to utilize land trusts to remove land from speculative markets and place it into collective care. Examples include the Native Conservancy, the Wiyot Tribe’s Dishgamu Humboldt Community Land Trust, the Native Land Conservancy, and many others."
Everything has a source. Trace anything you ate or used today back to its original source and you will find yourself at land. Indigenous Land.
All land carries Indigenous knowledges and stories, and is home to Indigenous peoples. What can we do to honor this? This Resource Guide from Sogorea Te’ Land Trust offers a variety of questions, prompts and ideas for how to engage this history and the ideas brought up in the “Remothering the Land” Film.
This mixtape is an offering of nourishment and care to the abolitionist community. Learn from some of the people who have been practicing and thinking about and creating organizations around Transformative Justice over the last two decades.
there is a great deal of confusion about both what socialism and capitalism mean. Here we look at different systems or models of socialism, capitalism, and solidarity economy.
For those working for system change, clarity is imperative. In its absence, the default is likely to be to “reform” capitalism, without even considering the possibility of building an economy and world beyond it. We respect those who seek a just and sustainable world by reforming capitalism. We just disagree as to whether that is possible.
Explore the timeline below to view key moments in the history of rural electricity cooperatives in the U.S., and learn how electricity cooperatives are now paving the way for a renewable future in the country.
It's time to put the power back in the hands of those that own our rural electric cooperatives — the member-owners.
For as long as there have been Africans in America, there have been examples of Black social, cultural and economic solidarity. Often formed in response to systemic exclusion and economic stagnation, examples range from mutual aid networks, to freedom farms and grocery cooperatives.
Though centuries of erasure have shrouded the impact Black Americans have had on the history and development of modern cooperative economic movements, countless historical examples remain.
Las cooperativas de viviendas de Mundo Afro impulsadas por el Grupo de Apoyo a la Mujer Afro (Gama) en colaboración con la Intendencia de Montevideo y el Ministerio de Vivienda y Ordenamiento Territorial, representan una respuesta concreta a las injusticias históricas sufridas por la población afrodescendiente en Uruguay.