The Sustainable Economies Law Center will be closed on Friday, May 10, 2024, joining the Global Strike for Rafah (#AllEyesOnRafah, #RiseForRafah) and supporting the urgent call for an immediate ceasefire. Today we join the call: No work! No school! No banking! No buying!  We are closing our offices and encouraging all staff to engage in local actions that advocate for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.  

By striking today, we aim to exercise our power to disrupt “business as usual.”  Our work centers on building systems based on solidarity economies and interdependence, and we recognize that our economic practices, including where we invest our time and resources, play a significant role in either perpetuating or challenging violence and injustice. 

We commend the student activists who are calling out their colleges and universities for their complicity in this genocide. As alumni of many of these institutions ourselves, we call for disclosure and divestment of their endowments from weapons manufacturers and other targets of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, as well as support for Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students, staff, and faculty, and amnesty for students, staff, and faculty who have participated in pro-Palestinian protests and encampments.

We are also taking this opportunity to better understand the role of the nonprofit industrial complex in perpetuating human rights violations against poor and oppressed people both at home and abroad. We aim to build a principled movement with other nonprofit workers who share our vision of dismantling the structures of power that contribute to these injustices.

#AllEyesOnRafah #RiseForRafah

Sustainable Economies Law Center joins the chorus of voices from around the world demanding an immediate ceasefire, an end to the siege on Gaza, and the release of Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners. We affirm our commitment to a world where all people live in their full dignity, free from subjugation and apartheid. We commit to honoring Palestinian self-determination. We commit to putting continued political pressure on our elected representatives, attending mass protests, and participating in boycotts. And as our friends and partners at Movement Generation have reminded us,

…we must continue to be visionary while oppositional. A ceasefire is imperative to stop the bad, but the battle will not end there, leaving Palestinians and Israeli settlers in the status quo of cyclical violence. Moving in the same direction as the ongoing movement to end Israel's occupation, genocide, and apartheid gives us a pathway to restore Palestinians’ right of return, self-determination, sovereignty, and land back. - 

The Path to Ecological Justice Runs Through a Free Palestine

Colonial laws have displaced and made way for violent theft of Palestinian land, just like the lands of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and beyond. We acknowledge that the law has consistently upheld the theft of communal land and wealth, which is why we practice and train other legal workers in nurturance lawyering  in our work to support land return to Indigenous and Black land stewards of Turtle Island. We must keep our hearts and minds open and engaged as we work towards a transformative shift away from privatization of land, which justifies racial and colonial violence, and remember that it is a “fictitious notion” created to restrict usage, to increase profit, and to create scarcity.

In this blog post, Law Center staff share how they’ve experienced and witnessed the impacts of settler colonialism in their lives and work, and how that experience helps us make sense of the ecological violence, displacement, and genocide currently happening to the people of Palestine. They also share resources on how to support and be in solidarity with the people of Palestine during this devastating time. With this piece, we’re also trying to be in conversation with each other, with our community, in hopes of supporting one another. We’re pushing back against professionalism and liberalism, which often has people afraid of speaking out, sharing individual experiences, and connecting with one another.

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.”

Imagine Indigenous and Black people free

to love and live with liberated Land.

Imagine the unique gifts the Land and her people have

to offer future generations.

This is happening now—a groundswell, a watershed moment.

This is happening here—in Northern California

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!

Housing is fundamental because housing is a prerequisite to everything: health, safety, and well-being. Can you imagine what our community would look like if we had all that we need?

Can we build new housing and not plug into the electricity grid? Recently, the Law Center wanted to help an Oakland-based grassroots group do this, and it brought up some interesting questions about law, about climate justice, and about life. 

Homeowners bear a heavy weight of responsibility, especially once they come to understand the role that property ownership and the speculative market have played in the theft of land, the impoverishment of communities, and the widening gap between the rich and poor. Over the years, Sustainable Economies Law Center has created several resources to help homeowners navigate the possibilities for buying, owning, and selling homes in greater alignment with values of social and racial justice. We've recently compiled some of those resources into one place here: Resources for Radical Home Sellers

What might we mean by “tenants without landlords?” This feels like a zen koan, a provocation to help us pause and revisit our understanding of what’s possible. Every person might have a different journey of inquiry with such a prompt. I’ll share one of my recent journeys, allowing me to glimpse the profound sanity of a world without landlords.

I just returned from a 6-month sabbatical in which I traveled to Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, India, Kenya, Tanzania, Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Fifteen years after becoming a lawyer, and 13 years after co-founding Sustainable Economies Law Center, I sought to immerse myself in places and cultures that could teach me what a kinder, more just, and more loving world can feel like. This is how I ended up spending a month in West Sumatra.

Dear friends, I hope this post brings you bursts of hope and nourishment. I’m sharing a collection of recent writings and videos in a slideshow called Patches of Aliveness. It’s like a quilt I’ve stitched together for the beautiful humans who are organizing more just, equitable, and caring communities. Each slide is a patch that, on its own, can perhaps bring you warmth or even inspiration when you need it. As a collection, I hope the patches can start to form a picture of a more nurturing world to heal the wounds inflicted by our legal and economic systems.