Author Archives: Guest Author

Click here to download this article as it appears in the magazine, with accompanying artwork.

Editors’ note: This article is from the Summer 2022 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “Owning Our Economy, Owning Our Future.”

What follows is primarily the intellectual work of Kamuela Enos, and presents in the first-person voice (his), with assistance from Miwa Tamanaha in producing this work in written form. Kamuela Enos and Miwa Tamanaha are spouses to each other, creative thought partners professionally, and coparents to their children in every space.

This article explores kinship from a Native Hawaiian perspective as a binding construct of “ownership.” Kinship with place—and the integrity of the ecologies, wisdom, and people our places hold—stands as a central tenet of ownership often lost in our contemporary nomenclature born of capitalism.

An important underlying technology Hawai’i has to offer its contemporary self is kinship to land. Kinship is our unbroken connection to our “operating system,” so to speak—the OS of our lands, our complex and interdependent relationship with the ecological systems that allow for life, our ancestral sciences (in service of living in and creating abundance). This connection persists and thrives despite almost two hundred and fifty years of brutal assault, including catastrophic population loss from introduced diseases, racist policies, political overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, and deliberate and continuing dispossession of land. It is the foundation for a just, abundant economy in Hawai’i.

Here I share my father’s kinship story, my kinship story, and some of the lessons I have gleaned from living them. This story is a Hawaiian story, but it is repeated across our planet. Vested in kinship to land, the contemporary work of Indigenous communities is iterating prototypes and frameworks for a resilient, just economy.

My Father’s Story, My Story

In the 1970s and 1980s, my father was part of a broad movement of Hawaiians and non-Hawaiian allies who organized in protest of Native Hawaiian land dispossession perpetrated by the U.S. government and U.S. corporations in Hawai’i. In particular, my father sought the return of lands to lo’i kalo.

Lo’i kalo is the ancient Hawaiian practice of cultivating the staple crop of kalo (taro) via wetland terraces. Lo’i kalo was a core engine of precontact Hawai’i’s economy. Lo’i systems are bounded by a waterway that starts at the headwater at the top of a valley, passes through terraced farms, and exits into an estuary. The nutrients that feed these parcels also nourish nearshore and pelagic (open sea) fisheries. From nearshore to mountaintop, this system is contained in the land unit of the ‘ahupua’a (basic self-sustaining unit)—where all of the complex carbs and lean proteins, building material and medicines, and implements for the creation of weapons can be developed in a hyperlocalized, highly skilled economy.¹ Absent the forces of industrialization and colonization, Native Hawaiians were self-sufficient, not only on our islands but also in our valleys.

My father’s and his peers’ efforts to reclaim lo’i kalo and bring it back to life was driven by the needs of the Native Hawaiian community of their time. Generations of displacement of Native Hawaiian people and families by colonizing forces had relegated many to conditions of dire poverty. I was raised in the public education system in a community that was predominantly Native Hawaiian, at a time when the dominant narrative told us our ancestors were savages and that our occupation by colonizers could (if we acted correctly) afford us the comforts of modernity for which we should be grateful. The idea of restoring lo’i kalo in this context seemed absurd to many, but my father held to a conviction that reclaiming the brilliant innovations of our ancestors is central to restoring well-being for all people for whom Hawai’i is home.

On the land my father reclaimed and stewards today, Ka’ala Farm, I walked with my ancestors.² I learned to be attuned to how water flows, how nutrients move along those pathways, and how cleverly the waterways had been designed and constructed.

In the dominant economic model of the time, the role of the people of our community was labor. If you were lucky, skilled labor. Even ownership of businesses by local community members often required their participation in the degradation of the landscape and practices. This was the pathway provided for economic development—we were to understand it was the only way.

We continue to restore the broad systems our ancestors deployed at scale and replicated across the archipelago—systems that allow for the production of goods and services, are greeted by an eager market, and are not extractive/ do not externalize the cost of production onto people and landscape.

My father and his peers came to question why the lo’i kalo—the core engine of an economic system that served the people of Hawai’i for centuries—could not be a viable means of regional economic development that centers people, place, and ecology. They asserted that it could. The lo’i kalo of Ka’ala Farm and like spaces across the Hawaiian archipelago have taught and inspired thousands of young people. Today, more people on more lands are restoring the flow of water and growing food for their communities than has been seen in well over a century. The economic development to which my father and his peers demanded access is an ever-growing reality.

I continue to live this story; it forms the foundation of the ideas I share in the following section. The steps I outline are not a checklist or recipe. These steps articulate practical lessons and a path made by walking, learning from, and living into my father’s story today toward a future we all cocreate.

An Indigenous Vision of Economics

Step One: We Restate Our Value

Where some saw a savage past, my father saw regional economic development. Today, Hawaiian knowledge, practices, and brilliance are still often relegated to the past—albeit, perhaps, romantically—by boxing them up as “Hawaiian culture.” We continue to resist the box. We have been bequeathed ancestral sciences and technologies of integrated systems management that we continue to innovate. We continue to restore the broad systems our ancestors deployed at scale and replicated across the archipelago—systems that allow for the production of goods and services, are greeted by an eager market, and are not extractive/do not externalize the cost of production onto people and landscape.

Step Two: We Uphold Standards—The Triple Piko Analysis

In bringing forward ancestral sciences and integrated systems management to our contemporary context, we must continue to support standards with rigor (recent history is rife with examples of appropriation of Indigenous ideas, innovations, sciences, and technologies). The Triple Piko Analysis is a framework with

built-in principles of practice that protect it from cultural appropriation and subsequent mishandling.

Revered Hawaiian Elder Uncle Kekuni Blaidell taught me the term piko, which means “portal.” He noted that the ancestors of Hawai’i had identified in the physical body three portals connected to the past, the present, and the future: the fontanelle (Piko O), the navel (Piko I), and the genitals (Piko A). They define kinship to past people, present people, and future people, and represent a unified transect in which all decisions are to be vetted: continuity of the work of your ancestors; application/practice and relevance to those alive with you now; and generative abundance provided for future generations.³

Piko O: Alignment with ancestral prerogatives. This first layer of analysis asks you to identify the Indigenous practice(s) you intend to bring to a contemporary space. To protect from co-option/appropriation, this layer of analysis requires you to be specific. Piko O requires you to have researched that practice, to have immersed yourself in that practice, and to share the lineage of your teachers. Ownership, responsibility, and genealogy of knowledge/practice must be put front and center. Figure 1 (below) provides in schematic form an analysis of how Native Hawaiian society operated prior to the period of European colonization.
Piko I: Empowering contemporary generations. The second layer of analysis asks you to articulate how your practice will provide agency to Indigenous communities. How does it affirm, restore, and grow that practice toward the creation of meaningful economic development, educational opportunity, and political support that accrue power to Indigenous people and our ownership of and kinship to our resources, ideas, and stories of our homelands? This work also requires mapping the existing challenges as they are outlined in Figure 2 (next page).

There is a continued need to build strong containers for ancestral sciences and integrated systems management in a contemporary context.

Piko A: Providing a foundation for future abundance. The final layer of analysis asks you to demonstrate how your practice will provide for and protect the agency of future generations to live in and create abundance. At this layer the aperture is widened to encompass not just a specific community, but all peoples. How might the global systems of which we are part move toward alignment with our proven ancestral models for social/ ecological/economic resilience? Figure 3 (next page) provides an illustration of our vision.

Step Three: The Just Container

There is a continued need to build strong containers for ancestral sciences and integrated systems management in a contemporary context. We must attend to the power structure of the organizations that carry these efforts, and how these efforts receive investment that protects and perpetuates community and practitioner agency, including agency to define our own success.

For over ten years, I worked at a social enterprise in my community, called MA’O Organic Farms.4 Founded by partners Gary and Kukui Maunakea-Forth, MA’O recruits young adults from Wai’anae, a predominantly Native Hawaiian community, to run the daily operations of the farm enterprise in exchange for a full tuition waiver to attend our regional community college. MA’O has grown to become the largest commercial organic farm on the island of O’ahu. At MA’O, our understanding of our success is rooted in the celebration of Makahiki.5 Prior to the U.S. occupation of Hawai’i, chiefs would gather the people in their domain during Makahiki time, and the community would show their bounty—what they had been able to produce—and demonstrate their fitness by performing feats of physical and intellectual strength. MA’O identified and adopted two contemporary Makahiki metrics to help measure the enterprise’s effectiveness: fitness of people as measured by education level, and abundance of land as measured by sales of organic produce. The focus on metrics of meaning has allowed MA’O access to different tables of

decision-making when it comes to the well-being of regional youth and articulating what is the best practice for a rural community.

Step Four: Live Our Agency

I don’t discount the effects of the code-switching that is inherent in walking this path—the complexities and complications and, yes, the compromises. We are called to show up each day whole in our humanity, in a broken world. In all of this, we make the choice to live our agency.

I am convinced now more than ever that our kinship— to land and to each other—shapes our economic futures.

Ka’ala Farm endures, and continues to pave the way for community economic development in Wai’anae and beyond. At MA’O, hundreds of students have received associate’s degrees, affirmed their kinship, and honed their land stewardship practices. In the last few years, MA’O’s farms have secured blended capital to scale from 24 acres of land to 281 acres. In the midst of a global pandemic that has shaken global supply chains, MA’O revenues have soared.

Today, I head the Office of Indigenous Innovation at the University of Hawai’i, where I work to advance and raise resources for our ancestral sciences and integrated systems management—bringing forward the solutions they hold in a contemporary context. I am convinced now more than ever that our kinship—to land and to each other—shapes our economic futures.

Among our learnings to date are the following:

• Native Hawaiian practices are sciences and technologies that sit at the cornerstone of a resilient economy for Hawai’i, and they create the conditions for resilience for Hawai’i (even as defined by other—external— cultures).
• These sciences and technologies thrive today—evidence of their
• Indigenous communities are now iterating prototypes and frameworks that are attracting the attention of policy-makers, philanthropists, and business leaders globally. Ally support (dollars, political backing, and effective policies and mental models) is needed (and requested) for growth.
• Kinship is a core tenet of an economy that is disruptive, generative, and

We see the benefit of this work every day. Ancestral sciences and integrated systems of management are improving soil quality for food production, creating new techniques for native seaweed aquaculture, and innovating climate-adaptation strategies—to name just a few innovations. The outcomes are tangible. The time is now.

***

The practice of ancestral sciences and integrated systems management is not romantic, does not live in the past tense, and is not easy. It is born of commitment and rigor—physical, intellectual, and spiritual. Kinship— like all relationships—requires work: of Indigenous peoples, of immigrants, of settlers, and of the descendants of colonizers. All of us. Zero-sum schemes, scarcity-minded policies, and extractive practices have led us to our current state. Now we have the opportunity to grow a resilient economic future seated in our ancestral sciences and integrated systems management—in the wisdom of our places.

Hawai’i has always been and continues to exist today as a multiethnic polity. In 1883, the sovereign Hawaiian government was overthrown by American plantation owners and business leaders, backed by the U.S. military. In 1993, the United States issued a law, informally known as the Apology Resolution, that acknowledges its role in the illegal overthrow.⁶ Still, today, Hawaiian lands are occupied by the United States and its military. Land claims remain unsettled. Native Hawaiians and non-Hawaiian citizens of Hawai’i continue to work to shape a just, resilient future for Hawai’i.

The ideas that we share here have been shared with us. First and foremost we must recognize the ancestors of Hawai’i in deified and human form that developed these systems and intentionally designed them to be bequeathable. We also must recognize Kamuela’s father, Eric Enos, and the people he brought to us to be in relationship with, including Puanani Burgess, Uncle Walter Paulo, Uncle Eddie Ka’anana, and Bob Agres. We also recognize Lilikalaˉ Kame’eleihiwa and Jon Osiorio, professors at the Hawai’inuiaˉkea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawai’i, Dolores Foley and Luciano Minerbi, professors in the department of Regional and Urban Planning, University of Hawai’i, and Karen Umemoto, a professor in the department of Urban Planning and Asian American Studies at UCLA. We recognize Kukui and Gary Maunakea-Forth and all the people of MA’O Organic Farms, the many people of, and the lands of, Ka’ala Farm, the Purple Mai’a Foundation, Hawai’i Investment Ready, our ‘ohana KUA, ‘Ewa Limu Project (Uncle Henry Chang-Wo, Wally Ito, and ‘ohana Fuji), Kuˉha’o Zane, Huihui and Luka Mossman-Kanahele, Haˉlau ‘Oˉhi’a and ‘ohana, Aunty Lynette Paglinawan, Dr. Manu Meyer, Kumu Miki’ala Lidstone, and our whole community of peers. Finally, we recognize the Kanaka’ole family—whose matriarch, Edith Kanaka’ole, shared the legacy that she held with all of Hawai’i, and who fundamentally and unabashedly exhibits ancestral practices of sciences and technologies that are rooted in profound spiritual relationship to the living landscape that preceded us, molds us, and continues to guide us in the restoration of abundance.

Notes

1. For more on lo’i kalo, see “Ahupua’a: An Introduction: Home,” Library & Learning and Resources, Kapi’olani Community College, accessed May 18, 2022, library.kapiolani.hawaii.edu/ahupuaa; and “Ahupua’a,” Kumukahi, accessed May 18, 2022, www.kumukahi.org/units/ka_honua/onaepuni/ahupuaa.
2. “Welina Mai!,” Ka’ala Farm, accessed April 28, 2022, kaalafarm.org/.
3. It should be noted that there are many variations on the nomenclature, and the Piko O, Piko I, and Piko A framework was taught to me by my kumu (teachers).
4. “Growing Food, Growing Leaders,” MA’O Organic Farms, accessed April 29, 2022, maoorganicfarms.org/.
5. “Makahiki,” Ancient Hawai’i, Hawai’i History, accessed April 30, 2022, hawaiihistory.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ig.page&PageID=534.
6. “1993: President Clinton apologizes for 1893 overthrow of Hawaiian monarchy,” Native Voices, accessed April 29, 2022, nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/578.html.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

In this series co-produced by Bargaining for the Common Good and NPQ, titled Building a Movement for the Common Good, we learn how and why Bargaining for the Common Good is the right strategy for our times of social crisis, featuring extreme wealth inequality and declining democracy as well as a renewed attention to labor organizing and mass uprisings for racial justice. The authors reflect on how the BCG strategy revives unions, builds new forms of collective power, and advances a multiracial movement championing racial, gender, climate, and economic justice that can take on 21^st century capitalism.

As we mark Labor Day 2022, it is clear that we are approaching an inflection point. We now face greater challenges and opportunities than we confronted during the depths of the Great Recession. On one hand, there is lots of good news. Workers are organizing for wages, working conditions, and power with an energy we have not seen in years. Community and housing groups are organizing tenants to take on corporate landlords and their private equity and hedge fund owners, who are getting rich by making housing more unaffordable. At the same time, however, capital is poised to take advantage of monopoly-induced inflation, and policy makers are threatening to weaken the favorable labor market that has contributed to workers’ rising expectations since we emerged from the COVID shutdown. The conjuncture of these developments has created fertile ground on which to organize. Polling shows higher levels of support for unions and taxing the wealthy than we have seen in decades. We live in a moment that is at once terrifying and dangerous, and inspiring and ripe with opportunity.

This precarious moment, we firmly believe, calls us to pursue a bigger vision than reviving unions and collective bargaining as they existed and operated in the 20^th century. It demands that we devote ourselves to creating new models of organizing and bargaining that meet the challenges of 21^st century capitalism. Craft unionism evolved to meet the needs of workers in the 19^th century. Industrial unionism emerged in the 1930s as the organizational model workers needed in the era of mass production. Public sector unionism developed in the post-World War II era as the numbers of government workers swelled. Similarly, we need to adapt our unions and their strategies to the ways that capitalism functions today. We need to find ways to bring workers and communities together in a common effort that is rooted both in and beyond the workplace.

Working together in recent years with union partners, community organizations, racial and gender justice advocates, and environmentalists, we have built such a model: Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG). In this series of essays published by NPQ over coming weeks, we will introduce you to this model and the ways it is catalyzing new thinking that can help us meet this moment. We believe that in the months and years ahead, Bargaining for the Common Good can play an important role in supporting and organizing a multiracial movement to redistribute wealth and power and realize real democracy.

BCG emerged from local struggles against the destruction of the public sector by the austerity policies implemented during the Great Recession, policies that furthered neoliberal trends that became dominant in the United States in the 1980s. Public school teachers in Chicago and St. Paul, state employees in Oregon, and municipal workers in Los Angeles, among others, began to realize that the ways they had been bargaining collectively with their government employers were no longer working. They were forced to bargain only over issues such as pay and benefits—issues that were most likely to create tensions between these public workers and the working-class constituencies to whom they provided services.

Meanwhile, corporate titans were setting the government’s agenda, dictating to public officials what public priorities ought to be. When unions sat down to bargain new contracts, they all too often found themselves sitting across the table from government representatives who didn’t hold real power in their communities but simply acted on behalf of the corporate ruling class. In transformational struggles like the organizing that led to the mammoth 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike, unions began pushing back by joining with parents and community organizations, inviting them to share in crafting bargaining strategies and using bargaining to make demands on behalf of the community—demands beyond the workplace in service of the common good.

By May 2014, significant experimentation in building community-union alignment around efforts to remake the collective bargaining process had occurred. That month, many leading practitioners of the new approach—including members of both unions and community organizations—convened in Washington, DC, outlined its main features, formed a network to spread the approach, and gave it the name Bargaining for the Common Good.

Since 2014, BCG has been bringing together unions, racial justice groups, and community groups to challenge growing public sector austerity, which has been devastating to our communities and jobs. The network has also expanded its work, hosting convenings and engaging in campaigns focused on racial justice, housing, K-12 and higher education, and environmental and climate change, all of which build on each other. Additionally, BCG has supported campaigns to raise revenue for public services by taxing billionaires and corporations.

Several features have become common to BCG campaigns over the past eight years. These include developing deep alignments between community organizations and unions, intentionally confronting structural racism, and exposing and challenging the ways that Wall Street, private equity, and corporate malfeasance have created a political economy of wealth extraction that is deepening inequality and undermining democracy.

What began as a movement among public sector unions and their community allies has gradually made inroads into the private sector. We believe the time is right for big breakthroughs there. SEIU local 26, UAW, and CWA recently led a BCG strategy session with hundreds of people where they described their efforts to move BCG into the private sector. For example, we are partnering with the United Auto Workers (UAW) and various environmental groups in an Organizing for the Common Good Campaign in the automobile and electric vehicle industry, with a major focus on the South.

In coming installments in this series, our BCG colleagues will tell you more about how this movement has been taking shape and why they believe it holds powerful, transformative potential in this historic moment. You will learn about the innovative structure that allows BCG to avoid pitfalls that have tripped up other efforts at union revival in recent decades. This structure provides a framework for building a new way of organizing and bargaining within the shell of our existing structures, led by community and union leaders on our advisory committee who are actually doing the work. You will learn how BCG allows unions and community organizations to build an intersectional framework that allows them to address racial and gender justice in ways unions have failed to do in the past. You will hear about autoworkers’ plans to join forces with environmentalists in the South and how healthcare workers in Connecticut used their power to win a living wage while also advancing racial equity. You will learn about the fight to save K-12 public education and how BCG is organizing on university campuses. And you will learn about how unions are beginning to make the affordable housing crisis a central issue in their collective bargaining fights.

We believe that these stories will help you understand why we are so hopeful in this moment. Not only are workers and community activists more restive and determined to confront injustice than we have seen in years, but they are fashioning a model that can help them bring their power to bear in precisely the ways they must if we are to reverse our slide into increasing economic and racial inequality, political division, and democratic decomposition. Through this series’ installments, our colleagues will lay out the ingredients of a big, broad, bold movement that is organizing to defeat the far-right’s attack on democracy and challenging the billionaires and corporations who have gobbled up our country’s wealth. We look forward to building this movement with you.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.

Click here to download this article as it appears in the magazine, with accompanying artwork.

Editors’ note: This article is from the Summer 2022 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, “Owning Our Economy, Owning Our Future.”

I learned about the concept of worker ownership in 2011, when I was hired into a research position at the National Center for Employee Ownership. Although the idea that workers can and should own their own workplaces deeply resonated with me, it felt too technical to be a transformative tool for economic or racial justice. Worker ownership involves corporate governance, legal structures, stock. I couldn’t explain it to my family or peers, or even to my nonprofit colleagues.

Since then—via positions at two other national worker ownership nonprofits, launching my own consulting firm, and service on more than a dozen boards—I have had the opportunity to design worker ownership plans and support the development of new worker-owned companies, using nearly every form of worker ownership. The projects have ranged from three-person worker cooperatives to a joint venture employing more than forty thousand workers. And although many people in my personal network still don’t quite understand what I do, it is clear to me that worker ownership is a linchpin in the movement for economic justice.

Community organizations are starting new co-ops to create job access for those excluded from the economy. Unions are leveraging worker ownership to build more agency and economic security for their members. Movement builders are developing worker cooperatives as living examples of what a reimagined economy based in mutual care can look like.

Cooperatives are the closest legal form to what we might imagine a liberatory version of work looks like when we reject capitalist norms and structures.

At the consulting firm I started, Upside Down Consulting, we focus on projects that connect worker ownership to larger systemic change. Our purpose is to lay the foundation for a solidarity economy;¹ we are working to create the conditions where such an alternative system can thrive. For us, worker ownership is a tool—a powerful one, but a tool nonetheless, not an outcome in itself. As Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson has described it, “We are very clearly not trying to build cooperatives for cooperatives’ sake . . . [but to] build base foundations of anti-capitalist society.”²

Getting to Know Worker Ownership

Worker ownership (also referred to as employee ownership) is a broad term that encompasses a variety of structures. For several reasons, worker cooperatives are the primary form of worker ownership associated with the solidarity economy. Prominent among those reasons is democracy. In a worker cooperative, democracy is baked into the model. Worker co-ops are structured in such a way that each worker-owner has an equal vote, and they directly choose—and serve on—the governing board. (With other forms of worker ownership—such as employee stock ownership plans [ESOPs], employee stock purchase plans [ESPPs], and equity compensation vehicles—democracy is possible but not a given, and it is uncommon to see these forms of employee ownership with democracy layered on top.)

But more important, cooperatives are the closest legal form to what we might imagine a liberatory version of work looks like when we reject capitalist norms and structures—that is, a group of people coming together for mutual benefit with care for one another, each with an equal voice, moving toward a common goal. (Other forms of employee ownership, on the other hand, are primarily designed to share profits—and possibly some influence—more evenly within our current economic rules.)

Though worker co-ops are the gold standard when it comes to democratic governance, we have worked with mission-driven organizations interested in democracy that prefer other forms of employee ownership. One reason companies we have worked with chose an ESOP or ESPP form over a cooperative one is because they were only interested in introducing a partial worker-ownership plan at the time, which is hard to structure within a worker cooperative. Others were interested in the tax benefits that come with the ESOP structure; for example, as with nonprofits, 100 percent ESOP–owned companies pay no corporate taxes. (This tax benefit also makes it more financially feasible for a company transitioning to worker ownership to manage the debt used to purchase the company from the selling owner/s at market rates.) Another rationale for preferring ESOPs and ESPPs is the wealth-building potential for workers. Workers in a cooperative receive annual dividends, but the underlying value of their share does not increase. In a company with an ESOP or ESPP, worker-owners receive the market value for their ownership stake when they sell their shares, which can result in significant financial gain. For some social entrepreneurs interested in worker ownership, this potential windfall is how they personally built wealth and is something they want to share with workers.

This structural difference between cooperatives and stock plans is analogous to housing. Limited equity housing—where the underlying value of the property only marginally increases based on a formula—keeps rates affordable and avoids a windfall for any particular resident based on current market conditions.

Owners of market rate housing, on the other hand, may double their financial assets (or more) in a matter of a few years (or less) under the right market conditions. Worker cooperatives are designed to be off the market, removing the possibility of a windfall and maintaining the long-term benefits and affordability for future worker-owners.

At Upside Down, we look at this full range of democratic worker ownership options when supporting clients. However, when we are building institutions ourselves, we are rooted in worker cooperative structures, as they most closely mirror our solidarity economy values.

Developing a Worker-Owned Company From the Ground Up

When I started Upside Down Consulting, my goal was to be able to make enough of a living from client work to be able to spend a significant amount of time and some resources supporting the development of a new worker cooperative. Although much of the focus of the worker co-op field at the time centered on conversions—transitioning existing businesses to worker ownership—I wanted to center the needs of those who did not have access to dignified work that creates long-term wealth.

Formerly incarcerated workers, for example, and especially Black women in this group, face significant barriers to economic security, wellness, and stable family relationships post-release. Before the pandemic hit, formerly incarcerated Black women had an unemployment rate of 43 percent, compared to a rate of 23 percent for formerly incarcerated white women (and 5 percent for the general population).³ This lack of employment access, along with other factors, contributed to the fact that 75 percent of formerly incarcerated women experienced homelessness.⁴ Again, these statistics are pre-COVID; the situation has likely significantly worsened since March 2020.

We were committed to democracy and full worker control. We were also hoping to build a long-term institution that was not meant to be sold or market valued.

In October of 2018, I brought in two organizers—Joan Fadayiro and Angela “Yaa” Orokoh—to build the foundation for ChiFresh Kitchen (although the project had no name at the time). We were focused on creating liberatory work and space for formerly incarcerated Black women. Our small development team assembled an advisory board of abolitionist organizers, solidarity economy advocates, and industry experts. In line with our value of centering those most affected in the design and decision-making process, the board included three formerly incarcerated Black women who made the key decisions on how to proceed. Beyond our formal advisory board, we also had a network of cooperators sharing their wisdom and resources throughout our planning phase.

From the outset, it was clear to everyone in the room that the business would be a cooperative. We were committed to democracy and full worker control. We were also hoping to build a long-term institution that was not meant to be sold or market valued.

The development team and advisory board went through a yearlong process of determining a business model. Our priorities were a company that paid living wages, was safe, could grow to dozens if not hundreds of people, and would provide a space where we could be in community together. We landed on replicating the model of City Fresh Foods, a Black-owned social enterprise in Boston that provides meals to schools, to nursing homes, to nonprofits, and to social programs (for example, Meals on Wheels). They were one of my clients and are now a partially worker-owned company with an ESPP that has democratic worker representation.⁵ They agreed to support us with advice and intellectual property as we got started.

Once we had the outline of a plan, we began organizing our first informational session. In the weeks leading up to our meeting, Yaa and our advisors took on recruitment. One of our advisory board members, Colette Payne, a tireless advocate for formerly incarcerated women, recruited Kimberly Britt. Kim, now the president of the board of ChiFresh and the co-op’s primary press contact, brought in three friends: Sarah Stadtfeld (who designs our gear and will oversee our retail space), Renee Taylor (secretary of the board, in charge of purchasing and inventory), and Edrinna Bryant (treasurer and head chef). Daniel McWilliams (who manages the facility and vehicles) received information about the session from his sister. We held our kickoff meeting on December 5, 2019, at the #BreathingRoom space, a community space stewarded by abolitionist organizers. Those five folks our team recruited—the ones who showed up to this first meeting—stayed with us throughout the process to become the founding worker-owners.

We met with the members weekly, sharing food and designing the business model, governance, and launch plan together. We prioritized meeting in aligned spaces: a Black-owned, coworking space in Pilsen called Blue Lacuna, and the office of an alderman, Jeanette B. Taylor, where Joan Fadayiro (one of the original development team members) was working. We planned for an early summer launch—but then COVID hit. In the midst of layoffs and unemployment applications, the members wanted to expedite the launch process. We registered ChiFresh Kitchen with the State of Illinois on March 13, 2020—the last weekday before the first round of COVID-related shutdowns.

In the weeks that followed, the Chicago Food Policy Action Council (CFPAC) began convening food ecosystem actors to coordinate and support each other on a “Food System COVID-19 Response” (later renamed “Chicago Food Justice Rhizome Network”).⁶ Organizations such as Chicago Public Schools, Greater Chicago Food Depository, and YMCA were in the room alongside urban agriculture and food justice organizations, as well as mutual aid groups, local restaurants, and others. ChiFresh was not yet operational, but we had been in discussions with CFPAC about their Good Food Purchasing Program standards and how we could integrate the values of that program into our policies and practices, which is why we were invited into the space.

It was in the context of these emergency food meetings that we first began building relationships with partners who would become a critical component of our “village”: Urban Growers Collective (UGC), Grow Greater Englewood (GGE), and CFPAC. UGC and GGE are both urban farming organizations rooted in racial justice and food sovereignty. CFPAC works closely with UGC, GGE, and other aligned organizations to address larger policy needs of the Chicago food justice ecosystem. We came together around shared values centering BIPOC-led organizations—and we referred to ourselves as the “Squad.” The Squad also included our fellow worker cooperative developers at Centro de Trabajadores Unidos, who supported the development of an immigrant-owned catering company, Cooperativa Visionarias. We began to meet weekly to design our collective response to the dire food conditions that the pandemic had exacerbated, especially in the South and West Sides of the city.

During this time, we wrote each other into grants, provided letters of support for each other’s work, and even pushed funders to finance us collectively instead of reviewing our applications as separate asks. As a newer organization with fewer philanthropic connections, ChiFresh was often on the receiving end of the Squad’s fundraising work. Our work with the Squad built what I expect to be lifelong relationships, while also providing ChiFresh with critical revenue in our start-up phase during the pandemic—all while meeting an urgent and crucial community need. Since May 11, 2020, when ChiFresh provided our first meals to Hope House of Chicago (a transitional home introduced to us through UGC), the Squad has provided tens of thousands of meals to folks facing pandemic-related food insecurity—meals that included produce grown right on the farms at UGC.⁷

We did not realize how embedded we would become in local movements for food justice, housing justice, and healing—working toward systemic change alongside dozens of aligned, committed partners.

The ChiFresh Kitchen members rose to every new challenge as we managed these emergency meals alongside our nonprofit and school clients. We went from fifty meals a day to two hundred in a matter of weeks. Now, we make more than fourteen hundred meals daily. In December 2021, ChiFresh purchased a 6,125 square-foot building, which we are renovating and will be moving into soon, and where we can expand to five thousand meals per day or more. In March 2022, ChiFresh reached an important milestone: our first profitable month as a business.

While we had hoped for these outcomes, we did not realize how embedded we would become in local movements for food justice, housing justice, and healing—working toward systemic change alongside dozens of aligned, committed partners. During this journey, we have experienced the transformative power of worker ownership. Not only have we witnessed the benefits to the members, to us as the co-op developers, and to those receiving food from the cooperative but also how a small pilot can weave into larger economic and racial justice strategies that lay the foundation for a solidarity economy.

Building the Solidarity Economy Ecosystem

The New Economy Coalition defines a solidarity economy ecosystem as “an environment where all of the things a community needs are controlled and governed by everyday people,” including land, food, money, and housing.⁸ The ChiFresh and Upside Down Consulting network is full of powerful individuals and organizations moving toward this vision. Over the past two years, we have worked with many partners to form coalitions, initiatives, and new institutions that go beyond supporting each other’s projects to focusing on how we can collectively achieve larger systemic change. While much of this work is nascent, each experiment is strengthening the emerging solidarity economy ecosystem here in Chicago. Indeed, many of our partners participate in multiple networks and initiatives like these, reinforcing our alignment and deepening our relationships and trust. (See Figure 2, following page, for some of our collaborations.)

In addition to these collaborative efforts, the members of ChiFresh and Upside Down are coming together to form the Chicago Solidarity Collective (CSC). The purpose of CSC is to build new cooperatives that meet the needs of ChiFresh members and their network. The first project of CSC will be to create cooperative housing that is accessible to formerly incarcerated individuals, including the current ChiFresh members. We plan to coordinate this work with PATHS Chicago, Urban Growers Collective, and other partners committed to housing justice.

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There is economic theory to back up the intuitive idea that humans are capable of cooperation in scenarios where private ownership is currently the norm.

One of the values underlying the solidarity economy is mutual benefit and care. This value not only applies inside a cooperative among the members but also in terms of how the cooperative moves relative to the stakeholders in its community. Even though worker cooperatives are (usually) for-profit businesses operating in the private sector, operating with generosity, care, and reciprocity in group dynamics is not only possible but also can lead to more creative, effective solutions for everyone involved. As U.S. Solidarity Economy Network’s Emily Kawano has written, “In contrast to the narrow self-interest, competition, and struggle to dominate others that are at the heart of racist, patriarchal capitalism, the solidarity economy is centered on a culture of solidarity, mutuality, caring, and cooperation.”⁹

There is economic theory to back up the intuitive idea that humans are capable of cooperation in scenarios where private ownership is currently the norm. In 2009, Elinor Ostrom received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for documenting examples of natural systems like forests, irrigation, and pastureland that were managed as commons by stakeholders, and were more efficient, sustainable, and equitable than those of private owners. Connecting with game theory work, Ostrom argued against predictions that people will tend to behave in self-serving and ego-driven ways.¹⁰

As ChiFresh Kitchen grows and becomes more established, we are excited to share what we have learned and support other groups interested in building worker-owned companies to lay foundations for more transformative change in our economy and society overall. We are also excited to learn from our comrades in other cities with similar strategies. For example, Cooperation Jackson and Boston Ujima Project (and its sister nonprofit, Center for Economic Democracy)—to name just a couple of standout efforts—each work to build institutions with the larger solidarity economy and political organizing work in mind, and each has had a powerful impact in their respective cities. Boston Ujima Project has a multimillion-dollar fund controlled by working class and poor people of color that finances community businesses and real-estate infrastructure.

Cooperation Jackson has created a community land trust with over forty properties to create local land sovereignty and prevent displacement. We hope to replicate those successes in Chicago, with the solidarity economy values of reciprocity and mutualism guiding our approach.

Notes

2. For background on the solidarity economy, see Emily Kawano and Julie Matthaei, “System Change: A Basic Primer to the Solidarity Economy,” Nonprofit Quarterly, July 8, 2020, org/system-change-a-basic-primer-to-the-solidarity-economy/.
3. Steve Dubb, “Co-op Leaders Seek to Reconnect with Movement’s Social Justice Roots,” Nonprofit Quarterly, October 27, 2021, org/co-op-leaders-seek-to-reconnect-with-movements-social-justice-roots/.
4. Lucius Couloute and Daniel Kopf, Out of Prison & Out of Work: Unemployment among formerly incarcerated people (Northampton, MA: Prison Policy Initiative, July 2018).
5. Wendy Sawyer, “Who’s helping the 9 million women released from prisons and jails each year?,” Prison Policy Initiative blog, July 19, 2019, www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2019/07/19/reentry/.
6. Jon Chesto, “Fast-growing City Fresh Foods sells a minority stake to its employees: Partners Sheldon and Glynn Lloyd say it’s a way to address inequity,” Boston Globe, last modified January 7, 2021, bostonglobe.com/2021/01/07/business/fast-growing-city-fresh-foods-sells-minority-stake-its-employees/.

6. “The Evolution of Our Chicago Food Justice Rhizome Network,” Chicago Food Policy Action Council, June 2, 2021, com/blog/2021/6/2/the-evolution-of-our-chicago-food-justice-rhizome-network.

7. Sharon Hoyer, “The city’s first food equity council works to feed everyone,” Chicago Reader, June 21, 2021, com/food-drink/the-citys-first-food-equity-council-works-to-feed-everyone/.
8. “The Solidarity Economy,” New Economy Coalition, accessed May 4, 2022, net/solidarity-economy/#what-is-the-solidarity-economy.

9. Emily Kawano, “Imaginal Cells of the Solidarity Economy,” Nonprofit Quarterly 28, 2 (Summer 2021): 48–55, nonprofitquarterly.org/imaginal-cells-of-the-solidarity-economy/; and see Emily Kawano, “Solidarity Economy: Building an Economy for People and Planet,” in The New Systems Reader: Alternatives to a Failed Economy, ed. James Gustave Speth and Kathleen Courrier (New York: Routledge, 2021), 285–302.
10. Elinor Ostrom, “Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14, 3 (Summer 2000): 137–58; and Arturo Lara, “Rationality and complexity in the work of Elinor Ostrom,” International Journal of the Commons 9, no. 2 (September 2015): 573–74. See also Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 13, 1968): 1243–48.
11. “Office of Equity and Racial Justice,” City of Chicago, accessed May 5, 2022, chicago.gov/city/en/sites/office-of-equity-and-racial-justice/home.html.

12. See Steve Dubb, “Navigating the Environmental Justice Terrain: Two Leaders of Color Speak Out,” Nonprofit Quarterly, November 1, 2021, nonprofitquarterly.org/navigating-the-environmental-justice-terrain-two-leaders-of-color-speak-out/.

This article originally appeared in the Nonprofit Quarterly. See the original article here.