Food co-op movie, discussion, and more 11/14

Dear Friend,

As a part of an education and fundraising initiative, Grassroots Economic Organizing Collective will have an on-demand showing of a French film about The Park Slope Food Cooperative in Brooklyn. The showing will be anytime between Nov. 13 -15, with a webinar discussion on Mon., Nov. 14 at 8 pm ET / 7 pm CT / 6 pm MT / 5pm PT. You can watch from the comfort of your home, or co-op, or other business organization in English, Spanish, French or Italian.

Park Slope Food Co-op is one of the oldest and most successful food cooperatives in the United States. It is unique because it brazenly and inexplicably breaks the co-op operating “rules” – most food cooperatives operate almost like a supermarket: you come and buy food. In some food co-ops, you pay a membership fee, which can be voluntary. At Park Slope, your membership fees are not voluntary; you cannot shop unless you work almost three hours every three months. This allows the co-op to cut one of its largest expenses – labor – by about 75%, and offer goods at a cheaper price. Its members love it!

Could this work in other places? Pros and cons?

We are inviting you to do several things: (1) Help us raise money by paying $5 to $50 to watch the film; or (2) co-sponsor the film, as a possible educational and marketing tool for your cooperative members; or (3) We also would love it if you joined us on a Zoom webinar on Nov. 14 to hear food activists, food co-op leaders and organizers and others talk about the film, the concept, and other lessons from the film. This is a fundraiser to help GEO carry out its mission to catalyze more cooperatives and other solidarity economy enterprises in this country which are needed more than ever. Your movie ticket purchased here admits you to the webinar as well. You may also check out a trailer at the Eventbrite link.

To co-sponsor, you could contribute $100 dollars and have your name on the marketing materials. You might even organize a watch party for your membership. We have included a study guide to help center the discussion around some important issues. If you would like to appear as a panelist for the discussion, please let us know.

Even if you would rather not sponsor or be a part of a panel discussion, we hope that you will help us to advertise the on-demand showing Nov. 13-15 to your membership, friends and comrades and cooperators about this inspiring and exciting way to organize. To RSVP, please fill out the form. Attached is a poster that you use to publicize the event on social media.

A little more about Park Slope. There in New York City, members of all races and socioeconomic classes flock to work the co-op’s mandatory hours. The 16,000 members feel fortunate to have this opportunity to buy healthy food at lower prices. The co-op is a welcome contrast to corner stores and small supermarkets which sell substandard produce or products at very expensive prices. Park Slope is one of the few co-ops that has been able to operate according to the Rochdale Cooperative Principles, and other people in New York City and Paris have replicated the model.

Yet Park Slope Food Co-op is not without its critics. Some have called its work requirement elitist. In addition, an attempt to unionize was unsuccessful. But as one member, an older veteran on a bike, in the film says:

“The coop…is an entire community, and it actually represents a new economic system in this country. It’s going to have to [catch on] because this country is going to collapse one day if this type of system doesn’t catch on.”

To purchase tickets, please do so at Eventbrite or here to sponsor or donate to GEO.

Thank you very much, and much love!

Sincerely,

Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo
for GEO Fundraising Circle

Jessica Gordon-Nembhard and Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo this morning!

Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D. and Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo, discuss the Unsung Cooperative Hero Award, and its first Recipient Ella Jo Baker. Tune in to WOL 1450 AM, 95.9 FM and WOL Live Stream September 29, 10:30 am EDT, for Everything Co-op, hosted by Vernon Oakes. This week we continue our recognition of the 2022 Cooperative Hall of Fame Inductees. Vernon’s sixth commemorative interview will be with Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D., Professor at John Jay College, and Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo, Co Editor at Grassroots Economic Organizing. Both are also economic social justice advocates. Vernon and his guests will discuss the Unsung Cooperative Hero Award, and its first recipient Ella Jo Baker.  

To listen live online Click Here! or Click Here! to Listen on your cell phone with Tune-in Radio.

Author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (2014) and 2016 inductee into the U.S. Cooperative Hall of Fame, Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D., is a Professor at John Jay College, City University of NY. She is a political economist specializing in cooperative economics, community economic development, racial wealth inequality, Black Political Economy. She is a member of the Cooperative Economics Council of NCBA/CLUSA; the ICA Committee on Co-operative Research; an affiliate scholar with the Centre for the Study of Co-operatives, University of Saskatchewan; and past board member of Association of Cooperative Educators.  
Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo is passionate about cooperatives as a community economic development tool and lifestyle strategy. She has an MBA and a Masters in Community Economic Development, and also earned a degree in Mass Media Arts from the University of the District of Columbia. She is a co-founder of the Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community Cooperative, an affordable housing cooperative in Washington, DC, and was a founding board member of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. Ajowa has a wide range of experiences on various boards, and is a long-time member of the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy. She also has a passion for working around internalized superiority/inferiority issues, and the role of love and spirituality in changing the world.  
Our host, Vernon Oakes, is a consummate advocate for cooperatives. He is a Past President of the National Association of Housing Cooperatives, and he’s served on several boards and committees to advance the interests of cooperatives. Recently, he served on the Limited Equity Cooperative Task Force, established by Anita Bonds, At-Large Member of the Council of the District of Columbia. Vernon is an MBA graduate of Stanford University, who has used his business acumen to benefit the community, by promoting the added value of the cooperative business model.   

Black municipal cooperative initiatives

In June, Professor Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Professor Stacey Sutton, and I had a really interesting panel discussion on Black municipal cooperative initiatives with Gordon-Nembhard’s summer cooperative class. Here is the video of the discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2D3BEv5FF8Y

Sutton discussed her work on 21st century municipal cooperative policy, which demonstrates the importance across US cities of municipal support to creating cooperative ecosystems: “Cooperative cities: Municipal support for worker cooperatives in the United States.” I discussed my research on cooperative development in Washington, DC, in the 20th century, including cooperative laws and a cooperative ecosystem envisioned by Cornelius Cornbread Givens and enacted by Mayor Marion Barry. The discussion with the students in the class was excellent. The real take away from the discussion is how people of color are absolutely instrumental in demanding and developing cooperatives. As I wrote in my article on DC cooperatives, “[In a segregated and deeply unequal society] African Americans had long supported cooperatives as a means to create economic wealth, political power, and cultural freedom…Cooperatives represented one way to forge a new society, a society in which all members might be equal.”

Cooperatives in Community Planning 6/30

Tune in to WOL 1450 AM, 95.9 FM and WOL Live Stream June 30, 2022, 10:30 am EDT, for Everything Co-op, hosted by Vernon Oakes. This week Vernon interviews Chris Tilly, professor of Urban Planning and Sociology at UCLA, with several of his graduate students: Geoff Gusoff, Eliza Jane Franklin, and Ernest Johnson. Vernon and his guests will discuss cooperative elements in community planning, and the health impacts of community ownership models including worker-owned cooperatives and community land trusts. The discussion will center on the community of Crenshaw, South Central, LA.

Next System event on Wed, 4/21 @5pm

What are the duties of the academy to society in this period of systemic decay?

Join us for a meaningful discussion among leading policymakers, innovators, community organizers, and academics working to prepare our society for a transition to a more democratic, sustainable, and fair political and economic system. More info: The Next System and the Academy: Systemic Crises, Movements, and Change in the 2020s – Office of Sustainability (gmu.edu)

Keynote

Major Panel

Academic Response Panel

Moderated by

Schor’s book on the gig and share economies

DC’s own Katie Wells has reviewed Juliet Schor’s After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back. Wells insightfully writes:

The challenge facing the platform workplace is to confront and overcome, rather than simply repackage, the alienating pressures of the capitalist city. This is especially important, because such a city is simply one iteration of sociality, among all the possible ones we can forge. We must go beyond the capitalist city. To build solidarities, practice anti-capitalist living, and prepare more just futures, we must tend to seeds of care.

For the full review: https://www.publicbooks.org/worker-worries-are-the-seeds-of-worker-action/

Very interesting book review

The book has chapters on the Freedom Farm Cooperative formed by Fannie Lou Hamer, the North Bolivar County (Mississippi) Farm Cooperative, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.

Monica M. White. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 208 pp. $19.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-6389-0; $14.99 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-4696-4370-0. Reviewed by Evan Bennett (Florida Atlantic University); http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54810
Published on H-Environment (February, 2021)
Commissioned by Daniella McCahey (Texas Tech University)

In the early twentieth century, Black North Carolinians B. C. “Doc” and Nannie Corbett built a sizable estate by purchasing numerous tracts of land. By the 1930s, they were among the largest landowners in Orange County. In 2016, their second-youngest daughter, Scnobia Taylor, still lived on a tract of land that once belonged to them, and, despite being in her 80s, she kept busy on it. The first time her younger sister attempted to introduce us, Mrs. Taylor was too busy working with her corn to meet. When we were finally able to meet nearly two years later—it was springtime—she had a garden started and corn planted. Fruit trees dotted the property; chickens, ducks, and guinea fowl wandered around. She had traveled the world with her husband, a soldier, but when he retired, they settled back on her family’s land, and she took up again growing things they could eat. She learned it from her parents, she said. Tobacco had been the source of whatever wealth they accumulated; homegrown vegetables, fruits, meat, and eggs were the safety net that protected them. Doc’s parents had done the same on that land, and Doc and Nannie taught the practice not only to their children, but to the Black sharecroppers who worked on their land.

Dr. Monica White would categorize the Corbetts’ farming as a resistance strategy: growing their own food was a way of maintaining their independence in a racist society. In Freedom Farmers, she joins scholars who have turned their attention to the extent to which rural Black Americans used these sorts of strategies to keep soul and body together in a society that largely denied them the independence to make their own way. In this book, she focuses on the collective efforts of the poorest Black farmers to protect themselves, their families, and their communities, particularly the efforts to create cooperatives in the era of the civil rights movement. She does this, she explains, in order “to connect contemporary urban farmer-activists to an earlier time when African Americans turned to agriculture as a strategy for building sustainable communities” (p. 5). Instead of attempting to provide a narrative of Black organizing across time, an effort that would be both Herculean and likely to impose too much order on a chaotic, disjointed story, White examines several moments in twentieth-century Black agricultural organizing in order to learn from them. Her method, she says, is rooted in the “African principle of sankofa: studying the past to understand the present, and, from that, to forge a future of our own making” (p. 19). While it would be presumptuous of me to gauge the impact of this work on the community of farmer-activists, as a historian of Black farming, I believe Freedom Farmers is an excellent model of using the past to inform the present.

White builds her work on the theoretical framework that she calls collective agency and community resilience, or CACR. This model focuses less on the disruptive forms of everyday resistance in favor of considering the “activities community members enact as a means to be self-reliant and self-sufficient” (p. 6). CACR can take numerous forms but are built on several strategies, three of which White argues were key for the development of the agricultural cooperatives she documents. The first of these is “commons as praxis,” an approach to land ownership that eschewed individualism and prioritized “community well-being and wellness for the benefit of all” (p. 9). The second strategy was a “prefigurative politics” (p. 9) that functioned as an alternative for those excluded from electoral politics and emphasized democracy and participation. The final strategy was to pursue economic autonomy that, like prefigurative politics, provided an alternative to the exploitative labor practices that Black workers endured in favor of a system that allowed them to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Having established the framework for the study as well as a brief exploration of historical examples of collective agency and community resilience (including gardens grown by enslaved people, the Colored Farmers’ Alliance, and the work of the United Negro Improvement Association) in a long introduction, White divides her study in two parts. In the first, she revisits the work of Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and W. E. B. Du Bois, three men she argues provided the theoretical underpinnings for agriculture as a resistance strategy. Washington, as president of the Tuskegee Institute, pressed Black farmers to fight for their independence through self-reliance, while Carver, from his lab there, worked tirelessly to give them the tools to feed themselves apart from plantation stores and their high-cost credit. Meanwhile, Du Bois, she argues, provided the model for prefigurative politics in his lesser-known advocacy of cooperatives as a strategy for rural Black people. For White, the success or failure of these men in realizing their goals is not the point—an approach to the past with which a historian might quibble—so much as it is the value of their ideas for informing the present.

From the intellectual foundations of agriculture as resistance, White moves to case studies of Black-led agricultural cooperatives in the second part of the book. She devotes a chapter each to the Freedom Farm Cooperative formed by Fannie Lou Hamer, the North Bolivar County (Mississippi) Farm Cooperative, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, and the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. While each developed in unique historical and geographic circumstances, and each took a slightly different approach, especially with regard to the scale of their operations, White finds connections for each in their ability to develop the strategies of collective agency and community resistance. Despite their internal limitations and the racist resistance each faced, she finds in each cooperative lessons for modern efforts to develop community agriculture projects. Freedom Farm Cooperative and its “oasis of self-reliance and self-determination in a landscape of oppression” is an example of how “those who have been historically been excluded” might build sustainable communities (p. 87). The North Bolivar County Farm Cooperative and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, meanwhile, demonstrate the power of networking and large-scale organization. The Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, for its part, shows how resistance through access to food need not be a rural phenomenon alone. White admits that her book is a “love letter” (p. 26) to these movements, so she spends less time examining the resistance they faced. Neither does she ever pose the question as to whether they, in a political economy built on exploitation and private profit, face too high of a hill to climb. White’s is a positive story with hope at its center, and people who similarly have hope in the possibilities of collective action should pay close attention to the strategies White discusses, for she offers much to learn.

Upcoming talk: Resource Mobilization and Worker Cooperatives: Pathways to Non-Extractive Financing

As part of broader workshop on social movements on Friday, March 12, 2021 at 2pm (EST), Heather Hax will talk about, “Resource Mobilization and Worker Cooperatives: Pathways to Non-Extractive Financing.” This talk will focus on the resource considerations and constraints of individual worker cooperatives, as well as the worker cooperative movement writ large. Like other social movements, worker cooperatives and the cooperative movement have treated resource constraints as collective action problem – and as a result has developed a series of institutional formations and strategies to address them. These constraints and corresponding strategies will be outlined and evaluated. Central to my question is their potential to prefigure non-extractive, post/anti-capitalist lending structures. To register, click here.

Heather Hax is a PhD candidate in Sociology at York University in Toronto whose work focuses on worker cooperatives and anti-capitalist social transformation. Currently residing in Baltimore, Heather teaches Sociology at Towson University, is a member of the zero-waste team with the South Baltimore Community Land Trust and is an elder ally with Sunrise Movement Baltimore.


New Tech Co-op!

According to this exceedingly interesting post on the blog The Workers’ Paradise, “Tech Co-op’s Are on the Rise,” tech co-ops are popping up all over. And here is some info about the new local tech co-op NOVA Web Development!

NOVA Web Development provides web page design and web application development at affordable rates for labor and community organizations, academic institutions, non-profits, and small business enterprises.

We are a democratically run, worker owned and operated cooperative focused on developing free software tools for progressive organizations, committed to economic democracy and the educational growth of our members. Our young web professionals work side-by-side with experienced veterans learning state-of-the-art webcraft while providing solutions to problems facing our local community, pursuing a social justice mission, and striving to create the world we want to live in.

The purpose of the Cooperative is to engage in and conduct lawful business, activities or functions aimed at providing for the livelihood of the Members in a manner consistent with the interests of society as a whole, guided by the following: 

PRINCIPLES

  1. We want to make a living, not a killing.
  2. We want to help build the world we want to live in.
  3. The people’s movement should use people’s software.