There are worker cooperatives in prisons all over the world, including in Ethiopia, South Africa, Iran, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Italy, and more. Folks incarcerated in California want them, too. At the Law Center, our vision is a future without prisons. To move toward that future, we want to help our partners in prison to create an ecosystem of “prison cooperatives,” i.e. worker cooperatives owned by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. That's why we're working with Earth Equity and others to make prison cooperatives possible.

By Mohit Mookim, Alejandra Cruz, and Tia Taruc-Myers

In 2024, the Law Center emerged with a new and expanded team of land justice legal workers. As four new staff attorneys were onboarded in mid-2023 — all of whom are passionate about land return work — our team created space to collectively and individually reflect on our land work through a six-month discussion series titled “Becoming the Land.” In that space, and in our regular “Land Eagles” meetings (where we surface strategic and high-level questions about our land work), one theme consistently emerged: the relationship between law and decolonization.

The Law Center strives towards decolonization. We use law to support movements for decolonization, moving with deep respect. But we also aspire to decolonize law itself. How do you decolonize law? Isn't "law" as we know it inextricably linked with colonization? Good questions...

On Sunday August 25th, 2024, the Law Center invited our closest Land and Housing Justice clients, collaborators, partners, and friends to join us for an afternoon of art making at the 510 Firehouse, located in Oakland’s Chinatown.

When we were deciding what to screen print, Law Center Staff Attorney Veryl Pow shared that Sarah Augustine — co- founder and Executive Director of the Coalition to Dismantle the Doctrine of Discovery — told him about a prayer she says every morning, “Thank you creator for the land, our body,” which is inspired by a prayer from the Nez Perce tribe. Members of the Law Centers Land Stewardship Circle agreed “The Land Our Body” was a value our community shared that we could screen print. Sarah Cauich holds up a screen print while Sandra De Leon (Somos Tierra) is to her left setting up for another round of printing.

Last month, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued Executive Order N-1-24, which directs California state agencies and departments to begin clearing unhoused people living on state property. The order comes at a time when similar policies are rising across the country, despite evidence that these approaches do not work to end people’s homelessness. Bay Area mayors, including Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao, have enthusiastically embraced the governor's order as a “step forward in the right direction.”

We, at the Sustainable Economies Law Center, condemn Sheng Thao’s recent enthusiastic response to Governor Newsom’s cruel and unconscionable Executive Order N-1-24, from July 25, 2024, justifying the escalated and aggressive sweep of our unhoused Oakland neighbors in the wake of the City of Grants Pass v. Johnson decision by the Supreme Court. At the Law Center, our work focuses on building an inclusive and democratic grassroots social ecosystem by supporting land and housing justice and solidarity economy movements.

On May 23, the Law Center held a labor-focused community appreciation event at Kinfolx Cafe in Occupied Huchiun (aka Downtown Oakland) where we invited some of our collaborators to come enjoy each others’ company for an evening. Our guests of honor that night were poverty scholar teachers from Poor Magazine, a poor people–led/Indigenous people–led, grassroots, non-profit arts organization dedicated to providing revolutionary media access, art, education, and advocacy to silenced youth, adults, and elders in poverty across Mama Earth.  The Law Center has been supporting Poor with legal advice on land and housing. Some of us have also attended Poor Magazine’s twice-annual People Skool seminar, which is coming up on August 24 and 25 (find out more here). That day, we invited folks at Poor to share their scholarship around labor.  We deeply appreciate them for sharing it.

Is recycling work? Is panhandling work? Is mothering work?

Yes, all of these types of labor should be considered work. But why do these activities become criminalized when the worker is a person living in poverty?

These are exactly the questions POOR Magazine asked of us in their theater presentation during a community appreciation party we held for clients, partners, and collaborators back in May. [Watch the full presentation here.] “As folks at Poor say, ‘you can’t perform poverty’ - so all of the actors had personal experience - or poverty scholarship - with what they were re-enacting,” shares Law Center Staff Attorney Tobias Damm-Luhr in this blog post where he describes how the presentation impacted his worldview.  

Thank you to everyone who joined us last month for #TheFutureOfWork campaign! We appreciate everyone who helped us raise $17,163! Alongside our fundraising — which also raised $1,716 for our solidarity partners Somos Tierra Campesino Collective — we held an MCLE panel discussion, a roundtable, and a fireside chat on an array of topics that we wanted to explore with our community.

When you find yourself at a party and a stranger asks, “So what do you do for a living?” Usually our default answer is to describe the paid labor most of us do 9-5, Monday through Friday. But what if we consider the work it takes to buy and prepare food, care for family members, our homes, and communities? Isn’t the day to day work of homemaking and caregiving “making a living” too?

One of the many realizations we came to during our month-long #TheFutureOfWork campaign this past May, is that not only is the standard definition of “work” and how we make a living quite narrow, but that when we expand our definition of work to include the labor that nourishes life, it can trouble our core understandings of family, community, and the kinds of labor we deem valuable. We came to understand that the future of work is more than a 9-5 job; it’s about dissolving the boundaries between paid and unpaid labor, honoring caregiving and life giving labor, and making care freely available to everyone regardless of their family structures or job status. Much of what we grappled with during #TheFutureOfWork was how to shift power in the workplace and within our families, so that we can focus our energy on visionary world-building.

By Sue Bennett, Nonprofit Quarterly

By Keith Schneider, The New York Times

The Sustainable Economies Law Center will be closed on Friday, May 10, 2024, joining the Global Strike for Rafah (#AllEyesOnRafah, #RiseForRafah) 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. 

We commend the student activists who are calling out their colleges and universities for their complicity in this genocide. As alumni of many of these institutions ourselves, we call for disclosure and divestment of their endowments from weapons manufacturers and other targets of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, as well as support for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students, staff, and faculty, and amnesty for students, staff, and faculty who have participated in pro-Palestinian protests and encampments.

We are also taking this opportunity to better understand the role of the nonprofit industrial complex in perpetuating human rights violations against poor and oppressed people both at home and abroad. We aim to build a principled movement with other nonprofit workers who share our vision of dismantling the structures of power that contribute to these injustices.

#AllEyesOnRafah #RiseForRafah

We envision a world where every person has a choice in how they work — where our survival is not dependent on our labor; where cooperation and liberation are embedded in the workplace; where the expansion of care is a universal, unconditional social good.

We honor the labor that invigorates and replenishes life and relationships and makes work more pleasurable and meaningful. We dream of a future where our work nourishes all life.

We recognize the wisdom inherent in the cyclical turn of seasons – hibernations and migrations, periods of wild abundance and of decomposition, moments to attune to transition. To adapt to these rhythms as a collective, the Law Center is taking Monday March 18th through Friday March 23rd off for a collective week of rest.  

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.