Doesn’t it feel so energizing to move furniture around, put a new coat of paint on the walls, or even remodel an entire room in your house? In the process, you get a chance to appreciate what you have and shift stagnant energy. And perhaps the ritual helps bring clarity to how you want to live your life! That’s how we feel every year after we refresh our Project Gallery. 

Our Project Gallery is our virtual space where we share our programmatic work, proudest achievements of the past year, and cherished collective memories. When we go through it we inevitably start asking bigger questions of ourselves: What’s the strategy here? How do we stay accountable to our clients and community?  Do we want to keep doing this work?  

Our most recent Project Gallery revamp kicked off a deeper review of our work. If the Law Center was a house, now is a good time to start considering what upgrades or repairs we might want to make to not just our projects, but also our org structure because in December the Law Center will be turning 15 years old 🎉 A self-delegated team of staff members has created a Strategy Pod who will guide the organization through this restructuring. We’re excited to share more about the process throughout the year, and how our 7 new core strategies  (slide 6) will ground the process.

It’s the thick of winter. The bare trees and chilly weather are a good reminder to slow down and ease into the new year. What better way to slow down than to read a good book? That’s why one of the Law Center's favorite new year rituals is to collectively curate a list of our favorite books from the previous year that moved us, changed our thinking, or were just plain fun. We hope you curl up with one of our favorite reads of 2023. And let us know if you have any book recommendations by replying to this email!

As you read this newsletter, Law Center staff and a few of their children and co-parents are enjoying our bi-annual all staff retreat. Since we work almost entirely remotely, we’ve made a commitment to retreat twice a year. We head to a beautiful place and unplug because we know nothing beats joining together as bodies in space to reconnect, recommit to each other and the work, and express gratitude for each other.

This year we’re diving deep into the luxury of bodily wisdom. We’re working with a Generative Somatics facilitator, Donaji Lona, who’ll guide our collective body through exercises and activities meant to support “individual, community, and collective liberation through working to embody transformation. Have you ever walked into a room and felt the buzzy collective energy of all the people? When everyone sits in a circle, facing one another after months apart, the vibe is palpable. This time around, we’ll be welcoming 4 new staff members into the organizational body. 

Looking around at the ever changing configuration of our team, we can find ourselves asking: Where do I fit in this group? Do we value the same things? We’re curious and excited to encounter the wisdom of our individual bodies and how our individual needs and desires might impact the organizational body.

Being part of a worker self-directed nonprofit often requires a person to walk the fine line between sharing stewardship responsibilities with coworkers while maintaining capacity for personally meaningful projects. This tension highlights the push and pull of being an individual within a collective body. We have the power as a WSDN to set priorities as a collective, but it requires trust and clear communication — two things that we’ll be investing time and energy into this week! Since we’ll be focusing on this important time together all week long, we’ll respond to emails when we return. Thanks for your understanding!

The movements for rematriation, reparations, and land justice are beginning to realize dreams many generations in the making. 

Back in June, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust announced they have partnered with Movement Generation to rematriate 43 acres to Indigenous care, in the unceded Bay Miwok territory of the San Francisco East Bay Area! MG and Sogorea Te’ liberated the land title from the speculative market, with Sogorea Te’ now holding the deed. We at the Law Center are proud to have supported the process, providing legal advice to both MG and Sogorea Te’ to help them create long-term agreements together for care of the land. Imagine how MG and Sogorea Te’ will restore peoples’ relationships with land and how this new land base will make space to experiment together to create liberated futures!

If you want to support MG’s Free the Land Campaign to build the Justice & Ecology Center visit https://movementgeneration.org/freetheland/. If you’re curious about how to liberate land back into the hands of loving land stewards, check out our Seeds of Land Return Toolkit. Sogorea Te' also made a beautifully designed version of Seeds of Land Return!

What does it feel like to be liberated with the Land? The Law Center, in partnership with The Cultural Conservancy, have brought together a network of deep-rooted Indigenous and Black led organizations — including  Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, The Nest, Shelterwood Collective, Movement Generation, and EARTHseed Farm — to create a film that will focus on Indigenous and Black land steward circles in the East Bay and Sonoma County living into the dream of rematriation and reparations.

This film aims to activate and embody a 100-year vision for land justice in the Bay Area articulated in a 2019 convening we co-organized at Occidental Arts and Ecology Center. It will amplify the work of the circles central to this moment, this place, this movement. If you want to read more about how the film is being collectively shaped, check out our blog post, “Indigenous and Black Land Justice Film: Participatory Narrative Workshop.”

Here in the Bay Area, it’s been an exciting season for workplace democracy and workers flexing their collective power. 

Thanks to the collective organizing of NoBAWC and The Real People’s Fund, vital resources and services have been restored to the Oakland City Budget, specifically for co-ops and small businesses. The workers of the iconic 127-year-old Anchor Brewing Company launched an effort to purchase the brewery and run it as a worker co-op after announcing it was declaring bankruptcy and closing for good. And lastly, the Bay is gaining another worker-owned business! 

We’re proud to share that Law Center Fellow Sarah Kaplan represented the workers of Nick’s Pizza and Bakery throughout the conversion process thanks to support from the Law Centers’ Worker Cooperative Legal Services Fund. The Legal Services Fund has been covering no-cost legal services to worker cooperatives since 2019 because many new cooperatives lack access to affordable and specialized legal support. Our Fund has enabled legal and technical support for 16 worker cooperatives across the country, including in Georgia, Ohio, Illinois, New York, California, and Puerto Rico. 

If you’d like to support worker cooperatives to gain access to legal services, consider donating!

We all want safe and healthy neighborhoods and stable housing, for ourselves, our family, and our kin. What we came to realize during our May #TenantsWithoutLandlords campaign, is the breadth and depth to which our community is living that vision. Our community is building housing policies that strengthen tenants' rights, identifying and utilizing legal tools to liberate housing and land, and organizing communities who govern their own housing and neighborhoods, so that we can take care of each other. We’re building a future our community deserves and it’s so exciting!

When we envision ways to create affordable and humane housing, what do we imagine?

A tight knit community of neighbors organize to own and control their multi-unit apartment building in North Oakland.

A Black elder rallies her East Bay community to help buy her Pinole rental home through grassroots fundraising and community developed CA housing policy.

A POC, community-centered development coop that’s democratically led, buys up buildings in Oakland to make them permanently affordable. 

These are not visions of the future but a few examples of the powerful cooperative housing organizing that has happened in the East Bay alone! It’s important to celebrate those who, despite the slow movement of policy change and greed of corporate landlords, continue to play with the possibility of a different way. 

How do you get your co-workers to support your projects with their input and support? In a worker self-directed organization, where workers have the freedom to choose which projects they dedicate their time and energy towards, this question can be trickier than you might expect. We all have different methods to rally colleagues around our individual work. But over the years we’ve learned, if you make the work a party, people will show up! Hence, Research Explosion Days! (If you want to see a peek into how we did it over 8 years ago, check out this fun video.)

My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.” 

- Ella Jo Baker, civil rights movement organizer

There’s something so nerve wracking about getting your photo taken. Maybe it’s from memories of school picture day and the emotions that go with it. Was my hair in place? Did I have anything in my teeth? Were my eyes even open for the photo?