On March 29th, the Schumacher Center hosted Andrea Golden, Co-Director of PODER Emma, as our Second Annual Robert Swann Lecturer. Andrea addressed “Community Not for Sale: Popular Education, Community Organizing, and Cooperative Economics” to a local Southern Berkshire audience, and the underlying message was appropriately directed at local organizing. “Fight for where you live, love it enough— not just the place but the people… to truly love your neighbors enough to fight for them as you would fight for your own children: that’s an act of love. Do it, and then do it the next day, and the next day…”
You can now watch a full recording of the lecture and subsequent Q&A.
Highlights from Andrea’s Swann Lecture
On the patient process of building community self-empowerment
Andrea begins her talk by introducing her small community of Emma, North Carolina, a neighborhood of about 3,000 households, including a large constituency of Latin American immigrants and descendants. She describes PODER Emma’s current work in cooperative development as the result of many years of organizing, which can at times feel like a slow process.
A wastershed moment came for Emma residents in their activism against racial profiling in policing, “a major turning point for our neighborhood.”
…People had been pushing so hard and working so hard for so long, not knowing would we actually be able to achieve a concrete change… and when the answer was ‘yes,’ it unleashed this imagination… what else could we change? I mean, if we could do that with our local sheriff, that seemed like a long shot. What else could we do?
[It] opened up these floodgates because, due to the conditions that people were living in, a lot of people were either leaving the neighborhood… or thinking of doing so, because it was it was getting increasingly hard to stay…
[F]or the next several years, the neighborhood really shifted into cultural organizing… it’s one thing to fight against something that is just wearing you down… It’s another thing to start to build the kind of place that you want to live in — and that really pulled in a lot of families into the work.
The importance of trust in sustainable community development
Next, Andrea describes the organization structure supporting multiple mobile home park cooperatives and worker-owned enterprises to flourish together. Beyond the technical side, PODER Emma emphasizes the indispensable role of ‘soft’ cultural organizing in strengthening bonds of trust crucial for long-term cooperation.
The cultural organizing —the continuing to build trust amongst neighbors — and the economic development had to go hand in hand…
[I]t takes such strong relationships to dare to build businesses and enterprises and own property together and to be neighbors and govern the mobile home parks that you live in…. we knew that we really had to work hard to invest in both, and to really link them together.
…[W]hat we did was bring together all the different grassroots efforts in our neighborhood to share one kind of like back office team to add capacity, and to share one 501c3 status, because we knew that we didn’t want our community to be in competition with each other…
Unlocking the potential of non-extractive capital
Given the early successes of their economic cooperation, PODER Emma came up against the need for access to patient forms of capital. Partnering with the national financial cooperative Seed Commons, they realized that the healthy cooperatives could, in a sense, be their ‘own lender.’
As our housing cooperative was having success and our worker cooperative was having success… we very quickly realized that, without access to capital, they were going to stay these small, beautiful kind of experiments that were going to be very hard to do more of around our neighborhood…
…Asking everyone you know for $500, and asking hundreds of people, is not a replicable model… So we set out to look both locally and nationally for someone that would partner with us, and it was really really hard because we were just told time and time again: ‘what y’all are trying to do is not going to work…’
After several years we were so fortunate to connect to Seed Commons, a national financial cooperative that works with communities. We were like: ‘We live in mobile home parks and we want to protect them but it’s going to take all this money,’ and they worked with us and they said: ‘We think y’all could become your own lenders: you could do this!’
Weaving a long-term vision for community well-being
Andrea concludes by discussing Emma’s recently-authored twenty-five year vision. A culmination of a deep collective process, the vision statement includes three key points, starting with PODER Emma’s commitment to overcoming the threat of displacement:
25 years from now, we will no longer be fearful of being displaced…
Second, our community as a whole will have access to non-extractive capital —money that does not do more harm than good… that allows you to build what you envision — and not only will we have access, but we will know how to use it strategically to create community well-being. And that’s a really important concept because, that’s different than individual access to capital to pull your family forward. It’s such a powerful vision to create community well-being through capital.
Third, that our worker co-ops [will] have created enough economic stability that there is well-being for generations to come for families in our neighborhoods. So that’s our 25 year vision…
By organizing at human scale, Andrea reminds us, we may draw on deeper reserves of love and conviction — resources needed in an increasingly uncertain future.
PODER Emma’s example is a timely and inspiring one; we do hope you’ll share it.