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All Native American reservations in Montana now have community gardens, and there are at least eight gardens on the Flathead Reservation north of Missoula, home to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. The tribe is teaching members to raise vegetables, some of them made into soup that is delivered to tribal elders. This year members grew 5 tons of produce to be given away.

Ancestral seeds are part of the effort. Each year the BNFSI sends out 200 packets of seeds for ancestral crops to Indigenous people in Montana.

On a cold Saturday in January, KC Tenants, the citywide tenant union in Kansas City, Missouri, received a call from the public school district. Teachers at Gladstone Elementary School in Kansas City’s Northeast neighborhood reported that a set of buildings near the school, home to several students, had lost heat.

The summer of 2023 was Los Angeles’s “hot labor summer.” Rolling strikes by hotel and airport workers disrupted conventions and airport concessions in the city’s busy tourist season.

For our final episode of The Response this year, we interviewed three mutual aid organizers from Orlando, FL, Hartford, CT, and Bvlbancha (aka New Orleans, LA). Gabbie Barnes is the founder of FREE HART Closet, a worker-owner at the People’s Saturday School, a mutual aid organizer, and a Library of Things Fellow. Rachel Kinbar is an organizer with Central Florida Mutual Aid, Orlando DSA, the operations director for Beautiful Trouble, and is a participant in both the Emergency Battery Network Co-Lab and a Library of Things Fellow.

Summary: Collaborative decision-making can be fast and efficient if we have clear guidelines what decisions are made by groups, and what decisions can simply made by a designated person in a role. 

On Wednesday, April 5, 2023, during the Platform Cooperatives community assembly on “Recent Developments in Data Collectives, Data Commons, and Peer Production Licenses”, the idea came up to compose a manifesto and open letter to the leadership of cooperative networks calling for support.

We arrived in Hervás, a Spanish town nestled in a valley a three hours drive outside of Madrid. A sharp turn off the main road, we slowly drove down a gravel road weaving between small orchards full of grapes, peaches, and apples, careful to avoid hitting the rabbits that leapt across ahead of us. Five minutes later, we came to a property scattered with little bungalows, sitting between olive trees and lush green.

This summer, Aasa attended the “Scaling up the impact of renewable energy co-operatives in Canada” conference in Ottawa, where  Renewable Energy Co-op (REC) leaders met to discuss how they could collaborate to grow their impacts. While there, she spoke to Johan Hamels of the Ottawa Renewable Energy Co-operative about what RECs are and why they’re important for communities.

The paradox of noble-cause corruption, unethical actions taken in pursuit of the greater good, is so prevalent in the non-profit sector that it’s become normalized. And due to the United States government’s ongoing divestment in public health, we have no choice but to rely on these organizations to access social services and support. But what kind of “support” repeatedly results in systemic violence being inflicted on marginalized individuals and communities? And what kind of “support” industry fails to support its workers?