Community over chaos calendar

What do you get when you cross a worker cooperative with a 501(c)(3) nonprofit? A worker self-directed nonprofit!

As the movement for economic and workplace democracy continues to grow, we believe it is important that nonprofit organizations also internalize and practice workplace democracy. We've put a fair bit of thought into our own organizational structure and culture, and now we are working to provide resources, advice, research, and a peer network to support worker self-direction in nonprofits everywhere. 

Join us for an MCLE webinar on how workers in nonprofits can replace a disempowering hierarchy with collective control, distributing leadership roles to every worker, and the legal gray areas of worker self-direction. 

Sue Bennett

Sue is Director of Operations and Miscellaneous Stuff, ensuring the organization's office space and internal operations contribute to the wellbeing of staff, and the effectiveness of Sustainable Economies Law Center’s programs. Sue has spent 25 years working in the nonprofit sector in a variety of program and administrative roles.  

Sue feels it's her professional destiny to advance The Law Center’s mission of supporting community resilience and grassroots economic empowerment. This feeling is fostered by her personal/political value alignment with The Law Center’s structure. Sue’s community activism is rooted in understanding and minimizing the impact of class and classism and is based on the principles of feminism and anti-racism.

Tia Taruc-Myers

Tia is the Sustainable Economies Law Center’s Director of Legal Education. She mostly represents Indigenous land return groups and radical real estate projects, but sometimes provides legal advice to nonprofits who want to adopt the worker self-directed model.

Tia helps organize the Law Center's teach-ins, webinars, legal cafes, MCLE seminars, online resources, and more! Passionate about redistributing power and wealth, Tia spends her time promoting participatory budgeting and community control of resources. 

Nonprofit organizations with a strong spiritual grounding might want to consider designating themselves or seeking federal tax exemption as a “church.” Sustainable Economies Law Center works with many land-based organizations that operate according to a very different logic than our dominant culture. For example, rather than relating to land as a commodity or asset, people might see themselves as inseparable parts of the land and all life on it. This prompts a different set of practices, beliefs, and ethics that, all combined, become so central in the lives of participants that it is equivalent to the place of God in the lives of many religious people.  These organizations often benefit from a legal status – as a religious organization or church – which gives them latitude to be themselves and be relieved of many burdens and procedures that could otherwise disrupt the sacred nature of their work. 

This MCLE is for lawyers interested in supporting groups who might benefit from church status. This webinar will go over federal and California law.

Erika Sato 

Erika was a 2021 Equal Justice Works legal fellow sponsored by Baker McKenzie and Salesforce, and is now a staff attorney at the law center. Erika received their B.A. in International Relations from Pomona College and their J.D. from Harvard Law School, where they were an editor of the Harvard Law Review and active in the QTPOC affinity group community. Starting in September of 2023, they transitioned to being a staff attorney at the Law Center.

Erika is passionate about economic justice, rematriation of land to Indigenous communities, collective control of resources, mutual aid, and making the law accessible to everyone. Erika lives in Berkeley, and they are licensed to practice law in both California and Illinois. In their free time, Erika enjoys crafts, sewing, cooking, singing, hiking, and gardening in their community garden plot.

Tia Taruc-Myers

Tia is the Sustainable Economies Law Center’s Director of Legal Education. She mostly represents Indigenous land return groups and radical real estate projects, but sometimes provides legal advice to nonprofits who want to adopt the worker self-directed model.

Tia helps organize the Law Center's teach-ins, webinars, legal cafes, MCLE seminars, online resources, and more! Passionate about redistributing power and wealth, Tia spends her time promoting participatory budgeting and community control of resources. 

An MCLE webinar providing political education on the history of worker co-op conversions and suggesting strategies to negotiate worker co-op conversions focused on the workers. This webinar is for lawyers interested in supporting workers in worker co-op conversions.

Jay Cumberland - SELC's Labor and Housing Attorney

Jay believes political theory, social movement theory, and an international perspective must inform his work supporting housing cooperative conversions and worker cooperative conversions. These conversions are, after all, political exercises happening in social spaces around the globe. Learning about Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi somewhat immediately propelled Jay into this work. He believes there’s a thick relationship between that introduction to cooperative economics and politics and the way he approaches his present work. Jay’s approach finds less excitement in creating things from scratch than in making existing things different. In a world without unoccupied political space, he believes it is not only exciting but also necessary to learn to travel through what exists to arrive at our imagined futures.  

Jay received a B.A. with a double major in Philosophy and Religion from Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and a J.D. with a Social Justice and Public Interest Concentration from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. He misses intermittent and unexpected Mississippi thunderstorms but has grown to love the ever-steady cycle of fog and sun in the Bay. He loves working with his hands (typing doesn’t count). He comes by that honestly. His dad insisted he be equally good at stringing barbed-wire fences and at stringing together words. Hopefully that combination helps Jay play a role in creating a world, as the Zapatista’s say, in which many worlds exist.

This MCLE workshop will deal with the recognition and elimination of bias by discussing the legal and social history of whiteness and how this impacts us today on a legal, economic, social, and spiritual level. We will also focus on implicit bias and share bias-reducing strategies that can address how unintended biases regarding race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, or other characteristics undermine confidence in the legal system.

After setting up a framework for how whiteness developed during early periods of settler colonialism in the United States, we will look at how legal rulings have upheld those notions of whiteness and it's relationships with protecting white property, wealth, and power structures. We will also share our thoughts about how the legal profession as an institution perpetuates white supremacy and some ideas about what we can do about it. We will also hold space for a discussion about how our own consciousness around whiteness and white supremacy culture shape our workplaces and lives. Bringing the historical and the spiritual together, we will imagine how we could exist beyond the systems of white supremacy, starting with our daily interactions with out clients, in our workplaces, and elsewhere, and how we are already doing it. 

Ricardo Samir Nuñez

Ricardo is a worker cooperative ecosystem development specialist supporting cultural practices, policies, organizations, and systemic changes that allow communities to build beyond the interlocking systems of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. He is currently the Director of Economic Democracy and a Staff Attorney at the Sustainable Economies Law Center where he collaborates on educational programs, legal services, policy advocacy, and regional and national ecosystem development to restore human labor to right relationship with people and the planet. He is board president of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives and an at-large board member at the California Center for Cooperative Development and the Southern California Focus on Cooperation. He also became a lawyer without going to law school through California’s Law Office Study Program! Check out Ricardo's Favorite Cooperative Resources here! 

Tia Taruc-Myers

Tia is the Sustainable Economies Law Center’s Director of Legal Education. She mostly represents Indigenous land return groups and radical real estate projects, but sometimes provides legal advice to nonprofits who want to adopt the worker self-directed model.

Tia helps organize the Law Center's teach-ins, webinars, legal cafes, MCLE seminars, online resources, and more! Passionate about redistributing power and wealth, Tia spends her time promoting participatory budgeting and community control of resources. 

An MCLE webinar addressing zoning law’s exclusion of non-family groups, proposing policy changes to support inclusion of non-family groups, and showing how this policy change can support California’s housing production goals.

Jay Cumberland - SELC's Labor and Housing Attorney

Jay believes political theory, social movement theory, and an international perspective must inform his work supporting housing cooperative conversions and worker cooperative conversions. These conversions are, after all, political exercises happening in social spaces around the globe. Learning about Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi somewhat immediately propelled Jay into this work. He believes there’s a thick relationship between that introduction to cooperative economics and politics and the way he approaches his present work. Jay’s approach finds less excitement in creating things from scratch than in making existing things different. In a world without unoccupied political space, he believes it is not only exciting but also necessary to learn to travel through what exists to arrive at our imagined futures.  

Jay received a B.A. with a double major in Philosophy and Religion from Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama and a J.D. with a Social Justice and Public Interest Concentration from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. He misses intermittent and unexpected Mississippi thunderstorms but has grown to love the ever-steady cycle of fog and sun in the Bay. He loves working with his hands (typing doesn’t count). He comes by that honestly. His dad insisted he be equally good at stringing barbed-wire fences and at stringing together words. Hopefully that combination helps Jay play a role in creating a world, as the Zapatista’s say, in which many worlds exist.