Our Strategies

Legal Research, Education, Advice, and Advocacy for Just and Resilient Economies

Direct Legal Support

We have four approaches to providing direct legal support to communities: 

Our Resilient Communities Legal Cafe is a “walk-in”advice clinic that happens 3 times each month, both in-person and on zoom. We serve about 30 clients each month with support from by dozens of volunteers. Since 2013, we’ve provided legal advice to 3,500+ grassroots organizations, cooperatives, and other social enterprises.

Consultations: We provide one-time consultations to organizations needing more specialized support than we can provide in the Legal Cafe setting. Through these consultations, we connect clients to resources and other sources of ongoing legal support, as needed.

Legal Support Teams: We form teams to provide ongoing legal support to organizations needing in-depth support. Teams tend to include staff, interns, and apprentices who meet regularly with clients, build relationships, and collaborate to creatively meet legal needs.

Legal Services Fund: We pay the cost of legal support provided by our Fellows to under-resourced organizations and cooperatives around the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico. Since 2019, we’ve disbursed over $174,000 to 23 Fellows to work on 46 clients and projects listed here.

Training and Supporting Legal Workers

Over the years, the Law Center has launched several programs to train and support lawyers and other legal workers, including the Cooperative Professionals Guild, a 300+ member online network, and an apprenticeship program through which five of our staff became lawyers without going to law school from 2013 to 2024. In 2025, our primary focus will be:

Fellows: Our 63-lawyer Fellowship Program supports these lawyers, and others, with annual gatherings and trainings and 2-3 monthly webinars and convenings, including a “Legal Beehive” where Fellows solve legal puzzles together. 

Apprentices: Our Radical Real Estate Law School supports community leaders to become lawyers without going to law school under CA’s Law Office Study Program, while building resources for radical real estate projects. 

Interns: We have an internship program that allows law students and other aspiring legal workers to get to know all aspects of the Law Center’s work, from internal governance to client support work. We also provide a living stipend to interns based on need.

Lawyers: We are a California-certified Mandatory Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) provider, and we maintain a library and annually offer for-credit training programs for lawyers. Beyond simply training lawyers on substantive legal topics, we also aim to offer a different vision for lawyering. See our blog and 3 training videos on Nurturance Lawyering.

Education and Research

The Law Center has built a wealth of legal guides, resource libraries, sample documents, and even cartoon legal documents to make the law welcoming and navigable to everyone. We also dive into innovative legal research to help our communities understand their place in the vast grey areas of the law. Some of our priorities include:

Legal resources and sample documents that we recently created:

⚖️ To support return of land to Indigenous people, we’re expanding on our Seeds of Land Return resource with guides on Gifting Your Home While You Live In It and Church Status for Land-Based Organizations.
⚖️ A complete re-design and new resources for our Co-opLaw.org resource library.
⚖️ A Cartoon Operating Agreement for an LLC cooperative, which our partner Ventures engaged a reading specialist to write for an audience with an 8th grade reading level. No legalese here!

Active research projects include:

⚖️ A Nonprofit Protection Guide that unpacks the risks of state repression with bills like H.R. 9495 and offers tools for nonprofits to protect themselves and their assets.
⚖️ A collection of new resources for donors and foundations about wealth redistribution and the democratization of philanthropy.
⚖️ Revamped food and farms resources, incorporating our learnings with partners over the last few years.

Policy Advocacy

We’ve spearheaded more than a dozen policy campaigns, passing laws to legalize homemade food enterprises, support worker cooperatives, and remove barriers to housing cooperatives, urban farming, and more. 

Hope Williams, our Director of Legislative Advocacy, works collaboratively with her coworkers to execute our state and regional policy strategies to bring the Law Center’s voice into many legislative conversations. We’re tracking legislation on housing, land, food, and worker cooperatives, while working in coalitions to catalyze new legislation.

Current policy work includes: 

🏛️ Researching legislation that cities could implement to Ban Land Grabs to stabilize communities in the face of corporate housing speculation. Last year, we finished an extensive report for Richmond, California, where we are working with partners to pass the ordinance!
🏛️ Co-drafting and coordinating legislative advocacy with the Let Us Contribute Initiative (LUCI), a coalition led by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people, to pass laws creating an ecosystem of worker cooperatives inside and outside of California prisons. 
🏛️ Exploring local ballot measures as a path to direct democracy and transformative legislation. Several staff are engaged with Community Democracy Project, which we have previously sponsored to gather signatures for an Oakland ballot initiative on participatory budgeting.
🏛️ Co-founding the Worker-Owned Recovery California (WORC) Coalition, which advocates for policies that help transition small businesses to employee-owned models.
🏛️ Working to fund and implement SB 1407: the CA Expanding Employee Ownership Act, a 2022 law we helped pass creating a worker co-op technical assistance hub within CA's Office of Business and Economic Development.
🏛️ Engaging in policy advocacy explorations with the California Food and Farm Network (CFFN).

Story Telling and Culture Keeping

The Law Center is as much a cultural organization as we are a legal organization, because we see law and culture as inextricably intertwined. We create films, cartoons, gatherings, events, writings, and other media to craft the story of the world we are co-creating with our clients and partners. When we bring this future to life through story, it lays the groundwork to shape the necessary laws and legal structures.

We’re co-creating a film on Indigenous and Black land justice with partners at The Cultural Conservancy. (See the Film Project Vision here.) This film builds on a convening we co-hosted in 2019, where a broad network of deep-rooted organizations collectively articulated a 100-year vision for land justice in the Bay Area. 

Our future of work campaign in May 2024 aimed to shift cultural narratives around labor and care work, including how cooperatives in prisons can be part of an abolitionist strategy and how to nurture caregivers under capitalism. Other examples of recent cultural work include our writings on kinship over transaction and decolonization and the law.

Incubation and Fiscal Sponsorship

The Law Center has created, incubated, fiscally sponsored, and/or spun-off nearly a dozen organizations. Most of these are projects conceived by Law Center staff in partnership with clients or collaborators.

These projects operate as largely autonomous organizations under our umbrella: 

✨ Minnow, a project to advance land justice for BIPOC farmers.
✨ Land Justice Film Project

We also incubated and continue to administer funding to three cooperatives: 

✨ People Power Solar Cooperative
✨ East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative
✨ Repaired Nations

We helped launch the following five organizations that now operate autonomously, as we continue
to collaborate: Worker-Owned Recovery California Coalition, The Cooperative Professionals Guild,
The Next Egg, Initiative for Energy Justice, and California Alliance for Community Composting.

We receive and administer funding to the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, the Let Us Contribute Initiative, Hasta Muerte Coffee Cooperative, Understory Worker Collective, and the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives (NoBAWC) for their cooperative education and development work. And we’ve also acted as a one-time fiscal sponsor to several other groups, when access to funding would have otherwise been impossible. 

Building Partnerships, Coalitions, and Ecosystems

We are intentional about building relationships, participating in coalitions and working groups, and nurturing ecosystems that enable broader transformation. In 2025, our closest collaborators will include: 

✨ Agroecology Commons
✨ Center for Ethical Land Transition
✨ East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative
✨ Sogorea Te’ Land Trust
✨ Homefulness / POOR Magazine
✨ Sawalmem (Winnemem Wintu Tribe)
✨ Housing Now!
✨ Community Democracy Project
✨ People Power Solar Cooperative
✨ U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives
✨ Climate Justice Alliance
✨ Nuns & Nones Land Justice Project
✨ The Cultural Conservancy
✨ Earth Equity
✨ Minnow
✨ Let Us Contribute Initiative
✨ Resist & Build
✨ New Economy Coalition
✨ Cooperative Professionals Guild
✨ Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives
✨ Nonprofit Democracy Network
✨ North Bay Organizing Project
✨ Justice Funders
✨ Resource Generation
✨ East Bay Community Law Center
✨ People’s Land and Housing Alliance
✨ California Community Land Trust Network
✨ Colmenar Cooperative Consulting
✨ Immigrants Rising
✨ Prospera
✨ Art.coop
✨ Repaired Nations
✨ Cooperation Richmond