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This article is the introduction to “A Green New Deal on the Ground” series produced with Climate and Community Project, a progressive climate policy think tank developing cutting-edge research at the climate and inequality nexus. The series examines how Green New Deal initiatives aim to create climate policy that positively impacts everyday life, explores the political coalitions and campaigns centering environmental justice and equity in decarbonization across the US, and champions both broad-based movement building and institutional power to harness resources and push for change.

Though it entered the political lexicon less than four years ago, the Green New Deal has influenced some of the biggest pieces of climate legislation at the federal, state, and local levels. The resolution signaled a stark move away from regulatory policy largely disconnected from communities’ desires for environmental and economic justice. By implementing these policies, activists and community organizations give us glimpses of a Green New Deal in action.

From housing to transportation, and from education to leisure, the impacts of climate change both reflect and reinforce widening US inequality. A Green New Deal approach to climate would counter these trends by channeling public investment to projects that both improve peoples’ everyday lives and achieve important climate mitigation goals.

Climate policy is no longer about molecules—it is about making people’s homes efficient and comfortable and building green schools so kids have healthy spaces to learn.

The articles in this series, A Green New Deal on the Ground, explore how, following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the coalitions driving progressive climate policy in cities and states across the US are centering environmental justice and equity in decarbonization. They show how a coordinated, investment-led approach can tackle the climate crisis and economic inequality together.

The Green New Deal aims to make the state, rather than corporations, the central actor in achieving cross-cutting objectives to address both the climate and inequality crises. Advocates for climate action have made an intentional shift from convoluted policies like carbon trading—which encourages private companies to reduce emissions but allows them to exploit loopholes to offset their pollution—to expanding public investment in climate and economic justice. Climate policy is no longer about molecules—it is about making people’s homes efficient and comfortable and building green schools so kids have healthy spaces to learn.

A Mobilizing Framework

Both as policy and as an organizing and conceptual rubric, the Green New Deal can help tackle longstanding problems—from localized air pollution to job insecurity to structural racism—simultaneously. This agenda requires concerted effort from environmental, racial, and economic justice organizers, but it offers the potential for big gains. It can mobilize new constituencies that, because of Green New Deal policies, see improvements in their lives and are ready to rally behind more investment, creating a positive policy feedback loop. This means initial projects or investments are high stakes: we need to show proof of concept to build broad-based coalitions that believe change is possible and push for more action at every level of government.

Broad-based coalitions have historically been essential to holding corporations and governments accountable and pushing for climate justice. Since the advent of the environmental justice movement 40 years ago, organizers have fought against polluters and their racist impacts and won crucial campaigns like shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline. Today, the Green New Deal offers a framework for channeling the energy and ethos of environmental justice toward a vision of a thriving future. This has led to important policy wins—from environmental justice investments that are now required for all climate spending in California, to the Portland Clean Energy Fund, which taxes big companies to support projects like home weatherization, to the Biden Administration’s J40 pledge, which promises to deliver at least 40 percent of federal investments in climate and clean energy to disadvantaged communities. These large-scale efforts show that linking climate action to other social concerns is the best way to mitigate the crisis and make climate justice a mainstream issue.

Though federal Green New Deal legislation stalled under both the Trump administration and conservative Democratic leadership, its impact has been undeniable. For a start, it is hard to imagine the Inflation Reduction Act’s unprecedented climate investments without the Green New Deal or its tireless advocates, led by youth organizers like the Sunrise Movement and by environmental, economic, and racial justice organizations in towns and cities across the country.

The IRA is insufficient—and it is not a Green New Deal. It is dominated by opaque mechanisms like tax credits and rebate programs, leaving environmental justice communities feeling sold out. Nonetheless, the $369 billion that the bill earmarks for clean power, electric vehicles, home retrofits, and myriad other needs offers an initial investment on the path to just decarbonization.

The IRA package shows a shift in US politics away from climate denialism, but now the struggle is to move beyond delaying change and technocratic fixes. Downplaying urgency and condemning mitigation, too many still seek to slow transition timelines by insisting that acting is both expensive and futile. Similarly, dangerous technological distractions like carbon offsetting or carbon capture purport to offer a green future without fundamentally altering the social, political, or economic structures that created our present problems.

The Coalitions We Need to Win

Building broad coalitions for climate action is never easy, but investment-led climate policy offers opportunities to build popular support for social transformation, particularly at the local level. Rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require changing the entire economy and the built environment where people live, work, and play. Countering the ideology of austerity regimes and individual blame—which has let corporations off the hook, made the rich richer, and placed the burden of the crisis on ordinary people—is key to addressing the systemic causes of the climate crisis.

Environmental justice is both ethically and politically essential to creating policy that can overcome inequality by redressing long-festering inequities and building working-class support for climate action. Historically, climate change has been portrayed as a preoccupation of affluent suburbanites and students with the luxury of considering faraway problems. Extreme weather and climate-induced disasters are making it clear that the crisis is hitting now and affecting everyone. The way to create popular policy is to tie climate mitigation policies, such as energy efficiency and sustainable land use, to provisions that benefit everyone, including workplace protections for office and construction workers, retrofitting for renters, homeownership for low-income families, and free transit for all.

In short, a Green New Deal must be an inclusive, just transition that phases out harmful activities and exploitative practices and envisions something new and better. People need more than promises of meeting vague international commitments; they need policy commitments to pursue healthy, abundant futures in communities that are, to the extent possible, insulated from the climate shocks that are inevitably to come. The Green New Deal empowers communities to be part of the transformation and see their families and neighbors benefit from public investment. That isn’t individual action on the climate crisis—it is collective, coordinated action that values and centers the multi-racial working class.

Policy You Can Touch

Initiatives aligned with the spirit of the Green New Deal are aimed at delivering “policy you can touch.” For instance, Boston’s mayor, Michelle Wu, campaigned in 2021 on a Green New Deal platform and has initiated fare-free bus lines in the city. The Los Angeles teachers’ union fought for and won environmental justice provisions in its contracts, such as climate counselors and electric buses. Last year, Pennsylvania state senator Nikil Saval passed the Whole-Home Repairs Program, designed to retrofit and weatherize homes, prevent displacement of Black and Brown families, and grow local workforces. A coalition in New York is advancing the ambitious Build Public Renewables Act to transition the state to a totally renewable, democratically controlled, publicly owned energy system. And in California, increased funding for forest restoration is making rural communities safer while creating new, good jobs for rural and historically marginalized communities.

Each of these policies—and dozens more being rolled out across the country—are models that can be expanded in place, adapted to suit other locales, improved to deliver tangible benefits to the communities that need them, and sped up to increase the pace of decarbonization. Sharing successful policies between states and borrowing from examples abroad will be critical to policy development and deployment. New, bold ideas are still needed, and they need to be deployed at scale. Even with the drop in emissions that the IRA will generate, the US is lagging on climate.

The stakes are high and only getting higher for communities throughout the US—and the entire world. We need to build political coalitions that can accelerate the momentum of inspiring policies rolling out across the country. These policies not only build political momentum but also furnish institutions and infrastructure ready to catch big investments at the federal level when they come. The Green New Deal on the ground is an effort to plant the seeds for that flourishing future.

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

Editors’ note: This article is from NPQ’s winter 2022 issue, “New Narratives for Health.” 

Disability justice emerged as a framework in the early 2000s, as disabled queer folks and BIPOC activists reflected on and critiqued the Disability Rights Movement of the 1960s and ’70s—which focused on advocacy for legislation and policy protecting the rights of disabled people.¹ The passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975 and the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 were pivotal successes for disabled Americans, cementing access to accommodations, equitable education, and physical spaces. Focused primarily on themes such as independent living and individual rights, however, this movement did not explicitly centralize the needs and experiences of those who experience intersectional oppression²—for example, people with disabilities who are people of color, immigrant, trans or gender-nonconforming, among many other identities.³

In 2005, a group of disabled activists—predominantly, queer women of color who came from movement spaces that did not systematically address ableism—came together to propose a disability justice framework focused on intersectional identity and collective liberation. One of those activists, Patty Berne, has observed that the disability rights movement is “single issue identity based; its leadership has historically centered white experiences; . . . it centers people with mobility impairments, marginalizing other forms of impairment; and centers people who can achieve rights and access through a legal or rights-based framework.”⁴ While the disability rights movement enabled an initial path toward justice, activists acknowledged that for many groups facing multiple forms of oppression, additional perspectives and approaches were crucial. Disability justice represents the second wave of the disability rights movement.

This second wave was the focus of a recent webinar hosted by NPQ on disability justice and its applicability in the workplace.⁵ The webinar—featuring Adela Ruiz, program and grants lead at the NBA Foundation, and Sandy Ho, Disability Inclusion Fund director at Borealis Philanthropy—lays out the principles of disability justice and its intersectionality with other movements, including LGBTQIA+ rights, BIPOC justice, feminism, and immigrant justice. The participants also discuss how workplaces, particularly at this point in the COVID-19 pandemic, should be ensuring equity for people with disabilities.

“Disability justice really comes about because traditional disability rights movements did not center or didn’t center as well the experiences and perspectives of queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, people of color, immigrants, and women. And that’s important, and the list is long for a reason, because it is a call-in to members of the community that had not been in the leadership roles and the decision making in the public leadership as much. It’s critical to have that leadership and opportunity component center folks that have been historically excluded,” explains Ruiz. “People with disabilities deserve respect, dignity, and genuine inclusion.”

Ho and Ruiz kicked off the panel by defining ableism as a “system of assigning values to people’s bodies and minds based on socially constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness.” These ideas are rooted in histories of oppression, from colonialism to eugenics, and have been integrated into our present-day systems and policies. As the panelists explain, one does not need to be disabled in order to experience ableism. A view of societal value that is based on an “ability to satisfactorily re/produce or ‘excel’ and ‘behave,’” Ruiz explains, is inherently harmful to marginalized groups who may already be deemed as “less than” by the systems with which they interact.

In response to the critical need for anchoring the movement in the needs and realities of intersectional identities, members of the disability rights movement with those multiple identities created a framework of disability justice that centers ten principles not historically centered within the movement:

1. Intersectionality—applying the perspectives and analysis of multiple identities and groups to movement work
2. Leadership of Those Most Impacted—centering democratic leadership by those with direct lived experience with disabilities
3. Anti-Capitalistic Politic—applying a critique of the ways in which capitalism centers productivity and narrowly defines societal value
4. Commitment to Cross-Movement Organizing—engaging with other social movements to ensure mutual reinforcement and strategic alignment
5. Recognizing Wholeness—valuing all parts of an individual’s offerings to the community and to movement work
6. Sustainability—building environments that are focused on long-term healing and change
7. Commitment to Cross-Disability Solidarity—preventing siloing within the disability justice movement and identifying shared aims
8. Interdependence—honoring communal exchange and relationships among individuals and movements
9. Collective Access—prioritizing access for multiple identities, geographies, and contexts
10. Collective Liberation—recognizing that struggles are interconnected and that working toward liberation for all is necessary⁶

“A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met. We know that we are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them.” —Patty Berne

These principles reflect an analysis of able-bodied supremacy as a form of oppression that is not unique to disability rights but rather is a root cause of other systems of exploitation, such as racism and capitalism. In centering white experiences, earlier phases of disability rights might have relied on corporate endorsements and strategies instead of grappling with the ways in which capitalism espouses a narrow definition of productivity. Similarly, a prior focus on self-advocacy for disabled people overlooks the ways in which interdependence and collective liberation are key to those with intersectional identities achieving shared visions for well-being.

As Berne observes, “A Disability Justice framework understands that all bodies are unique and essential, that all bodies have strengths and needs that must be met. We know that we are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them.”⁷

Adopting a Disability Justice Framework in the Workplace

Understanding the above ten principles that make up the disability justice framework is a crucial prerequisite to applying disability justice to the workplace (and beyond), particularly given a history in which these principles have not been centered. The panelists emphasize this need particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, which launched a major shift in national dialogue and practices surrounding ways of work. They share three major takeaways that have emerged out of the past two and a half years:

1. Our country’s public health policies, heightened in the context of a pandemic, manifest ableism by deeming some bodies as less deserving of equal access to health, well-being, and medical treatment than others. For example, Ho notes that “we have seen the ways that emergency rooms have done medical care rationing of ventilators when a person with a disability comes in and is deprioritized because of ableist beliefs that undergird our public health system and prioritize a nondisabled person’s ventilator access.”⁸
2. Disabled folks, many of whom stand to be particularly negatively impacted during a pandemic, have had to advocate for services that enable them to experience ongoing quality of life, from home-based services⁹ to vaccination.¹⁰
3. Workplaces across the country pivoted toward a more access-centered culture and workplace during the pandemic—from remote work to four-day workweeks and the opening up of positions that previously had criteria related to physical Such access, however, has been bittersweet for those with disabilities, as many of the accommodations they had requested previously from their workplaces were denied or seen as a hindrance, but when those without disabilities requested the same changes, there was rapid adaptation.¹¹

“The COVID-19 pandemic has [been a lens into] the ways that our country and at least some pockets of our community continue to dig deeper into equity and disability justice values [and] then really challenge what this idea of ‘normalcy’ is that we’re all suddenly trying to return back to   A return to normalcy is a return back to ableism [and] ableist practices that we knew did not facilitate equity and equality [even] in some of our organizations that are more justice-aligned,” Ho reflects.

The panelists share several areas for workplace assessment within a disability justice approach:

First is education, particularly around the concepts of intersectionality, cross-movement solidarity, collective access, and more—ensuring that employees across a workplace are grounded in the history of disability and understand its intersectionality with other identities within the workplace. “It’s an addition, versus something that should be extractive,” Ruiz explains. “If you are working with young people, with Black and Brown people, with queer/trans people, chances are that a critical mass of your constituents manage disabilities in some way or another—so it’s important to understand what the historical connection is and how ableism shows up in their lives and in their experiences.”

The second area named is hiring. Reflecting on their roles in philanthropy, Ho and Ruiz share that funders are often unclear about how to build relationships with the disability community in order to broaden their hiring pool and inform their work. “Here’s the thing: you’re likely already doing disability justice work, even if you’re not calling it that. People with disabilities and ableism are present in every community, every issue area.” Engaging in equitable hiring practices requires breaking the myth that lowering barriers to access for employee candidates with disabilities is a compromise of quality, when in fact hiring people with disabilities into various levels of the organization—including leadership—is a way to bring unique perspectives into the work. Ruiz emphasizes, “People with disabilities can do a range of things. And actually, the research shows that disabled people excel, overperform. Not to reduce contributions to labor alone! But a lot of the excuses as to why folks don’t hire disabled people have to do with concerns around productivity, around not being able to accommodate, and it’s actually not the case. Disabled people are assets.”

Particularly in the context of valuing wholeness and honoring the leadership of those most impacted, hiring disabled people can add significantly to the overarching justice mission of an organization. Practices in this space, particularly on the recruitment side, could include providing interpretation services and accessible interviews available in alternative formats, and ensuring that hiring qualifications are written in an open- ended way,

The third recommendation centers on discussion as an area to focus on, including hosting conversations with people with disabilities and listening to the community’s ideas on ways to partner. Both panelists provide examples of inviting disabled people onto committees or advisory boards so as to incorporate them into organizational governance and advising. They also share instances of grantees they have worked with setting aside dedicated space for those with disabilities to raise their ideas—whether a lunch conversation, a suggestion box, a broader training. And they underscore that policies that benefit disabled people (such as remote work options) often benefit everyone.

Lastly, the panelists recommend engaging with the disability community—particularly with peers and nonprofits already engaging in this work. “It is hard to have one person—especially if this person is not in a decision-making role at the organization—take on all of that organization’s accessibility and disability justice journey,” says Ruiz. “So, the number one thing I would recommend is, find allies. You are not [necessarily] the only disabled person at your organization—one in four people have disabilities.” The panelists provide examples of identifying those organizations that have already adopted a disability justice framework, who are thinking about accommodations, and who can bring much-needed movement perspective to the work of organizations and funders who are similarly trying to support their employees.

***

“When we consider [work] with a disability justice lens, we are acknowledging that disability is a part of human diversity, it is across the lifespan, and that disability and ableism can happen to anybody, whether you identify as disabled or not,” Ho explains. This shift, rooted in the disability justice framework and lifted up by the panelists, looks at disability as a universal part of the human condition rather than an issue impacting just the few. This, in turn, enables us to imagine workplaces that are more caring, sustainable, and adaptive. At a time when establishing a new, equitable paradigm for work is more crucial than ever before, centering the voices of disability justice advocates can help blaze the path to achieving that reality.

Notes

1. Arlene Mayerson, “The History of the Americans with Disabilities Act: A Movement Perspective,” Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, 1992, org/about-us/publications/the-history-of-the-ada/.
2. “Disability Rights, Studies & Justice: Disability Justice,” Harold Johnson Library Resource Guide, Hampshire College Library, last updated September 26, 2022, resource guides.hampshire.edu/c.php?g=759682&p=5447794.
3. Patty Berne “Disability Justice—a working draft,” Sins Invalid (blog), June 10, 2015, sinsinvalid.org/blog/disability-justice-a-working-draft-by-patty-berne.
4. Ibid.
5. “Deepening Organizational Equity: Disability Justice in Our Workplaces,” NPQ webinar, November 8, 2022.
6. Berne, “Disability ”
7. Ibid.
8. Sheri Fink, “U.S. Civil Rights Office Rejects Rationing Medical Care Based on Disability, Age,” New York Times, updated March 30, 2020, nytimes.com/2020/03/28/us/coronavirus-disabilities-rationing-ventilators-triage.html.
9. “Guidance for Direct Service Providers,” COVID-19 Information and Resources, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, page last reviewed September 13, 2021, cdc.gov/ncbddd/humandevelopment/covid-19/guidance-for-direct-service-providers.html.
10. Benjamin Mueller, “People with disabilities have a tougher time getting Covid vaccines, the C.D.C. reports,” New York Times, September 30, 2021, nytimes.com/2021/09/30/health/covid-vaccine-disabilities.html.
11. Neelam Bohra and AJ Willingham, “Remote work made life easier for many people with They want the option to stay,” CNN Health, August 10, 2021, www.cnn.com/2021/08/10/health/remote-work-disabilities-pandemic-wellness-trnd/index.html.

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

Late last year, the California Public Utilities Commission passed a new iteration of the state’s net energy policy, which determines what happens with excess energy. Dubbed NEM3, this policy significantly lowers the number of credits ratepayers with rooftop solar receive when they send excess energy back to the grid. Climate justice advocates believe that this policy adoption will have long-standing impacts as solar incentives continue to diminish across the country. And while advocates are sounding the alarm on what is now at stake for California’s clean energy future, NEM3 is just one example of how climate progress in America is at risk.

Before the revision to NEM3, California’s previous net energy metering policy—1995-96 SB 656—was intended to diversify the state’s energy resource mix, stimulate economic growth in California, and encourage private investment in renewable energy. The bill instituted solar credits, a key incentive that helped to make California a leader in residential solar and, over time, has helped to make clean energy accessible to middle- and working-class communities. Thanks to the CPUC’s expansion of a number of Solar for Disadvantaged Communities programs, a Lawrence Berkeley National Lab analysis found, middle-income and working-class households outpaced wealthy households in adopting solar in 2021.

[This] key incentive policy helped to make California a leader in residential solar and, over time, has helped to make clean energy accessible to middle- and working-class communities

Despite that forward progress, NEM3 was passed unanimously on December 15^th in a CPUC public meeting. Beginning in April 2023, the decision will impact anyone looking to adopt rooftop solar in the state as well as some existing solar ratepayers. The new policy cuts the number of credits that rate payers are entitled to by 75 percent—from $0.30 per kWh to $0.05 per kWh. This decision will especially affect schools and churches as they will see the biggest reduction in solar credits. NEM3 also stretches out the payback period on a solar installation from an average of six years to over 10 years. How quickly solar adoption grows is largely dependent upon how much solar panel owners can be compensated, so the new policy is a setback. In a January 2023 press release, the Center for Biological Diversity points out that the December 15 decision comes after years of the utility commission’s clear opposition to solar, which allows for energy independence, stops the utility commission from monopolizing the energy system, and is the biggest competition the state’s private utilities face.

When California first began looking to revise the policy in 2021, a report published in July that year detailed a vision of a NEM3 policy that could have helped the expansion of the state’s solar adoption. That vision included solar incentives primarily focused on homeowners and landlords, providing greater support for community buildings, and enabling the creation of virtual power plants. Using case studies from California, Hawaii, and Missouri, the report concludes that “policy changes like sharply reducing net metering payments and imposing high, solar-only fixed charges that reduce the economic viability of solar power can slow its growth—and, in the most extreme cases, can cause solar installations to plummet.” Sadly, California’s NEM3 policy may lead to a significant slowing of solar adoption.

“Rooftop solar is good for everybody whether they have solar or not,” says Dave Rosenfeld, executive director of Solar Rights Alliance, an association of California solar owners. The most detailed study on distributed energy generation in California concluded that rooftop solar could save ratepayers over $120 billon over the next 30 years. That is equivalent to saving each ratepayer $300 per year, whether that ratepayer has solar or not. When people generate and store their own energy locally, the need for long distance power lines is reduced. In turn, utilities can spend less on building and maintaining transmission lines, lowering rates for customers.

California aims to fully remove fossil fuels from its energy portfolio in order to become carbon neutral by 2045. But to get there, the state needs to triple the rate of solar expansion, which could include rooftop solar and large solar panel projects. “If we don’t meet those clean energy goals, a lot of people stand to lose because that’s more pollution and more climate change, “says Rosenfeld.

Grassroots and Nonprofits Fighting Back

“This could be the biggest cut to net energy metering in the country” —Jessica Tovar

The Local Clean Energy Alliance and Solar Rights Alliance are two grassroots organizations that fought hard to stop NEM3 leading up to the December 15 vote. The entities helped to get over 100,000 people to testify at public meetings, send letters, and speak out against the CPUC’s continued hold on the state’s energy. Solar Rights Alliance organized 10 rallies across the state with climate justice activists in cities including San Francisco, San Diego, and Palm Springs in a Solar Day of Action, held on December 1^st, to raise awareness of what was at stake in the vote.

“This could be the biggest cut to net energy metering in the country,” says Jessica Tovar, LCEA’s lead organizer, in a press call days before the vote. She explains that slashing these credits especially hurts disadvantaged communities and harms middle- and working-class families and that utilities are the only party that will benefit from the new metering policy. The opportunity for a large majority of ratepayers to adopt solar and potentially get out from under utility debt is now farther away, Tovar points out.

The rooftop solar battle does not stop here, however; three other environmental groups are pushing back on the decision. Earlier this month, Environmental Working Group, Center for Biological Diversity, and Protect Our Communities Foundation appealed the CPUC decision and are bringing attention to the fact that it will harm environmental justice communities that can benefit from solar energy, San Diego Union-Tribune reports.

“The CPUC needs a reset to fit an emerging new world of electric power. We now have strong competition for utilities from distributed solar, battery storage and microgrids, a technological and economic transformation the likes of which we haven’t seen in more than 100 years,” says Ken Cook, Environmental Working Group president.

A Possible Pattern

Following California, North Carolina might be on track to cut solar credits to ratepayers, too. The day after California’s NEM3 was passed, North Carolina’s largest utility, Duke Energy, filed a joint proposal along with other industry groups that proposes a number of changes to the state’s existing net metering policy. Those changes similar to California’s include reducing the number of credits ratepayers would be compensated for excess energy. Duke Energy’s proposal also includes instituting a monthly bill to ratepayers that switch to solar in the future, and credits would vary based the time of day and electricity demand. The North Carolina Utilities Commission is set to vote on the proposal sometime this year.

In Florida, the state’s biggest utility, Florida Power & Light, launched a statewide lobbying campaign that included giving $3.2 million to legislators, Tampa Bay Times reports. This expansive lobbying effort led to the passage of HB 741, which will do away with all rooftop solar incentives by 2028. Major utilities in other states such as Indiana are also battling to significantly diminish their net metering programs.

“There is a lot of outrage from different members of the community,” says Tovar. She believes that the state is moving in the wrong direction as besides NEM3, keeping the state’s last nuclear power—Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant—open past its set retirement date is under consideration, CBS reports. The cards seem to be tipped in the favor of the utilities Tovar points out. “We need to act in a way that shows energy in a human right—that’s what we at Local Clean Energy Alliance remain committed to in this fight,” says Tovar.

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

If today’s healing justice movement is a holistic response to our current political and economic landscape, what we can we learn from the legacy of Black, Brown, and Indigenous ancestors who resist our political present and imagine a just and liberated future?

As NPQ continues to honor and highlight Black histories this month, we present an essay from a new anthology that reclaims this political legacy. Healing Justice Lineages elevates Black, women of color, queer, trans, and abolitionist feminist-led traditions of liberation and survival that have been left out of most history books—even as they continue to this day.

The following text has been lightly edited for republication here and is excerpted from Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety by Cara Page and Erica Woodland, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2023 by Cara Page & Erica Woodland. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.

This piece lifts up the Queer and Trans, Women/People of Color, and feminist organizing legacies that fought for the visibility and power of our communities. We give thanks:

• To the courage of the revolutionaries from the 1960s to the 1990s that carved out dark spaces and safe harbors for our kinfolk.
• To the dives and bars for Black and Brown people, Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, Two Spirit, Intersex (LGBTQTSI+), sex workers, and drag queens that spun sanctuaries and spiritual spaces that saved our lives.
• To the feminist bookstores, healing circles, and women’s health clinics that we relied on for our physical, emotional, and political/cultural survival.
• The raves and club scenes that took us off the streets to avert the killings, disappearances, policing, and surveillance of our communities.
• From the Compton Cafeteria Uprising in 1966 in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco to the Stonewall Uprising in New York City in 1969.¹ To the Trans and Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Queer of Color formations like the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (aka STAR), founded in 1970 by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera in New York City.²
• To the Black Lesbian–led Combahee River Collective in 1974 that amplified a Black feminist socialist political analysis and agenda for our futures.

To the many organizations that left their indelible marks, blueprints/blackprints for our freedom and revelations for our movements of collective power, care, and safety.

Integral to these blueprints/blackprints for freedom and resistance… was the leadership of two revolutionary Black women… visionaries who changed the future of our grassroots liberation movements.

The late 1970s and 1980s would also bring a critical time of uprisings against war and US imperialism, the swell of Global South/Feminist of Color movements, environmental justice, reproductive health, and antiviolence movements led by Indigenous and Women of Color. The HIV/AIDS epidemic was another pivotal moment for LGBTQTSI+ leadership to build collective care strategies outside of the state. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) initiatives and grassroots organizations swept across the country to respond to the AIDS epidemic and answer the call for our communities’ safety and survival. This deeply shaped the legacy of BIPOC/LGBTQTSI+ movement leadership. We lift up the institutions that still hold our communities today, including the GLBTQ+ Asian Pacific Alliance (formerly known as Gay Asian Pacific Alliance)³ in the Bay Area; the National Native American AIDS Prevention Center (1987);⁴ and the Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS Community Health Center (APICHA CHC) in New York City (1989)⁵. As well as critical Black women–led organizations, including SisterLove (1989)⁶ as the first women’s HIV, Sexual, and Reproductive justice organization in the southeastern United States; and Women with a Vision (WWAV) (1989)⁷ founded in New Orleans, Louisiana. These are still some of the organizations that continue to deepen political analysis inside of a public health response that often does not center our people nor confront the massive health inequities of structural oppression.

These were but a few imprints of our liberation movements and a sign of the times. Integral to these blueprints/blackprints for freedom and resistance in these decades was the leadership of two revolutionary Black women, Miss Major and Barbara Smith. They are both visionaries who organized against state and communal violence and changed the future of our grassroots liberation movements.

Legends  

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Barbara Smith organized against policing, state violence, and structural oppression alongside the rise of radical liberation movements of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement (AIM), Young Lords, and the Asian American Student and Yellow Power movements, and the anti-Vietnam war campaign that was also rising globally. But often divides inside these movements were wide because of rampant misogyny, xenophobia, transphobia, and homophobia. Both of these leaders witnessed critical moments that would greatly impact their leadership. We lift up these legends and Black warrior elders who changed political direction with their vision and set a course for our movements that would impact many of our lives.

Miss Major

I’ve been involved in this since back a long time ago before most of (you) were born, and I’m still here, and I’m still fighting the good fight.⁸

As a Black Trans woman warrior, Miss Major has played a critical role in Trans herstories since she has been leading resistance for Trans Women of Color, BIPOC/LGBTQTSI+ liberation in response to criminalization and state violence. The neglect and invisibility of the Trans community by the state and our movements has caused immense pain, harm, and isolation for Trans People of Color. Miss Major would push against this in her leadership. “As a veteran of the infamous Stonewall Riots, a former sex worker, and a survivor of Dannemora Prison and Bellevue Hospital’s ‘queen tank,’ her global legacy of activism is rooted in her own experiences. She continues to uplift transgender women of color, particularly those who have survived incarceration and police brutality.”⁹

For Trans People of Color, there were multiple fronts of struggle: the increase of state violence and the invisibility resulting from movements not responding to the conditions of Trans People of Color in their communities. It is necessary to name these deep fissures within community health and feminist care strategies, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. Often feminist health clinics and LGB communities would create a transphobic, anti–substance user, and anti–sex worker culture, leading to wide gaps in services and care for Trans communities. Trans Women of Color had to become adaptive and visionary in their organizing of collective care and safety as a liberatory practice outside of the state and, at times, without other communities. Miss Major reflects on this in the following:

We were concerned that so many girls were dying, so many girls were disappearing . . . It was about us taking care of us, as we had done for years. We continued then, and we continue to do so now and always. We had been on the outskirts looking in. So that not one person is left behind, and all of us are taken care of. It should be equitable straight across the board. That’s the way it should be.

In the 1980s and 1990s BIPOC/LGBTQTSI+-led initiatives and grassroots organizations swept across the country to build advocacy and harm-reduction strategies that became a necessary salve and liberatory practice rooted in pro–sex worker, abolition, anti-capitalism, and street/survivor economies. Critical to Miss Major’s leadership was meeting other liberation organizers along the way who would support her vision for the safety and dignity of Trans People of Color.

Attica Uprising

Black, Indigenous, and People of Color who were incarcerated at Attica would risk their lives to expose the truth of inhumane treatment within the prison industrial complex, and this would greatly shape prison abolitionist movements globally. Miss Major recalled a poignant turning point in her leadership when she met Black,¹⁰ one of the organizers of the Attica Prison Uprising, in 1971.¹¹

When Black got transferred to the prison after Attica that I was in, he told me what it was that I was doing was not helping the community. So, it made me think of becoming more aware of what was happening, more aware of what I can do to make sure my girls were safe, secure, and out of harm’s way. So, that is something that I will always remember, you know. That’s the one thing that stays constant.

This inspired her to build more organizing strategies for the livelihood, safety, and dignity of Trans People of Color, especially Trans Women of Color who were experiencing heightened racist, transphobic, and misogynist violence, both inside and outside of prisons, that was often fatal. Integral to this vision was her work at the Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (2004).

Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Intersex Justice Project

The Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP) was founded by Alex Wick in San Francisco, California, as “a group of transgender, gender-variant, and intersex people, inside and outside of prisons, jails, and detention centers, creating a united family in the struggle for survival and freedom.”¹² TGIJP quickly rose up to become a political sanctuary for Trans and Intersex communities and a critical voice for prison abolition at the intersections of housing, prisons, and health care for Trans and Intersex communities. Alongside such Trans-led political organizations as the Transgender Law Center, Trans Queer Pueblo, Casa Ruby, TransLatin@ Coalition, LaGender Inc., the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and Trans Justice, a program of the Audre Lorde Project, they brought to the forefront a Trans justice political agenda that has changed BIPOC/LGBTQTSI+ liberation movements.

Miss Major was deeply involved in the leadership and legacy of TGIJP as the former executive director. There she led a Trans justice vision that centered the livelihood and safety of low-income Trans People of Color, especially those who were formerly incarcerated and living within a street economy.

TGIJP became a really vital and unique resource for the Trans community. I was in charge of the women in the system, who got out [of prison] without nothing. No chance for survival, no subsidized housing, no place to go, no place to live, no place to eat . . . We would write the girls in prison, and when they came out we would meet them. We treated them like they were family, and that is so important even today. Because when somebody calls us a faggot or points at one of us, or tries to kill us, we have us to turn to. We have us to rely on, to stand up and say, “No Motherfucker! BRING IT ON!”

Since rolling out of TGIJP, she continues to fight for rights and justice work that focuses on the conditions of incarceration, poverty, health, employment, and heightened violence deeply impacting Trans and Intersex People of Color. This work includes the […] personal support she provides as an elder in the community […] and speaking on legislation that advocates for safety and liberation of Trans communities. She is also fiercely committed to elevating BIPOC Trans and Intersex leadership within BIPOC and LGBTQTSI+ liberation movements.

“Care and resistance, they have to be together and they have to work together. …it is so important to care for the people you are building power with.”—Miss Major Griffin-Gracy

Miss Major speaks to the strategy of care as being inseparable from resistance and recalls it as being deeply undervalued in our movements. She has always been fiercely committed to centering collective care and safety strategies for Trans Women of Color as integral to her political vision.

Care and resistance, they have to be together, and they have to work together. One thing that has really used to drive me crazy was the fact that we always separated care. We kept care over here, and every time you try to bring it together, our communities and movements separate it again. And the fact that it’s been so hard to do both. One of the things that I have found is, when I work on different aspects of the community, like civil rights or gender [justice] . . . that it is so important to care for the people you are building power with.

She continues to influence and transform so many of us with her powerful voice, humility, power, and righteousness as a Black Trans woman leader.

Barbara Smith

Black feminist organizing built a political environment in which one could assert the importance of [Black women’s] work and not necessarily just lose everything—one’s sanity, one’s job, one’s status, one’s credibility. We were building a real-life context in which Black women could, if not be free, at least be free to express what we needed to express.¹³

Another legend of our movements, Barbara Smith, is a renowned Black feminist, Lesbian activist, and author of such seminal writings as “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,”¹⁴ and “Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology.”¹⁵ Her writings have been formidable and groundbreaking across social justice movements. She is founder of the Black-led Kitchen Table Press¹⁶ and co-founder of the Combahee River Collective,¹⁷ a Black Feminist Lesbian organizing collective founded in Boston, MA, and known for the powerful “Combahee River Collective Statement.”¹⁸ Barbara has spent her lifetime fighting against state and communal violence and building a Black socialist feminist ideology at the intersections of many social justice movements.

In 1974, the Combahee River Collective would rise as a critical Black feminist political voice centering socialism through a gender, race, class, and sexuality lens as a pivotal voice for global feminism and social change. As Barbara Smith recalls, “In the 1960s there was a Third World Women’s Alliance and they had a newspaper, Triple Jeopardy.¹⁹ They were looking at race, class, and gender, but they were not talking about sexuality . . . Combahee was unique because we had a socialist analysis and the fact that we were talking about the oppression of people who were not Black cisgendered heterosexuals . . .” Their work centered a political analysis against state and communal violence that was unprecedented. One example is the campaign they led to respond to the murders of Black women.

Combahee’s Response to Black Women Murders in Boston in the 1970s

In 1979, the level of violence targeting cisgendered Black women in Boston was heightened during a period of back-to-back murders.²⁰ Barbara Smith reflected on this as a pivotal moment for the organizing of the Combahee River Collective: “I consider the organizing in response to the murders of eventually twelve Black women in 1979 to be the pinnacle of Combahee’s political organizing and political practice . . . We were motivated, of course, as Black women, to speak out about violence against Black women.”

They organized Women of Color and white women allies to form a Women’s Coalition of Safety and to mobilize rallies in response to the murders. No one else was organizing against the murders, let alone building safety strategies with Black women during this time. Barbara recalled the misogyny at the rallies from Black men. “The Black community, at the time, they didn’t have any thoughts about violence against women as being even real. That was not even something that they would have been able to wrap their minds around. The suggestions that were made, or the advice that was given from the stage, was that Black women always needed to go somewhere with a man to be safe . . .” This led her to writing the pamphlet called Six Black Women: Why Did They Die?,²¹ which highlighted strategies of safety and care for Black women and presented a gender, sexuality, race, and class analysis on the root cause of why Black women were being killed.

In addition to organizing rallies and meetings, the Combahee River Collective also created spaces to care for Black women.

We created a rich Black women’s culture in the context of Combahee. Demita Frazier [a member of the Combahee River Collective] for me was key to bringing wellness because of her commitments to healing and well-being.

We were all devastated during that period because every time we looked around, another Black woman was being murdered. After one murder that happened in late April, my sister Beverly and I decided to have a Mother’s Day brunch. And that was our effort and desire to acknowledge and to give people something to experience that wasn’t tragedy.

This strategy built an essential space for collective grief and reflection while organizing against these murders, showing building care strategies as integral to our political liberation.

The Combahee River Collective also organized for reproductive rights and fought against the continued use of state-coerced sterilization abuse under the guise of population control²² and the US government’s belief that single Black welfare mothers were a national threat to security. Barbara expounded on the work of Combahee in these moments, “We worked with the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse. We also were actively involved with the founding of the Abortion Action Coalition in Boston, which was a leftist, socialist feminist response to the Hyde Amendment.”

“I don’t think that movements are supposed to be safe… You can’t be safe under systems of massive oppression.”—Barbara Smith

In her recent organizing, in response to the police killing of George Floyd, Barbara Smith has written a proposal for an anti-racist program, the “Hamer-Baker Plan” (in honor of Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker). In the plan she calls for a “comprehensive racial justice program that would imagine new ways to challenge systemic racism.”²³ Barbara Smith continues to be innovative and a powerful force of Black feminist organizing and leadership for our futures.

Toward Our Collective Healing Futures

When we asked these two warriors to radically imagine and dream for the collective care and safety for BIPOC and LGBTQTSI+ futures, Miss Major and Barbara Smith were clear in their vision. Barbara Smith said,

I don’t think that movements are supposed to be safe. I think that people should be respected in movements and that they should not be abused within movements, but that, to me, is maybe word choice. I would not talk about that as safety, per se, because the thing is I feel like if the focus is on safety, we may not go to the wall when we need to go to the wall . . . You can’t be safe under systems of massive oppression. It’s not possible while we live under heteropatriarchy and racial capitalism . . . We can draw lines about what we will accept, as far as our physical integrity and our emotional and spiritual integrity in our lives. But we can never expect to be safe under white supremacy.

Healing justice… requires we embrace principled disagreement and struggle in relationship to knowing our collective oppression and generational trauma have greatly contributed to our pain and discordance with one another.Healing justice was never meant to ensure safety, but as Barbara speaks to, HJ was to be in the practice of building care, respect, dignity, and protection that was self/community determined. HJ does not discard struggle but instead requires we embrace principled disagreement and struggle in relationship to knowing our collective oppression, and generational trauma have greatly contributed to our pain and discordance with one another.

Miss Major spoke about collective care as the sanctuary she is building in Little Rock, Arkansas, for Trans Women of Color, known as Telling It Like It Fucking Is (TILIFI), formerly named House of GG:

It’s a place of complete serenity and tranquility. I want it so that girls can come, relax, and rejuvenate themselves . . . to touch nature if they so choose. To relax and understand what it is they’re doing, because doing this work is not easy. It’s not easy, it’s not! You’re not going to get rich doing it. You’re not going to all of a sudden become the head of the ball. It becomes a really tough thing to do, and when you come here you let go of all that. You simply relax, feel good about yourself, which is so important. Then you go back and you prepare to fight again . . . which is also important that we must always be prepared to fight and win because we’ve got to.

[These leaders] love with strength and clarity, pushing forward a dream for our people without apology to offer safe harbor and political power in teaching us how to set the political and spiritual mandate for our futures.

Barbara Smith also reflected,

Our ancestors want us to transform oppression and eradicate it. They want us to fulfill the beautiful potential that we are born with and that almost never, or so seldom, comes to full blossoming under the systems in which we live. They want us to live as the cherished babies they think we are . . . Our ancestors want that for us. They also want us to fight. They want us to be as courageous as they were.

We give our deepest gratitude to the leadership of these two legends who live and struggle and breathe among us, embodying our collective liberation and practice. They love with strength and clarity, pushing forward a dream for our people without apology to offer safe harbor and political power in teaching us how to set the political and spiritual mandate for our futures.

Notes

1. “The Stonewall Uprising: LGBTQIA+ Studies A Resource Guide,” Library of Congress, accessed July 2021; Sam Levin, “Compton’s Cafeteria Riot: A Historic Act of Trans Resistance Three Years before Stonewall,” The Guardian, June 2019.
2. “Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR),” Global Network of Sex Work Projects, accessed September 2021, www.nswp.org/timeline /street-transvestite-action-revolutionaries-found-star-house.
3. Gay Asian Pacific Alliance (GAPA), accessed, January 2022, www.gapa.org/.
4. National Native American Aids Prevention Center, www.nnaapc.net/.
5. Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS Community Health Center (APICHA CHC), accessed January 2022, www.apicha.org/en/about.
6. SisterLove, accessed February 2022, www.sisterlove.org/.
7. Women with a Vision, accessed February 2022, https://wwav-no.org/.
8. Lucy Diavolo, “Miss Major Griffin Is Still Here and Wants Young Activists to ‘Keep Fighting,’” Teen Vogue, June 17, 2020, www.teenvogue.com/story/miss-major-griffin-gracy-still-here-young-activists-keep-fighting.
9. “Miss Major,” accessed February 2022, https://missmajor.net/.
10. “A Nation of Law? 1968–1971,” Eyes on the Prize, directed by Louis J. Massiah, Thomas Ott, and Terry Kay Rockefeller; highlights an interview with Black, who was incarcerated at Attica during the uprising, www.imdb.com/title/tt0896125/.
11. Stanley Nelson, “How the Attica Prison Uprising Started—And Why It Still Resonates Today,” Interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR, October 27, 2021, www.npr.org/2021/10/27/1049295683/attica-prison-documentary-stanley-nelson.
12. Transgender Gender-Variant & Intersex Justice Project, accessed January 2022, www.tgijp.org/.
13. Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks with Barbara Smith, “Building Black Women’s Studies.” Chapter 4 in, Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Albany, State University of New York, 2014, https://barbarasmithaintgonna.com/.
14. Barbara Smith, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Conditions, Vol.1, no. 2 (October 1977): p. 25–44. Reprinted by JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable /20709102.
15. Barbara Smith, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, Naid Press, 1983.
16. Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,” Frontiers, Vol. 10, no. 3 (1989): p. 11–13. Published by University of Nebraska Press.
17. Combahee River Collective, accessed January 2022, https://combaheeriver
    collective.weebly.com/history.html.
18. “Combahee River Collective Black Feminist Statement” (1977), https://combaheerivercollective.weebly.com/the-combahee-river-collective-statement. html; www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/combahee-river-collective-statement-1977/.
19. Third World Women’s Alliance, accessed December 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Third_World_Women%27s_Alliance
20. “Roxbury Murders,” accessed December 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxbury_murders.
21. Combahee River Collective, accessed December 2021, Six Black Women: Why Did They Die (pamphlet), 1979.
22. Population control (see glossary).
23. Barbara Smith, “How to Dismantle White Supremacy: To end systemic racism, the country needs a comprehensive racial justice program even more sweeping than the Marshall Plan,” The Nation, September 21/28, 2020 Issue, www.thenation.com/article/politics/how-to-dismantle-white -supremacy/.

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

The cultural sector is actively seeking alternatives to business-as-usual. This article is the fourth in the series, “Remember the Future: Culture and Systems Change,” co-produced by Art.coop and NPQ. In this series, queer, trans, and BIPOC artists and cultural bearers reflect upon the unique role that culture has played and can play in activating and enacting structural change—and in building a solidarity economy.

Through my study and experiences, I’ve come to think and speak of cooperatives themselves as ancestral technology, the ancient sankofa energy of looking to our past to innovate for our futures. This is because the cooperative practices of group work, pooled resources, shared responsibility and reward, and collective decision making in pursuit of shared goals to benefit the individual and the collective are evident in the traditional practices and values of Indigenous communities around the world, and throughout the African continent. My story is just one person’s cooperative journey, but it forms part of a much wider movement that connects art, culture, African history, and cooperatives.

My Visit to Dahomey

In the Kingdom of Dahomey, currently known as the West African country of Benin, a relief mural runs along the route from the ancient slave market to the Point of No Return in Ouidah, depicting the plight of the millions of Africans captured and sold into enslavement.

Called the Zomachi Memorial, with Zomachi translating loosely into “fire that never goes out,” the many panels display rows of chained Africans marching in circles around trees in a ritual meant to make them forget their homeland, and canoes carrying them from their shores—for the last time—to ships that would be packed like cans of sardines, but with living human cargo. The suffering these enslaved people endured in foreign lands would drive the growth of the global colonial economy.

The final panel in this mural, though, celebrates the resilient spirit that survived through tradition and manifested in Haiti’s slave rebellion of 1791, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. The memorial tells the story of violence, theft, and racism—but also survival; it offers a history and an invitation to live the futures we want.

You wouldn’t know it just by looking, but according to the guide leading the tour that I took during my three-month West African residency with Magic and Melanin at the end of 2020, this panel also nods to the role of voodoo in the success of the Haitian Revolution. The direct lines of connection between the voodoo traditions of Benin and those of the African diaspora struck me.

At the time, I was newly exploring the practice of magick—and approaching my true calling—in my personal and spiritual life. I deeply felt the impact of being displaced from my homeland and culture as an adoptee. My visit to West Africa made vivid for me the historic defiance of enslaved Africans against erasure of their cultural identity, reminding me that where we come from has everything to do with where we’re going, and that our purpose, path, and power as a people is embedded in our DNA. Knowledge of this purpose can be unlocked through our cultures, traditions, and connection to our ancestors.

My Introduction to Cooperatives

Returning to the United States after my three months in Africa, my understanding of the ways our ancestors live through us today and the relationship between those ancestral values and modern-day cooperatives had deepened.

While the co-op world reveres Mondragón, the famed worker co-op network that employs 80,000 people worldwide, my initial study of cooperatives was framed by the history of Black American cooperation, as researched and recounted by Dr. Jessica Gordon Nembhard in Collective Courage. Her book found me around the spring of 2018 in South Central Los Angeles, 18 months into starting my pet-care business in hopes of disrupting the socioeconomic systems Michelle Alexander describes in The New Jim Crow and creating opportunities for economic empowerment and prosperity, specifically for formerly incarcerated Black folks.

I first was exposed to Dr. Nembhard’s work by chance, when I clicked onto a Youtube video of Dr. Nembhard, the renowned Black political economist, speaking with other Black women cooperative leaders on a panel on how cooperation benefits Black folk. After watching the video, my mind was off to the races, imagining what a cooperative pet-care business that was not just a personal business, but one owned and operated by system-impacted Black folks, could mean for my community.

I immediately went to Eso Won Books in Leimert Park, one of the last Black-owned bookstores in Los Angeles, and ordered a copy of Collective Courage. Here, I learned about the inspiring Black mutual aid societies that arose to meet the needs of newly freed Black folks and evolved into mutual insurance companies; about W.E.B. Dubois’ and Fannie Lou Hamer’s equally inspiring devotion to cooperation as a tool for Black liberation; and the Coleman Manufacturing Company in North Carolina, “the only cotton mill in the world owned, conducted and operated by the Negro race.”

I saw so much of myself in the spirit of these ancestors. My discovery of and resonance with cooperation seemed to me a clear example of my connection to those who came before me. My dreams of a singular co-op evolved, and I became invested in cooperative culture—in what we now know as the solidarity economy—and in how Dr. Nembhard invites us through her call to build on our ancestral cooperative traditions to remember the future.

Putting the “I” in “Collective”—My Personal Journey

I latched onto cooperatives’ potential to transform the lived experience of contemporary Black folks, as well as other marginalized and under-resourced groups, like the LGBTQ+ community—and decided to transition my sole-proprietorship into a worker-owned cooperative. Once I had settled on this path, the resources to support my goals came to me with ease and speed—undoubtedly facilitated by my ancestors.

I asked my friend, Ade, founder of Leimert Park’s Ride On! Bike Co-op, about his process of forming a worker-owned cooperative and was introduced to the L.A. Co-op Lab and invited to cooperative classes, parties, and conferences that accelerated my cooperative education and development. I assembled a squad of friends, lovers, and friends-of-lovers. We leveraged our resources and dove into the work of learning, unlearning, and building the infrastructure necessary to create LA’s first (and only) pet-care cooperative.

At the beginning of 2020, we completed our bylaws with the support of the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Then the pandemic hit. We decided to incorporate our cooperative anyway, celebrating that accomplishment in June. People always say not to go into business with your friends and, indeed, the traumas of the global health and economic crises and the worldwide racial reckoning, the stress they induced, and the strain they put on our squad’s relationships would be our undoing. To Be Loved Pet Care Co-op dissolved less than a year after incorporation, but the culture of cooperation remains in my life.

The pandemic also led me to tenant organizing, arising from a need, shared by millions of others, to sustain our housing despite losing our income. I shared a home, the Altar House, as it was known in our community, with seven other Black and Brown, queer and trans, working-class, and creative folks—DJs, musicians, sex workers, and healing, creative, and erotic artists.

The house provided affordable housing, collective living, and a safe space for QTBIPOC for years before I got there. We supported each other’s shows; bought each other’s art; and created, ate, played, conjured, struggled, and resisted together (and sometimes against each other). During this time, I remembered Dr. Nembhard’s call to ancestry and cooperative culture—and looked to my own histories to find ways that we heal and hold ourselves steady while organizing amid compounding crises.

I had to reckon with the gap between cooperative theory and the praxis that lives in the nuances of our relationships to our own and each other’s trauma.

At the Altar, I learned ancestral reverence as a spiritual practice, and I learned to own my power and hone my magick. I also learned what it was like to cultivate community in one moment—and mourn its loss in the next. Ultimately, the Altar would come down, as one by one my housemates moved out to find safety and stability with family or seek new opportunities. I left for my West African residency during an attempt by our landlord to evict those of us left.

While I was away, I felt my stories and experiences encircle each other.

Finding My Way: Learning from Co-op Failure

I had been inspired by Dr. Nembhard and cofounded a co-op. I had spent three months in Africa. But there is no sugarcoating the fact that when I came back to Los Angeles, I returned to an empty Altar House and a pet-care co-op nearing collapse. I had to reckon with the gap between cooperative theory and the praxis that lives in the nuances of our relationships to our own and each other’s trauma and how we engage our conflicts, our shadows. Failure is hard.

So, I left Los Angeles and the Altar for my mother’s home in Louisiana to regroup and lick my wounds. Months later, a friend of mine shared an opportunity to join the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative as a project manager. I felt my ancestors at work once again; the job description and the organization’s mission were too aligned with my experience, values, and dreams to be mere coincidence.

One of the things about that job description that inspired me was the opportunity to participate in the revitalization of Esther’s Orbit Room, a cultural revival project named after Esther Mabry, an Oakland-based Black woman, who owned and operated a blues and jazz club by that name starting in 1959. In the 1960s, major acts played at the club, including BB King, T-Bone Walker, and Ike and Tina Turner. The club would operate until 2011, one year after Mabry passed away at the age of 90.

Efforts to revive the space emerged out of a series of community conversations focused on creating cooperatives and small businesses along the historic 7th Street Corridor, an area in West Oakland that was once known as the “Harlem of the West.” Using a community-led planning model, the project aims to meet the needs of current residents, respect neighborhood character, and build on the historic district’s legacy of Black businesses.

[Our] vision includes a café; bar; performance, healing, and movement art space; a community garden; and affordable housing for artists and worker-owners of the commercial spaces.

For me, the project demonstrated the transformative and liberatory impact of cooperatives on distressed communities—and on Black people in particular. For descendants of enslaved Africans, stewarding (in contrast to personal ownership) and building equity from land breaks generational curses. It is a full circle moment.

The vision for Esther’s is revolutionary—and especially personal for our West Oakland-born and bred executive director, Noni Damali Session, whose father, Major Session, owned a local grocery store in the area and often took her to Esther’s for treats and to buy supplies for their fishing trips. This vision includes a café; bar; performance, healing, and movement art space; a community garden; and affordable housing for artists and worker-owners of the commercial spaces—all cooperatively owned and democratically governed. We invite our community to co-develop with staff through community-design happy hours and regular community owner circles.

Esther’s is not our only project, however. On the other side of town, in East Oakland, my team’s anti-displacement work recalls traditions of radical Black organizing and political education and applies these traditions to the specific cultural contexts of the area. A partner in the Better Neighborhoods, Same Neighbors initiative, our team is on the ground, door knocking and meeting our neighbors where they’re at and connecting long-time, legacy residents to resources to keep them rooted and #here2stay. EB PREC also offers bridge capital and long-term impact investments and have supported a unique community-centered direct public offering to raise funds (349 people have invested $1,000 or more so far and the number of investors is regularly rising).

I love the heart- and liberation-centered work of our small but mighty team, rooted in ancestral culture and a practice of radical cooperation, with transformation at its core.

Manifesting the Vision

Just like the OGs [original gangsters] from the Rollin 40s keep pouring one out for their dead homies, we keep saying Esther’s name during the revitalization of Esther’s Orbit Room. The spirit in us—the descendants of Africans struggling to see us live the greatness we’re meant for, recalling the nature of our people—is the fire that never dies.

Our ancestors are always near, guiding and supporting us. The Zomachi trail may be thousands of miles away, depicting a horror that occurred hundreds of years ago, but my entrance into EB PREC was effortless, fitting. My whole body and soul found what it had been doing for centuries prior—burning like an everlasting fire, fuel to fulfill a destiny. The future is bright. It is our own history to make.

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