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.

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.)

In the early days of the Law Center, co-founder and staff attorney Janelle Orsi had a vision of bringing together 1 million lawyers in the name of economic democracy. This vision motivated Law Center staff to build a community of cooperative legal workers, which would come to be known as Law for Economic Democracy (L4ED).

We all want safe and healthy neighborhoods and stable housing, for ourselves, our family, and our kin. What we came to realize during our May #TenantsWithoutLandlords campaign, is the breadth and depth to which our community is living that vision. Our community is building housing policies that strengthen tenants' rights, identifying and utilizing legal tools to liberate housing and land, and organizing communities who govern their own housing and neighborhoods, so that we can take care of each other. We’re building a future our community deserves and it’s so exciting!

Dear movement friends, comrades, teachers, peers, family (if you're reading this, that's you!) ~ 

This month I’ll transition off the staff collective at Sustainable Economies Law Center. I’ve spent the last several months reflecting on what I’ve learned – and what questions still feel alive – from more than ten years working and organizing with a range of professional, voluntary, and grassroots formations loosely part of the US solidarity economy movement [1]. I’ve been personally transformed by the relationships I’ve built this past decade. And still I’ve found it easy to sometimes see all this work as hopelessly marginal, to lose track of our collective impact while overwhelmed by the day-to-day grind of audits and grant reports and legal work. Have you ever struggled with that?

If so, here is a humble invitation to reflect on what we have built together. As Gopal Dayaneni powerfully reminded some of us in a recent Collaborate to Co-Liberate webinar: “freedom is the pre-existing condition.” I have glimpsed collective freedom enough times in your presence to know it is always possible [2].

Housing is fundamental because housing is a prerequisite to everything: health, safety, and well-being. Can you imagine what our community would look like if we had all that we need?

Can we build new housing and not plug into the electricity grid? Recently, the Law Center wanted to help an Oakland-based grassroots group do this, and it brought up some interesting questions about law, about climate justice, and about life. 

Since 2018, Sustainable Economies Law Center staff have annually dredged the bottom of our souls seeking enthusiasm about our annual financial audit. We’ve learned to make it enjoyable and easeful in many ways. It helps that we’ve worked with wonderful people – our awesome bookkeepers at the cooperative Wholehearted Bookkeeping, and thoughtful CPAs at Crosby & Kaneda. 

Yet, especially after supporting several clients with audit processes, I have heavy questions in the pit of my stomach: Could the audit process do more harm than good? Could audits be an unmerited drain on organizational resources? Could they lend toward a culture of distrust? Could they be disrupting organizations’ missions? Could they be a tool to perpetuate racial bias and white supremacy?

Homeowners bear a heavy weight of responsibility, especially once they come to understand the role that property ownership and the speculative market have played in the theft of land, the impoverishment of communities, and the widening gap between the rich and poor. Over the years, Sustainable Economies Law Center has created several resources to help homeowners navigate the possibilities for buying, owning, and selling homes in greater alignment with values of social and racial justice. We've recently compiled some of those resources into one place here: Resources for Radical Home Sellers

What might we mean by “tenants without landlords?” This feels like a zen koan, a provocation to help us pause and revisit our understanding of what’s possible. Every person might have a different journey of inquiry with such a prompt. I’ll share one of my recent journeys, allowing me to glimpse the profound sanity of a world without landlords.

I just returned from a 6-month sabbatical in which I traveled to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Kenya, Tanzania, Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Fifteen years after becoming a lawyer, and 13 years after co-founding Sustainable Economies Law Center, I sought to immerse myself in places and cultures that could teach me what a kinder, more just, and more loving world can feel like. This is how I ended up spending a month in West Sumatra.

When we envision ways to create affordable and humane housing, what do we imagine?

A tight knit community of neighbors organize to own and control their multi-unit apartment building in North Oakland.

A Black elder rallies her East Bay community to help buy her Pinole rental home through grassroots fundraising and community developed CA housing policy.

A POC, community-centered development coop that’s democratically led, buys up buildings in Oakland to make them permanently affordable. 

These are not visions of the future but a few examples of the powerful cooperative housing organizing that has happened in the East Bay alone! It’s important to celebrate those who, despite the slow movement of policy change and greed of corporate landlords, continue to play with the possibility of a different way. 

How do you get your co-workers to support your projects with their input and support? In a worker self-directed organization, where workers have the freedom to choose which projects they dedicate their time and energy towards, this question can be trickier than you might expect. We all have different methods to rally colleagues around our individual work. But over the years we’ve learned, if you make the work a party, people will show up! Hence, Research Explosion Days! (If you want to see a peek into how we did it over 8 years ago, check out this fun video.)

My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.” 

- Ella Jo Baker, civil rights movement organizer