About This Episode

In 2010, The American Bar Association named Janelle Orsi a Legal Rebel, for being an attorney who is remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation. We agree- Janelle is a rebel with a cause, transforming the way we think about leadership in this shifting economy. From participatory leadership to salary transparency, Janelle is leading by example to expand our definition of leadership. In this episode, Janelle shares examples of how her organization’s leadership practices create opportunities for every level of staff to be engaged in contributing to the organization.

About Janelle Orsi

Janelle Orsi is a lawyer, advocate, writer, and cartoonist focused on cooperatives, the sharing economy, land trusts, shared housing, local currencies, and rebuilding the commons.She is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), which facilitates the growth of more sustainable and localized economies through education, research, and advocacy. Janelle has also worked in private law practice at the Law Office of Janelle Orsi, focusing on sharing economy law since 2008. Janelle is the author of Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy: Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise, and Local Sustainable Economies (ABA Books 2012), and co-author of The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life & Build Community (Nolo Press 2009), a practical and legal guide to cooperating and sharing resources of all kinds.

Janelle’s cartoons include Awkward Conversations with Babies, The Next Sharing Economy, Economy Sandwich, Share Spray, The Beatles Economy, The Legal Roots of Resilience, Housing for an Economically Sustainable Future, Transactional Law Practice for a Sharing Economy, Governance is Life, and Citylicious.

Janelle is an advocate for a more open, inclusive, and accessible legal profession, and you can see her 10-minutepresentation on transforming the legal profession here. Janelle supervises two legal apprentices — co-workers who are becoming lawyers without going to law school. Janelle and her apprentices are blogging about the process at LikeLincoln.org. 

In 2014, Janelle was selected to be an Ashoka Fellow, joining a robust cohort of social entrepreneurs who are recognized to have innovative solutions to social problems and the potential to change patterns across society.  In 2010, Janelle was profiled by the American Bar Association as a Legal Rebel, an attorney who is “remaking the legal profession through the power of innovation.” In 2012, Janelle was one of 100 people listed on The (En)Rich List, which names individuals “whose contributions enrich paths to sustainable futures.”

In her words…

“I’ve come to realize, if we cultivate the right conditions, we can end up with communities and organizations where, a lot of people, or even all the people, feel that they have power and agency to just shape the world around them.” “I have a lot of hope and optimism for what I think we can do in this world. I think a lot of my role as a leader has just been to help impart that same enthusiasm. I do that. I really hone my skills as a communicator and I do a lot of speaking, I draw a lot of cartoons, I do a lot of writing in ways that I hope inspire other people. What ends up happening is that when other people are inspired, they’re highly intrinsically motivated to get involved. That’s my form of leadership, it’s spurring a lot of voluntary and intrinsically motivated participation in this work as opposed to coercive. I almost never want somebody to do something if they don’t feel intrinsically motivated to do it. For me, my style is to create the vision and communicate it in a way that people are going to want to and feel really driven to get involved in.” “I think we need to start young and just get everybody used to having more power in agency. I think most people walk around their cities or their neighborhoods and they watch things happen. They see, ‘Oh, that building got bought up by a big developer,’ or, ‘That building’s being torn down.’ They watch things happen and it just sort of washes over us, but we don’t always necessarily feel like we have the power or opportunity to change things or shape the world around us. To the extent that we can start practicing that in small ways and creating opportunities for people everywhere to practicing that in small ways, it’ll, I think, ultimately lead to people doing it in bigger ways and having a bigger impact.” “Sometimes I hear people say, ‘there are too many nonprofits,’ or ‘there’s too much redundancy.’ You know, we don’t need more nonprofits, but in a way, I think that we do, because every organization or every program within an organization is a space in which people are able to have a lot of agency and power and to take things on and to achieve a lot. And the degree of social change that we need, if we really are gonna make it through this next 10 years, we have the UN predicting that 2030 is the year in which basically climate change is gonna be irreversible. These are huge problems to take on and of course, the inequality’s been getting worse. Racism’s been getting worse. We’re on a trajectory where things are getting worse, and so to really turn things around, it’s gonna take a lot. A lot of people really focusing on making that change.” “I think the nonprofit sector will grow and that it should grow and that there should be a diversity of organizations working in the same sector. A lot of people say, ‘don’t just duplicate efforts’. But I think we should duplicate efforts. We need a lot of people doing the same kind of work, but doing it in their unique communities, in their unique ways, trying innovative things. And so I think a plurality and diversity and multiplicity of nonprofits emerging in coming years I think will be important. And I think the highly participatory leadership structure is gonna be really critical to that in order to create that leaderful society.” “I just think the passion and the dedication and the intrinsic motivation of nonprofit workers is perhaps the most valuable resource that we have for social change. That it’s the workers themselves and the drive and the motivation that we bring. That’s what’s really going to make change. And then in order to tap into that drive and into that motivation, we have to be thinking about our organizational structures and our organizational culture. So it could really come down to that. Maybe this is my way of saying that nonprofits that aren’t really thinking deeply about their structure and their culture right now are missing an opportunity to tap into that incredibly valuable resource.” 

Questions Answered on this Episode

• What is shareable leadership?
• Why do you think it is beneficial in the nonprofit sector?
• What issues or opportunities do you see in traditional structures of leadership?
• Cooperatives and shared economy models are seeing a surge in popularity. In many ways, cooperatives, in particular, are creating new economic opportunities for people who may have been previously counted out. How do we invest in those leaders and groups to prepare them as their organizations grow?
• How would you describe your leadership style?
• What has been the overall response to the concept of shareable leadership?
• Are there specific conditions under which the model will thrive or fail?
• What response does “shareable leadership” get from funders? Have they embraced the concept?
• Our current political climate has birthed leaders that haven’t followed the typical trajectory but felt the need to lead in order to create something better. Do you have any predictions about leadership structures and what we may see in the next 5 or 10 years?

The post Legal Rebel, Janelle Orsi, Transforms the Way We Think About Leadership appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Nonprofit Democracy Network is a community of practice and peer support network for organizations working to make their organizations – and the broader nonprofit sector – more liberatory and transformative. We want the nonprofit sector to be more effective at creating a just, joyful, and sustainable world. We want our organizations to be living examples of the equitable, caring, and effective communities that we know are possible. And we know that there is a rich field of experimentation and practice of democratic self-governance from which we can learn and which we can help grow by building and sharing with one another.

We launched the network at our inaugural gathering in fall of 2017 (read more about it here). At our second gathering, March 27-29, 2019, we’ll dive into the nuts and bolts of co-creating forms of collective self-governance, taking on topics like compensation, inclusive decision-making, the impact of identity and culture on participation, coordination and accountability, and collective budgeting of time and money.

Participants in the inaugural Nonprofit Democracy Network gathering

Are you part of an organization experimenting with any of these areas? We would love for you to join us! This is an opportunity to learn about the state of the field, connect with fellow practitioners, learn from groups at the forefront of experimentation, and deepen your own organization’s practice.

We’re looking for organizations that are:

• Committed to undoing dynamics of racism, patriarchy, and other forms of structural oppression;
• Playing with more democratic internal structures, regardless of how far advanced; and
• Interested in being part of an ongoing network to deepen this work.

More details:

Format:This three day gathering will include education, conversation, and co-creation around common themes of collective leadership. The first day will focus on frameworks for organizational design and how those relate to systems change, identity, and liberation. On the second day, participants will break into smaller groups to dive deeper into specific issues and growing edges (e.g. staff/board structure, compensation policies). The third day will focus on identifying next steps and how to integrate learnings into your organizations.

Cost: Sliding scale from $400 – $1500 based on organization’s annual operating budget. We want participation in this cohort to be as accessible and community-driven as possible. We also want to justly compensate our facilitators, organizers, and other vendors. (Cost includes venue, facilitation, and meals over three days for 2 org representatives.) More information on cost included in the application form.

Organized and facilitated by: Participants in the 2017 Nonprofit Democracy Network, including staff from Sustainable Economies Law Center, Community Development Project, 350 Seattle, Reflex Design Collective, and more.

For more information and to apply: Fill out this Application by December 5th, and we will get back to you by the end of December.

WHEN
March 27, 2019 at 9am – March 30, 2019
WHERE
Exact venue TBD
Oakland, CA 94612
United States
CONTACT
Chris Tittle · [email protected]

Photo by CIFOR

The post Tools for Collective Self-Governance: A Nonprofit Democracy Network Gathering appeared first on P2P Foundation.

At the Sustainable Economies Law Center, we support creativity and innovation in many ways, one of which is to uplift homemade food enterprises. So, it wasn’t easy to come to our decision to not support AB 626. AB 626 is a bill that was drafted at the behest of tech company executives and lobbyists to prioritize their interests above the interests of home cooks and consumers. After being stalled for several months, the bill passed a vote of the full Assembly in January and will soon be up for a vote in the Senate Health Committee.

The media has been reporting a lot lately on “the dark side of the tech revolution” (KQED) as you may have noticed. The New York Times Magazine described typical strategy among tech start-ups as striving to “metastasize from transaction enablers to, with sufficient success, participation gatekeepers.” An example of this is food-delivery apps like Seamless which tout convenient ways for customers to get food delivered from local restaurants, but in some cities the app has become so pervasive that “its customer base becomes too big to ignore, even for restaurants that struggle to afford its steep commissions” so a consumer-friendly app becomes just another means for consolidated corporate control of the food system.

We recognize that the fundamental paradigm of Big Tech is a problem: this paradigm which revolves around extremely rapid growth, monopolization, exploitation of workers and user data, disregard for important public safety and worker protection laws, and inhumane and unsustainable profit maximization.

So what’s the solution?

Our friends and allies have repeatedly called for a new revolution in tech that would make tech platforms democratically owned and controlled by users, proposing to make Facebook a regulated utility or a platform cooperative and proposals to buy Twitter to make it a cooperative. People have wondered: what if Uber were owned by the Uber drivers? Spoiler alert: venture capitalists, business executives, and absentee shareholders who own and control these tech giants tend to disapprove of such proposals so while they are exciting visionary ideas that stimulate important conversations, they are not likely to be realized in the near future.

But while an established tech giant becoming a user-owned cooperative seems far fetched, we’ve been engaged in another opportunity to change the paradigm of Big Tech and support the creation of more community-owned tech platforms. That brings us back to AB 626, the California bill that proposes to dramatically change the regulation of homemade food sales to be much more permissive; a bill that would represent a major shift in food safety regulations and likely set new precedent around the country.

The bill is backed by tech companies, including Airbnb and executives of the soon-to-be retired tech start-up Josephine, among other venture capital backed tech companies. There are numerous reasons to support the general concept of the bill: legalizing an industry that’s already active, creating more opportunities for small business ownership, supporting local food systems, and more. One reason we’ve historically supported legalizing homemade food enterprises is that this provides opportunities to challenge concentrated corporate control of the food system.

However, tech company executives and lobbyists have been making the decisions on the direction of this bill. The bill has been amended several times and more amendments could be on the way, but each version of the bill has failed to place serious responsibilities on the tech companies involved in transacting sales of homemade food and each version has failed to ensure adequate worker protections. We fear the imminent Uberization of homemade food if nothing is done to change course.

We have proposed a policy that would allow more sales of fresh homemade foods made in home kitchens with reasonable food safety requirements (such as safe food handling training, kitchen inspections, sanitary standards) and with the important condition that only certain types of legal entities could operate a web application or web platform that promotes sales of homemade food and takes a cut of each transaction. This is very similar to how California law has restricted certified farmers’ markets for decades: only certified farmers, nonprofits, and local governments may manage farmers’ markets (for-profit non-farm enterprises such as Walmart and Whole Foods cannot operate a farmers’ market) which helps protect the integrity of the farmers’ market as supporting farmers by providing a venue for direct producer to consumer sales of fresh agricultural products.

This is an opportunity to change the paradigm of tech: if this alternative vision were incorporated into California’s next expansion of homemade food legislation it could set a huge precedent in tech across sectors and around the globe.

We need your help! Forms of support needed range from simple letter writing to more active participation in a working group, community outreach, and more.

Read our much more detailed policy paper here.

Read more about the evolving political landscape of homemade food in California here.

Photo by siwiaszczyk

The post Supporting new cooperative tech paradigms to protect the homemade food economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The complex issues arising out of Silicon Valley are numerous, from sexual harassment in the workplace to exclusion of women and people of color from career opportunities to dismissing impacts of the tech industry on gentrification.

And these issues are not isolated, they are deeply connected by a pervasive and insular start-up culture and an economic paradigm over-reliant on venture capital. The false promises of the “gig economy” that these companies celebrate must be faced head on, including in the food system.

That’s why we cannot support AB 626, the homemade food bill that has been pending in the California Legislature for the past year. After being stalled for several months, the bill passed a vote of the full Assembly last week. At the Sustainable Economies Law Center, we work to support creativity and innovation in many ways, including by supporting homemade food enterprises. So, it wasn’t easy to come to our decision to not support AB 626.

Here’s the thing about legislation: it reflects the people who write it, and this bill was written by a tech start-up. . The most recent changes to the bill make it so that home cooks carry all of the liability while the tech platforms that promote the transaction and take a cut of cooks’ incomes cannot be held liable if anything goes wrong. Tech platforms wanting to take profits but avoid all liability is essentially the same story we’ve seen play out with Uber and Lyft denying any responsibility for liability when their passengers have been injured or even killed by negligent drivers. But AB 626 proposes unprecedented protections against liability for gig economy apps: it expressly shields web platforms from liability for any illness or injury associated with food purchased through its platform. As a point of comparison, since 2013, California law requires ride apps such as Uber and Lyft to carry $1 million per incident liability insurance to cover their drivers (separate from any insurance individual drivers may carry). Some cities, such as San Francisco, require Airbnb hosts to carry liability insurance.

Food system workers are already among the lowest paid and the most vulnerable workers in our economy and we need to rethink what the future of work looks like in a healthy, resilient community, especially in our food and farming systems. We don’t need a technological quick fix, we need a new paradigm that values all workers, regardless of their status as employees or contractors. We need a new paradigm for workers that protects their rights in balance with consumer preference for fast and convenient service. We need a new paradigm in our economy that provides real economic opportunities for everyone, not just the elite. And we need a new paradigm in policymaking, where grassroots food justice and workers’ rights organizations are at the table, not on the menu.

So we are urging the California Legislature to set a new course for homemade food sales through tech platforms, starting with rejecting AB 626 and bringing home cooks and community based organizations to the table to craft a bill that truly empowers workers of the next economy. We’ve put forth a proposal for an equitable homemade food economy that includes a new type of “gig economy” platform that is owned and controlled by the very users and workers that give the company its value: a platform cooperative.

Incidentally, last week on the heels of the pro-tech platform amendments, the start-up behind AB 626, Josephine, announced it will be closing down in the next few months. This opens the door to an even higher likelihood that some other entity, with far less of an interest as Josephine in supporting home cooks, will dominate the homemade food economy. There is no guarantee that the preferred platform for homemade food will prioritize workers’ rights, food safety, and economic justice. Unless we act soon.

Take action today!

• If you have not yet written to your legislator, find a template letter here. This is an easy and helpful way to get involved.
• Please sign up here if you have time to volunteer during the next few months.
• Read our detailed policy proposal here.

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Photo by nicubunu.photo

The post The Future of Homemade Food is at Risk appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The NPDN is not the only attempt to learn how to operate effective nonprofit organizations; what sets it apart from other similar projects is how it defines “effective.”  For the NPDN, deliverables, quantifiable metrics, and program delivery are limited measurements of effectiveness; equally important is the extent to which the relationships, culture, and governance of the organization enacts values of justice, community, and sustainability while creating the potential for systemic transformation. This group of organizations envisions a liberated, resilient, and dynamic movement capable of solving social problems at their roots; and they have come together to help each other build it.

Participating organizations had varying areas of focus: providing legal services for immigrants, organizing permaculture action day, creating feminist media, ensuring access to abortions, and coordinating new economy organizations. Like trees in a forest, they may appear separate but underneath the surface they are connected. This diverse group is united by two characteristics: (1) an understanding that the success of all of their work depends on transforming patterns deeply embedded into our social, political, and economic system;  and (2) a need for organizational models that enable them to collaborate more effectively and equitably.

The gathering charted much of the terrain of democratic organizational governance. Each participating organization facilitated conversations or gave presentations on one of a number of topics including staff structure, culture creation, strategic planning, participatory budgeting, tactical fundraising, just compensation, and efficient and equitable decision-making. Since the end of the gathering, organizations have been staying in contact one-on-one, participating in group check-in calls, sharing support through a Slack group, and building an online resource bank.

This three-day gathering was just the beginning. Organizations across the country and around the world are acutely aware of a central struggle we all face:  many of our solutions to social problems reproduce the very problems they are trying to solve, and until we solve that dynamic, we we will never be able to really accomplish our goals.  This nascent network is not just bringing the conversation to the nonprofit sector, it is coming up with solutions and experiments to work through the struggles it observes.

Want to learn more and hear about upcoming opportunities to participate? Sign up here and we’ll keep you in the loop!

The post Launching the Nonprofit Democracy Network appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are nonprofit organizations that acquire land with the goal of creating permanently affordable housing. There are various regional CLTs whose purpose is to acquire land for low-income residents, and keep it out of the speculative market indefinitely. These CLTs would be able to do their job more effectively, however, if there were adequate funding sources and legal mechanisms to enable them to compete with private developers. As it is now, few private banks are willing to offer loans to housing cooperatives and other CLT projects. California law entitles nonprofits to intervene on tax-defaulted properties after five years of delinquency and before a private developer is given the opportunity to bid (CAL. REV. & TAX. CODE § 3791.4), but this law is rarely enforced. In a world where the poor, elderly, and disabled are being thrown to the streets without relocation fees because of loopholes in rent control laws (such as Costa Hawkins and the Golden Duplex Rule), CLTs must be adequately funded so that they can intervene when property becomes available.

In San Francisco, supportive legislation called the Small Sites Acquisition Fund was recently passed to help enable nonprofit developers to acquire properties before tenants are evicted through the Ellis Act. But the amount allocated by the fund per unit is still not enough to keep the property affordable to low-income tenants. Many CLTs are stuck waiting for land to be donated or sold to them below market rate in order to accomplish their mission.

Other housing models in the Bay have also challenged the status quo of property ownership. The Sustainable Economies Law Center and the People of Color Sustainable Housing Network have teamed up to create the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EBPREC), which combines features of CLTs, limited equity housing cooperatives, and self-organizing social movements. In addition to residents, members of EBPREC will include neighbors who want to support the initiative by investing what they are able (up to $1000) to empower the community to take ownership of their neighborhoods. Although this model has a broad base of support in its incipient phase, start-up funding is still necessary to acquire land and begin its first project.

Many private banks and lending institutions hesitate to fund projects that benefit local communities because they determine that it is too risky, or not profitable enough. The federal statute, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), was supposed to require banks to address the needs of low and moderate income communities where they do business. The CRA is currently under attack by the Trump Administration, and even without changes in the law, there is still inadequate oversight to require banks to live up to this standard. At least 97% of banks receive outstanding or satisfactory ratings under CRA standards, despite evidence that many have engaged in discriminatory practices, including but not limited to the predatory lending that took place during the 2008 foreclosure crisis. There are examples of banks doing the right thing, however. For example, OneUnited Bank in Boston created a loan fund specifically for Community Land Trusts. More banks must follow their example to invest in the communities and projects that need capital the most.

Instead of waiting for more banks to do the right thing though, we must take matters of capital investment into our own hands. Public banks have been proposed in the cities of Oakland and San Francisco. We must demand not only that they are created, and that these banking institutions refrain from investing in pipelines, prisons, and other destructive institutions, but also that these banks invest in enterprises and organizations that benefit the community directly, and that they be governed by the community, with adequate oversight that they stay true to their mission. (See this essay by the Defenders of Mother Earth – Huichin coalition for a discussion of how to create accountability over public banks.) The creation of permanently affordable and community controlled housing, the kind created by CLTs and the PREC model, must be prioritized and funded to benefit local residents at risk of being displaced.

Here are a number of ways you can get involved:

• Sign up to be a community stakeholder with the East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative! http://ebprec.org/community-stakeholder-pledge

• Donate to preserve another permanently affordable housing project in Oakland! https://www.crowdrise.com/newton-house-collective

• Support the creation of a public bank in Oakland! https://friendsofpublicbankofoakland.org/

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Photo by byzantiumbooks

The post Permanently Affordable Housing: Challenges and Potential Paths Forward appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Before introducing those peculiarities, first some background: If people could own their energy, they’d be more secure – both financially and infrastructurally. We could save money and increase our ability to bounce back after natural disasters by producing clean, decentralized energy in our own communities. If ordinary people could put their money toward renewables, instead of investing in fossil fuels on Wall Street, we’d also speed up our response to climate change.

But as we began working toward this vision for community-owned renewable energy, strange things started turning up. We found that you can’t share power with your neighbors even if your roof could produce enough solar power for the both of you. And it’s legally very difficult to pool resources to build and access energy from a neighborhood solar project. Ultimately, most people aren’t able to access local solar energy because they are renters, have poor credit scores, or don’t have enough sun exposure on their roof for solar panels.

Stranger yet, there is a lot of money incentivizing solar for some people, but not as much for low to moderate-income households. Solar tax credits are available for homeowners and wealthy investors, but what about everyone else?

We’ve been working to address those strange things. For example, thanks in part to our advocacy, it’s now at least possible to develop shared solar energy projects with your neighbors. Unfortunately, because of opposition from entrenched interests, it’ll cost a premium for most people to take advantage of that policy. But while there are barriers to sharing energy, we believe we have found a path forward with a new legal model: the Permanent Community Energy Cooperative.

This model allows everyone to join a cooperative that strives for permanent access to and control of renewable energy for all of its members. We recently were awarded a grant from the California Energy Commission through the CalSEED program to further develop this model. Exciting! It may be just strange enough to work! If you’d like to learn about some our stranger thoughts behind it, check out this cartoon.

Let us know if you want to learn more and stay informed on community energy updates — such as jobs or volunteer opportunities, social events, and hopefully one day, memberships in an energy cooperative.

We haven’t been spooked by the strange things we’ve run into — we’re energized by the emerging opportunities and hope you are too!

Photo by National Renewable Energy Lab

The post A Permanent Community Energy Cooperative model to fight climate change and wealth inequality appeared first on P2P Foundation.

So we keep pondering community investing as a capital-raising strategy for farmers, ag. co-ops, and other food and farm enterprises, especially beginning farmers who often strive to implement sustainable agricultural and fair labor practices.

Although “direct public offerings” and other community investment campaigns have successfully raised capital for many community-based food enterprises including grocery co-ops, restaurants, artisan breweries and creameries, they are less common among farm enterprises. These strategies work well for local food businesses because, for one, people who don’t  think much about investing often feel a strong personal connection to their local cafe, eatery, or grocery store and will invest in a local owner’s business because of that connection. Most people have less connection with their local farm.

We don’t actually know of many agricultural enterprises that have successfully raised money directly (not through a national or global exchange) from the public in California recently. One example is Farm Fresh to You, a multi-farm community supported agriculture (CSA) business that operates multiple farms, and aggregates produce from many more farms, to deliver organic produce boxes to consumers throughout California.

So why aren’t farmers and agricultural cooperatives using community financing options more? We’re not really sure but we have a few guesses. One is that farming is a ton of work even and crowd-financing campaigns are also laborious. It might just be too much for one or a few beginning farmers to do both simultaneously. Another guess is that it may be more difficult to raise capital from the community in rural areas where people are more spread out. Another issue is likely rural poverty. There may be other reasons. In any case, we’d like to find out if community investment campaigns have the potential to transform financing for the beginning farmers of today and tomorrow.

What types of agricultural enterprises or farmers might be good candidates for community investment campaigns? Here’s a list of indicators:

• Farm enterprises seeking to raise roughly between $200,000 and $1 million for purchasing land, equipment, supplies, or for working capital;
• Farmers with experience in farming who can instill a sense of confidence in prospective investors;
• Farmers committed to organic, diversified, pasture-grazing, and/or other sustainable farming practices;
• Farmers who are active in the community and well-connected to their customers (i.e., through sales at farmers’ markets, CSAs, or on-farm tours and events);
• Farmers who are enthusiastic about the idea of asking their customers and community to become investors in their farm business;
• Farmers who can develop a clear and concise business plan, either working alone or with a business advisor;
• Farm enterprises seeking growth capital over a 2 to 3 year period (because community investment campaigns take some time to plan and execute they are not suitable for urgent funding needs);
• Farmers with strong communication skills. English fluency is not essential, but farm enterprises need at least one one person who can communicate, orally and in writing, in a compelling way about the business); and
• Farmers dedicated to the farming enterprise for a long period of time.

Like what you read here? See our Grassroots Finance page for more about what we’re up to and sign up for our newsletter here to get updates in your inbox. Also, coming up September 10 through 13 is the annual ComCap Conference in Monterey, California where members of the Law Center’s staff will be speaking along with other thought leaders, movers, and shakers in the community capital movement.

Photo by gmtbillings

The post Can Community Capital Finance the Next Generation of Farmers? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The fate of a banana peel can illustrate this. Different regulatory frameworks apply when the peel is:

1. picked up from a restaurant or residence (local waste collection laws);
2. transported in a vehicle (state and local laws);
3. dropped at an intermediate location (state transfer laws and local zoning laws);
4. taken to a composting facility (state compost facility licensing laws, environmental laws, and zoning laws);
5. rotting (ongoing reporting requirements by the compost facility);
6. bagged up for sale (testing and labeling laws); and
7. sold (special sales tax rules sometimes apply).

Those are a lot of legal considerations for a decomposition process that nature has traditionally managed without any guidance whatsoever!

Compost is a hot topic now, mainly because compost can save the earth! Or, at the very least, it can greatly enhance our ability to sequester carbon. Also, many states now have legislated mandates to systematically divert organic waste from landfills. In California, this requires that we scale our composting infrastructure rapidly. One legislative analyst estimated that more than 14,000 jobs could be created by such a mandate.

We have only a short window of time to influence the shape of the nascent compost industry. Will large corporations build massive compost facilities and seek exclusive rights to manage our communities’ green waste? Or can we act now to create a decentralized, community-based composting sector that will create rich soil, fertile local gardens and farms, educational opportunities, and good jobs? Law and policy play a significant role in answering that question, which is why the Law Center has gotten involved.

Over the past two years, volunteers have helped us research compost law, draft policy recommendations, pitch legislative proposals in California, and provide legal advice to community-based compost organizations. Now, we are collaborating with a loose coalition of California-based compost organizations to explore advocacy routes. If we can raise sufficient funds, we’ll likely expand to do this work nationally.

We’ve also been working with wonderful law students and Berkeley Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic to produce a draft brief for policymakers on ways to advocate for community composting. We are currently working to revise and expand this brief. In the meantime, we’ve inspired law students to draw cartoons about compost law. Here is a bewildered banana peel on its way to a community compost center. True story!

Learn more about our compost work here.

Photo by davidsilver

The post Taking Back Our Soil: Our Project on Compost Law & Policy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Community Farmland Trusts

While the overwhelming majority of the more than 250 community land trusts (CLTs) in the United States currently focus on preserving affordable housing, the roots of the CLT movement spring from agriculture and civil rights struggles of Black farming families dispossessed of their land in the 1950s and 1960s who purchased and collectively managed farmland as a survival tool in the face of racial discrimination and violence. Today, one of the biggest barriers to the equitable ownership of farmland is the increase in land values as a result of the financialization of land as an economic asset. CLTs effectively address this barrier by removing the speculative pressures from farmland when they acquire it. The CLT holds land for the benefit of the community and enters into long-term leases to provide farmers with secure tenure and the autonomy we generally associate with ownership. The CLT can also partner with another entity to sell a conservation easement, which drastically reduces the value of the land, making it that much more affordable for the farmer and preserving the agricultural character of the land forever. As nonprofit organizations, CLTs also legally bind the farmland to the charitable purposes for which the CLT was incorporated, essentially ensuring that the farmland it owns will be put to uses that will benefit the public in perpetuity.

Importantly, CLTs also structure their Board of Directors, the ultimate decision-making body for most nonprofits, to localize decisionmaking power. CLT boards include representation from professionals, tenants (in this case, farmers), and immediate community members to ensure that the CLT is acting in the best interests of those impacted by its activities. At the Law Center, we are working with Agrarian Trust to further develop the CLT model into a decentralized and democratic community institution by piloting the model of worker-self direction within the land trust itself.

Other examples of farmland CLTs include South of the Sound Community Farmland Trust and Sustainable Iowa Land Trust.

Worker-Owned Farms

REITs exemplify a dominant feature of farmland in the United States, absentee ownership. This “out of sight, out of mind” approach leaves open a gap in land management that agribusiness has been all too eager to fill with its overuse of chemicals, export-driven cropping practices, and worker exploitation. It is one reason why communities in the Central Valley of California, mostly people of color, experience some of the highest rates of food insecurity and environmentally-influenced diseases in the state, even though they live in the heart of the richest agricultural economy.

Worker-owned farms, on the other hand, are by definition locally-owned. And local ownership matters. Placing farmland ownership in the hands of the people who work the land, live in nearby communities, and raise their children there leads to a seismic shift in decision making over land management. Empowered is this way, would farm worker-owners choose to spray chemicals in the fields where they work? Would they choose to grow crops without considering whether they will be able to feed themselves? Would they contaminate groundwater with nitrates from overusing fossil-fuel based fertilizers? We think the answers are no, no, and no.

At the Law Center, we are leveraging our expertise with worker cooperatives to put together a series of resources for farmers and farmworkers interested in developing worker-owned farm enterprises. While the cooperative model has a long history of supporting self-sufficiency in agriculture (see Federation of Southern Cooperatives), worker-ownership has not been a key feature. Recently, several examples of worker-owned farms have developed, including Our Table Cooperative, Solidarity Farm, and Our Harvest Cooperative. Swanton Berry Farm, while not set up as a cooperative, does include features of worker-ownership through an Employee Stock Ownership Program and a unionized workforce.

Community Financing for Farmland

There is no question that one of the biggest challenges to implementing a just transition in farmland ownership is identifying sources of financing. In traditional real estate transactions, financing tends to greatly influence the ownership structure. A common principle is that the person who invests the most money gets to own most of the land and make most of the decisions. While this may appeal to the investor in each of us, such a model perpetuates the myth that because wealth is generated based solely on merit, those with wealth ought to be in control. It also erases the history of unjust enrichment of White people in the United States at the expense of Native Peoples, Black farmers, and waves of immigrants of color.

If we are to truly develop an equitable food system, then we must envision a new relationship between money, land, and ownership.

Nonprofit lenders focused on supporting farmers already exist, and have been providing low-interest operating loans to farms for decades. California Farmlink and Northern California Community Loan Fund are great examples of the role nonprofit lenders can play in extending beyond operational support to finance equitable farmland acquisition. Both are Community Development Financial Institutions, or CDFIs, which allows them to access a larger pool of federal funding that they redirect to supporting economic development in low-income communities. As nonprofits, they may also have an easier path to aggregating investment capital because of exemptions from federal securities laws for charitable organizations.

There is also the example of a cooperative twist on REITs, called a Real Estate Investment Cooperative (REIC). REICs sell membership shares to community members, specifically targeting non-accredited investors (those who are not very wealthy), to aggregate capital to finance projects that benefit specific communities. Examples of this model include the Northeast Investment Cooperative and NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative. Black Land Matters is using the REIC model to finance, among other things, farmland acquisition to rebuild Black land ownership in the United States.

At the Law Center, we are interested in supporting these models as well as exploring other less developed, yet potentially impactful, financing strategies to secure an equitable future in farmland ownership. These include unlocking people’s retirement incomes (like an IRA or 401k) from Wall Street and allowing people to self-direct their investments into local farm enterprises and farmland ownership. This could directly counter the current use of similar funds by pension fund managers that promote domestic land grabs. We also see potential in expanding crowdfunding laws to promote broad-based community investment in local agricultural enterprises, including supporting farmers in acquiring land. Or, how about creating pathways for advanced investment in cemetery plots to fund pasture land preservation and promote green burials?

Our guiding principle in exploring these possibilities is that the democratization of land ownership requires the democratization of capital. To reach this goal, it’s likely that all of the strategies discussed above – community control of land, worker ownership, and non-extractive finance – will need to work together in order to ensure an equitable and sustainable future for farmland.

By Neil Thapar, Food and Farmland Attorney / republished from the Sustainable Economies Law Center blog

The post The Future of Farmland (Part 2): Grabbing the Land Back appeared first on P2P Foundation.