by Natalie Orenstein, The Oaklandside

Our inspiring friends at Homefulness/POOR Magazine have encountered every legal barrier imaginable as they work to build housing for Oakland's unhoused community. The Law Center has partnered with them to address the latest

Read full article here.

(Originally published October 20, 2021.)

By: OSCAR PERRY ABELLO, Next City

Excerpt: “We’re trying to hold our ground by not defining the entire process up front or acting like it’s our job to do that,” says Janelle Orsi, staff attorney and co-founder at the Sustainable Economies Law Center, which helped convene the collective starting in May. “What we’re defining instead is a participatory process we’re going to facilitate, giving a lot of examples on how it might play out. We’re treating the budget more like a menu that we could all order off of, as opposed to a budget of exactly what we’re going to do.”

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(Originally published August 24, 2021.)

By: Mwende Hinojosa and Jocelyn Foreman, Nonprofit Quarterly

Excerpt: My mother had just died, and I was being retraumatized by seeing the foreclosure notices. Christine [Hernandez of Sustainable Economies Law Center] was telling me I had more options than cash for keys. But then I realized I had to tell people my situation and be naked. I had to know my rights and stand in my power.

Read full article here.

(Originally published August 18, 2021.)

To the vast majority of people, the word “democracy” evokes electoral politics and voting booths. But what about our day to day experience living in a democratic society? Maurice Mitchell sums up the limitations of our current understanding of democracy in this Nonprofit Quarterly article:

“If most of our waking hours are spent in a hierarchical workplace at work, that isn’t democracy. That is the definition of capitalism. And there should be a tension there between a democratic society and capitalism.” - Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party

The tension is at a breaking point: Amazon warehouse worker organizing squashed; worker unionization on a decline; income inequality at an all time high. And still, what we see across popular culture continues to deify billionaires and grind culture. 

Democratic values must permeate every layer of society because we can’t simply wait for election season to vote our way to liberation. Because bosses control so much of our lives, the most impactful place to start is in the workplace. Worker control and power is a way for people to practice democracy every day.

We’re spending the last week of September questioning workplace hierarchies, discussing shared leadership in the workplace, and more! We’re calling it #Coopalooza Week and we hope you’ll join! 

What are some of the invisible forces activating the hearts and minds of staff and interns of Sustainable Economies Law Center? Recently, several staff found simultaneous resonance around the word interdependence, and we planned a month of events to deepen our understanding of interdependence. Below, a few of us share sources of our inspiration: the books that helped us each recognize the truth of our interdependence and live into it more fully.

In the opening to her book “Braiding Sweetgrass”, Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us into the mythic Potawatomi story of Sky Woman. She accidentally falls from Sky World towards dark water below, animals witnessing her distress and offering help in whatever way they could. The result of her fall is the co-creation of our world; a place where the interdependence of humans, plants, and animals could flourish.

Recently, Wall Kimmerer revisited this story and offered different perspectives: 

“In one version, she was pushed. In another she was thrown—not from malice but because she was needed for the sacred task and needed ‘help’ in leaving her beloved home for the next...

What does it take to abandon what does not work and take the risks of uncertainty? We’ll need courage; we’ll need each other’s hands to hold…”

Is our society flailing in free fall or actively jumping into the unknown, agents of our own future? Whether or not Sky Woman jumped or fell, her future might have ended terribly if not for the assistance and care the animals gave her in that moment of crisis. We at the Law Center choose to imagine ourselves as courageously jumping towards a future we choose, despite the uncertainty, because we are “Living the uncertainty, together” as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke once said. Part of our intention with Interdependence Month is to bring our interdependence into wider focus so we can live into the uncertainty of the future, with the possibility of co-creating a better one.

By: By Marisa Kendall, East Bay Times

Excerpt: “I’m sure they felt really hopeful that within a short period of time they’d be able to do great things with this land,” said Janelle Orsi, co-founder of Sustainable Economies Law Center, which has been helping Poor Magazine with the project. “I don’t think they ever would have imagined they’d hit so many barriers. And what it shows is that our laws and city procedures are not set up to support the groups that are supporting our community and creating the necessary housing.”

Read full article here.

(Originally published July 1, 2021.)

Announcing The Oakland People’s Plan:

29 Oakland Groups Ask the City to Rethink the General Plan Process

June 29, 2021

On June 25, 2021, a newly formed coalition of Oakland organizations called The Oakland People’s Plan, submitted a community-centered proposal to the City of Oakland in response to Oakland’s Request for Proposals (RFP) seeking a prime consultant to manage the City’s General Plan update. The Oakland People’s Plan (TOPP) formed instantaneously – in the space of one week – in response to feelings that the City’s approach to the Plan update would prevent meaningful community participation. 

Staff and interns of the Sustainable Economies Law Center helped convene the group after conversations with several community organizations, planning professionals, and the City’s Planning Department. “The City says it wants to engage the community in this process, but their approach shows the opposite,” said Tia Taruc-Myers, an attorney with the Law Center who helped lead the effort. “We asked the City to extend the RFP deadline so that community groups could come up to speed and get involved, but the City refused. It appeared that only for-profit planning firms were planning to submit proposals.”

Imagine a bustling neighborhood where the local grocery and cafe is cooperatively owned. It’s a hub, a meeting place, a point of connection where people come to shop for the week's groceries but stay to chat over a cup of tea. All the investors in the store are neighbors and the worker-owners know them by name. The co-op hosts a yearly fiesta where neighbors and investors get to meet the farmers who grow the food for the coop.

A beautiful image of a sustainable community that’s interconnected and nourishing itself, right? Because we all know that a sustainable economy centers relationships, not transactions. 

Interdependence has been a recurring concept at the Law Center that has evolved into a closely held value. So much so, that we’ve decided to offer a series of events and happenings next month to explore how we rebuild lives, communities, and legal systems on a foundation of interdependence. This will be a space to conjure images like the one above, and more!

As a prelude to Interdependence Month, we’re narrowing in on the individuals in our web of interdependence. Who are the people that hold the Law Center up, push us to strive and think creatively, and support us in all we do?

California's investor-owned utilities are opening up a new front in their power grabbing war against California's energy utility customers -- and that means you. 

In California, profits for these investor-owned utility (IOU) monopolies like PG&E are not determined by how much energy they sell, but by how much they invest in infrastructure (transmission lines, etc.). Their return on these investments is guaranteed by state regulators. It’s no secret that every year, IOUs spend millions of their customers’ money to lobby policymakers in Sacramento to increase energy rates for customers and line the pockets of their shareholders. That’s their business model, and it’s been working out well for them, until now. 

What can we do to support communities facing anti-Asian violence?  Our colleague Alejandra Cruz took the time to sit with this question after a discussion came up at the Law Center about the increased incidents of violence over the past few weeks.  Many ideas emerged: We could do more to uplift movements working to end anti-Asian violence; we could bring in speakers and educators on the subject; and we could share the history of anti-Asian laws here in the US.

Ultimately, through her reflections, Alejandra reminded us that solidarity across race, ethnicity, class, and gender is fundamental to the solidarity economy movement. We’ve always been doing the work.

In campaigns to liberate housing from the speculative market,
In the inclusive and democratic bylaws of worker co-ops we support,
In the space we hold for other worker-self directed organizations,
In the spirit of all our teach-ins, workshops, webinars, and legal cafes, 
In the political advocacy for marginalized communities to own and control their own energy and power sources, 

Solidarity is integral to the DNA of this organization and this movement.

California’s rich food culture owes much to the Filipinx, Hmong, Lao, Sikh, and many other Southeast Asian agricultural workers who have stewarded the land for generations. Equally important, Asian agricultural workers up and down the state have farmed and organized alongside Latinx agricultural workers. Mexican and Filipino solidarity is the foundation of California’s agricultural workers rights movement, and for Law Center Staff Attorney Alejandra Cruz, so much more.

Alejandra grew up in California’s Central Valley in a family of agricultural workers that were both Mexican and Filipino. She shares that community care was so strong that “solidarity was in our bones”, which helped her thrive despite economic insecurity and a racist school system. In this blog post, she shares the stories of deep care and solidarity of her childhood community as inspiration for us to move from exploitation to collective ownership to rematriation and liberation.

Worker-ownership has emerged as an important strategy to keep people employed, doors open and communities served in the midst of COVID-19. A Rutgers study found that majority employee-owned companies outperformed traditional businesses in job retention, pay, benefits and workplace safety during the pandemic. Local and state governments are developing policies and funds to support this movement: New York City opened an employee-ownership hotline in December 2020 and the City of Santa Clara launched a Worker Cooperative Initiative in January of this year. As of 2019, the Berkeley Revolving Loan Fund can be used to finance worker cooperative conversions, has removed barriers to co-op access and has a minimum 10% lending target worker cooperatives or businesses converting to democratic worker ownership.

The Law Center will be closed for Chrysalis Week from May 3rd - May 7th 2021.

chrys·​a·​lis | \ ˈkri-sə-ləs
a protecting covering also : a sheltered state or stage of being or growth

The Law Center is taking a week off to re-energize and re-center ourselves as we go through a period of rapid growth and expansion. Although spring season is known as a time of blossoming, it is also an important time for renewal. We continue to learn from the wisdom of seasons by attuning to cycles of growth and rest.

It’s been an exhilarating month at the Law Center. One of our clients, Jocelyn Foreman is now the first renter in California to purchase her home through the new state law SB 1079! When her home went up for auction last month, Wedgewood Inc. made the $600,000 winning bid to purchase. Wedgewood is the company synonymous with artificial housing scarcity thanks to the organizing efforts of Moms4Housing. Luckily, Jocelyn’s well on her way to raising the funds to match Wedgewood’s bid, which will ultimately allow her to own her home because of SB 1079.