Sustainable Economies Law Center
2024 Project Gallery
Also see our 2023 Project Gallery here and our 2022 Project Gallery here
Overview of the Law Center
Since 2009, the Sustainable Economies Law Center has been a catalyzing force in creating more just and regenerative economies across the U.S. At the intersections of economic, racial, and climate justice, the Law Center supports and develops projects such as immigrant-owned cooperatives, community-controlled housing, Indigenous land trusts, and other enterprises that redistribute wealth, democratize governance, and provide long-term stewardship of vital resources. �
The Law Center is one of the few organizations focused on the legal needs of the solidarity economy and is widely considered to be a leader in developing new models and policies for cooperative and community-owned economies. We have partnered with over 100 local grassroots groups and a dozen national coalitions, offered donation-based legal advice to over 3,000 community leaders and organizations, and led more than a dozen policy advocacy campaigns that changed laws and removed barriers to cooperatives, urban agriculture, local food systems, and more.
Nourish an ecosystem
As you’ll see below, the Sustainable Economies Law Center is a rich ecosystem where dozens of diverse projects grow and flourish. Each project can stand alone and make an impact, but it is infinitely more powerful as part of an interconnected web of work, both within the Law Center and embedded in broader collaborations, coalitions, and movements.
We’ve arrived here after 14 years of responding to grant RFPs and seeking project-specific funding. Now, we’re clear that we will make our greatest contributions to the world if we prioritize and raise substantial general operating support. At minimum, we’re looking to raise $1M by mid-2024, and our projects are poised to go far deeper if we raise $1.5M or more.
�Law Center staff use participatory budgeting to allocate resources across our ecosystem. Our July 2023 budget process resulted in us growing several projects internally and giving $162,000 to four other organizations. The process also surfaced several projects that are poised to make excellent use of more funding. Your contribution will be spread in ways that enrich the whole ecosystem and deepen the impact of each project.
To discuss your contribution, we invite you to reach out to any staff member whose work inspires you and/or to any member of our Grants Circle: Alejandra, Itzel, Mwende, Elizabeth, and Sue. Everyone’s email address is their first name followed by @theselc.org �(e.g., elizabeth@theselc.org).
Our team:
Facts about the Law Center
Our 7 Core Strategies
The following 7 slides detail our core strategies. All combined, these strategies position the Law Center to serve as a legal backbone of solidarity economy movements nationally.
Direct legal support
We have four approaches to providing direct legal support to communities:
Our legal support programs have taught us so much about the legal needs of communities, and in turn, this has informed our development of public policies, new program areas, and educational resources.
Training and supporting legal workers
Over the years, the Law Center has launched several programs to train and support lawyers and other legal workers, including the Cooperative Professionals Guild, a 300+ member online network, and an apprenticeship program through which four of our staff became lawyers without going to law school from 2013 to 2020. In 2024, our primary focus will be:
Education and research
The Law Center has built a wealth of legal guides, resource libraries, sample documents, and even cartoon legal documents to make the law welcoming and navigable to everyone. We also do innovative legal research to help our communities understand their place in the vast grey areas of the law. Now and in 2024, some of our priorities include:
Legal resources, education, and sample documents in progress:
Current research projects include:
Policy advocacy
We’ve spearheaded more than a dozen policy campaigns, passing laws to legalize homemade food enterprises, support worker cooperatives, and remove barriers to housing cooperatives, urban farming, and more.
We work with a dedicated state-level policy advocate to execute our policy strategies and bring the Law Center’s voice into many legislative conversations. We’re tracking legislation on housing, land, food, and worker cooperatives, while working in coalitions to catalyze new legislation.
Current policy work includes:
Cultural change and creative storytelling
The Law Center is as much a cultural organization as we are a legal organization, because we see law and culture as completely intertwined. We create films, cartoons, gatherings, events, writings, and other media to craft the story of the world we are co-creating with our clients and partners. When we bring this future to life through story, it lays the groundwork to shape the necessary laws and legal structures.
We’re co-creating a film on Indigenous and Black land justice with partners at The Cultural Conservancy. See the Film Project Vision here.) This film builds on a convening we co-hosted in 2019, where a broad network of deep-rooted organizations collectively articulated a 100-year vision for land justice in the Bay Area.
Other examples of recent cultural work include our #TenantsWithoutLandlords event and blog series, recapped here.
We are also in the process of creating a series of cartoon videos and accompanying discussion guides for land justice organizations seeking to have deeper conversations about their work and envision a transformed world. Recent cartoon videos:
Incubation and fiscal sponsorship
The Law Center has created, incubated, fiscally sponsored, and/or spun-off nearly a dozen organizations. Most of these are projects conceived by Law Center staff in partnership with clients or collaborators.
Some projects operate as largely autonomous organizations under our umbrella. These include:
We also incubated and continue to administer funding to three cooperatives:
We helped launch the following five organizations that now operate autonomously, while we continue �to collaborate: Worker-Owned Recovery California Coalition, Cooperative Professionals’ Guild, �The Next Egg, Initiative for Energy Justice, and California Alliance for Community Composting.
Lastly, we receive and administer funding to Hasta Muerte Coffee Cooperative and the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives (NoBAWC) for their cooperative education and development work. We have also fiscally sponsored funding to several other groups on a one-time basis, when access to funding would otherwise have been a barrier.
Building partnerships, coalitions, and ecosystems
We are intentional about building relationships, participating in coalitions and working groups, and nurturing ecosystems that enable broader transformation. In 2024, our closest collaborators will include:
Our 7 Project Themes for 2024
Over the years, our work has addressed dozens of issue areas, including urban farming, local investing, retirement savings, seed sharing laws, community compost law, local currencies, technology cooperatives, and much more. Often, once we have made an impact in a particular sector – or when we see other organizations stepping in to take leadership – we step back and shift our focus. At present, our hearts are drawn to focus on the seven �themes addressed in the following slides:
Projects to support land return
We work for widespread return of land to Indigenous stewardship, offering all people a liberatory vision for more nurturing and just ways of living with land and each other.
A key project in 2024 will be co-creating a film on Indigenous and Black land justice.
We will also launch a specialized legal advice clinic to support land-based organizations whose work is rooted in spirituality and/or non-dominant worldview systems.
We continue to develop user friendly resources like Seeds of Land Return and the Rematriation Easement.
Our current work also includes:
Housing justice projects
We organize communities, build coalitions, change laws, and provide legal support to organizations doing inspiring work to secure housing for all. Our work currently includes:
Law Center Staff with EB PREC Staff
Food and energy sovereignty projects
Food and energy have long been focal points for the Law Center’s work. We support the land, funding, and workplace democracy needs of these sectors, while continuing to work with sector-specific clients and collaborators described here:
Erika Sato and Dorian Payán at an Agroecology Commons work party:
Projects to support nonprofit workplace democracy
Social change organizations need tools and frameworks for organizational development and governance that match their visions and values for a more equitable, inclusive, and liberatory world. We offer training, resources, and consultations on worker self-direction in the nonprofit sector. We also co-host the Nonprofit Democracy Network, a peer network of more than 100 organizations developing more democratic and equitable workplace practices — from innovative pay structures to shared leadership — to counter models of hierarchy and white dominant organizational cultures.
In mid-2023, we wrapped up the first iteration of Collaborate to Co-Liberate: Structures and Practices for Democratic Organizations, a 15-month peer learning journey that brought together 200 participants from nearly 100 organizations. The program explored the stickiest questions facing movement groups striving to build equitable, democratic, and life-giving organizations, with modules led by leading practitioners, including adrienne maree brown, Gopal Dayaneni, and more. The journey was divided into four seasons: Transformative Relationships, Organization Fundamentals, Navigating Capitalism, and Connecting to Your Web of Relations.
Now and in 2024, we are growing the Network while expanding our online community of practice, planning a second cohort of Collaborate to Co-Liberate, and developing new videos in our popular worker self-directed nonprofit (WSDN) TV series.�
More resources for worker self-directed nonprofits:
Worker cooperative development projects
The Law Center provides the most comprehensive collection of legal resources available for U.S. worker cooperatives, filling what had previously been a significant gap in essential resources. This includes:
We also build ecosystems of support for worker cooperative development and provide direct legal services to cooperatives. In 2024, this will include:
Projects to support immigrant cooperatives
We partner with Prospera, Immigrants Rising, Colmenar Cooperative Consulting, and others to fill the gap in legal resources and support for immigrant cooperatives and to support the leaders who are building economic resilience and job stability for their communities. Each year, we provide legal advice and training to dozens of cooperators.
Our work includes:
Wealth redistribution projects
In 2024, we will center several projects on the theme of wealth redistribution, which we believe is critical to supporting all other work we do. This work builds on our prior projects focused on Mutual Aid and on Grassroots Finance, but with a focus on activating larger sums of money to flow in the form of gifts to nourish cooperatives and other solidarity economy initiatives.
Our work includes:
Additional background: From 2019 to 2022, the Law Center co-led TheNextEgg.org, where we built tools so people could invest retirement savings in their communities. We’ve moved away from this project, and it is now managed by LIFT Economy. See our essay on our shift away from The Next Egg and our essay describing the structural problems of 401(k)s and IRAs.
A day in the life
To paint a picture of what the above work looks like, here’s what our coworkers might be doing on a typical day:
2023 highlights and celebrations (p. 1 of 3)
2023 highlights and celebrations (p. 2 of 3)
Even more 2023 highlights and celebrations
Thank you to our collaborators, supporters, volunteers, and fans for a wonderful 2023!
Thank you
To discuss your contribution, we invite you to reach out to any staff member whose work inspires you and/or to any member of our Grants Circle: Alejandra, Itzel, Mwende, Elizabeth, and Sue. Everyone’s email address is their first name followed by @theselc.org (e.g., elizabeth@theselc.org).