Doesn’t it feel so energizing to move furniture around, put a new coat of paint on the walls, or even remodel an entire room in your house? In the process, you get a chance to appreciate what you have and shift stagnant energy. And perhaps the ritual helps bring clarity to how you want to live your life! That’s how we feel every year after we refresh our Project Gallery. 

Our Project Gallery is our virtual space where we share our programmatic work, proudest achievements of the past year, and cherished collective memories. When we go through it we inevitably start asking bigger questions of ourselves: What’s the strategy here? How do we stay accountable to our clients and community?  Do we want to keep doing this work?  

Our most recent Project Gallery revamp kicked off a deeper review of our work. If the Law Center was a house, now is a good time to start considering what upgrades or repairs we might want to make to not just our projects, but also our org structure because in December the Law Center will be turning 15 years old 🎉 A self-delegated team of staff members has created a Strategy Pod who will guide the organization through this restructuring. We’re excited to share more about the process throughout the year, and how our 7 new core strategies  (slide 6) will ground the process.

The Law Center submitted a public comment to the IRS last week about new federal regulations being proposed about Donor Advised Funds or DAFs. We intervened with the hopes that our perspective as a movement support organization would be a helpful counterbalance to the numerous comments from the wealth defense industry—including foundation interest groups and fund managers. Our overall message was: these funds belong to the community, not to donors. We see this intervention as harm reduction in a current context of unlimited donor control in the nonprofit sector. While our suggested changes alone would not transform philanthropy into grassroots-driven funding flows oriented towards movement solidarity, not charity, we would see it as a step in the right direction—curbing the commercial DAF industry.

It’s the thick of winter. The bare trees and chilly weather are a good reminder to slow down and ease into the new year. What better way to slow down than to read a good book? That’s why one of the Law Center's favorite new year rituals is to collectively curate a list of our favorite books from the previous year that moved us, changed our thinking, or were just plain fun. We hope you curl up with one of our favorite reads of 2023. And let us know if you have any book recommendations by replying to this email!

For the past few years, Law Center staff compile a list of our favorite books we read from the year before. We share books that we couldn’t stop thinking about. Books we’ve gifted to our family because they changed our lives. Books that expanded our sense of self and the way we navigate the world. And if you work your way through this list and need more reading material, take a look at our past book recommendations here: 2022, 2021, 2018.

By Tiny Gray POOR Magazine

At this point Terry’s family is literally on the street. We are trying to raise money to get them into a motel. And an attorney to get them some rights in that completely unjust, arbitrary Probate court system where the well-funded parties always take legal precedence over any kind of so-called justice. The liberation lawyers at Sustainable Economies Law Center are also working to support them and we are planning a press conference soon. 

Read full article here.

(Originally published January 8, 2024)

The Sustainable Economies Law Center will be closed on December 11, 2023, joining the Global Strike for Palestine (#GlobalStrike4Palestine) and supporting the urgent call for an immediate ceasefire. Today we join the call: No work! No school! No banking! No buying!  We are closing our offices and encouraging all staff to engage in local actions that advocate for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.  

By striking today, we aim to exercise our power to disrupt “business as usual.”  Our work centers on building systems based on solidarity economies and interdependence, and we recognize that our economic practices, including where we invest our time and resources, play a significant role in either perpetuating or challenging violence and injustice. 

By Nicole Wires, Non Profit Quarterly

Can movement nonprofits create and sustain liberatory and resilient structures, cultures, and practices—and still be effective and efficient in their operations?
This question was at the center of an experiment led by the Nonprofit Democracy Network, a fiscally sponsored project of the Sustainable Economies Law Center. The experiment, called Collaborate to Co-Liberate, brought together over 200 practitioners from nearly 90 organizations across the country (and beyond) for 15 months to co-develop ways to build accountable, self-governing, and radically democratic organizations that embody liberatory visions while preserving overall effectiveness.

Read full article here.

(Originally published November 28, 2023)

Sustainable Economies Law Center joins the chorus of voices from around the world demanding an immediate ceasefire, an end to the siege on Gaza, and the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. We affirm our commitment to a world where all people live in their full dignity, free from subjugation and apartheid. We commit to honoring Palestinian self-determination. We commit to putting continued political pressure on our elected representatives, attending mass protests, and participating in boycotts. And as our friends and partners at Movement Generation have reminded us,

…we must continue to be visionary while oppositional. A ceasefire is imperative to stop the bad, but the battle will not end there, leaving Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the status quo of cyclical violence. Moving in the same direction as the ongoing movement to end Israel's occupation, genocide, and apartheid gives us a pathway to restore Palestinians’ right of return, self-determination, sovereignty, and land back. - 

The Path to Ecological Justice Runs Through a Free Palestine

Colonial laws have displaced and made way for violent theft of Palestinian land, just like the lands of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and beyond. We acknowledge that the law has consistently upheld the theft of communal land and wealth, which is why we practice and train other legal workers in nurturance lawyering  in our work to support land return to Indigenous and Black land stewards of Turtle Island. We must keep our hearts and minds open and engaged as we work towards a transformative shift away from privatization of land, which justifies racial and colonial violence, and remember that it is a “fictitious notion” created to restrict usage, to increase profit, and to create scarcity.

In this blog post, Law Center staff share how they’ve experienced and witnessed the impacts of settler colonialism in their lives and work, and how that experience helps us make sense of the ecological violence, displacement, and genocide currently happening to the people of Palestine. They also share resources on how to support and be in solidarity with the people of Palestine during this devastating time. With this piece, we’re also trying to be in conversation with each other, with our community, in hopes of supporting one another. We’re pushing back against professionalism and liberalism, which often has people afraid of speaking out, sharing individual experiences, and connecting with one another.

As you read this newsletter, Law Center staff and a few of their children and co-parents are enjoying our bi-annual all staff retreat. Since we work almost entirely remotely, we’ve made a commitment to retreat twice a year. We head to a beautiful place and unplug because we know nothing beats joining together as bodies in space to reconnect, recommit to each other and the work, and express gratitude for each other.

This year we’re diving deep into the luxury of bodily wisdom. We’re working with a Generative Somatics facilitator, Donaji Lona, who’ll guide our collective body through exercises and activities meant to support “individual, community, and collective liberation through working to embody transformation. Have you ever walked into a room and felt the buzzy collective energy of all the people? When everyone sits in a circle, facing one another after months apart, the vibe is palpable. This time around, we’ll be welcoming 4 new staff members into the organizational body. 

Looking around at the ever changing configuration of our team, we can find ourselves asking: Where do I fit in this group? Do we value the same things? We’re curious and excited to encounter the wisdom of our individual bodies and how our individual needs and desires might impact the organizational body.

Being part of a worker self-directed nonprofit often requires a person to walk the fine line between sharing stewardship responsibilities with coworkers while maintaining capacity for personally meaningful projects. This tension highlights the push and pull of being an individual within a collective body. We have the power as a WSDN to set priorities as a collective, but it requires trust and clear communication — two things that we’ll be investing time and energy into this week! Since we’ll be focusing on this important time together all week long, we’ll respond to emails when we return. Thanks for your understanding!

The movements for rematriation, reparations, and land justice are beginning to realize dreams many generations in the making. 

Back in June, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust announced they have partnered with Movement Generation to rematriate 43 acres to Indigenous care, in the unceded Bay Miwok territory of the San Francisco East Bay Area! MG and Sogorea Te’ liberated the land title from the speculative market, with Sogorea Te’ now holding the deed. We at the Law Center are proud to have supported the process, providing legal advice to both MG and Sogorea Te’ to help them create long-term agreements together for care of the land. Imagine how MG and Sogorea Te’ will restore peoples’ relationships with land and how this new land base will make space to experiment together to create liberated futures!

If you want to support MG’s Free the Land Campaign to build the Justice & Ecology Center visit https://movementgeneration.org/freetheland/. If you’re curious about how to liberate land back into the hands of loving land stewards, check out our Seeds of Land Return Toolkit. Sogorea Te' also made a beautifully designed version of Seeds of Land Return!

What does it feel like to be liberated with the Land? The Law Center, in partnership with The Cultural Conservancy, have brought together a network of deep-rooted Indigenous and Black led organizations — including  Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, The Nest, Shelterwood Collective, Movement Generation, and EARTHseed Farm — to create a film that will focus on Indigenous and Black land steward circles in the East Bay and Sonoma County living into the dream of rematriation and reparations.

This film aims to activate and embody a 100-year vision for land justice in the Bay Area articulated in a 2019 convening we co-organized at Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. It will amplify the work of the circles central to this moment, this place, this movement. If you want to read more about how the film is being collectively shaped, check out our blog post, “Indigenous and Black Land Justice Film: Participatory Narrative Workshop.”

Imagine Indigenous and Black people free

to love and live with liberated Land.

Imagine the unique gifts the Land and her people have

to offer future generations.

This is happening now—a groundswell, a watershed moment.

This is happening here—in Northern California

By Tia Katrina Taruc-Myers, Nonprofit Quarterly

Excerpt: The Sustainable Economies Law Center is a nonprofit organization democratically run by staff co-stewards who are caring, trusting, and radical. Still, the proposal for a 40-week paid parental leave policy proposal was controversial. Along with my two co-workers, I helped draft an organizational policy proposal to support pregnant people and new parents.

Here in the Bay Area, it’s been an exciting season for workplace democracy and workers flexing their collective power. 

Thanks to the collective organizing of NoBAWC and The Real People’s Fund, vital resources and services have been restored to the Oakland City Budget, specifically for co-ops and small businesses. The workers of the iconic 127-year-old Anchor Brewing Company launched an effort to purchase the brewery and run it as a worker co-op after announcing it was declaring bankruptcy and closing for good. And lastly, the Bay is gaining another worker-owned business! 

We’re proud to share that Law Center Fellow Sarah Kaplan represented the workers of Nick’s Pizza and Bakery throughout the conversion process thanks to support from the Law Centers’ Worker Cooperative Legal Services Fund. The Legal Services Fund has been covering no-cost legal services to worker cooperatives since 2019 because many new cooperatives lack access to affordable and specialized legal support. Our Fund has enabled legal and technical support for 16 worker cooperatives across the country, including in Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, New York, California, and Puerto Rico. 

If you’d like to support worker cooperatives to gain access to legal services, consider donating!

This is an embarrassing situation, to say the least: We have a narrow window of time in which to take action and avert massive extinctions, sea level rise, and other climate disasters. We’re also watching the rapid spread of global poverty, inequality, and community displacement. Meanwhile, U.S. philanthropic foundations sit on more than a trillion dollars that could be activated for climate and economic justice, but most of that money is instead invested in the Wall Street companies fueling the disasters. “We can’t spend our endowment,” sings the chorus of funders, “our hands are tied.” Among foundations, there is a widespread belief that, somewhere, there lurks a legal document or law forcing them to cling tightly to most of the foundation’s assets. Very often, that belief is wrong. This needs to come to light. 

Some foundations are seeing the light, and one large UK foundation, Lankelly Chase, just announced a plan to “abolish itself” and give away the full endowment. The foundation said in a statement:

In California, apprenticing in a law office or alongside a practicing attorney is a little-known pathway to becoming a lawyer. Becoming a lawyer without going to law school means you can sidestep the debt, and trauma-inducing, white dominant culture of law school, and are able to create the learning environment and rhythms that best meet the needs of the apprentice. For example, learning in a non-hierarchical, nurturing environment that views everyone involved as both learners and teachers. Increasingly, movement lawyers are looking to grow awareness of the apprenticeship model as a way to diversify the legal profession and empower legal workers. In California, this program is called the Law Office Study Program and the rules for apprenticing are set by the State Bar of California. 

In summer of 2021, after 7 years of apprenticeship, the Law Center’s Director of Economic Democracy, Ricardo Nuñez passed the bar and became an attorney, joining three previous non-lawyer staff members who became lawyers via apprenticeships. He joined his coworker Mwende Hinojosa on Zoom for a casual conversation about his journey — the experience of self-directed learning; the challenge and heart ache of finding his own way; and the joy of living out his grandfather’s dream. 

(This interview was edited for consistency and clarity.)