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

The Sustainable Economies Law Center will be closed on December 11, 2023, joining the Global Strike for Palestine (#GlobalStrike4Palestine) 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. 

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.