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After seven years of kitchen-table and Zoom organizing, a multi-stakeholder, cooperative, community-owned grocery store is taking shape in Louisville, KY. In October, the metro council of Louisville’s combined city-county government voted to allocate $3.5 million to help make a co-op grocery a reality.

There are still many steps to take. The grocery store has over 600 member-owners; we need more. We secured $3.5 million from the city; we need to raise another $3 million. And, of course, there are always contingencies with public money. We are under pressure to meet agreed-upon timelines for site preparation, store design, permitting, and construction. If we fall short, the money from Louisville’s city-county government could be rescinded. But we are getting there.

Construction is anticipated to start in the third quarter of 2023. In 2024, the Louisville Community Grocery should open its doors in Smoketown, a downtown neighborhood and the first of the city’s Black settlements.

It’s been a long journey to get here. This is our story.

Louisville’s History of Black Exclusion

The need for the Louisville store reflects familiar watermarks of racial capitalism. Like many cities, Louisville is highly segregated by neighborhood. Through the middle of the 20th century, discriminatory practices by the federal and city governments and the local real estate industry prevented Black residents from purchasing homes outside of designated Black neighborhoods, which were redlined. Smoketown, just east of the city’s downtown core, is one of these neighborhoods.

Louisville is known nationally for its busing initiative, which was intended to integrate the county school system. In 2007, the US Supreme Court deemed this initiative unconstitutional. Subsequent efforts to create a diverse student body have been impacted by funding constraints and political and parental pressures and foundered, leaving the schools as segregated as ever.

Most notorious perhaps, is Louisville’s longstanding record of racism and the Louisville Metro Police Department’s regular misconduct. The state police bill of rights makes holding police accountable for acts of racism difficult, and a previous effort to establish a civilian review board failed. During months-long protests spurred by Breonna Taylor’s murder, the police department indiscriminately tear gassed, shot rubber bullets at, and harassed peaceful protestors. In one incident, an LMPD officer shot rubber bullets at a young Black woman. In another incident, the Kentucky State Police, who were assisting LMPD, killed a beloved business owner in the Black community. Black protestors were captured inside a church for hours, and the Kentucky General Assembly’s only Black female representative was arrested and charged with rioting.

In response to the protests and adverse national publicity, Louisville put into place a civilian review board. The LMPD has stymied the board’s efforts to investigate complaints of misconduct. Reporters and community members have also complained about LMPD’s failure to respond to records requests.

And, as in so many other cities, Louisville’s predominantly Black neighborhoods are subject to food apartheid. For decades, supermarkets have been scarce in these areas, another result of destructive urban redevelopment and redlining. Downtown grocery stores have recently disappeared, exacerbating food apartheid: between 2016 and 2018, five grocery stores in Louisville’s urban core closed. Not coincidentally, dollar store outlets have flourished in the same areas. It does not surprise, then, that Black neighborhoods face health disparities relative to their white neighbors, with marked differences in rates of infant mortality, asthma, gun violence, and life expectancy.

A New Co-op Vision Emerges

The largely volunteer team that initiated the grocery co-op has attempted to learn from and build on earlier grassroots efforts to address Louisville’s food inequities, including a series of initiatives extending back to the early aughts that sought to connect regional farmers with urban shoppers, as well as efforts to create a Food Policy Council, support community gardens, and develop new processing and marketing options for food producers and venders. Some of these projects were top-down in conception and execution. Ohers suffered from short planning horizons or insufficient community outreach.

Meanwhile, a proliferation of farmers markets fueled the local food movement but marginally addressed food access. The most successful initiative of the late aughts, New Roots was from the get-go concerned with racial disparities. With an emphasis on community building, it has provided hundreds of families with affordable produce. This organizing wave taught Louisville food activists the value of persistent, deep organization and informed co-op organizing as people began to gather at kitchen tables, public libraries, and churches in 2015.

Two White women and one Black woman, who shared a history of food and farm activism, led the initial campaign to form Louisville Community Grocery. Until 2019, most engaged volunteers were White and motivated by concerns with food justice. The composition of leadership shifted soon after the grocery’s formal incorporation in mid-2019, with the first LCG and LACE (Louisville Association for Community Economics, the nonprofit developer of the grocery store) board elections seeing candidates of color chosen for a majority of seats.

The current Louisville co-op organizing effort is committed to BIPOC leadership, a departure from earlier food activism practices. The organizing group is willing to move slowly to build deeper relationships with residents. It envisions a cooperative grocery store as a first step in creating a larger cooperative ecosystem—one that may ultimately help to redress widespread economic inequities in and around Louisville.

Early team members included local, regional, and national experts in cooperative development. The original model for LACE was Co-op Cincy, which has successfully incubated an ecosystem of worker-owned cooperatives in Cincinnati, located about 100 miles northeast of Louisville.

LACE has focused on raising funds (over $4.5 million to date) to develop, construct, and outfit the store. Because LACE was volunteer led for years, not hiring permanent co-executive directors until March 2022, board members and other volunteers secured most of these funds via grant-writing efforts. Co-op organizers also pursued an ownership campaign to increase the number of member-owners. An ownership share costs $150 or $25, depending on a person’s economic circumstances. The volunteers also shopped for land, investigating at least 14 different properties, and commissioned market analyses for many of them. Along the way, they discovered the challenges of identifying and determining the feasibility of commercial real estate.

Throughout, the LACE-LCG team has benefitted from the national cooperative ecosystem—receiving guidance, technical support, and encouragement. A young nonprofit, LACE is also learning to navigate private philanthropy, public funding, and public/private financing, as well as governance and operational matters. Additionally, LACE, like our partner organizations, Co-op Cincy and Co-op Dayton, is beginning to take admittedly small and aspirational steps to nurture other cooperative enterprises. Currently, LACE is focused on launching LCG, mindful that this first, huge step may attract others to cooperative initiatives.

A Co-op for Whom?

The original group of three founders and other volunteers worked with a local attorney and a research team from the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law to draft the co-op’s original bylaws. While the team recommended taking an investor class, and while some LACE members wanted workers to have a greater voice in decision making, the majority initially wanted an equal vote for each member, whether that person was a consumer or worker. A draft of the bylaws and the story of their formation is available in this article.

The co-op has 600 consumer members already, far more than the number of workers the store will employ. Given our original structure, consumer votes would vastly outweigh worker votes, rankling some. In response, and with assistance from Co-op Dayton, the bylaws were retooled to recognize two classes of owners—consumers and workers—with a weighted voting system. Once there are seven worker-owners, workers’ votes will be weighted in all general membership votes, so that their vote will count as 40 percent of the total vote, with consumer members votes counting for the remaining 60 percent. This ensures that worker-owners will have a significant say in how the co-op is run.

Currently, LCG owners are considering whether to add an investor class. When a grassroots group with fluctuating membership and advisors engages in decision making, organization building is an iterative process. The addition of more classes in the multi-stakeholder framework reflects lessons learned over seven years of self-education, activism, and fundraising.

Moving Forward

LACE and the Law School Diversity Committee worked together to host a series of events to educate the community about cooperatives and their history in Black communities. They reached out to organizations beyond the usual social justice map—including library and business groups—to build long-term partnerships.

Enlisting additional partners, including the Louisville Free Public Library and the Louisville Independent Business Alliance, as well as other advocacy groups, they hosted a visit by Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, author of Collective Courage. Her work had influenced the early grocery activists, and her visit helped catalyze coalition building in Louisville. As part of this visit, Gordon-Nembhard spoke at the public library and an LIBA-hosted reception and joined a panel with Sadiqa Reynolds, then CEO of the Louisville Urban League.

University staff, faculty, and students were among the early supporters of a multi-stakeholder cooperative, offering public validation of this unfamiliar idea. (Universities can also play a vital role as economic anchors for co-op endeavors). In addition to supporting the Gordon-Nembhard visit, members of the university community contributed to the co-op project in numerous ways. A business school team conducted the initial feasibility and market study for LCG. Three students published Courier Journal op-eds applauding the grocery initiative. To learn about the attributes residents would like a grocery co-op to have, the university’s sustainability program developed a survey that volunteers, most of whom were students, administered for LACE to hundreds of residents. Researchers from the College of Education and Human Resources published a case study of the challenges faced by grocery cooperatives serving communities of color.¹ 

The LACE/LCG team used some simple measures to encourage wider involvement. They held regular monthly meetings at the Joshua Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church in the city’s West End, and they secured a grant to cover childcare to enable those with young children to attend. To facilitate volunteer recruitment, they developed a series of helpful tasks suitable for recurrent or one-off participation. For instance, volunteers were asked to collect comparative price data at corner and convenience stores. Volunteers also attended community events to share information about the grocery co-op and survey residents.

Activists also partnered with community-oriented businesses to draw in new owners and volunteers. For instance, for three years, volunteers and a Smoketown bike shop have co-hosted a jolly, holiday fundraiser, where attendees make wreathes out of old bicycle rims. To brighten the grim 2020 season, the group worked with multiple nonprofits, small businesses, and arts groups to celebrate the “12 days of Cooperation,” featuring events from tree-pruning lessons to yoga classes and concluding with a virtual gala concert.

Mindful that food-insecure communities lack access to decent produce and basic staples now, volunteers began holding pop-up markets in Central and West Louisville neighborhoods in mid-2019. Not only did these miniature farmers’ markets offer seasonal items at good prices, but they also helped the grocery connect with local growers. As the pandemic exacerbated food insecurity, the grocery team, together with other food justice activists, joined in the #FeedTheWest initiative. Over eight weeks in the summer of 2020, LCG purchased and helped distribute thousands of dollars’ worth of produce from Black farmers.

That summer, the city announced $3.5 million in grant funding for LCG to build a community-owned grocery. LACE was one of two bidders and won the contract in 2021. Unfortunately, after several months, the uneasy negotiations fell apart when the city government determined that LCG had not met their timetable for land acquisition and other metrics. Fortunately, a year later, LCG had obtained site control. This October, it secured a $3.5 million city award for construction. While construction has not begun, we believe that this time, with clear site control established, the money is more secure.

Getting Site Control

How did LCG get site control? A one-acre parcel in Smoketown that LCG now owns, the long-vacant site, former home of the Louisville Slugger factory, is a gift from the Community Foundation of Louisville.

Such donations by foundations are not common. Why did the foundation bequeath a property with a declared value (2021) of $625,000 for a fledgling grocery co-op? The donation is the result of the foundation’s attention to Smoketown residents, its commitment to trust-based philanthropy, and the neat fit between these two priorities and visions for a community-owned grocery in an historically excluded neighborhood.

As Ramona Dallum, the foundation’s vice-president of equity and impact, explained, the land offered their philanthropic organization an opportunity to think and operate differently; with this gift, they could shift power to Smoketown residents.

In 2015, Hillerich & Bradsby, owners of Louisville Slugger Company, donated the land to the foundation. The Hillerich family, Dallum recounted, wanted to benefit the neighborhood, envisioning a green space for local children to enjoy. The foundation team explored creating a Boys and Girls Club location or a park designed by nearby Bernheim Aboretum staff. Another option was to sell the land to generate funds for Smoketown. But that, Dallum said, would have left power with the foundation.

Through conversations with residents, team learned that residents were most concerned with a lack of grocery stores and access to healthy food. Another priority was addressing affordable housing and creeping gentrification, an ongoing threat given the neighborhood’s proximity to the expanding downtown health science/medical complex. Indeed, people put food and shelter ahead of amenities like parks.

The foundation was willing to support the cooperative because of their commitment to centering trust and relying on the lived experience of grantees.

Around this time, the foundation became aware of LCG, as well as another local organization, Rebuilding Our Urban Neighborhood Dwellings (REBOUND, Inc) which aims to create a community land trust. Both community groups were responding to people’s immediate priorities and offered the prospects of wealth creation and leadership to residents.

The foundation recognized that LACE faced a chicken-and-egg problem, one common to many cooperative founders. The nonprofit lacked sufficient capital to proceed with the store. A big obstacle to fundraising was the lack of a secured site, but without funds, how could LACE purchase property?

The foundation was willing to support the cooperative because of their commitment to centering trust and relying on the lived experience of grantees. When asked if she had qualms about the gift to LACE, Dallum expressed concern that the cooperative might accelerate gentrification; as has been painfully demonstrated, nice food outlets, even cooperative ones, can exert harms. She worried, too, that the store might turn into yet another well-intentioned, White-led project. Knowing that co-op decision-making remains in the hands of its member-owners, the foundation provided a renewable multi-year grant to fund community relations initiatives encouraging member-ownership among long-time residents of Smoketown and other historically Black communities.

Initial Lessons and Next Steps

Food co-ops can and must collaborate with those addressing systemic racism, health equity, and economic justice.

LACE has taken away valuable lessons. Food co-ops must collaborate with those addressing systemic racism, health equity, and economic justice. Such collaborations may be playful: Christmas wreathes from bicycle parts! Volunteers can take on tasks like grant writing and successfully compete with organizations that have professional grant writers, especially as more donors allow for video and audio submissions. Critical support and advice can be found by reaching out to participants of similar projects in other cities. Finally, groups can approach community foundations or other key donor institutions to explore novel forms of philanthropy, such as land donation.

Securing a site for the Louisville grocery store and funding from city government followed years of grassroots self-education, countless hours of volunteer organizing, and creative advocacy. Of course, we still must build—then operate—a well-run, community-owned grocery store. The work has just begun, but we are excited to take the next steps.

Notes

1. See also L. Halliday and M. Foster, “A tale of two co-ops in two cities,” Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 9.2 (2020): 239–254, https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2020.092.005.

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.” 

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

Healing justice . . . is a framework that seeks to lift up resiliency and wellness practices as a transformative response to generational violence and trauma in our communities.

—Cara Page, cofounder, Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective¹.

“We all belong. We are all healing. We are all welcomed in our wholeness.” These words were draped across our lobby wall until the closure last December, after thirteen years of service, of our Third Root Community Health Center in Flatbush, Brooklyn—the oldest cooperative holistic health center in New York City. With basic healthcare being stripped away—and communities already impacted by intergenerational trauma experiencing the ongoing trauma of a pandemic, the repealing of reproductive rights, and an epidemic of gun violence—we decided, as we closed, to share our reflections and learning. With the benefit of hindsight, we have a clearer picture of some key factors that allowed us to grow and prosper, as well as some understanding of what we wish we had done better. Our hope is that our lessons learned can help future healing spaces to be rooted in right relationship with community and sustainable.

Healing justice is both a delicate and critical value to center in these times, for it can be a powerful guiding principle in moments of compounded crisis and trauma. Cara Page, cofounder of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, reminds us that the origins of healing justice lie in Southern Black Feminist practice and praxis,² and that an integral part of healing justice practice is the dismantling of oppressive systems.

Our opening, in August 2008, was the culmination of the dreams of healers who envisioned holistic healthcare access for those most in need.

Third Root Community Health Center was created specifically to overcome historic inequities in health access,³ and we understand healing justice as the increased capacity for individuals, families, and communities to experience wellness while righting historical inequality regarding access to economic resources and healthcare.

Our opening, in August 2008, was the culmination of the dreams of healers who envisioned holistic healthcare access for those most in need, and was built upon previous health justice work—such as the Black Panthers’ health programs,⁴ the Young Lords,⁵ and more recent projects like Working Class Acupuncture and Off the Mat, Into the World.⁶ Third Root’s strategies for overcoming health inequalities were to offer sliding- scale holistic healthcare, herbal education, yoga, acupuncture, and massage for some of the most vulnerable residents in New York City. The founding structure was cooperative ownership with a consensus-based decision-making process. We began with seven founding members—Green Wayland-Llewellin, Jacoby Ballard, Robyn Ji-Hye Choi, Angela Ueckerman, John Halpin, Romina Rodriguez-Crosta, and Julia Bennett—a group of healers committed to equity, access, and cooperative ownership, who dreamed of a center that would be replicable across the world. Throughout Third Root’s lifetime, there were twenty cooperative owners (at its largest, the co-op had twelve worker-owners) and over one hundred and fifty staff, teachers, and volunteers whose contributions continuously evolved the culture of care.

Challenges in Collective Practice

And yet there were challenges. While we did succeed in providing a steadfast resource that many long-term BIPOC community members relied on for healing and community building, bringing services into a community that had been historically marginalized did not in and of itself overcome cultural and access barriers. Although Third Root aimed to serve those most impacted by health inequality, we found ourselves situated in one of the most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn.⁷ And because of historic gaps in access to holistic health modalities for working-class people of color, at least half of our patrons were white, and many were new city residents.⁸ The irony—given our mission, given that the practices of yoga, massage, and Chinese medicine and acupuncture come from people of color, and given that the staff and owners comprised more than 50 percent people of color—resulted in pain and harm to the community and the BIPOC staff and owners. And yet our work held distinction and profound meaning for people of color, especially those at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities. While BIPOC people may have had many beautiful, connected, and important healing experiences here as patrons, practitioners, collaborators, and/or one-time visitors or longstanding community members, those truths don’t erase the fundamental challenges around racial equity at Third Root— challenges that are important, if sometimes difficult, to reflect on.

We strove to rectify these gaps by increasing affinity group programming, offering free and lower cost services to BIPOC folks via application, inviting community feedback,⁹ and working internally with skilled facilitators to organize social justice training for all staff¹⁰—but challenging white supremacy in our own culture, language, and principles should have been a keystone of our founding and operations. As a holistic health business in a primarily Caribbean and Latinx neighborhood, the onus was on us to understand and undo our own privilege. From its inception, Third Root did plan and budget for anti-oppression training, but we failed to make this work central to our organizational culture—a core failure for an organization helming a healing space in a diverse and increasingly gentrifying neighborhood.

For our collective to sustain a commitment to undoing racial oppression and white supremacy on an ongoing basis, we needed to develop sustainable business practices that would allow us to invest in antiracism while navigating the paradox of being an anticapitalist cooperative that must meet a bottom line. For example, we ought to have begun and sustained our venture with antiracism training for staff and community members from an organization such as The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB);¹¹ without a core, unwavering commitment to challenging white supremacy, when resource scarcity comes up—as it does for many small businesses—decisions may be made that exclude, disempower, and disinvest from the most marginalized.

And this is exactly what happened at Third Root when we began struggling to cover our basic operating expenses. Sadly, although we had a clear guide to our sliding-scale model, clients consistently self-selected into the bottom tiers of payment even when they could afford to pay more. We believe this is rooted in the internalized nature of resource scarcity in a capitalist system. And because our economic model was not sustainable, antiracist training and practice became peripheral over time, eroding the integrity of our mission and vision as a healing justice center committed to racial and economic justice. Third Root held many concurrent truths about race, healing, and community that were both imperfect and profound. Ultimately, we had to face that we would not be able to sustain our business with this model, and that irreparable faults at the very foundation of the venture played a critical role.

A COVID Non-Survival Story

With New York City at the epicenter of the first US wave of the pandemic, our community witnessed firsthand how COVID-19 rapidly accelerated the gap between those with adequate healthcare and those without.

And then COVID hit. Amid the COVID-19 economic shutdown, there have been many stories about organizations that pivoted in the pandemic and thrived. This was not the case for us. Understanding that our self-selecting sliding scale model was not sustainable, in late 2019 and early 2020 we designed a new justice pricing model with clear qualifying parameters for subsidized care. The new model identified specific groups most in need, lifting up BIPOC, formerly incarcerated, immigrant, queer, trans, and disabled community members, as well as those receiving public benefits—all of whom qualified for greatly reduced price services. High-income earners and those with intergenerational assets were asked to pay above-market rates, making accessible care possible for those most in need in our community. Tragically, the launch of the justice pricing model, complete with new marketing materials and web redesign, was timed for March 2020, just as the pandemic hit.

With New York City at the epicenter of the first US wave of the pandemic, our community witnessed firsthand how COVID-19 rapidly accelerated the gap between those with adequate healthcare and those without.

BIPOC and working-class communities here and across the United States suffered vast, disproportionate levels of illness, death, and economic loss throughout the pandemic. Additionally, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor, the same communities were impacted by the ongoing and intergenerational trauma of police violence on Black and Brown bodies.

In response, during the summer of 2020, we implemented our Collective Care Fund, which allotted donated funds to cover low-fee and free massage, acupuncture, herbalism workshops, and yoga services for community members most impacted by health disparities. But like many small businesses, we weathered the prolonged crisis with no financial reserves. To maintain operations, we pared down staffing to a bare minimum, qualified for and drew down federal and state pandemic aid, and made many pivots in the model of service throughout the start-and-stop nature of repeated closures and reopenings.

We implemented online yoga and workshops, created an online marketing and outreach strategy, and offered outdoor services. Nonetheless, more than a year of sustained losses began to fracture an already tenuous financial situation. By mid-2021, faced with losing our lease and a long-shot option to relocate, we knew we could not shoestring our way out. Healing justice includes economic justice; and the confluence of challenges of running a business in New York City while aiming to pay a living and equitable wage amid a global pandemic led us to shutter our business.

We are honored and humbled to have had a vision and to have tried putting it into practice. Throughout our thirteen years, we centered the intention of “being with” change. Our growth and adaptation presented both obstacles and innovations, some of which are shared here. We know firsthand that mistakes can cause harm; they can also impart lessons when repairs are made.

Lessons Learned: Setting the Standards for Healing Justice

As a collectively owned and managed cooperative, we pondered deeply what it would mean to our community and staff if we were to close our doors. We found ourselves navigating the important question of when an organization has reached the end of its life cycle. Through this process, we realized that there is a gap in support services for cooperatives—many organizations assist start-up cooperatives, yet few effective supports exist for midrange cooperatives, cooperatives navigating financial hardship, and cooperatives attempting to pivot to avoid closure.¹²

As we shuttered our center, we developed a healing justice map to direct folks to similar resources;¹³ and below, we share our recommendations on healing justice practices for cooperatives and other businesses that are committed to racial, social, and economic justice.¹⁴ It is our hope that a network of healing justice organizations and beloved practitioners will continue to thrive and serve those in our community in need of the deep care and healing that they found in our space, and that this network of care will hold them on the next leg of their journey.¹⁵ (If you know of a healing justice business that you would like added to our map, you can submit it for consideration.¹⁶)

Based on our thirteen years of experience at Third Root, we offer healing justice businesses six recommendations for overcoming the effects of systemic inequality:

1.   Ensure leadership by BIPOC and local community members

Optical allyship is allyship that only serves at the surface level to platform the “ally,” it makes a statement but doesn’t go beneath the surface and is not aimed at breaking away from the systems of power that oppress.

—Latham Thomas, founder, Mama Glow

Liberation practice’s definition of justice is healing the root cause. What equity means in liberation practice is ownership of the soil one lives on and compensation that allows Black and Brown folks to become and own their role as the fabric of a community. Like other institutional sectors, healthcare requires representation at the highest levels by people who share the lived experiences of those being served.

Health disparities reflect systemic inequality rooted in racial capitalism, leading to poor health outcomes and shorter life spans for Black and Brown people and BIPOC trans community members.¹⁷ For this reason, it is critical that those most impacted by health disparities in any community are at the forefront of healing efforts. Leaders living at the intersection of racism, classism, transphobia, and ableism are best able to articulate, envision, and lead practices that can truly heal a community.

It is also imperative that allied organizations and resourced individuals support training and professional development that provide rising BIPOC leaders with the mentorship, healing, and support needed to develop sustainable and holistic leadership practices necessary for long-term change (meaning, there can be no space for underpaid roles and burnout culture).

2.   Offer sliding scale, free, or scholarship options

Life is very short. What we have to do must be done in the now.

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

Equitable pricing is a core aspect of healing justice that creates access for folks who historically have been priced out of or made to feel unwelcome within mainstream wellness spaces that cater to high-paying clients. Besides the robust sliding scale Third Root maintained for all our programming for many years prior to the pandemic, our Collective Care Fund provided free and low-fee services to Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, the formerly incarcerated, intergenerational Brooklyn residents, trans folks, and disabled folks. We also offered a “no one turned away for lack of funds” option for many of our yoga classes, meditation classes, and workshops, as well as Community Care Days, which were free outdoor healing spaces.

3.   Pay a living and equitable wage

The economic system still depends on a profound racial hierarchy. It still depends on the degradation of Black labor and still depends on and develops tools to segregate and disenfranchise Black people and other working people.

—Jennifer L. Morgan, chair, New York University Department of Social and Cultural Analysis

The labor of people who are Black and Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, disabled, trans, formerly incarcerated, elderly, and female is undervalued, underpaid, and overlooked. As at Third Root we were at least 50 percent BlPOC in our ownership, staff, and teachers, and majority women and queer, our commitment to remain accessible to our students and patients came into conflict with our ability to pay ourselves equitably. We knew that if we failed to uplift and sustain our healing justice providers, we would not survive long enough to provide care to our clients. It was an ongoing struggle to balance our anticapitalist values with our need to become solvent, and payroll was always our highest overhead cost. With the additional challenge of the pandemic, we simply could not pay ourselves enough to fulfill a fundamental principle of our work: Healing justice includes economic justice.

We envision that living wages in a healing justice cooperative would account for the varied needs of cooperative members who are impacted differently by structural inequality. For example, some bear the costs of child care as single or partnered parents, some sustain multiple family members on their wages, some live and work with disability, and some carry seniority and expertise as elder healers in our community. Staff like founding member Julia Bennett, who began her many-decades-long career in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Lincoln Hospital and served the Flatbush community long before our cooperative began, should have been afforded a compensation package that included at least a modest retirement.

Individual healing work never happens outside of collective healing work, and collective healing must include collective liberation—from generations of white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, homo-/transphobia.

Additionally, in talking about equitable payment, it is necessary to name that within wellness communities there is work to be done to rectify the cultural appropriation and profiting from teachings that are not from the practitioner’s culture of origin. Monetizing healing traditions within white supremacist capitalism is problematic, especially when people from the cultures that developed these practices do not have equal access to the teachings and healing tools themselves. We recommend repatriating a portion of profits to healing organizations led by Indigenous practitioners of the relevant healing traditions as an entry point to righting this wrong.

4.   Center social justice and racial equity

Individual healing work never happens outside of collective healing work, and collective healing must include collective liberation—from generations of white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, homo-/transphobia. Communities of color, immigrant communities, queer and trans communities, and disabled communities continue to disproportionately bear the health impacts of our unjust society. At Third Root, we provided trauma-informed and affinity-group-based programming such as Brown Sugar: Yoga for Folks of Color, Yoga for Abundant Bodies, queer & trans yoga, and a QTIBIPOC meditation.¹⁸ We provided herbal education programming that addressed settler colonialism and cultural appropriation in relation to Native American plant medicine. Our physical space bore many accessibility barriers (for example, we had no ADA compliant ramps, restrooms, or access to the downstairs space), so we provided stopgap measures and aimed to communicate these clearly with accessibility statements on all our material. To maintain integrity, we created an anti-oppression code of conduct and led racial justice and equity meetings within our staff, teacher, and volunteer communities.

We recommend that any health justice facility prioritize full chair and scooter accessibility. We also recommend that healing justice spaces center, budget, and plan for ongoing racial and economic equity training, such as The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) Undoing Racism® workshop, and/or Resmaa Menakem’s Somatic Abolitionism workshop, and engage consulting partners experienced in navigating equity within a business, such as Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA).¹⁹

Strategies to support such trainings financially can include an adequate budget line to cover training costs, engaging in external fundraising, and/or a stated expectation that owners and staff of European descent will take on participation in antiracism training on their own if the business cannot sustain these costs.

5.   Actively participate in advocacy as a form of healing

Dismantling systems of oppression is integral to building a world in which we all feel free and can fully live in our purpose individually and collectively. . . .

We are our ancestors’ continued presence. We believe in our community’s right and ability to heal.

—Latinx Therapists Action Network

Healing justice asks us to actively right wrongs, and this means employing advocacy and organizing strategies to defend and strengthen healthcare access. It is not enough to promote individual healing and it is not enough to develop holistic health services absent an understanding of the impact of racialized trauma and systemic inequality on communities.²⁰ We must be in action—for in advocacy and action, we are also healing intergenerational trauma and the roots of institutional harm. As Dr. Anna Ortega-Williams writes, we heal our “collective self” when we involve ourselves in movements for social justice and safety for our people.²¹ Not only is movement building cathartic, advocacy is central to healing justice.

What is needed to increase our collective tolerance for stress is equally as important as how to cultivate our collective experiences of joy—and sanctuary spaces where we can reset our nervous systems, be accepted, and receive care are vitally important.

If we were to start a healing center in these times, it would be one that embodies the practices and care that heal intergenerational harms. We dream that new generations of healing justice businesses will center holistic reproductive healthcare, mental health and trauma support, and racial justice study as a wellness practice— all anchored in communities of mutual support, so as to cultivate healing as an integral part of bringing into being all that is possible for our communities.

6.   Cultivate stewardship of our spaces as owners

Without community, there is no liberation.

—Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House

When opening a cooperative in a community where you contribute greatly and where your work enhances the cultural capital of a place, do what you can to own the space you occupy.

While Third Root Community Health Center occupied a building in Flatbush and we contributed to the cultural capital of the place, we were renters, with no means of earning equity. In short, the community we helped build ultimately priced us out. We could not keep up with the pace of rent increases.

Inequitable access to home and land ownership is central to the perpetuation of racial capitalism. Redlining—the historic and ongoing exclusion of neighborhoods based largely on the racial makeup of a community—and the systemic denial of ownership opportunities and resources to these communities continue to accelerate the racial wealth gap. As Leah Penniman illustrates in Farming While Black, people of color in the United States perform over 80 percent of land labor, yet own and manage only 2 percent of farmland.²²

Those who can leverage the capital to buy land or space for building healing justice centers can become stewards of care in the places where care is most needed. Anything less leaves us to gentrify ourselves out of our beloved communities. In practice, we envision this as being possible through financial education for BIPOC healers toward understanding the home- and land-buying processes. We also recommend the development of a robust profit-sharing model that includes a down payment match—allowing worker- owners to, over time, become permanent homeowners in the communities they serve. This creates the conditions to challenge systemic inequality by cultivating a long-term, intergenerational investment in the healing of a community.

Daring to Dream

In a conversation with Geleni Fontaine, a long-time acupuncturist and Third Root member, they shared that “a lesson for me as a collective member at Third Root was to not be afraid to vision. To not be afraid to really expand the sense of what was possible. And doing that with other people—how thrilling that was.” Fontaine then asked the question, “What is this work?” Answering their own question, Fontaine said, “It’s the work that we’re getting paid to do. But it’s also who we are. It’s our lives. And those of our families and our communities. There couldn’t be a separation between doing the work of being in this collective and working on making it something that’s equitable and that addresses who we are as practitioners living our lives.”

Through this commitment to equitable and justice-centered healing practice, Third Root continued to be a sanctuary within the Flatbush Brooklyn community through the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and racialized trauma. In response, besides the Community Care Days we offered to provide acupuncture, massage, and yoga in an outdoor setting to people in need of care, we also provided scholarship services to over three hundred Black, Indigenous, trans, and formerly incarcerated community members through our Community Care Fund. Collectively, the 160 healers and teachers who practiced at Third Root provided over one million unique services to over three hundred thousand people during our tenure. Many of those healers and teachers supported people who came from historically marginalized communities, some of whom felt safety in their bodies for the first time in our queer and trans yoga classes, in our affirming, trauma-informed services, and in being held by healers who looked like them and were trained to support people moving through trauma. These healers and teachers helped us to evolve and deepen our practices of healing justice, and now move through the world holding intersectionality and healing justice as central to their practice. We know many of these healers will go on to seed healing justice centers that continue evolving and building on the legacy we started together.

***

We, the former member-owners of the Third Root Community Health Center, recognize that we are in critical times that require all of us to pause and radically reconfigure. For some in the world of healing justice, the work that is needed right now is rest and wellness; for others, it is advocacy and action. Whatever one’s calling, we are in a moment to tap inward and listen. When we are well, we can dream what is next. When we are at peace and in equilibrium, we can see each other and connect.

“We all belong. We are all healing. We are all welcomed in our wholeness.” As we sunset our cooperative, it is our deep wish that these words and our lessons learned can seed the next generation of healers and healing justice practices.

While our collective is no more, former worker-owners still offer consultations and insights via workshops and one-on-ones. If you have ideas and visions for healing justice, we’d like to hear them. You can contact info@ thirdroot.org to share your reflections or for inquiries.

Notes

1. “Statement on Healing Justice,” Third Root, accessed October 16, 2022, thirdroot.org/2022/04/12/ healing-justice-statement-map-third-root/.
2. “Kindred Offering to this Moment,” Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, July 23, 2020, kindredsouthernhjcollective.org/kindred-offering-to-this-moment/.
3. Ted Scheinman, “The Historical Roots of Racial Disparities in American Health Care,” Smithsonian Magazine, April 2022, smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/historical-roots-racial-disparities-american-health-care-180979800/.
4. See Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
5. See Ed Morales, “The Roots of Organizing: The Young Lords’ revolution,” The Nation, March 24, 2020, thenation.com/article/culture/young-lords-radical-history-johanna-fernandez-review.
6. For more on Working Class Acupuncture, see workingclassacupuncture.org; for more on Off the Mat, Into the World, see www.offthematintotheworld.org.
7. See, for example, Kim Velsey, “The New High-Rent Districts,” New York Times, August 24, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/realestate/the-new-high-rent-districts.html.

8. See “Flatbush Residents,” Niche, accessed October 26, 2022, niche.com/places-to-live/n/flatbush-new-york-city-ny/residents/; and “Flatbush Demographics,” Point2, accessed October 26, 2022, www.point2homes.com/US/Neighborhood/NY/Brooklyn/Flatbush-Demographics.html.
9. Early on in our tenure, a member of our collective who was dedicated to outreach and organizational partnerships coordinated town halls in our space that accommodated between twenty and forty people per session, most of whom were acquainted with Third Root. The groups were racially and culturally mixed—roughly 60 percent white and 40 percent BIPOC. Ideas generated in these sessions would go back to meetings with the collective, in which we decided on how we would incorporate the feedback that was aligned with our mission and vision. Early surveys focused on what the community was interested in; later surveys focused on the accessibility of our services and on how the sliding scale worked or didn’t. During the first phase of the COVID pandemic, we surveyed extensively to help shape COVID-safe protocols and meet needs during that time.
10. For instance, Moksh Consulting (see mokshconsulting.org/about) and AORTA (see aorta.coop/).
11. See The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB), pisab.org.
12. Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City runs a comprehensive leadership institute for co-ops that we couldn’t manage the capacity to attend; nonetheless, CEANYC provided us with an emergency grant in 2018, when they learned that we were in big financial trouble (see gocoopnyc.org/). Organizations that assist start-up cooperatives include New York City Network of Worker Cooperatives (NYC NOWC), coop/home/; United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives, www.usworker.coop/home/; and Green Worker Cooperatives, www.greenworker.coop.
13. Third Root developed a healing justice map, which can still be found here: thirdroot.org/healing-poc-brooklyn-new-york-practitioner-directory.
14. Third Root, “Statement on Healing Justice,” April 12, 2022, thirdroot.org/2022/04/12/healing-justice-statement-map-third-root.
15. Third Root, “Connect With Former Practitioners,” accessed October 26, 2022, org/massage-acupuncture-practitioners-at-third-root-brooklyn-how-to-book/.
16. Healers and healing spaces led by white people (people of European descent) can be listed on our Healing Justice Map if they have participated in racial equity training, such as PISAB-Undoing Racism: org, and have built an achievable timeline to train and promote BIPOC and long-standing local communities into leadership and decision-making roles in their practice. See Third Root, “Healing Justice Map,” thirdroot.org/healing-poc-brooklyn-new-york-practitioner-directory/.
17. Francisco Pérez, “How Do We Build Black Wealth? Understanding the Limits of Black Capitalism,” NPQ, April 27, 2022, org/how-do-we-build-black-wealth-understanding-the-limits-of-black-capitalism.
18. See the following sites for more information: Brown Sugar: Yoga for Folks of Color, brownsugaryoga.com; Yoga for Abundant Bodies, theshadowleague.com/black-girl-strength-creating-space-for-abundant-bodies-in-yoga/; Queer & Trans Yoga—Virtual, jacobyballard.net/product/queer-trans-yoga-virtual/; QTIBIPOC meditation, thirdroot.org/2021/02/22/meditation-for-queer-and-trans-people-of-color/; and Love Circle Sangha, www.facebook.com/groups/Lovecirclesangha/.
19. See The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond: PISAB, org; Resmaa Menakem: Embodied Anti- Racist Education, www.resmaa.com/movement; and Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA), aorta.coop.
20. For more on this, see “Free Racialized Trauma Course,” Cultural Somatics Institute, accessed October 26, 2022, culturalsomaticsinstitute.com/courses/cultural-somatics-free-5-session-ecourse.
21. Anna Ortega-Williams, “Organizing as ‘Collective-Self’ Care Among African American Youth in Precarious Times,” Journal of African American Studies 25, no. 1 (March 2021): 3–21.
22. Leah Penniman, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (White
    River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018).

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

This article is part of Climate Justice Organizing for Belonging, a series co-produced with NPQ and Mothers Out Front. The key question guiding this organizational shift—and this series—is: what does successful organizing look like for the most impacted when resources fully support them?

We all know the song. The wheels on the bus go round and round all through the town. But what about the air on the bus? For millions of children and adolescents, that air makes them cough and cough due to toxic fumes laden with particulate matter that children breathe in from diesel-powered school buses.

I’ve always told my daughters that if you’re taking action, there is hope. As a National Leadership Team member and volunteer for Mothers Out Front, I am modeling that by organizing parents here in Virginia and around the country to advocate for a just transition to electric school buses.

Nationwide, 26 million children travel on 480,00 school buses each day, 90 percent of which run on diesel fuel. In Fairfax County, VA, where my family and I live, there are 1,625 diesel school buses, making it the second largest school bus fleet in the country. The county’s children, who sometimes ride these buses for up to four hours a day, are exposed to up to 12 times more air toxins than the rest of the population. This exposure is linked to reduced lung function and increased incidences of asthma and pneumonia. The National Resources Defense Council estimates that school bus diesel exposure poses as much as 23 to 46 times the cancer risk considered significant under federal law. In Virginia, asthma rates for children are higher than in other areas of the country, disproportionally affecting rural parts of the state that are medically underserved.

I first heard about Mothers Out Front in 2019 while doing climate advocacy work with a coalition in Northern Virginia. The more I learned, the more scared I felt for my kids’ future, impressing upon me the urgent need to do more to help. We as mothers are the ones who must fight for our kids’ future when politicians and corporations won’t. I wanted to bring my friends and peers into the movement in a way that was easily actionable and fit their busy schedules. I learned about electric school buses from a Mothers Out Front organizer and realized how effective the group’s organizing was. For me, the electric school bus campaign was a clear avenue to act on and one that moms could easily relate to.

As school buses are the largest mass transit system in the country, transitioning to electric buses can significantly reduce greenhouse emissions, even when the source of electricity used to power the buses is considered. The health and safety implications of such a transition are also huge. Electric vehicles don’t produce exhaust fumes, which means cleaner air and fewer doctors’ visits for children with respiratory problems.

Using the Power of Legislation

Upfront costs are one of the toughest hurdles when planning deployment of any climate solution. This is especially true for cash-strapped school districts. But the cost benefits of electric buses, which include energy incentives and savings for school districts operators, are well documented. Additionally, US Public Interest Research Group’s studies show that while electric buses are more expensive upfront, lifetime savings per bus could be up to $400,000 in fuel expenses and $125,000 in averted maintenance costs. Here in Fairfax County, those savings would be significant.

After meeting with our local school district’s transportation director and fleet manager, it was clear they wanted to make the transition to electric, but the upfront cost was a major issue. If Fairfax didn’t have the budget for it, such a transition would be even harder for smaller districts. Mothers Out Front decided the best way to help school districts with upfront costs would be through legislation. Our Virginia-based team of six researched existing legislation as well as the health impacts, air quality issues, and climate impacts that a bill could address. We met weekly to discuss and strategize and enlisted the help of our state delegate, Mark Keam.

After compiling enough information, we started writing our bill, which was modeled after the federal Clean School Bus Act of 2019. Designed to be a grant program for the state of Virginia, our proposed bill eventually became the Virginia Electric Vehicle Grant Fund and Program (HB 2118)—a state-level grant fund that prioritizes localities with high asthma levels and poor air quality, helping school districts to cover the cost of upgrading their school buses to electric.

The bill was first introduced into the Virginia General Assembly in 2020 by delegate Keam. It took persistence, many meetings with legislators, and two sessions in the General Assembly. But finally, in 2021, HB 2118 was signed into law, making Virginia the first state to establish a grant-funded program to transition to an electric school bus fleet.

The campaign’s next step is to get money into the statewide fund, and there are several sources we can tap—including federal dollars, philanthropic grants, or private donations—to get it. Once money is in the fund, the Virginia Department of Energy will establish a working group to help implement a feasible transition plan for the state. Mothers Out Front is ready to get creative, but our first priority is making sure the fund isn’t cut as state governor Glenn Youngkin is trying to reverse other important climate legislation.

To move this work forward, our core group is slowly building a relationship with the new county superintendent and meets periodically with the Fairfax school board to help advocate for the transition to electric buses. We use our networks to turn out parents to school board meetings and focus on keeping the district on track with its commitment to replace its diesel-powered bus fleet by 2035.

Last October, the Biden administration announced the Clean School Bus Grant Fund. Housed under the EPA, this $5 billion federal grant will help school districts transition to electric buses over the next five years. This year, $1 billion in grants has already been awarded to districts around the country, and the next round of funding is set to open soon. Mothers Out Front is also a member of the national Alliance for Electric School Buses, which is playing a large part in shaping the EPA funding. This alliance of 25 organizations will help Mothers Out Front teams around the country tackle next steps as we move toward our goal.

Even my daughters are taking action. Just last year, one of my daughters became a plaintiff in the Our Children’s Trust lawsuit, suing Virginia for exacerbating the impacts of climate change in the state by choosing to continue relying primarily on fossil fuels. The original climate-related lawsuit, Juliana v. United States, was filed in 2015 against the US government. It asserted that, by allowing the continued combustion of fossil fuels, the government was not fulfilling its sovereign duty to protect its citizens.

Through this electric school bus campaign, our state will see a decrease in carbon emissions, healthier children, and the power people have when they come together and take action to make a difference.

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

Nonprofit facilities communicate, and we need to be more conscious, thoughtful, and vocal about what they say about who and what our organizations value. A dilapidated and dysfunctional facility communicates that the work conducted inside it is unimportant, the people served deserve no better, and the surrounding neighborhood is forgotten and forsaken.

In contrast, a facility with functional—even beautiful—design sends a clear, edifying message to its occupants, visitors, and the neighborhood that they are important, with intrinsic value and a realizable vision of hope.

For years, I have directed IFF, a community development financial institution that specializes in nonprofit facilities lending. In fact, before we expanded to a multistate region, our initials stood for Illinois Facilities Fund.

One of our greatest challenges is serving clients who are so accustomed to a mindset of scarcity and workaround that they struggle to envision operating any other way. For example, I recall asking a health clinic with which we worked, “How big should the waiting room be?” The response was: “Tiny, so we can use the money for more sinks.” Each nonprofit sector has its own version of this scarcity mindset. In childcare, for example, that scarcity mindset is often the importance of toilets in the classroom.

The urge to economize is expected. Nonprofit management is always prioritizing precious dollars: specific needs take priority over general wants; the tangible is more important than the intangible; and it can be challenging to think about the concerns of tomorrow until today’s crises are addressed. In the process, the big picture about overall facility needs often falls by the wayside.

A Hierarchy of Nonprofit Facilities’ Needs

After 30 years in community development, I have come to think of nonprofit facilities as existing on a continuum of need. Psychologist Abraham Maslow theorized a hierarchy of human needs, a motivational model that transitions from basic physiological needs like food and shelter, through safety and security, to self-esteem and self-actualization. As I suggest in the graphic below, nonprofit facilities exist on a similar hierarchy—with physical, psychological, and economic needs that must be met before an agency can transition to the next stage of its work.

Shelter

At the most basic level, a nonprofit facility needs four walls, a roof, electricity, a bathroom, and running water. This setup can barely be described as a “facility.” It is simply a “space.”

Nonprofit professionals—particularly those working in under-resourced communities—know this makeshift setup well. Smaller, younger, poorly resourced agencies that are providing vital services on a shoestring budget often occupy such spaces, which are usually auxiliary spaces in a larger facility—borrowed, donated, or rented for a nominal fee. Such spaces tend to be a large, poorly lit room, maybe in a basement with few windows and with bathrooms located elsewhere in the building.

The cash-strapped organizations that work in such conditions often feel fortunate to have a space at all, for at least it offers them a place to assemble and provide services. But staff spend as much time managing the space as serving their clients. It is too hot or cold. Electricity is spotty. Plumbing is unreliable. There is little privacy and storage. There are noise problems, access issues, building code violations, and other problems over which the nonprofit has no control. Adapting the space for the agency’s programmatic needs is impossible—making licensing requirements difficult to meet—and virtually no accommodation can be made for clients’ comfort and dignity.

Basic Function

The next tier is a space that provides an agency with more control and privacy. Often originally designed for a completely different purpose, such a space can be adapted and made to work, providing some comfort and even privacy and allowing for distinct areas dedicated to the agency’s different functions. If the space houses a childcare center, for instance, it may have classrooms that technically meet licensing requirements with curtains or movable partitions, but it may lack more ideal floor-to-ceiling walls and doors. If the space is a health clinic, it may have designated exam rooms, but perhaps these are curtained-off areas providing minimal privacy. The space may have its own entrance, office, and storage areas that can be locked. Heating and cooling systems provide basic comfort. Electricity can accommodate modest technology requirements. Toilets may be elsewhere in the building.

Agencies have more control in such a space, and staff spend less time managing problems. But the agency is still adapting—and often compromising—its programs to fit a space that was not designed to facilitate them.

High Function

Here, we can start to use the word facility versus space. In this category, facilities were created for their current use, and their physical elements enhance agency programs. More space is available, allowing for areas with dedicated purposes and ensuring privacy where needed. The facility has separate entrances with lobbies, as well as meeting rooms, kitchenettes, and bathroom facilities. Heating, cooling, and electricity support programs and comfort.

A facility like this allows staff to focus on programs and clients instead of constantly managing space limitations. It is utilitarian, providing staff and clients with high levels of satisfaction and the organization with the opportunity to excel.

Interior Beauty and Inspiration

The next level up is a facility designed not just for function, but with attention to how staff, clients, and stakeholders feel when they are in it. Form both enhances and goes beyond function, making allowances for beauty, mood, and the physical and spiritual sensations good aesthetics can create.

In this type of facility, intentional design creates a tone and mood consistent with the agency’s purpose and the services it provides. For example, the facility can be designed to generate feelings of warmth and security, calm and focus, or light and inspiration, putting staff and clients in a mindset that matches a nonprofit’s mission. Such spaces foster learning, inspire, energize, and create a sense of safety.

Far from trivial or superficial, these are essential considerations for effective programming. Considerable research documents the positive physiological and psychological effects that sound architectural design has on wellbeing. Studies show that design helps people heal, learn, and feel calm, safe, and cared for in a range of spaces—including childcare facilities, schools, and healthcare facilities, among others. For example, childcare facilities should be designed to facilitate sensations of learning, play, security, warmth, sleep, and recreation throughout the day. Health clinics are most effective when they radiate competence and cleanliness and their clients feel safe, welcome, and treated with dignity. A well-designed facility bolsters the confidence and self-esteem of staff and clients alike; it inspires.

Community Inspiration

Finally, at the top-most level, a nonprofit facility can signal both the value of its mission and the people it serves. Such a facility not only honors and inspires staff and clients who use the building, but the surrounding neighborhood as well. The full impact of facility design—when viewed from this perspective—is almost impossible to quantify.

Aligning Financial Resources with Values

Nonprofit agencies need financial resources to move from scarcity to inspiration. Even with resources, however, such evolution seldom occurs in a straight line, and the marriage between form and function is rarely without conflict. Exemplary nonprofits operate effectively from imperfectly adapted spaces, creating facilities that are not only functional but beautiful and inspirational in their own right. And even the most expensive building can fail to support an agency’s programs or create an atmosphere that complements the agency’s mission.

Too often, nonprofit leaders remain mired in a scarcity mindset that every available dollar must go to programming.

“How much space do we need? What can we afford?” These are often the first questions nonprofit leaders ask when considering a real estate project, but the answers are more complicated than calculating square feet. Not captured by the math are intangibles, like how a space that was not designed for your programs can waste staff time, undermine sustainability, and create negative experiences for clients and stakeholders. Or, alternatively, how a space designed with your programs in mind can support smooth operations and inspire everyone who moves through it.

Can we put a simple dollar value on these tradeoffs? No, but we can align our financial resources with what we value.

Too often, however, nonprofit leaders remain mired in a scarcity mindset that every available dollar must go to programming. As a result, enhanced facility design, inspiring aesthetics, or staff and client comfort are treated as unaffordable luxuries. Instead, limited funds go to addressing building code violations, fixing century-old plumbing, upgrading electrical systems, and installing new HVAC systems, leaving little money for functional improvements, let alone beauty and inspiration.

Even more insidious are the psychological pressures that accompany these financial decisions. For many agencies—particularly in formerly redlined neighborhoods—staff and boards are accustomed to being surrounded by other devalued and barely functional buildings. So, even where the funds exist, nonprofit leaders feel pressure to not be “the nicest facility on the block”—to not spend precious program dollars on facilities that honor and inspire.

Nonprofit leaders face many competing pressures. But I would argue it is time for our nonprofit ecosystem to recognize these tensions; to free nonprofit leaders and their boards from the psychological oppression these economic pressures have wrought; and to understand that facilities have value beyond services.

Quality nonprofit facilities are community development.

Perhaps, if those of us who care deeply about nonprofits—and particularly about agencies dedicated to serving low-income communities—name and discuss these tensions and the underlying value choices involved, we can start to prioritize, manage, and mitigate them. Here are a few ideas on how to begin:

• Board members: Stop challenging your agency directors about facilities that look “too good.” Resist the insinuation that quality facilities will make it more difficult to convince donors that your agency needs money.
• CDFIs: Stop limiting loans to nonprofit agencies in response to property appraisals. Appraisal-based lending severely limits lending for nonprofit facility projects, particularly in formerly redlined communities where decades of devaluation have made it nearly impossible for nonprofits to obtain the resources needed to develop their facilities. Appraisers are never going to value the hope and inspiration that comes from a well-designed nonprofit facility, but CDFIs can—and must!
• Banks: Find ways to help. Banks can underwrite loans, even while maintaining an abundance of caution that, instead of relying on a flawed appraisal system, responsibly lends beyond appraised value. If each bank made a few such loans, the impact in neglected communities would go far beyond the loans’ dollar values.
• Foundations and donors: Remember that most programs require a facility and that the quality of that facility enhances or detracts from the program being funded. Stop treating human services, childcare, education, and healthcare as functions separate from community development. Quality nonprofit facilities are community development. Every quality nonprofit facility changes the profile and trajectory of its community, not just through the vital services it provides, but through its very physical presence, which reminds the community in which the facility is located of the community’s value and the agency’s investment in it.

The Importance of Intentional Design

One of our clients, Kyle Smitley, executive director of the Detroit Achievement Academy, says it best: “Buildings communicate a lot internally to the people who are in them, and they communicate just as much externally to the neighborhood where they are located. Space communicates values and wealth. It always has.”

Yes, buildings communicate! Take the example of the healthcare clinic with which I began. Yes, the doctors got their sinks. But, with intentionality, the redesigned clinic also honored the volunteers that worked there and the clients who received care. The staff got a lounge. The clients got spaces for privacy during intake, a waiting room with natural light, and a sectioned-off area for children. The space wasn’t perfect, but it was a functional, modern health clinic where staff worked in comfort and clients were treated with dignity.

And the investment yielded significant unexpected returns. Many doctors and nurses would never have worked in a dysfunctional place, but with the new facility, volunteer recruitment increased 40 percent. The clinic design also created room to serve more people. And by providing more services, the clinic raised more money, offsetting its initial facility investment. Fundraising climbed more than 50 percent.

And the clients? The uninsured people who rely on clinic services? Their reaction is best summed up by one client who attended the building’s grand opening and said with a tear in his eye, “When I had to go to the old location, it reminded me that I was poor. When I come here, for a moment, I get to feel like everybody else.”

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

How do you support development across the food system in a way that builds community ownership and power for Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities? This is a question that a group of food system activists of color have come together to address. And in so doing we are challenging the community development field to do better—by creating new tools to support truly equitable food-oriented development.

Many large community development financial institutions, credit unions, and foundations present themselves as community-based food financing leaders. Yet, all too often, their investments inadvertently exacerbate inequitable power dynamics in communities, reinforcing existing disparities and underlying health and wealth-building challenges.

Fed up with a system that regularly provides limited, top-down support, a group of BIPOC-led organizations banded together to create the EFOD Collaborative in 2018. EFOD stands for “equitable food-oriented development.” Our mission is to challenge systemic barriers in finance and lead a shift to a community-driven framework for equitable capital. Our steering committee is comprised of leaders from around the US, including the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, CA; Durham and Henderson, NC; New Orleans, LA; El Paso, TX; and Anthony, NM.

Over the last several years, our group has worked to drive resources to community-based organizations. Many of the folks in this network have been denied capital because traditional CDFIs did not deem their projects “investment ready.” And yet, not only do these groups provide essential healthy food to their communities, but they do so in way that builds on authentic local relationships and creates much-needed community assets. This work is worth supporting. Here are a few examples:

• In East Cleveland, OH, Loiter, a local nonprofit, is revitalizing the city’s historically Black community by building a community-owned business through its acquisition of Wake Robin Foods, a local fermented-food company.
• In California, Oakland Bloom supports poor and working-class immigrant, refugee, and BIPOC chefs to start their own food businesses. Its incubator program and shared commercial kitchen are a critical asset for local food entrepreneurs, who would otherwise be priced out of opportunities due to the high cost of commercial space in the San Francisco Bay Area.
• In Washington, DC, Dreaming Out Loud is rebuilding urban, community-based food systems owned by residents of Wards 7 and 8, historically Black neighborhoods, through its social enterprise aimed at increasing access to healthy food, supporting entrepreneurs and farmers from low-income communities, and creating opportunities for at-risk residents to earn sustainable, family-supporting wages to build generational wealth.

These groups are part of a larger ecosystem of place- and community-rooted organizations that are providing accessible, healthy food to children and families in need. They are also ensuring that small food enterprises in their neighborhoods are supported. And they are working in co-liberation to build structures and systems to support equity and vitality in low-income communities of color.

The identifying characteristics of EFOD-aligned organizations are:

• Equity and Justice First
  Equity and justice are part of the mission. This means that the organizations are involved in other organizing, advocacy, or policy work—it’s not just about food.

• Place- and People-Based
  Each of the members are embedded in a local or regional network and have a strong identity and history of community work.

• Use Market-Based or Business Strategies
  Members in the network are developing new markets and enterprises that generate meaningful economic opportunities.

• Community Leadership Development and Community Organizing
  Network members have boards of directors and executive leadership that are representative of the community and who are often people of color. Work is done by and for community members.

• Community Ownership
  Network members build community assets, equity, and ownership by employing community-based ownership structures and decision-making processes.

Overcoming the Obstacles in Conventional Community Development

Time and again, despite a track record of successful grassroots food-oriented development in undercapitalized neighborhoods, BIPOC practitioners speak of the difficulties that they face in translating their experience into securing investment that supports their work.

Member organizations, even those with 20-plus years of experience, have been told that their projects and enterprises were “too risky” and have seen finance denied or delayed. Sometimes, they have been made to jump through additional hoops, such as securing philanthropic guarantees, before loans are made available.

Even as CDFIs position themselves as community-based alternatives to banking, they often face pressure to adhere to bank industry norms, which can alienate the BIPOC communities that they aim to serve.

Anthony Chang of Manzanita Capital Collective, and an allied member of the EFOD steering committee, observes that the CDFI movement’s history has influenced these practices. While CDFIs strive to bridge the wealth gap to underserved markets, Chang notes that many CDFIs depend on banks for a considerable share of their capital.

Why? Under federal regulations, banks can often satisfy their Community Reinvestment Act obligations to invest in previously redlined communities by providing below-market capital or donations to CDFIs. The high presence of banks in the industry, which often includes bankers serving on CDFI loan committees, can alter the culture of CDFIs, reinforcing systemic barriers to capital.

Even as CDFIs position themselves as community-based alternatives to banking, they often face pressure to adhere to bank industry norms, which can alienate the BIPOC communities that they aim to serve. As Chang puts it, “CDFIs are still very much shaped by a view of capitalism and don’t consider community ownership as important.”

EFOD Steering Committee member Rudy Espinoza is also executive director of Inclusive Action for the City, a BIPOC-stewarded CDFI in Los Angeles aiming to reshape traditional CDFIs from the inside out. Espinoza agrees that CDFIs often adopt practices rooted in traditional banking. “When you use these tools, and you don’t consider how they should be redefined or revised, then you’re going to replicate the same problems over again.”

Another challenge of conventional community finance is the process of getting funded, which is daunting and time-consuming for grassroots organizations and leaders responding to their communities’ daily needs. EFOD Steering Committee member, Mariela Cedeño, who like Chang is a member of the Manzanita Capital Collective, recalls her experience closing on a loan of nearly $1 million.

“It was a really long process, and a lot of language being used that, even us as a team that had a lot of privilege from academia and professional exposure, still found very foreign.” The focus, she added, was on “self-sufficiency ratios and how they were going to make money on the loan, and so they weren’t working to build terms that work for us. They were working to have us fit into the extractive terms that work for them.” Cedeño adds that “there were a lot of language barriers, and as we got deeper into the process, the process itself felt self-defeating. All the lenders we worked with placed capital preservation as their highest concern.”

Another issue is the long wait time often involved with obtaining funding. “One of the challenges that the community has historically named is the long process of waiting for approval. Because of that long process, other opportunities may have been missed, or maybe there’s a critical need for funding at that moment,” Espinoza said.

At the root of these institutional barriers is a paternalistic tendency among wealth holders and stewards reflecting a fundamental belief that “[communities] don’t know how to control their own resources,” according to Chang. Leaders and organizations that are determined to create pathways towards community agency and self-determination face not only barriers to capital access; the resources they receive often come with obtrusive and onerous strings attached. In Chang’s view, “We have to ask ourselves what kind of capital the community needs, and how can that capital be deployed in ways that are responsive to community, centering the needs of the community, and shaped and governed by the community?”

Building an Alternative Financing Model for Equitable Development

The good news is that not all CDFIs are alike—some support the EFOD approach. A report published by EFOD, Duke University World Food Policy Center, and DAISA Enterprises, titled “How Innovative CDFIs Fund Equitable Food Oriented Development,” describes an alternative model. As author Lianna Gomori-Ruben details, developing place-based practices is critical to overcoming systemic financial barriers.

The report interviewed people at three CDFIs—Inclusive Action for the City, New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, and the Intertribal Agriculture Council—and identified six themes of practice that characterize CDFIs that succeed in supporting equitable food-oriented development:

1. Cultivating trust to identify opportunity
   This involves CDFIs relying upon their networks to identify borrowers, funders, and technical assistance providers. They recognize the importance of building trust with the communities they serve and prioritize resources towards that end.
2. Amassing and deploying flexible capital
   This means focusing on amassing flexible sources of capital that can be customized into financial services that meet borrowers’ needs.
3. Underwriting with relationships
   This requires building relationships with borrowers to mitigate risk. By establishing coaching partnerships, these CDFIs help businesses grow and manage their repayment obligations.
4. Designing products and services in a bottom-up fashion
   This means assessing businesses individually to identify the most impactful interventions for them rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach.
5. Developing localized expertise
   This requires dedicating time and effort to developing extensive expertise regarding the communities they serve.
6. Responding to local systemic barriers
   This involves identifying the systemic barriers that burden communities and taking action to change them.

It’s not just about having a seat at the table. It’s about building our own tables to design the solutions.“How do you build up CDFI models like Espinoza’s that are actually piloting and helping smaller scale businesses and rooted in community accountability?” asks Camryn Smith, executive director and founding member of Communities In Partnership, a grassroots community organizing and education group based in Old East Durham, NC. “We need to directly support people on the ground, like myself or other people who refuse to displace, materially, poor Black and Brown people.” This alternative model works, says Smith, “because we are refusing to be colonizers in our own Black or Brown embodiment or operationalize on White supremacy.”

Community-Controlled Finance for the Long Haul

Cedeño says that true equity in community finance means being responsive to the communities that CDFIs aim to support and centering frontline BIPOC practitioners. “It’s not just about having a seat at the table. It’s about building our own tables to design the solutions.”

“We believe that if we focus on the most vulnerable entrepreneurs in our communities, the ones who are most impacted, that if we support them, the benefits will trickle up to support other types of entrepreneurs,” added Espinoza. “Our theory of change, if you will, is really focused on supporting Black and Brown entrepreneurs at the bottom.”

In addition to granting funds to allied organizations, the EFOD Collaborative Investment Committee recently voted to partner with Community Credit Lab—now part of Common Future—to scale up investments. With shared principles of leveraging the expertise of community practitioners, deploying capital with terms set in partnership with practitioners, and pairing investments with culturally relevant, practitioner-led technical assistance, a collective model of finance is beginning to emerge.

Other funds that are part of this trend include Native Women Lead and Black Farmer Fund. This emerging network is beginning to fill critical gaps to support community-led projects through mixed capital built by and for the communities served.

Understanding what the community needs, Espinoza notes, requires more than book learning. “There are things that simply can’t be taught,” Espinoza explains. “Our goal is to deploy resources to people who carry with them their personal experiences and cultural understanding of how to work in community with the folks they serve.”

 For more information, watch this webinar, titled “Reimagining Alternative Futures: A Look at Community-Controlled Funding in Food Systems and Beyond,” hosted by Equitable Food Oriented Development on November 17, 2022, in Partnership with Duke’s World Food Policy Center and the Food and Farm Communications Fund.

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