The 51st is D.C.’s first worker-led nonprofit newsroom. But we’re part of a larger system of cooperative organizations working to build a better world.
I got to see what that meant more tangibly this past week, when I spoke on a panel at the 2025 Cooperative IMPACT Conference alongside Jasper Wang. He’s one of the co-founders of Defector, a newsroom our team looked to for inspiration — and advice — before we launched last year.
This conference is the only cross-sector gathering of cooperative businesses, from credit unions to neighborhood grocers, to housing coops. This year, our worker-led and worker-owned newsrooms were present too — in recognition of the surge of new cooperative news organizations around the country we’ve been excited to be a part of.
Over the two days, a theme that kept emerging was the importance of being honest about the times we’re living through. “We can’t afford to act like this is a normal moment,” said Renee Hatcher, a human rights and cooperative lawyer and solidarity economy organizer based in Chicago.
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