Are you passionate about Black economic justice? Are you involved in a Black-led collective, cooperative, or land trust? Apply to the North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship! Together, we will learn and reclaim the history of Black cooperation over 7 months through intentional practice, storytelling, and skill-building. Learn more here and apply below.
We’ll be kicking off Black History Month with another Black Study Session on Wednesday, February 1st, from 5-7pm on zoom. Registration link will be live soon!
Join us to learn about Black cooperatives, to meet other community members, and to learn more about community wealth building efforts, including the Black Community Trust Fund. These sessions are Black-centered, but all community members are welcome to come connect and learn. From housing collectives and social clubs to freedom farms and mutual aid, Black social, cultural, and economic solidarity IS Black History. Cooperation and collectivism live on as we fight for our liberation, and center our healing and joy.
Check out these incredible cooperators! These fellows are brilliant and imaginative and kind. You don’t want to miss them. You can get a preview below, and read all about them here.
Jayanthi RaJaSa, Yonci Peaceful Jameson, Kenna-Camara Cottman
House of Culture is a cooperative manifestation based in the oral tradition and griot skills that form the foundation of Voice of Culture.
Cal Adeboye, Lane Brown, Mari Fitch, Izzy Vielman, Mo Hanson, Jai Jami, Sun Kai
A Farm Called Home invests in Black and Indigenous future farmers by providing access to land-ownership and housing stabilization through cooperative development, education and environmental stewardship.
Olivia Nichols, Sophia Nichols, Syreeta Sevé
The mission of Lupine is to restore relationship with the land, animal, human, and plant kin in our home of Mni Sota Makoce.
Alicia Clerk, Chakita Lewis
Our mission is to develop a sisterhood based on mutual respect, collaboration, inclusion, and shared economic opportunity.
Mujahid Layton, Tenille Foreman
We seek to provide sanctuary to those seeking freedom from oppressive systems by modeling our ancestral agrarian & natural lifestyles on 20 acres of land in Georgia.
Jihan Thomas
We strive to be a place where Black people can gather to ideate, share the joy of the day, and just be.
Please join us in giving our new team member, Leanna Browne, a warm welcome! Leanna is a dancer, a teaching artist, a choreographer, and a connector in community. At Nexus, she’s a program associate working on the North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship. Right now, Leanna’s filling her cup through sharing space with folks and being in community.
“I’ve been thinking about how it is very easy to be isolated right now. I am thinking about how community is being cultivated. Where can people gather and be their full selves? Being a part of North Star—a Black-led and centered space—where folks are able to gather around cooperation, Black liberation, and community wealth has been really special.”
Outside of work, Leanna has been getting energy from dance. For Leanna, “dance is a way to not only be connected to your body but also to connect to others. Reconnecting with yourself and with community is powerful! I want to cultivate spaces for folks to experience that.” If you want to dance with Leanna, she has a free Umfundalai (muh-foon-duh-luh) class coming up! Learn more here.
Kai Andersen is a Gemini, Minneapolis born and raised, and chock full of thought-provoking questions. He joined Nexus in July 2021 as our North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship – Research Assistant. He also is a student pursuing his Master’s of Urban and Regional Planning (MURP) at the University of Minnesota.
For Kai and North Star, Black cooperation is a path to self and collective healing and transformation. As a part of The North Star Team, Kai will be helping to expand and deepen their curriculum on Black cooperative thought and practice. He will be taking a deep dive into the history and cultural lineages and legacies of Black cooperation, a journey that will span cooperation and survival after Slavery, cultural ways of living and working collectively, and present-day, formally incorporated cooperatives led by Black folks. Some people and co-ops already on his list include Fannie Lou Hamer and Freedom Farmers, Cooperation Jackson, Boston Ujima, and East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative.
Cooperatives are an economic development strategy that are particularly interesting to Kai, as an Urban Planning student. Historically, planners and their practices have harmed Black communities through extracting resources, redlining, disinvestment, Jim Crow laws and racist policies. As a Black, mixed race Urban Planner, Kai is reckoning with that history and learning about reparative planning practices that can help return those resources to Black communities.
For Kai, shared ownership is one of the most powerful and promising solutions out there. Unlike traditional economic development, cooperation and collective ownership are paths to big structural changes. He said, “doing work with coops is really energizing because of the self-determination that is central in it. Cooperatives allow our communities to explicitly develop what we want, and that can be reparative, transformative, and healing.”
When Black and Brown communities have ownership—of their own businesses, housing, or spaces—they are able to become powerful decision makers, protecting themselves and the interests of their neighborhoods, while also building community and intergenerational wealth. Community ownership offers an alternative to the all-too-common story: outside developers buy land and/or buildings in BIPOC neighborhoods, make decisions with little regard for the people who live there, resulting in the displacement of families, small businesses and communities. In his year with Nexus, Kai’s driven to explore “how cooperatives play a role in growing and dreaming…and in protecting our neighborhoods from displacement, gentrification, disinvestment and extraction.”
Before coming to Nexus, he worked at the Alliance for Metropolitan Stability and co-facilitated a workgroup on livability from a BIPOC, healing justice lens. Outside of work, he loves soaking in the energy of the Mississippi on river walks, enjoying herbal tea, and sharing food with people. Kai self-identifies as eclectic and renaissance-y, loving creative writing, theatre, music.
Did you miss our first North Star Information Session this morning? Thankfully we recorded it! Watch it below to learn about the 2021 North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship and our focus on Housing Coops and Land Trusts, and Investment Cooperatives.
You can apply here by filling out the application, or you can submit a video response with your answers to the application questions.
When this North Star cohort started in October, it was our first virtual cohort, our first cohort organized around collective land ownership, and our first cohort where entire cooperatives participated together. In anticipation of North Star graduation this Wednesday, we will be revisiting some of the North Star sessions, what they learned, and sharing some resources.
Cooperatives provide a different model of ownership and wealth sharing, and in the process, we are asked to invest deeply in one another, identify and communicate our needs, and skillfully navigate conflict. At Nexus, we realize that we are all connected – what affects one person or community, affects another – and this kind of approach to decisions and conflict is one part of learning how to honor our responsibility for each other. In April, Autumn Brown joined our North Star to discuss democratic decision making and conflict resolution.
A co-owner at AORTA, Autumn taught us about different models of democratic decision making and strategies for working through conflict. Autumn emphasized the importance of breaking down HOW decisions are made, identifying who has the final say, and thinking about if you like how it is. These considerations are key for any group of people starting a cooperative.
A key piece of democratic decision making is navigating conflict—a natural and healthy part of people working and/or living together. Autumn talked about how to prepare and plan for conflict before it even happens, making it easier for conflict to be handled well, and be generative and healthy for the group. For example, self-evaluations of conflict styles, helping cooperative members understand how they feel about conflict, and how they like to address it, help cooperatives determine their approach to conflict before it starts.
Conflict resolution skills are foundational in cooperatives, and in our lives, communities, and movements as well. Dealing with conflict in grounded and centered ways can be difficult, but is essential. As we fight for better futures for all of us, we must simultaneously consider how we govern ourselves—how we want to be together, how to make decisions together, how we want to deal with hurt and harm, and what accountability means to us.
Do you want to learn more about North Star? Mark your calendars for graduation this Wednesday (5/26)! Learn about our incredible fellows, and hear some of our keynote speaker Noni Session’s wisdom (East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative). Click here to RSVP.
When this North Star cohort started in October, it was our first virtual cohort, our first cohort organized around collective land ownership, and our first cohort where entire cooperatives participated together. In anticipation of North Star graduation this Wednesday, we will be revisiting some of the North Star sessions, what they learned, and sharing some resources.
Second in our series is our session on cooperative governance. Governance describes the shared agreements that shape how your cooperative actually works, like determining how people become members, how members share profits, who can be on the coop’s board, or how the cooperative communicates. At Nexus, we believe that when we make decisions that affect our lives, we share the power in making those decisions, and co-op governance is a big part of that.
Signe Harriday started our session off by sharing her journey with cooperatives, and how she became one of the co-founders and co-owners of Rootsprings. Rootsprings is a land-based Cooperative in greater MN stewarding space for healing and development of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) artists, activists, healers, and community centering Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ) folx.
Rootsprings has two legal structures, a non-profit and a cooperative. This dual structure allows them to leverage tax-deductible dollars to support their start up costs while they build out a self-sustaining cooperative businesses model. Fellows really vibed with Rootsprings, the creativity of their structure, and the need for BIPOC and LGBTQ centered healing spaces where folks can connect with nature.
Renee Hatcher, a community lawyer based in Chicago, spoke about her experience leaning into Black cooperative history, and how she tries to bring that into the cooperative law field. As a cooperative lawyer, Renee helps worker-owners understand cooperative legal structures, and many different ways of governing are possible within them. Cooperatives are a space that allows us to decolonize how we govern by relying on our own indigenous democratic practices.
Do you want to learn more about North Star? Mark your calendars for graduation this Wednesday (5/26)! Learn about our incredible fellows, and hear some of our keynote speaker Noni Session’s wisdom (East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative). Click here to RSVP.
Cooperatives are a key part of transitioning to a just economy, and cooperative finance is a crucial piece of the process. But, with banks’ and lenders’ histories of racism in lending to Black and Brown communities, applying for loans can be daunting. The North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship exists to help Black-led cooperatives navigate these processes in community and with support.
Last month, the North Stars dove into finance with our partners at Shared Capital, Jessica and Samantha, Social Impact Strategies, Elaine Rasmussen, E Coco Consulting and Nexus’ own Christina Nicholson, the Worker Owner Initiative Program Manager. Our speakers and teachers were thoughtful, supportive, realistic as they shared their expertise and answered fellows’ questions.
Shared Capital is a CDFI (community development financial institution) that finances cooperatives across the nation. Jessica and Samantha walked the fellows through the loan application process, the different types of investments they can make in cooperatives, and the ways the cooperative principles guide Shared Capital’s work.
Afterwards, our partners had a panel discussion about their experiences with cooperative finance, including different opportunities and obstacles Black-led cooperatives can face when raising capital. Elaine talked about how to get connected to and build relationships with investors. Coco talked about opportunities to raise money to support cooperatives in an unexpected place—philanthropy. She gave fellows insights into how to navigate spaces with funders and find opportunities for funding that might not be obvious.
Fellows and speakers supported each other in this conversation about financing. Together, they unpacked how banks, lenders, and foundations have extracted wealth from Black communities while also denying them support—this historical and present discrimination can make financing an exhausting process. It was powerful for fellows and speakers to talk about these barriers together and find support in their shared experiences. Black people have built cooperatives throughout history to support each other and thrive, and there is a tight community of folks ready to dig in and help other cooperators out.
Do you want to learn more about North Star? Mark your calendars for graduation next Wednesday! Learn about our incredible fellows, and hear some of our keynote speaker Noni Session’s wisdom (East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative). Click here to RSVP.
At our last session, Mapping Prejudice set the context of racist and Anti-Black housing discrimination in the Twin Cities, while Angela Dawson of 40 Acre Coop showed us an alternative: Black cooperative ownership and land reclamation.
After learning more about racial covenants and the rigged rules that barred Black communities from building wealth, we had a vibrant discussion about what culturally-rooted home ownership can in Black communities. In the context of hundreds of years of oppression, focusing on the individual alone is not enough—we need a village of folks who rely on each other and work together.
Angela Dawson, President & CEO of 40 acre coop and 4th gen Midwest Farmer, shared a vision of cooperation. Existing and taking up space as a Black person in Rural Minnesota, in the white-dominated hemp industry, is challenging because many systems are not designed for us. However, 40 Acre Coop is thriving and relishing in the power of reclaiming ancestral knowledge and Black folks’ ties to the land, farming, growing, and plants—and making those opportunities accessible to other Black farmers in Minnesota and throughout the US.
On day 1 of the Chauvin Trial, we ground ourselves in powerful projects that invest in and nourish Black life and joy, like 40 Acre Coop. Justice is transformation and radically reimagining how our world can and should look. The courts will not and have never given that to us—community is building the future we need, now and always. #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd
The North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship (NSBCF) has extended it’s deadline for applications to Friday, November 27th. You can find the application to apply here.
Also, the North Star Information Session zoom recording and the powerpoint presentation are both now available.NorthStar2021InfoSessionPPT If you have questions regarding the North Star 2021 Fellowship please feel free to reach out to Nkuli Shongwe Nshongwe@nexuscp.org or Danielle Mkali at dmkali@nexuscp.org
Please check out the Housing and Land edition of the North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship. The North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship is a five-month fellowship focused on Black American Cooperative Economics. North Star is centered on the history of Black cooperative economic thought and practice. Our 2021 North Star Fellowship will focus on housing cooperatives and land trust models for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. As a cohort, fellows will explore the power and landscape of resident-controlled community ownership models that are permanently affordable and provide dignified housing options for our communities. We are forming a cohort of fellows that have a vision of collective living, permanently affordable, and community-controlled land and co-operative housing that will provide a space for our communities to have access to spiritual, cultural, and economically sound options.
Also, new this year, we are only accepting applications in groups of 2 or more. Apply here! And for more information please contact Danielle Mkali at dmkali@nexuscp.org or Nkuli Shongwe at nshongwe@nexuscp.org.
