By Sustainable Economies Law Center Staff Attorney, Cameron Rhudy

It’s Here, it’s Here, it’s Finally Here! Our Guide to Starting a Legal Cafe

Over the years we have received many inquiries from attorneys who want to start legal clinics  in their community that resemble our Resilient Communities Legal Cafe. In response, we have created our Practical Guide to Starting a Legal Cafe, a comprehensive guide for how to do just that. In the guide you will learn how to get the basics of your Legal Cafe in place and how to create that unique Legal Cafe experience. The guide also includes sample intake documents and a breakdown of tasks for scheduling and planning your Legal Cafe. 

By Sustainable Economies Law Center Executive Director, Janelle Orsi

So often, it comes back to money. Questions of finance are tethered to nearly every issue we work on at the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Efforts to build sustainable systems for food, housing, energy, water, and jobs rely on a community’s ability to access and transact with dollars.

By Sustainable Economies Law Center High School Summer Intern, Ciara Smith

In today’s society the idea of distributing a universal basic income can seem like a utopian ideal. In most cases it isn’t taken seriously because people are scared of change or fear such an idea would not work effectively. If you give a homeless man money you leave him with the choice to buy whatever he wants with it. It was your money so you want some say in what he does with it, but you don’t have any say in the matter and that, for me, is the hard part.

Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) endorses the Movement for Black Lives and their historic policy platform “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice.” This platform reflects the vision, courage, and collective will of more than 50 organizations and thousands of Black people struggling to make real the insight that “all lives will only matter when Black lives matter.”

By Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) Community Renewable Energy Intern, Adrien Salazar

I arrive on a day when the kids are learning about the Filipina revolutionary hero Gabriela Silang, making pinakbet, a vegetable stew, and getting familiar with the Tagalog words for emotions and feelings. I come to the Lakeshore United Methodist Church community center to find a group of kids chopping up vegetables with their instructor, chef and farmer Aileen Suzara.

By Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) Summer Intern, Adrien Salazar 

Communities of color have played and continue to play a pivotal role in realizing alternative economies in response to chronic economic exclusion in the United States. The history of civil rights is entwined with the history of cooperative economics in the United States. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, in her book Collective Courage, demonstrates this history in her account of black cooperatives and collectives in the United States. Nembhard documents the many black communities that organized cooperatives by necessity to build economic power in marginalized communities.

Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) Fall and Spring Legal Intern, Simon Mont, reflects on his experience researching - and participating in - a worker self-directed nonprofit.

I didn’t know much about SELC’s governance structure when I began interning. All I knew is that I had been offered the position by the founder of the organization, Janelle Orsi, but that she needed to check with the staff to make sure it was OK to bring me on. She mentioned that SELC had some sort of collaborative governance but didn’t really go into. A few days later, she suggested that I read “Reinventing Organizations” by Frederic Laloux in order to prepare for my position. The book described how the philosophy and structure of human organizations has changed over time, and how that shift relates to human development and our understandings of who we are and how we relate to others. As I read its account of innovative organizations that blend empowerment, democracy, and teamwork to succeed, I got a bit more insight into exactly what I was getting myself into. I started to understand that SELC’s vision for a new economy didn’t just require us to do new things; we had to do them in new ways.

By Sara Stephens, Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) Housing and Cooperatives Attorney

We want to create a worker cooperative…what legal entity should we form?

This is probably the most common question I hear at our Resilient Communities Legal Cafes. Lots of entrepreneurs come to us wanting to form a worker-owned business, but they are unsure what legal structure will work best for them. Are they required to form as a cooperative corporation? What if they’re not ready to incorporate yet? Can they form as an LLC or some other entity and still be a cooperative? What are the benefits and drawbacks of the entity options?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Berkeley Passes Resolution Supporting

Worker Cooperatives

BERKELEY, CA (February 9, 2016) — On Tuesday, the City of Berkeley made a bold proclamation in support of democratic and equitable workplaces, passing City Councilmember Jesse Arreguín’s “Resolution Supporting the Development and Growth of Worker Cooperatives.”