Thank you to everyone who joined us last month for #TheFutureOfWork campaign! We appreciate everyone who helped us raise $17,163! Alongside our fundraising — which also raised $1,716 for our solidarity partners Somos Tierra Campesino Collective — we held an MCLE panel discussion, a roundtable, and a fireside chat on an array of topics that we wanted to explore with our community.

Before you watch our offerings, you can read a summary of a few themes that emerged during the month of learning, discussion, and storytelling here or by clicking the image above. We hope the following ideas can continue to shape the evolution of how we think about labor and the future of work.

[MCLE] From Cells to Liberation: Are Cooperatives Controlled by Incarcerated Persons Part of an Abolitionist Strategy? reminded us that there is an entire swath of the population — incarcerated people — whose labor is invisibilized and who are forced to labor for the state; often for pennies or nothing at all. We learned how empowering prisoners to take ownership of their labor through cooperatives can be a “non-reformist reform” gesturing towards a more positive world building like Abolition — a radical, generative, and communal world building practice that not only envisions a world without prisons, but a world without coercive wage labor as well.  

In our roundtable discussion about how we nurture caregivers under capitalism, we learned how domestic labor became devalued and why it’s revolutionary to imagine this labor breaking out of the confines of gendered roles within the nuclear family. [ROUNDTABLE]  Labors of Love & Care Work: How do we nurture caregivers under capitalism? 

The important work of confronting and unlearning the internalized bosses became a touchpoint in our fireside chat about the important skill of collective governance. [FIRESIDE CHAT]  If We're Not Prepared to Govern, We're Not Prepared to Win

Do you have ideas or resources to share on these topics? Email us at communications [at] theselc.org and let us know! A special thank you to the panelists, presenters, and community members who contributed to these discussions! 

How the Law Center Adjusts to Growth

Last month Sue Bennett, our Director of Operations and Miscellaneous Stuff, participated in a panel discussion “Remaking the Economy: Worker Self-Directed Nonprofits in Practice”, hosted by Nonprofit Quarterly. She shared her experience about what it takes to manage a growing worker self-directed nonprofit through inevitable change. Read and listen to an excerpt of Sue talking about how to build trust and stay true to values of transparency here.  

Kinship over Transaction: How Bolivians Meet Community Needs

Mwende Hinojosa, our Director of Communications and Strategic Storytelling, has spent the last year in Bolivia, where the economía solidaria (solidarity economy) is impressively robust thanks to deep cultural values of reciprocity. In this Nonprofit Quarterly piece, Mwende shares examples of some of the many practices Bolivians follow to meet their communities' needs and some of the lessons US solidarity economy activists can learn from our Latin American counterparts.