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Catalyzing worker co-ops & the solidarity economy

Towards Thriving: Building a Movement for Black Food Sovereignty

History teaches us that solutions to social problems are most likely to come from communities that have been excluded from the social good.

For instance, in 1969, two Black cooperative models were established in response to the racial violence and lack of access to resources and opportunity that Black people continued to endure during the civil rights and Black power movements. Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunshine County, Mississippi, was created after Fannie Lou Hamer was fired and evicted for registering to vote as a sharecropper. The cooperative, which sought Black self-sufficiency, offered affordable housing, entrepreneurial opportunities, and education to tenant farmers, as well as a pig bank and access to fresh produce to feed families living in poverty.

That same year, the first community land trust, New Communities, established by a collective of civil rights and land activists, including Charles and Shirley Sherrod, took 5,700 acres off the speculative market to be stewarded by Black farmers to feed their rural South Georgian community and protect the ecosystem through regenerative agricultural practices.

Read the rest at Nonprofit Quarterly

 

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