By Jean Tepperman of East Bay Express

Image credit: Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), a grassroots tenants' rights organization

Excerpt: A growing network of support for land trusts and housing cooperatives operates in the background [of this effort to rethink affordable housing]. The Sustainable Economies Law Center has long provided legal help and policy advocacy for collective economic activities and will soon launch a Radical Real Estate Law School to train lawyers to work with these projects. The California Community Land Trust Network shares resources and promotes favorable state policies. At the grassroots level, the People of Color Sustainable Housing Network connects community activists working in many of these projects. It also partners with the Sustainable Economies Law Center to deliver a training program to equip low-income residents to launch their own projects. 

Read the full article here.

(Originally published March 4, 2020.)

By Charlotte Tsui and Elizabeth Burnett, Staff Attorneys at the Law Center

This morning, the House of Representatives voted in favor of the $484 billion relief bill that passed in the Senate earlier this week. Once signed into law, the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act will infuse fresh new funding for small business relief to the tune of $310 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and $60 billion for SBA Economic Injury and Disaster loans (EIDL) and grants.

By Jay Cumberland  , Equal Justice Works Fellow Sponsored by the eBay Foundation

Read time: 15 minutes

DISCLAIMER: This is legal information, not legal advice. Please consult with your own attorney before taking action based on this information.

Small businesses confront a cash flow crisis without help on the horizon. Lenders aren’t helping enough. State governments aren’t helping enough. The federal government isn’t helping enough. Big businesses have the help they need, of course.  When no one else has been willing to help, who can small business owners turn to? They’ve already been turning to their customers to raise funds. They can also turn to their workers. This is mutual aid--exchanging resources and services to satisfy needs without depending on the government. Providing workers with partial or full ownership can help small business owners and workers during COVID-19. Want to watch a video about this instead of reading? Check out the video below!

This morning, SBA announced that it is no longer accepting applications for its COVID-related loans due to a lapse in funding. The funds set aside for SBA’s Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL) and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) ran out in just a few weeks after launch. 

We compiled resources so communities can take action and support our beloved small businesses as they renegotiate commercial leases and protect against eviction. During this half-hour huddle, Tobias Damm-Luhr from the Lawyers Committee shared about eviction moratoriums adopted by cities, sample letters to landlords, tips on renegotiating rent payments, and more! 

The Sustainable Economies Law Center is co-hosting this event with Legal Services for Entrepreneurs, an economic justice and community empowerment project of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights. LSE was founded in 1997 by attorneys who recognized that a small business’s long-term viability may be jeopardized when it forgoes legal assistance on fundamental business matters. LSE provides free transactional legal services to low-income individuals who want to start or develop businesses, businesses committed to investing in economically distressed communities, including hiring people with arrest and conviction records, and mom and pop shops located in areas where gentrification is a force for displacement.

Last Friday, March 20, the Law Center co-hosted a webinar with the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives (NoBawc) for the cooperative community to share resources and discuss potential responses in light of unprecedented challenges caused by the pandemic. If you missed the webinar, you can tune in to the recording below. 

Watch the Webinar Recording

By Natalie Orenstein of Berkeleyside

The Law Center's Jay Cumberland, second from the left, congregate alongside supporters and opponents of Berkeley’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA) outside a City Council policy committee meeting Thursday, March 5, 2020. Image credit: Natalie Orenstein

Excerpt: Under TOPA, authored by Mayor Jesse Arreguín, landlords who wanted to sell their rental property would have to give their tenants the first right of refusal to buy it, at a price named by the owner. The tenants can assign their rights to a city-approved affordable housing organization — like a land trust — if they couldn’t afford the cost themselves. If the tenants decided to move out instead of buying the building, those housing organizations would get second dibs.

Read the full article here.

(Originally published on March 6, 2020.)

Subin Devar, the Law Center's Director of Community Renewable Energy, penned this essay, Are You Thinking About Climate Change Wrong?, as part of our membership campaign in January 2020. It was recently republished in Nonprofit Quarterly.

Everyday people, at least in the US, are more concerned and more pessimistic about climate change. Perhaps this is because of diminishing trust in government or the sheer scale of the problem. From my experience, people who work on climate, energy, or social justice issues are a bit more hopeful than others, even if they are weighed down at times by worry. It appears that people around the globe are a little more optimistic that we can avoid the worst effects of climate change. But is that enough? Avoiding the worst effects?

In this context, a pass/fail framing of climate change has two key problems. 

Read the article on Nonprofit Quarterly here, or the original post on the Law Center's blog here.

The Law Center's Director of Community Renewable Energy, Subin Devar, contributed to this white paper which provides guidance for creating community solar programs that promote racial and economic equity. 

SUMMARY: This paper is intended for city elected officials and policymakers, administrators of municipal electric utilities (i.e., munis), and local advocates building equitable third-party or muni-owned community solar programs. It is most applicable to municipalities with a municipal electric utility or other lever that provides flexibility in sourcing energy, such as a Community Choice Aggregation entity. Much of this paper is relevant for policy makers and advocates designing regional or state-level community solar programs, as well.

Read the full report here.

Neil Thapar, the Law Center's Director of Food and Farms, penned this essay, How to Win Land Justice in a Decade, as part of our Land Justice campaign in January 2020. It was recently republished in Civil Eats.

Excerpt: In the next decade, we can rewrite the story of our collective future—one that manifests indigenous sovereignty, reparations, and a livable climate. Winning land is a precondition not only for a racially equitable food and farm economy, but for a real, thriving, and inclusive democracy. And, true to the definition of democracy, we all have a role to play.

Read the full article on Civil Eats here, or the full, original version on the Law Center's blog here.

How is February almost over already? As we look forward and make plans for the coming year, we made this video to share how 2020 is turning into the most lovable year yet. Enjoy! And see below for the many ways we want you to be part of it. 

Do you hold an HR Role in a worker cooperative? Are you starting or converting to a cooperative and wondering what employment policies you should have for your workers? This teach-in was recorded just for you!

Click here to watch the video and to learn about how new employment laws under AB 5 might affect your business.

A housing lawyer, a farmland lawyer, an energy lawyer, and a grassroots finance lawyer walked into our office and formed the Law Center's new Land and Resources Circle. Together, they agreed on a collective vision: Democratize. Decolonize. Decarbonize.

And so they launched the #DemocratizeDecolonizeDecarbonize campaign. Their goal? Recruit 20 new Community Members. Their game plan? Set some time aside away from their daily grind. Reflect on the Law Center's work on housing, farmland, and energy. And then take a deep-dive with a three-part essay series explaining why we do what we do.

Neil wrote about unjust farmland ownership in How to win land justice in a decade.

"The land we occupy today has been stolen from the indigenous peoples of this continent. A crime repeated every time land is bought and sold as a commodity.* Anyone who has felt the sand between their toes on a beach, stood in awe of a mountain range, or laid their head to rest in a warm place they call home knows that land is not simply a commodity. Its value cannot be reduced to dollars and cents. In the case of the farmland that nourishes all of us, commodification has created a crisis in our food system that only a strong commitment to land justice can solve."

By Karen Khan of Fifty by Fifty

The Cheese Board Collective, in Berkeley, CA, has been owned by its workers since 1971.

Excerpt: For worker cooperatives, one of the barriers to growth is access to capital. Small business loans usually require the business owner to offer what is known as a “personal guarantee”—i.e., if the business fails to pay off a loan, the owner is on the hook to pay it back. Without a lone owner to guarantee the loan, lenders have been wary of lending to cooperatives, where multiple people own the business. To help grow local cooperatives, Berkeley, CA, is changing the rules.

Berkeley established a small business loan fund with a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration in 1987, writes Oscar Perry Abello in Next City.  The fund has been used to support minority-owned and women-owned businesses denied traditional loans, but because of the personal loan guarantee, loans to cooperatives have been exceedingly rare.

Read the full article here.

(Originally published on November 19, 2019.)

Law Center staff at the Law Center's 10-year anniversary party held on October 12, 2019.

Excerpt: Many organizations — including those funded by AmbitioUS — are popping up in recent years to develop new economic systems focused on local production, sustainability, and community. However, many of these organizations run into entrenched legal barriers and regulations that work for free-market capitalism but not so well for collaborative ventures. The Sustainable Economies Law Center is a nonprofit law center that is working to cultivate a new legal landscape. AmbitioUS is supporting SELC’s project, Next Egg, which will give individual investors a community-based option for investing outside of Wall Street.

Read the full article here.

(Originally published January 8, 2020.)