Late July in North Carolina most years swelters, a muggy, peak heat experience, with the occasional warm summer rainshower. But the 160+ organizers, co-op owners, teachers, artists, facilitators, and more who converged on Durham for the New Economy Coalition People’s Assembly arrived in a cool, gray city at the peak of a historic drought. The Eno River trickled along at the lowest levels in recent memory. Nothing was as it should be... and yet we persisted.

It’s been seven years since the Coalition gathered in person in Virginia. In that span of time we’ve lived through a pandemic, a cascade of apocalypses, and a steady march towards authoritarianism. Perhaps because of this pressure, the magic of being in-person was especially powerful; as was the difficulty for people to venture outside their homes, commit to being in the flesh for three days, and trust they will be safe in increasingly dangerous times.

IMAGE ID: A group of Assembly attendees stand facing a stage. They all have one hand stretched out in front of them with their palms facing forward. Photo by Nica Guerrero.

How we come together is as important as why. 

How did we gather?

We shared these three days with an intimate group of practitioners from all over Turtle Island. The community convened in the heart of Black Hayti, in a former Black elementary school built during segregation. We sat alongside a beautifully adorned altar to welcome the presence of ancestors. We were invited to an opening dance procession accompanied by African drums and rhythms. The space was opened with recognition of the native Occaneechi lands we stood on. Many of us were with our babies and children in tow because they are essential to our world building. Sometimes, some of us took space to rest in a low-lit room off to the side, full of tea and soft cushions. We were always fully masked. 

Why were we there and what are we doing together?

New Economy Coalition: Assembly for our Futures

“This Assembly is a call to amplify our collective imagination toward the many futures that become possible when solidarity is at our core. It is an intentional space to seed deeper alignment across our network and sharpen our strategy to meet this political moment.”

Have we ever experienced a world where solidarity is at the core? Just three weeks before the Assembly, the so-called United States of America turned 250 years old. No, America is not “We the People” and it never was. One great American lie says we should pull ourselves up by the boot straps; alienating us further from the potential of collective power. Luckily, if you’re part of the solidarity economy movement, you’ve turned your back to that story of the American Dream a long time ago, or never believed it in the first place. Our Assembly was a declaration: “I am willing to create something I don’t have an embodied experience of,” a commitment which scholar Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs channeled for us at the gathering.

However, before we could get into visioning, we were reminded — by local land and culture stewards Judge Beverly Scarlett and Anna Jeffries — that we need to know where we’ve come from first, so we can bring that wisdom with us into the future. This reminder was for us as individuals but equally important, for us as a movement.

IMAGE ID: Five people sit on a stage, including two NEC staff members and panelists' Anna Jeffries, Beverly Scarlet, and Georie Bryant. Above them is a projection with the panelists photos and the words, "Black & Indigenous Solidarity Economies". At their feet are seven white singing bowls and several other sound healing tools. Photo by Nica Guerrero.

“Go and see where your people come from. That’s how we connect with each other. That’s how we stay accountable to ourselves and each other”,  Anna Jeffries nudged us on day 1 of the gathering.

Remembering the Future

A small group of us were given the opportunity to be guided through the Stagville Plantation by Georie Bryant — chef, community activist, and land steward who was also a descendant of Stagville. He taught us that slavery was African cultural material production — highly skilled blacksmiths, potters, agroecologists, medicine people, midwives, and more — stolen through exploitation. Those nearly 400 years of stolen labor are the foundation of American capitalism.  At one point, Georie said, “The reason AI is such a big thing is because they want to replicate the kind of production that happened in places like this.” Full scale exploitation is part of this country’s DNA and the ruling class is trying to get back to their ideal homeostasis with their AI project.

We’re remembering the pain and we’re also remembering the beauty that sustained us. The ancestors who endured Stagville never stopped resisting. They created spaces and claimed their time outside of slavery to engage with the world and each other. They made music and processions despite the violence. We step inside the Great Barn, built with no nails over 160 years ago by skilled enslaved Tikar people, from current day Cameroon. We’re all marveling at the expert craftsmanship when Georie asks the group: 

How can we find space within capitalism to be human?

IMAGE ID: Georie Bryant gives a tour of the Great Barn at Stagville Plantation. He's wearing all white traditional West African clothing, a red beaded necklace, and holds a red hat in his left hand. Photo by Nica Guerrero.

And I immediately think, can we even remember what it means to be human? Something happened during the pandemic that made it harder to come together, harder to maintain connection, harder to think clearly. In this age of AI takeover, it is imperative to our survival that we stay rooted in what we need as humans to survive, beyond food, water, and shelter. We need to feel responsible to each other and our more-than-human kin again. I know the erosion of authentic connection and deepening alienation is wrong. Inhuman. I believe we have a right to a future that isn’t the fantasy of these tech billionaires. We have a right to shape our own future.

The 900 enslaved people at Stagville endured and never lost sight of their right to freedom. Those conditions didn’t break their determination. We must stay rooted in our humanity so we can both resist the conditions that we find ourselves in and also build a better world. 

The Humans of the New Economy Coalition

Since 2019, the make-up of the coalition has changed. Membership has expanded and guiding principles have sharpened. “Guided by Black and Indigenous liberation visions and grounded in a working-class, grassroots lens” has become the coalition’s north star. In these changes, the make-up of NEC staff and board has shifted dramatically as well.  On the morning of the second day of our assembly, I looked around the conference hall and realized this is the most Black, Brown, and Queer people I’ve ever seen in leadership in any space.

PHOTO ID: Seven NEC staff members pose together in front of a photo banner during the Assembly for our Futures. Photo by Nica Guerrero.

The solidarity economy movement is just another name for old ways of taking care of ourselves, each other, and our community by decentering money and extraction, and re-centering kinship and survival. The goal is to “Remember what it means to live beyond capitalism” as Alexis Pauline Gumbs reminded the Assembly attendees.

The solidarity economy (SE) has expanded greatly since 2019 in large part because of collapse — of institutions, the federal government, our social structures, and our ecosystems. As the collapse deepens and cascades, SE practices are catching people. Mutual aid, care pods, collective land and housing efforts, civilian safety squads, and more: these are not fringe practices anymore. People are practicing these instinctually, many not knowing there is a movement of people working to transition our entire economy in this direction. During the assembly breakout sessions, several groups circled around the question of how we can fold those people into the work we’re doing to build lasting infrastructure for a solidarity economy.

Again: Have we ever experienced a world where solidarity is at the core? There was once a world within the United States where Black people freed themselves through imagination, strategy, and self-determination. They didn’t just escape slavery; they destroyed the institution and made the idea of slavery an abomination worldwide.

What kinship practices survive the ravages of capitalism and continue within contemporary American culture? Is what we’re doing new or is it an echo of our past? How did the ancestors of Stagville make space to be human while also enslaved? How do we make a SE world within this capitalist world? 

The state of the Solidarity Economy

Movements are not controlled by any one person or group. And yet movements are ultimately shaped and propelled by individuals and groups working in concert with each other. Whether we like it or not, philanthropy is part of what is shaping our movement. One big question that kept emerging across breakout sessions and informal conversations: How is philanthropy organizing us? I found myself quiet, sitting with my racing thoughts whenever this question came up during the assembly.

Social movements in the United States change, but people forget that change is an important part of movement. Movement in nature — murmuration for starlings or migration for pods of whales — doesn’t need to be taught. Social movements need to keep moving while simultaneously bringing young ones into belonging and honoring the wisdom of the elders, without becoming static. If we stop moving, we die.

Social movements aren’t just about making shapes for the sake of movement. They have a direction and purpose they move towards. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the solidarity economy was moving one way — still wading in the wake of the Occupy Movement. The current SE movement — like everything else in the world — was forever reshaped and refined and is moving very differently since March 2020. A resounding sentiment we agreed upon in many break out spaces during the Assembly is that the pandemic's impact now centers care work within the vision of the SE movement.

Bibliomancy - Undrowned

IMAGE ID: Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs sits on a green velvet couch on a stage. She holds a microphone in her right hand on a her book M Archive in her left. Photo by Nica Guerrero.

I returned home feeling both energized by the connections and work, and overwhelmed by the state of collapse. And inspired by our collective hope in the chaos, I now recall  the last day of the Assembly, when Alexis Pauline Gumbs introduced us to her practice of bibliomancy — an oracular practice of randomly choosing a part of a book to learn about a specific question — using her book, M Archive. I’m a huge fan of her work, and so I go to my shelf to grab her book, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.

I sit on my bed, center myself, take a few deep breaths, and ask the book: How do we know what we're doing is enough?

I use bibliomancy to choose page 48 and flip to that page:

What about you? Are you swimming sideways? Keeping one ear to the Earth, one to the sky? Are you re-evaluating what your thought process meant? Are you questioning the directions of your lines? I am. Indus and Ganges susu echolocate all the time; they are functionally blind and their movements through the river are not about day or night or getting somewhere. Heads bobbing, clicking continuously, they are asking where am I now and now and now? Which is necessary in rivers thick with nets, where your body is prized as bait, and aphrodisiac, and scarce research commodity.

Where are you now and now and now? Navigating planetary and political retrogrades? Do you feel like the world is on its side? Sometimes I do too. And I wonder who decided up and down? And what was I missing when I looked at the world top and bottom like they said? And what do I know about the world? It turns. I turn to you, disoriented. Where are we now?

Dedication

I want to dedicate this reflection to all the people doing the slow, relational work to shift our culture of individualism towards collectivism and interdependence. 

I also want to dedicate this reflection to Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. During the Assembly for our Futures, she taught the attendees to dedicate our time with her to someone. Thank you for the reminder that dedication is a way to welcome the sacred into what we do.