We're always cooking up pay-it-forward legal advice, action-oriented workshops, and happy hours with engaging conversations on how to build just and resilient local economies. And we don't only provide in-person events for you to connect with us, we provide online trainings and travel across the country to support grassroots economic empowerment. Don't miss out!
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Find Sustainable Economies Law Center's events below!
Wednesday, July 23, 2025 at 10:00 AM PDT · $50.00 USD · 7 rsvps
ZoomPaying Ourselves Equitably (Module 7 Collaborate to Co-Liberate -C2C)
How can we pay ourselves equitably in our nonprofits practicing liberatory governance and in our movement homes? What skills and practices can we use to navigate difficult conflicts around money, especially when it gets personal - our livelihoods? How can we hold with care how all of our conditioning (class, race, gender, education, ability, and so much more) informs our relationship to money, worth, and value?
We must confront these questions, along with many others, when we work in our liberatory organizations to set our own salary structures.
Join us for Collaborate to Co-Liberate Module 7: Paying Ourselves Equitably, in which we will explore facilitation tools for talking about money skillfully in our organizations, and how to navigate some of the tensions and contradictions that arise when quantifying our needs. We’ll share examples of equitable pay structures and how they were developed, how they evolve, and what factors to consider when defining your compensation structures. And we’ll explore how to achieve our compensation visions legally under our current legal constraints.
This offering is essential for:
- Changemakers within organizations who want to introduce new approaches to how compensation is determined
- Organizations practicing liberatory governance who want examples, support, and guidance for paying yourselves equitably
- Organizations who have experimented with alternative pay structures and are looking for new ways to be even more values and vision aligned at the level of compensation
Includes a Follow up Q&A Aug 6, 10-11:30 PT 1-2:30 ET
Collaborate to Co-Liberate: Structures and Practices for Democratic Organizations (C2C) is a year-long learning journey designed for solidarity economy and social justice movement left organizations who are building organizations with democratic, participatory, and liberatory leadership structures.
To view the other events in the series click here.
Wednesday, July 30, 2025 at 12:00 PM PDT
Online via Zoom in Oakland, CAOnline Legal Cafe
The Sustainable Economies Law Center provides direct legal support to individuals and groups who are working to create new solutions for resilient local economies. The Resilient Communities Legal Cafe provides sliding-scale donation-based legal advice, via Zoom, by appointment.
If you need advice about starting a worker-owned cooperative, converting an existing business into a cooperative, organizing a housing cooperative, founding a nonprofit or other social enterprise, please RSVP below! Here are some questions we will be prepared to answer:
❖ Radical real estate law: How to form a housing cooperative, real estate cooperative, or nonprofit housing?
❖ Legal formation for small businesses: What are the regulations and requirements to have your organization legally function?
❖ Legal entity choice: Should your org be a for profit, non-profit, and which legal entity fits best with your vision?
❖ Employment law: Whether you're an employer, employee, or a cooperative, we can answer questions on how to prevent or resolve issues?
❖ Tax law: What are the ways to receive tax exemption for your org?
❖ Contracts: Contract review, drafting, and negotiation
❖ Liability issues: What are your governance requirements to avoid liability?
❖ Environmental law: Do you have questions about how to create more green spaces for your community?
❖ Worker Self Directed Nonprofits: How can you run your nonprofit organization more like a worker-owned cooperative?Note: We especially encourage Black, Indigenous, people of color, and low-income communities to RSVP. We focus on cooperatives, participatory or democratic nonprofits, land trusts, and mutual aid groups. If you need Spanish Language or American Sign Language interpretation, please email Hope ([email protected]) with Subject Line "Interpretation Request - for [mm/dd/yyyy] event." We will do our best to accommodate your request.
Keep an eye out for an e-mail when you RSVP. The e-mail will have your appointment slot, instructions on how to attend our Legal Cafe remotely, and an intake form that we need you and your partners to fill out.
Format: You and/or your group will be paired with a lawyer for 30-45 minutes to get answers to questions about entity formation, contracts, governance, and more! Since we're based in Oakland, our event times are listed as Pacific Standard Time.
Got any questions? E-mail [email protected]!
Only one person per group needs to RSVP.
Tuesday, August 05, 2025 at 11:00 AM PDT · $5.00 USD
WebinarMCLE Worker Self-Directed Nonprofits and the Law
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.
This activity is approved by the California State Bar for 1 MCLE credit.
Please email [email protected] for accessibility needs and/or if you can't afford the ticket price.
Presenters
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.
Monday, August 11, 2025 at 11:00 AM PDT · $5.00 USD
WebinarMCLE Maybe We Are a Church?
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.
This activity is approved by the California State Bar for 1 MCLE credit.
Please email [email protected] for accessibility needs and/or if you can't afford the ticket price.
Presenters
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.
Wednesday, August 13, 2025 at 01:00 PM PDT · $5.00 USD
WebinarMCLE Worker-focused Worker Co-op Conversions
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.
This activity is approved by the California State Bar for 1 MCLE credit.
Please email [email protected] for accessibility needs and/or if you can't afford the ticket price.
Presenters
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.
Thursday, August 14, 2025 at 12:00 PM PDT
Online via Zoom in Oakland, CAOnline Legal Cafe
The Sustainable Economies Law Center provides direct legal support to individuals and groups who are working to create new solutions for resilient local economies. The Resilient Communities Legal Cafe provides sliding-scale donation-based legal advice, via Zoom, by appointment.
If you need advice about starting a worker-owned cooperative, converting an existing business into a cooperative, organizing a housing cooperative, founding a nonprofit or other social enterprise, please RSVP below! Here are some questions we will be prepared to answer:
❖ Radical real estate law: How to form a housing cooperative, real estate cooperative, or nonprofit housing?
❖ Legal formation for small businesses: What are the regulations and requirements to have your organization legally function?
❖ Legal entity choice: Should your org be a for profit, non-profit, and which legal entity fits best with your vision?
❖ Employment law: Whether you're an employer, employee, or a cooperative, we can answer questions on how to prevent or resolve issues?
❖ Tax law: What are the ways to receive tax exemption for your org?
❖ Contracts: Contract review, drafting, and negotiation
❖ Liability issues: What are your governance requirements to avoid liability?
❖ Environmental law: Do you have questions about how to create more green spaces for your community?
❖ Worker Self Directed Nonprofits: How can you run your nonprofit organization more like a worker-owned cooperative?Note: We especially encourage Black, Indigenous, people of color, and low-income communities to RSVP. We focus on cooperatives, participatory or democratic nonprofits, land trusts, and mutual aid groups. If you need Spanish Language or American Sign Language interpretation, please email Hope ([email protected]) with Subject Line "Interpretation Request - for [mm/dd/yyyy] event." We will do our best to accommodate your request.
Keep an eye out for an e-mail when you RSVP. The e-mail will have your appointment slot, instructions on how to attend our Legal Cafe remotely, and an intake form that we need you and your partners to fill out.
Format: You and/or your group will be paired with a lawyer for 30-45 minutes to get answers to questions about entity formation, contracts, governance, and more! Since we're based in Oakland, our event times are listed as Pacific Standard Time.
Got any questions? E-mail [email protected]!
Only one person per group needs to RSVP.
Tuesday, August 19, 2025 at 12:00 PM PDT
Online via Zoom in Oakland, CAOnline Legal Cafe
The Sustainable Economies Law Center provides direct legal support to individuals and groups who are working to create new solutions for resilient local economies. The Resilient Communities Legal Cafe provides sliding-scale donation-based legal advice, via Zoom, by appointment.
If you need advice about starting a worker-owned cooperative, converting an existing business into a cooperative, organizing a housing cooperative, founding a nonprofit or other social enterprise, please RSVP below! Here are some questions we will be prepared to answer:
❖ Radical real estate law: How to form a housing cooperative, real estate cooperative, or nonprofit housing?
❖ Legal formation for small businesses: What are the regulations and requirements to have your organization legally function?
❖ Legal entity choice: Should your org be a for profit, non-profit, and which legal entity fits best with your vision?
❖ Employment law: Whether you're an employer, employee, or a cooperative, we can answer questions on how to prevent or resolve issues?
❖ Tax law: What are the ways to receive tax exemption for your org?
❖ Contracts: Contract review, drafting, and negotiation
❖ Liability issues: What are your governance requirements to avoid liability?
❖ Environmental law: Do you have questions about how to create more green spaces for your community?
❖ Worker Self Directed Nonprofits: How can you run your nonprofit organization more like a worker-owned cooperative?Note: We especially encourage Black, Indigenous, people of color, and low-income communities to RSVP. We focus on cooperatives, participatory or democratic nonprofits, land trusts, and mutual aid groups. If you need Spanish Language or American Sign Language interpretation, please email Hope ([email protected]) with Subject Line "Interpretation Request - for [mm/dd/yyyy] event." We will do our best to accommodate your request.
Keep an eye out for an e-mail when you RSVP. The e-mail will have your appointment slot, instructions on how to attend our Legal Cafe remotely, and an intake form that we need you and your partners to fill out.
Format: You and/or your group will be paired with a lawyer for 30-45 minutes to get answers to questions about entity formation, contracts, governance, and more! Since we're based in Oakland, our event times are listed as Pacific Standard Time.
Got any questions? E-mail [email protected]!
Only one person per group needs to RSVP.
Wednesday, August 20, 2025 at 10:00 AM PDT · $50.00 USD · 4 rsvps
ZoomCollaborative Budgeting (Module 8 Collaborate to Co-Liberate -C2C)
A budget is much more than a spreadsheet with numbers. At best, it can be a guiding document that helps a group align around its mission and strategic priorities.
Yet, without intentional processes for democratizing decisions about money, a small group of people tasked with creating organizational budgets often hold disproportionate power over how an organization operates.
Join Ananda Valenzuela for Module 8 of Collaborate to Co-Liberate 2025: Participatory Budgeting. Ananda will share concrete tools to support groups to share power in budgeting processes, create clarity about how decisions about money are made in an organization or group, and create a realistic budgeting timeline and process.
This offering is essential for:
- Organizers and changemakers who want tools or resources to distribute the often unspoken power that comes with holding and making decision about money in a group
- Organizations practicing liberatory governance who want to create right-sized pathways for more meaningful engagement and shared power in decisions about money
- Organizations looking for concrete tools and timelines for creating more participatory budgeting processes in their home organizations
Includes a Follow up Q&A Sep 3, 10-11:30 PT 1-2:30 ET
Collaborate to Co-Liberate: Structures and Practices for Democratic Organizations (C2C) is a year-long learning journey designed for solidarity economy and social justice movement left organizations who are building organizations with democratic, participatory, and liberatory leadership structures.
To view the other events in the series click here.
Thursday, August 21, 2025 at 12:00 PM PDT · $5.00 USD
WebinarElimination of Bias MCLE: A Legal History of Whiteness
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.
This activity is approved by the California State Bar for 1 Elimination of Implicit Bias MCLE credit.
Please email [email protected] for accessibility needs and/or if you can't afford the ticket price.
Presenters
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.
Tuesday, August 26, 2025 at 12:00 PM PDT
Online via Zoom in Oakland, CAOnline Legal Cafe
The Sustainable Economies Law Center provides direct legal support to individuals and groups who are working to create new solutions for resilient local economies. The Resilient Communities Legal Cafe provides sliding-scale donation-based legal advice, via Zoom, by appointment.
If you need advice about starting a worker-owned cooperative, converting an existing business into a cooperative, organizing a housing cooperative, founding a nonprofit or other social enterprise, please RSVP below! Here are some questions we will be prepared to answer:
❖ Radical real estate law: How to form a housing cooperative, real estate cooperative, or nonprofit housing?
❖ Legal formation for small businesses: What are the regulations and requirements to have your organization legally function?
❖ Legal entity choice: Should your org be a for profit, non-profit, and which legal entity fits best with your vision?
❖ Employment law: Whether you're an employer, employee, or a cooperative, we can answer questions on how to prevent or resolve issues?
❖ Tax law: What are the ways to receive tax exemption for your org?
❖ Contracts: Contract review, drafting, and negotiation
❖ Liability issues: What are your governance requirements to avoid liability?
❖ Environmental law: Do you have questions about how to create more green spaces for your community?
❖ Worker Self Directed Nonprofits: How can you run your nonprofit organization more like a worker-owned cooperative?Note: We especially encourage Black, Indigenous, people of color, and low-income communities to RSVP. We focus on cooperatives, participatory or democratic nonprofits, land trusts, and mutual aid groups. If you need Spanish Language or American Sign Language interpretation, please email Hope ([email protected]) with Subject Line "Interpretation Request - for [mm/dd/yyyy] event." We will do our best to accommodate your request.
Keep an eye out for an e-mail when you RSVP. The e-mail will have your appointment slot, instructions on how to attend our Legal Cafe remotely, and an intake form that we need you and your partners to fill out.
Format: You and/or your group will be paired with a lawyer for 30-45 minutes to get answers to questions about entity formation, contracts, governance, and more! Since we're based in Oakland, our event times are listed as Pacific Standard Time.
Got any questions? E-mail [email protected]!
Only one person per group needs to RSVP.