Beautiful Solution Cards

Activity Instructions:

Read your group’s slides - each person present a card.

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Guiding Questions:

• What’s mindblowing?
• Are any of these happening and/or possible in your communities?
• What makes these solutions possible?

Share back:

• 1 mindblowing solution �(in the chat)
• What makes these possible? �(“recipe” wordcloud)

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DECK #1 (for groups A1, B1, C1, etc.)

Boston Ujima Project

What’s the aim?

WE ARE RE-WRITING THE STORY OF BOSTON. IN OUR STORY...

Everyone has a voice. People work together to take care of each other. And communities have the final say over the development that impacts their streets and their families.

AN ECOSYSTEM FOR CHANGE

We believe that change won’t happen if we continue to work in silos. The challenges facing our communities — gentrification, poverty, homelessness, lack of food access, unemployment, and lack of healthcare — are all interconnected. We need a solution that is equally complex. Explore our ecosystem of innovative strategies for transformation.

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How does it work? A lot of linked activities with shared governance

• General Assembly: All voting members engage in collective governance
• Good Business Alliance: The Ujima Business Alliance (UBA) is a local business association sponsored by the Boston Ujima Project for community-oriented companies within its network that adhere to the Business Standards.
• Democratic Ujima Fund: The Ujima Fund is a democratic investment vehicle raising capital to finance small businesses, real estate and infrastructure projects in Boston’s working-class Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color, as part of the larger Boston Ujima Project. Ujima, named for the Swahili word for collective work and responsibility, uses a participatory budgeting process in combination with traditional underwriting to put economic decisions in the hands of community members.
• Time Bank: A Timebank is a system of exchange where the unit of
• When a member of a timebank does one hour of service for another member, they get one hour of credit in the Timebank, which can be redeemed for one hour of service from another member. So Samantha can fix Jess’s blinds, and Jess can teach Freddie Spanish, then Freddie later gives Samantha a ride, and the Timebank keeps track so it’s fair.
• Anchor Institution Advocacy (ask Rachel Schlueter about this!)
• Arts & Cultural Organizing, Creative Consumer Organizing, Grassroots Organizing
• Financial and Political Education

Solidarity Economy Ecosystem

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Thunder Valley CDC

What’s the aim?

Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation was inspired and incubated by a group of youth and young families that were reconnecting to cultural spirituality and identity through spiritual ceremonies. This reconnection to spirituality was supported by the Thunder Valley spiritual circle. It was our involvement in those ceremonies that inspired us to do more for our communities and for our people. We are a grassroots community development corporation that is guided by the needs and ideas of our community. Our values are deeply rooted in Lakota values and the continued engagement of our community in this project.

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How does it work?

Our programs and initiatives are centered on strengthening, healing, and building community.

Each program takes a focused approach to one area while being a part of a broader approach to creating a sustainable community. We do not limit this definition of community to the 34 acres we are developing--our programs and initiatives serve people across the reservation and surrounding areas. Our goal is to build power by building up individuals to create the changes they wish to see. Our community has helped us to identify key areas to work in to achieve our larger goal of creating systemic change. We work in the areas of:

• Education: Youth Programs, Workforce Development, Homeownership Education
• Youth Leadership Development
• Food Sovereignty: Demonstration Farm, Food Sovereignty Coalition, Community Gardens
• Lakota Language: Immersion Childcare, Elementary School, Adult Language Learners, Multimedia Press, Curriculum Development, Immersion Health & Wellness Mentorship,
• Housing and Homeownership: Building affordable energy-efficient housing, paths to homeownership
• Workforce Development: Sustainable construction program
• Social Enterprise : Building community wealth through worker ownership (coops)

Each of these focus areas are part of holistic initiatives geared to building community and providing an ecosystem of opportunity.

Solidarity Economy Ecosystem

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PODER Emma, Western North Carolina

What’s the aim?

PODER Emma Community Ownership creates tools and strategies to prevent displacement and preserve the tight-knit nature of mobile home communities which keep our families safe.

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PODER Emma and partner grassroots organizations have been working for more than a decade to build deep relationships, strengthen leadership skills and capacity in ourselves and our neighbors, and to cultivate a sense of place, belonging, identity and culture. Over the years we have created community solutions to problems in our neighborhood that have created a collective belief that when community comes together we can improve our lives for ourselves and future generations.

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As the City of Asheville rapidly develops, many communities are facing accelerated displacement. The community relationships, trust, infrastructure and resources that have been built by neighbors is at risk being lost, particularly due to the vulnerability of mobile home residents who have seen the replacement of mobile home parks with condominiums and commercial properties across the county. This is why we focus on community controlled economic development, local policy advocacy and cultural work to protect our community.

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How does it work?

Community Led Development:

1. Neighborhood Outreach Team
2. Neighborhood Association & Neighborhood Planning
3. Mobile Home Safety Program
4. Emma Traditional Foods Cooperative
5. Emma Living History - youth-led storytelling

Cooperative Development and Lending:

• Housing & Real Estate Cooperative Network - 7 members including 5 resident owned mobile home parks
• Worker Owned Cooperative Network - 5 members including bookkeeping, cleaning, language justice, property management
• Early Childhood Education Shared Learning & Services Cooperative Network - Spanish-speaking women educators

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Solidarity Economy Ecosystem

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No Bail! - Arch City Defenders (St Louis)

What’s the aim? De-criminalizing poverty

ArchCity Defenders (ACD) is a holistic legal advocacy organization that combats the criminalization of poverty and state violence, especially in communities of color. ACD’s foundation of civil and criminal legal representation, social services, impact litigation, policy and media advocacy, and community collaboration achieves and inspires justice and equitable outcomes for people throughout the St. Louis region and beyond. ArchCity Defenders is committed to revolutionary justice. We believe that the law is not the final arbiter of justice; rather, we advance a view of justice rooted in love, support, accountability, and equity for all people. In our work with clients, partners, and each other, we strive toward abolition of the prison-industrial complex. We believe that our challenges are best addressed by people in intentional and supportive community with each other–with universal access to healthcare, housing, educational and employment opportunities, and shared public spaces–and not by prisons and jails, policing, or prosecution.

How does it work? Redistributing unjust fees

• DEBTORS PRISON: In early 2015, ArchCity Defenders filed its first class-action debtors’ prison lawsuits against the cities of Jennings and Ferguson on behalf of residents targeted primarily with traffic tickets on the basis of poverty and race, and then jailed for their inability to pay court debts. The settlement in the Jennings suit resulted in wholesale changes in the city’s practices, and a monetary settlement of $4.75 million for a class of roughly 2,000 people.
• FINES AND FEES: An important feature of the debtors’ prison landscape in the St. Louis region has been the proliferation of overly burdensome fines and fees. In addition to the federal debtors’ prison litigation, ACD has brought numerous state court challenges to illegal fees collected through the municipal court system. Working with co-counsel from the St. Louis University School of Law Civil Advocacy Clinic and Campbell Law, ACD has helped to recoup more than $2 million for people forced to pay these unlawful fees.
• CASH BAIL: Cash bail and pretrial detention are major drivers of mass incarceration locally and across the country. On both the municipal and state court level, ACD is bringing challenges to cash bail practices that violate the constitutional rights of individuals accused of crimes and result in arbitrary wealth-based detention.

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Transformative Culture & Justice - SpiritHouse

What’s the aim?

SpiritHouse is a multigenerational Black women- led cultural organizing tribe with a rich legacy of using art, culture and media to support the empowerment and transformation of communities most impacted by racism, poverty, gender inequity, criminalization and incarceration. Since 1999, we have worked from our home base in Durham, North Carolina, to uncover and uproot the systemic barriers that prevent our communities from gaining the resources, leverage and capacity necessary for long-term self-sufficiency.

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How does it work? A literal alternative to incarceration

SPOTLIGHT ON ONE PROGRAM: The Harm Free Zone (HFZ) supports a community-centered vision that helps us repair the damage of racism, and the oppression of poor people of color by providing tools and trainings to both strengthen and develop our capacity to prevent, confront and transform harm. The Harm Free Zone emphasizes independent and self directing community autonomy as a necessary step towards creating shared collective accountability strategies and practice.

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The goals of the Harm Free Zone include:

• Uncovering and restoring intervention practices, existing within distinct communities, to prevent or intervene in incidents of interpersonal conflict and state violence.
• Fostering intergenerational reciprocity within our communities.
• Creating community driven practices and policies that center the health, safety, and sustainability of our most vulnerable people.
• Increasing civic participation of disenfranchised community members directly impacted by poverty, criminalization, and the war on drugs.
• Reducing and eventually eliminating community reliance on law enforcement

Emilia Romagna, Italy

What’s the aim? Emilia Romagna, a region with nearly 4.5 million people whose capital is the medieval university city of Bologna, has one of the densest cooperative economies in the world. About two out of every three inhabitants are co-op members, together producing around 30 percent of the region’s GDP. Emilia Romagna’s co-op economy is a product of organizing going back to at least the 1850s, developing in conjunction with a rich, high-value-added agricultural tradition and surviving despite a brutal historical encounter with fascism.

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How does it work?

1. Build ecosystems not monoliths: In Emilia Romagna, the cooperative movement is more a networked ecosystem than a single, overarching corporation. This has key advantages. If you can’t build a giant firm because the sector you are working in requires flexibility and specialization, or if the people involved are uninterested in being part of a giant corporation, then the network form can give you advantages of scale without overcentralization.
2. Raise capital from consumers (crowdfunding!): In the wake of a 1971 law that exempted co-ops from certain kinds of banking limitations, Coop was able to raise a lot of money in small amounts from many, many members. Coop became the Italian retail leader in part because it could tap its already sizable membership base for the loans it needed to expand.
3. Tap the care work market (social coops!): Bureaucratic welfare services were high-cost and low-quality, so citizens started self-organizing to deliver key care-related services themselves. This allowed caregivers and those receiving care to work together to govern the delivery of services like childcare or elder care. Here, cooperatives are community institutions that humanize social services in a way that neither state nor market mechanisms alone could.
4. Politics matter: The growth of Italian co-ops has been fueled by deep connections to broader sets of political commitments and values. The largest two federations, Legacoop and Confcooperative, are organized with strong historic ties to the Italian Communist Party and the Catholic Church.
5. Policy matters too: Under the Marcora Law, money due to workers as unemployment insurance can be used as capital to cooperatize their workplace. More than 9,000 workers who would have been out of a job created 257 new worker-owned businesses in the past 30 yrs.
6. Coops aren’t a magic bullet, but are more resilient: During the first four years of the ongoing European crisis, the report shows that cooperatives actually created a net increase in jobs. As the global economy crumbled, people in Italy turned to cooperatives.

Solidarity Economy Ecosystem

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Resident-Owned Housing / Learning Circles - ONE DC

What’s the aim?

At ONE DC, our mission is to exercise political strength to create and preserve racial and economic equity in Shaw and the District. We seek to create a community in DC that is equitable for all.

We build on and organize with the participatory democracy goals and principles taught by Ella Jo Baker:

• involving grassroots people in the decisions that affect their lives;
• minimizing hierarchy and professionalism in organizations working for social change; and
• engaging direct action to resolve social problems.

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How does it work?

Organizing and buying our rent-controlled building in 2011 was a huge accomplishment that took 7 years. Our building used to be called the Norwood Apartments and today it is called 1417 N Street NW Co-operative. We converted our 84-unit building into affordable housing and no longer had to worry about being pushed out because of gentrification.

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The ONE DC learning circle has started study groups focused on specific types of co-ops. As Jessica Gordon Nembhard remarks in her seminal book, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, "[e]very African-American-owned cooperative of the past that I have researched, and almost every contemporary cooperative I have studied, began as the result of a study group or depended on purposive training and orientation of members." We are taking this guidance, and starting study groups.

Housing Co-op study group

Health Co-op Study Group

Monthly Learning Circle explores the principles and legacies that ONE DC moves forward.

Chantier de Québec

What’s the aim? Create support infrastructure to grow solidarity economy movement

�The mission of the Chantier de l’économie sociale is to promote the social economy as an integral part of Québec’s plural economy, and in so doing, contribute to the democratization of the economy and emergence of this development model that is based on the values of solidarity, equity, and transparency.

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How does it work? �Québec’s social economy comprises over 11,200 collective enterprises with overall sales exceeding $47,8 billion, or more than the construction, aeronautic, and mining industries combined. Over 220,000 people work in the social economy every day, in all sectors of activity from retail to the emerging technologies. Discover this movement!

Role of the Chantier as part of this movement

The major contributions of the Chantier de l’économie sociale in upcoming years will come under one of the following areas of action:

• MARKETING: Raise awareness of the vision of a more democratic, sustainable, and fair economy
• POLICY: Bring together the main stakeholders to create favourable policies for solidarity economy.
• RESEARCH / DEVELOPMENT: Sharing of best practices, knowledge, and anaylsis to inform action
• TECHNICAL CAPACITIES: Creation of development tools with structuring effect (financial, marketing, research)
• EDUCATION: Learning, discussions, and networking at the international level by involving members and partners

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CONSTITUENCIES: Networks of social economy enterprises, Labour union federations and members of these federations, Social movements, Québec-wide First Nations and Inuit networks and their member groups, Youth network

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Solidarity Economy Ecosystem

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Cultural Restoration & Restorative Justice -

Rescue, Release, Restore / SIMBA

What’s the aim? Leadership development and cultural restoration for young people

By rescuing gifts, releasing potential and restoring the promise of our youth within their communities, RRR’s mission transforms the self worth and empowers youth through leadership training, artistic expression and mentorship.

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How does it work? Camp programs

Safe in My Brother’s Arms (SIMBA) offers African American young men (ages 8-17) a safe space to examine their lives, their choices, and their futures. Based on a rites of passage model, the camp takes young males through a process which exposes the traps that lie waiting for them in their world, and lifts up the power and promise of African and African American culture and heritage.

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(SIMBA) eventually grew into a separate nonprofit called Rescue, Release and Restore. It created two new programs—SIMSA (Safe In My Sister’s Arms), which expands the mentoring camp experience to African American girls, and MYLA (Multicultural Youth Leadership Academy), a camp for teens to develop leadership skills for a multicultural world.

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These camps create opportunities for people to listen to each other, engage in dialogue and understand how individuals can share their gifts and receive others—relational practices that lead to constructive conflict-resolution skills.

Coop Loan Fund - Cooperation Richmond (CA)

What’s the goal? Build community wealth

“Cooperation Richmond builds community controlled wealth through worker-owned and community-owned cooperative businesses and enterprises by and for low-income communities and communities of color in Richmond whose wealth has been extracted. We encourage, incubate and facilitate the launch and successful operation of diverse cooperative enterprises in Richmond operated by local residents, especially those of us coming from legacies of systemic marginalization and barred opportunity.”

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How does it work? Incubating and financing cooperatives

In order to achieve the greatest success in creating a cooperative economy, Cooperation Richmond will provide a variety of services that span the range of cooperative development from beginning to end, including customized technical assistance and capital based on the needs of each project.

These services will include:

1. COOPERATIVE EDUCATION: political ed & coop how-to
2. MATCHMAKING: build a team
3. ASSESSMENT: are you ready to start a coop?
4. COACHING: support for first few years
5. CAPITAL and CREDIT DEVELOPMENT: The revolving loan fund will aggregate capital from a variety of sources, including divestment capital, individual lender-supporters, and gift funding. The revolving loan fund will operate on the principles of Non-Extractive Finance, creating not only capital resources for projects, but also expanding local wealth generation by re-investing to create more projects through profit-sharing of the existing cooperatives

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Successes: a handful of new coops - bike shop, food truck, construction, event space

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What’s its aim?

Empowerment

Putting financial decision-making and power in the hands of the people who need it most with this small-scale tool for cooperative saving and lending.

Accessibility

Giving people and families savings and lending options to meet personal needs and goals, fund community projects, business start-ups and expansions, etc.

Impact

Giving and receiving support in a tangible real-life way that impacts personal, family and community well-being and resilience.

What’s it called?

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10-25 people/families pool their savings and make interest-free loans to each other. Members set their own savings goals and all members may approach the pool for a loan. Pools meet regularly to make deposits and discuss loan proposals. Loan proposals are approved by the pool and funded by individual members who serve as the lenders. Borrower’s “reciprocate” the no-interest loan by paying back their loan plus additional savings that they agree to lend to other members over time.

How does it work?

Tierra Fertil (a group of 7 Hispanic members in Henderson County, NC), created a savings pool to support each other in saving, and to reach their common goals:

• Recover the knowledge, autonomy, and power to produce and consume nutritious and healthy foods,
• Open access to resources and land for Latinx immigrants,
• Create capacity and leadership through a model of collective and collaborative work,
• Improve economic, social, and cultural conditions of members and their families, and
• Promote justice, solidarity, and mutual aid among members and community.

Successes

Savings Pools