oakland – P2P Foundation https://blog.p2pfoundation.net Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Fri, 14 May 2021 00:05:07 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 62076519 Oakland, California Declares Climate Emergency https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/oakland-california-declares-climate-emergency/2018/11/07 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/oakland-california-declares-climate-emergency/2018/11/07#respond Wed, 07 Nov 2018 10:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=73362 Originally published on Commondreams.org Andrea Germanos: Tackling ‘Urgency and Scale” of Crisis, Oakland, Calif. Declares Climate Emergency. City council passed resolution Tuesday endorsing declaration of a climate emergency and calling for just transition. The Oakland Climate Action Coalition claimed victory Tuesday night after the California city passed a resolution declaring a climate emergency and committing... Continue reading

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Originally published on Commondreams.org

Andrea Germanos: Tackling ‘Urgency and Scale” of Crisis, Oakland, Calif. Declares Climate Emergency. City council passed resolution Tuesday endorsing declaration of a climate emergency and calling for just transition.

The Oakland Climate Action Coalition claimed victory Tuesday night after the California city passed a resolution declaring a climate emergency and committing it to urgent action to tackle the crisis.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. In this time we must go both fast and far, together,” said Colin Cook-Miller, coordinator for the coalition. “Our movement for a rapid Just Transition mobilization must be coordinated, strategic, and unified, with leadership from the most-impacted frontline communities who are at the forefront of change.”

The “Declaration of a Climate Emergency and Requesting Regional Collaboration on an Immediate Just Transition and Emergency Mobilization Effort to Restore a Safe Climate” resolution commits the city to:  an “urgent climate mobilization” to slash emissions, moving towards zero net emissions; building resilience strategies for the coming climate impacts; a just transition, making vulnerable communities central to such a shift; and calling on other states, the federal government, and other nations to make a similar mobilization towards climate action and a just transition.

In a letter to city council members on Tuesday, local organizational leaders including Miller, as well as Greg Jackson of Sustainable Economies Law Center, Miya Yoshitani of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and Bonnie Borucki of Transition Berkeley, and Kemba Shakur of Urban Releaf, noted that climate emergency resolutions have already been in the California cities of Richmond and Berkeley passed and wrote that the measure before the Oakland city council  “matches the urgency and scale of the ecological, economic and climate crisis that we face.”

“At this time in history,” they wrote, “a livable future for any of our children is far from guaranteed. We must do everything in our power today to create a safe, just, and healthy world for ourselves, for our children, and for future generations.”

 

Photo: Takver/flickr/cc

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Permanently Affordable Housing: Challenges and Potential Paths Forward https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/permanently-affordable-housing-challenges-and-potential-paths-forward/2018/03/06 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/permanently-affordable-housing-challenges-and-potential-paths-forward/2018/03/06#respond Tue, 06 Mar 2018 09:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=69922 Julie Gilgoff: While billion dollar development companies eat up affordable housing units throughout the Bay Area, dedicated teams of organizers, nonprofit service providers, community development corporations, and others fight a relentless battle along side and on behalf of those at threat of displacement. Some are seeking to transform the current system of land ownership, removing profit... Continue reading

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Julie Gilgoff: While billion dollar development companies eat up affordable housing units throughout the Bay Area, dedicated teams of organizers, nonprofit service providers, community development corporations, and others fight a relentless battle along side and on behalf of those at threat of displacement. Some are seeking to transform the current system of land ownership, removing profit incentives, and assuring that the land is used for the benefit of longtime community residents.

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:

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

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Photo by byzantiumbooks

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Show your solidarity for the Omni Commons! https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/show-your-solidarity-for-the-omni-commons/2017/12/11 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/show-your-solidarity-for-the-omni-commons/2017/12/11#respond Mon, 11 Dec 2017 08:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=68845 A call for support from Oakland’s exciting Omni Commons project. The following text was written by Julian Francis Park. Click here to contribute. Julian Francis Park: Dear friends of the Omni Commons. We’re coming up on the first anniversary of collectively owning the historic building we inhabit thanks to your ongoing participation in the Omni.... Continue reading

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A call for support from Oakland’s exciting Omni Commons project. The following text was written by Julian Francis Park. Click here to contribute.

Julian Francis Park: Dear friends of the Omni Commons. We’re coming up on the first anniversary of collectively owning the historic building we inhabit thanks to your ongoing participation in the Omni. Like you, we’ve been super busy this year—defending, organizing with, and supporting communities of struggle. We’re focused on improving the Commons to satisfy more community needs and desires. To do so, we ask for your material support: we need your involvement and we need your funding.

I’m Julian, a volunteer with the Omni’s Communications Working Group and member of Bay Area Public School. With eco-social tensions constantly growing around the region and world, the mission of the Commons—a more equitable commoning of resources and meeting human needs over private interests or corporate profit—continues to be urgent.

You probably already know about the awesome member collectives that inhabit and manage Omni Commons, but you may not be aware of the major projects they have worked on this year:

The Chiapas Support Committee has been hosting monthly ‘Waffles and Zapatismo’ classes, as well as several events featuring the art, poetry, music and cooperatively-produced products of the Zapatistas and Chiapas, Mexico.

A collaborative project between Sudo Mesh and Secure Scuttlebutt, DisasterRadio is a low-bandwidth, long-range, disaster-resilient communications network powered by the sun and utilizing open source software and off-the-shelf hardware

Bay Area Applied Mycology runs a small lab in Counter Culture Labs for experiments, classes and workshops on bioremediation with fungi, DNA barcoding of unknown mushroom species, a native fungi species bank, and more!

Three Build Your Own Internet quarterly hands-on workshops have been hosted by The People’s Open Network, a community-owned and -operated wireless mesh network in the East Bay, with more planned next year as the network grows.

A collaborative project of Counter Culture Labs and BioCurious is developing vegan cheese by genetically engineering baker’s yeast to produce milk proteins, which are then combined with water and vegan oil and converted into Real Vegan Cheese through standard cheese-making processes – just like cheese from cow or goat milk.

Open Insulin is a team of biohackers working out of Counter Culture Labs on an open source way to make insulin and take this essential medicine out of the control of large pharmaceutical companies.

Omni’s in-house video production collective, Liberated Lens, hosted 24 independent filmmakers in their local film series this year, and trained 25 people through their film production workshops using their shared equipment and editing suite.

Several times over the past year, we have have been asked by the community to support urgent work in specific ways such as fiscal sponsorship or temporary space usage. A couple of these are Safer DIY Spaces, a coalition responding to the social vulnerability of non-traditional “DIY” living and/or work spaces in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire; and The Village, a community-supported encampment on public land in Oakland that meets the needs of displaced and houseless folks through mutual aid, and fights for housing for all. Your support will increase our capacity to respond to future requests.

Omni Commons relies on your tax-deductible donations to keep the doors open, the lights on, and the roof leaks patched. And from now until December 12th of this year, you can use this free tool to leverage a matching donation from your employer. Any donation you give is the right amount. If you’re not able to donate now, please share our ask with your friends by forwarding this email and on social media.

Don’t forget—while we depend upon and appreciate your donations, they’re only one way to support the Commons. Bring your events here, bring your organizing here, get involved with a working group or a collective, or start a new collective! Come to an orientation at the Omni before our delegates meetings (every first and third Thursday at 6pm) to learn more about how we work and how you can get involved.

Much gratitude and solidarity to all our comrades, friends, and supporters, from all us Commoners at the Omni.

La lucha continúa, the struggle continues,

Julian Francis Park

Click here to donate.

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How Biohackers at Counter Culture Labs Are Trying to Make Insulin More Affordable https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/biohackers-counter-culture-labs-trying-make-insulin-affordable/2017/12/09 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/biohackers-counter-culture-labs-trying-make-insulin-affordable/2017/12/09#respond Sat, 09 Dec 2017 11:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=68834 Cross-posted from Shareable. Ruby Irene Pratka: According to the World Health Organization, more than 420 million people around the world — including over 29 million Americans — have diabetes. People with diabetes are unable to naturally produce sufficient insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar in the body. Over 90 years ago, Canadian scientists discovered a way... Continue reading

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Cross-posted from Shareable.

Ruby Irene Pratka: According to the World Health Organization, more than 420 million people around the world — including over 29 million Americans — have diabetes. People with diabetes are unable to naturally produce sufficient insulin, a hormone that regulates blood sugar in the body. Over 90 years ago, Canadian scientists discovered a way to extract the hormone from pigs and cattle and purify it for human use. Then, in the 1970s, scientists used a new “recombitant DNA rechnology” using human genes and bacteria to make insulin.

Problem solved, right? Wrong, say increasing number of doctors in the U.S. Insulin is one of fewer and fewer drugs for which no generic version is available. According to an NPR report from 2015, as these more expensive, new drugs became available, the older ones left the market. The bill for uninsured patients can be several hundred dollars per month — as a result, one Baltimore doctor told NPR that some of his patients had stopped taking the drug altogether, putting their health at risk.

Anthony DiFranco and his team at Oakland’s Counter Culture Labs are hoping to change that. DiFranco is a medical researcher, self-described bio-hacker, and cofounder of the Open Insulin Project. He has Type 1 diabetes himself. DiFranco and his team are working on a protocol to extract insulin from genetically engineered yeast cells and produce a generic drug at a cost of around $10 for a month’s supply. He says users could even eventually produce the drug in their homes. The project has created a definite buzz, raising nearly $17,000 in a crowdfunding campaign on the science-oriented crowdfunding platform Experiment.

Shareable caught up with DiFranco to learn more about the Open Insulin Project and the team’s mission to make diabetes management affordable.

Ruby Irene Pratka: How long have you been involved with the biohacking movement?

Anthony Di Franco: I got involved first in about 2011, with the founding of Counter Culture Labs. A year before that, I had worked on the founding of our sister hacker space, which deals with computer technology, and I wanted to explore ideas related to diabetes. A friend of mine had been doing research on the security of insulin pumps, and I originally wanted to [build] a DIY secure pump, but then people started thinking about founding a biohacking space, and I started rethinking my original idea.

Why insulin?

At the time, I had already had diabetes for five years. I had seen that progress was essentially non-existent — now it’s been 12 years and that hasn’t really changed. One major vendor did release a more secure [insulin] pump, but that was because hackers had pulled ahead and were putting pressure on them. If you want anything done you have to do it yourself. While I was looking into that, I saw a blog post on do-it-yourself thyroid hormones and met with a researcher who was able to get me up to speed on the chemical aspects of making [hormones] manually and potentially automating the process further down the road. We had a successful crowdfunding campaign and started actual lab work in January 2016.

Considering that close to 30 million people in the US alone live with this disease, you would think someone would have tried this before now. Why haven’t they?

I can only speculate on the reason, but it’s undoubtedly a lot of work. Many people seem to be afraid of having to deal with regulatory requirements that cost big companies millions. Insulin is one of the last holdouts where there is no generic version of the drug after more than 90 years. There are low-cost producers in other countries, but Western producers are very good at holding onto the [domestic] market. In some cases, drug companies have paid generic manufacturers not to produce drugs. The big producers are determined to keep their oligopoly.

Chemically, what is insulin? What are you building in the lab?

It’s a very small protein. In the lab, you need to introduce a gene into some organism so it creates the protein, and then find some way to extract it. We started with a protocol to make it in E. coli bacteria, but bacteria lack the sophistication to modify or secrete proteins, so the protein we extract is proinsulin, which still needs to be modified into the active form in the lab. We were looking at just making the proinsulin and making small changes to it that would allow us to complete the other steps in vitro… Now that we have some people on board with expertise in yeast engineering, we’re thinking about moving [the production] to yeast. With yeast cells, you can engineer them to secrete insulin, instead of having to extract proinsulin from dead cell debris [as with the bacteria cells]. Then you can purify [the insulin] from yeast, which is a relatively simple task. That’s what we’re focusing on. We’re still just making proinsulin as a first step and working on engineering the yeast to do everything for us. Our final product will be a strain of yeast cells that secretes insulin. Once we succeed, we will share what we come up with and build something that works for the long term.

Why is it so expensive? 

Markets are the main reason. It’s not that expensive to produce. For me, a month’s supply would cost about $10 to produce, but I’m paying about $1,000 before insurance and still $75 after insurance. If people were paying $15 for a drug that cost $10 to produce, that would still be a very healthy profit margin.

Tell us a bit about the work that has gone into this.

Most of it was just persistence. Some weeks there was very little to do in the lab and some weeks there was much more. Right now the yeast experts are the ones that are always in the lab, and I’m doing the organizing. It has been a lot of work, and we have had quite a few people coming and going, but it’s important enough to enough people that we always have enough people to keep moving it forward. A lot of our volunteers have just finished school and have the perfect science background, and they see it as doing something cool for a good cause.

What remains to be done to get the yeast-produced insulin into circulation?

We need to compete the yeast engineering, figure out a technique for purifying it and then look at the next step — how to set up a low-cost manufacturing operation and get over all the regulatory hurdles. That would require more money and more organizational sophistication than we have now, but hopefully by then our case will speak for itself and we will be able to prove we have the technology and it is usable. It will not be a for-profit undertaking.

How do you plan to test this? 

First we’ll have to verify that we have created insulin, then we’ll use standard techniques to purify it. From a regulatory point of view, if you’re making an existing drug, you just have to demonstrate that you made the right drug, you don’t have to demonstrate its efficacy all over again. We would just have to show that we made the right [chemical] sequence. We may have to do a receptor-binding study but we’re not going to worry about that right now — we will just focus on making a form of insulin that has been in common use.

A lot of the media coverage of your efforts has referred to “home-brewed insulin”— is that accurate? Are people going to be able to cook this up in their homes?

I don’t know if it will be economical to produce it in your home, but it’s not out of the question. At some point, someone will develop a protein-purifying machine which can be distributed to pharmacists or taken out into the developing world. The technology exists but the engineering work still has to be done.

What is your timeline? When do you hope to be able to distribute generic insulin?

Three or four years from now is a realistic timeline, but I hope we can do it a year or two sooner. I’m hoping we’ll have the yeast strain that does all the work soon, and then we’ll raise money to actually produce the product.

How do you react to the wave of support that you’ve gotten via the crowdfunding initiative?

It has been really encouraging. Although some people have dismissed the whole thing as impractical, a lot of other people have seen the value in it.

What motivates you about this experience?

It has confirmed what I know as a person with diabetes. The establishment views and treats diabetes and diabetes patients as a means of making money, and not as a group of people who need to be cured of an ailment. People are desperate for something they can afford. A significant number of the people who supported us have been people with diabetes who couldn’t afford their own insulin. They gave us 25 bucks to see if we could come up an alternative to these oligopolies. You realize how many people are desperate even in the Western world. By making the market competitive for insulin and eliminating these absurd profit margins, we want to contribute to the realignment of incentives in health care. We’re watching people slowly degenerate due to this condition [and] I’m skeptical about whether the economic landscape incentivizes a cure in the short term. If projects like ours give people access to drugs, in the long term they collapse the market and [incentivize] getting a cure out there.

Header photo courtesy of Anthony Di Franco.

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Why the #DefundDAPL movement is about more than divesting from Wall Street https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/why-the-defunddapl-movement-is-about-more-than-divesting-from-wall-street/2017/09/05 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/why-the-defunddapl-movement-is-about-more-than-divesting-from-wall-street/2017/09/05#respond Tue, 05 Sep 2017 08:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=67410 At a recent Oakland City Council meeting, Wilson Riles, a community leader and former City Councilmember, reminded us why Wall Street is so-called: it actually had a wall built around it in the 17th century to keep out Native tribes displaced by early colonists. It’s also worth remembering that Wall Street was the site of... Continue reading

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At a recent Oakland City Council meeting, Wilson Riles, a community leader and former City Councilmember, reminded us why Wall Street is so-called: it actually had a wall built around it in the 17th century to keep out Native tribes displaced by early colonists.

It’s also worth remembering that Wall Street was the site of New York City’s first slave market, and the first modern financial instruments were developed to collateralize Black bodies in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The roots of the modern financial industry grew strong off stolen land and stolen bodies. Today a growing pipeline divestment movement, catalyzed by the struggle at Standing Rock, is again making the connections clear between Wall Street investment banks and ongoing colonization and racial oppression in this country. Earlier this year, leaders of the Standing Rock Sioux called upon water protectors and those fighting for indigenous sovereignty to take opposition to the proposed Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from the burial grounds of the Standing Rock Sioux to the boardrooms of the financial institutions funding the pipeline. [Read a more in-depth review of the struggle at Standing Rock here.] Where bodies and prayers alone could not stop the pipeline construction, Native leaders tried speaking in a language that Energy Transfer Partners and their financiers might understand better: money.

#DefundDAPL: Prayerful Resistance

#DefundDAPL in OaklandThe #DefundDAPL campaign was born, taking lessons from past and ongoing social movements that have effectively used divestment campaigns to end Apartheid in South Africa, pressure Israel to end the occupation of Palestine, weaken the tobacco industry, shift university endowments out of fossil fuel companies, and more.

Since the call to divest earlier this year, grassroots campaigns have pushed nearly a dozen cities and tribes across the continent – from Seattle, Los Angeles, and Portland to the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota and the Nez Perce in Idaho  – to divest public money from financial institutions funding resource extraction, mass incarceration, and predatory banking practices. To date, roughly $5 billion of public money has been pledged for divestment from the financiers of DAPL, and another $83 million of personal funds have been shifted out of these banks (much of that into local credit unions and community banks).

Here in Huichin, (the Ohlone name for what is now Oakland and Northern Alameda County, California), a coalition of Native leaders, Oakland residents and workers, and community members impacted by nearby fossil fuel refineries recently succeeded in changing the City of Oakland’s banking policies. Banks that wish to contract with the City must now disclose any material support for companies 1) constructing or operating DAPL, 2) operating or profiting from private prisons or detention centers, or 3) otherwise contributing to violations of indigenous sovereignty. Read the full ordinance here. The new policy also requires depositories to address racial disparities in their local lending practices, acknowledging a history of discriminatory, predatory, fraudulent, or otherwise unequal lending practices in Oakland communities of color.

All oppressions are interconnected, all healings are interconnected

Key to success for many of these municipal divestment campaigns has been highlighting the interconnected nature of oppressions funded by a small number of large banks. It is largely the same institutions that are simultaneously profiting off fossil fuel pipelines, private prisons, fraudulent banking services, and home foreclosures – all activities that disproportionately harm communities of color, yet harm all “downstream” communities regardless of race. We all need clean water, clean air, and healthy soil to survive – even bankers.

Our coalition, Defenders of Mother Earth-Huichin, formed shortly after several of us returned from Standing Rock in November and December 2016. Energized by that experience and the early success of Seattle’s campaign to divest from Wells Fargo, our initial coalition quickly realized that we needed to slow down and build authentic relationships of trust and accountability between Native peoples and non-native people working together. After several meetings where we discussed what Native leadership should look like for us in the context of this divestment campaign, at least two things became clear to me: 1) this work was about divesting from far more than just a few corporations, but from an entire worldview and model of leadership rooted in domination; and 2) that our coalition needed to go slow to go far and cultivate patience in moments of perceived crisis.

The way we conducted coalition meetings, our approach to working with City Councilmembers, our understanding of how state power operates and how to build community power all shifted when we took time to slow down and ground ourselves in the understanding of Native peoples in the coalition. It is not just about changing particular laws (though there are thousands that need changing), but changing the very way that policy is made. At the Law Center, we have launched a new project to focus on just that: Transformative Policymakers.

DOME_oakland1.jpg

Members of Defenders of Mother Earth-Huichin in front of Oakland City Hall

As more and more cities move to divest from financiers of DAPL and other pipelines, an uneasy conundrum still exists: nearly every financial institution large enough to provide the banking services needed to run a city are in some way invested in the extractive economy of pipelines and prisons.

This is an integral part of the story we need to be telling though: neither Wall Street nor the extractive economy of pipelines and prisons can exist without the other. From the very beginning, the entire system of international banking and finance has relied on extractive economies to drive profits. Thus, the Native-led #DefundDAPL movement is not just about disciplining one bank for funding one pipeline or one private prison – it is about reimagining the role of finance in an equitable, life-sustaining society and redirecting resources to the communities with a vision for creating that society.

Indeed, the call for divestment and reinvestment in community solutions now emanates loudly from a diversity of frontline coalitions, including the Visions 4 Black Lives policy platform, ReFund Oakland, Freedom Cities movement, Defund DAPL, Appalachian Transition initiative, and more.

Reinvesting in frontline leadership

So what could a finance system not reliant on the plunder of people and planet look like?

Frontline communities understand the challenges and threats better than anyone, and have developed cultures and ways of thinking that we all must learn from in the collective project of transitioning to a life-sustaining economy and society. As Patricia St. Onge, indigenous grandmother and co-leader of Idle No More SF Bay and Defenders of Mother Earth-Huichin, says: “Indigenous people are the antidotes to annihilation.”

On the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, one of the poorest communities in the country, the Lakota-led Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation is developing a completely sustainable community development model. On the Standing Rock Reservation, the Standing Rock Sioux are now working to build community-owned solar and wind farms, while the Native-led Native Renewables is working with the Navajo Nation to transition from coal to solar. Across the Southeast, the Southern Reparations Loan Fund is raising money divested from Wall Street to finance worker-owned businesses in communities healing the centuries-old legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In Richmond, California – in the shadow of the Chevron Refinery, California’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions – Cooperation Richmond is similarly developing and financing worker cooperatives, like Rich City Rides, that enable community members to use their labor to heal rather than harm the community.

Ultimately, the fossil fuel and pipeline divestment movement must be about redistribution as well as resistance: redistribution of financial capital and the material resources needed to sustain life in an equitable economy, and of the political power and social platforms needed to elevate the voices, visions, and wisdom of frontline communities.

Want to join the # campaign and the broader divest/invest movement? Move your personal money into a local credit union or community bank (more resources here); join or start a local #DefundDAPL campaign (more resources here); follow and support indigenous-led organizations like Mazaska Talks, Indigenous Environmental Network, and Lakota People’s Law Project; learn more about other intersectional divest/invest efforts on the New Economy Coalition’s new “Move Your Money to the New Economy” page.


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Photo by Stephen D. Melkisethian

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Lessons on Creating an Equitable and Sustainable Economy https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/lessons-on-creating-an-equitable-and-sustainable-economy/2016/12/03 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/lessons-on-creating-an-equitable-and-sustainable-economy/2016/12/03#respond Sat, 03 Dec 2016 10:30:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=61911 Maira Sutton: The economy can often feel like it’s out of our control — a system that abides by its own forces that we have no power to influence. While business reporters tend to spotlight the rise and fall of stock prices and policymakers focus on gross domestic product (GDP) to push their agendas, these... Continue reading

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Maira Sutton: The economy can often feel like it’s out of our control — a system that abides by its own forces that we have no power to influence. While business reporters tend to spotlight the rise and fall of stock prices and policymakers focus on gross domestic product (GDP) to push their agendas, these numbers don’t reflect the economic realities of most people. Stock prices may be soaring and GDP may be rising, but a majority of a country’s population may still be struggling to make ends meet. What these numbers succeed in doing is reinforcing the notion that the success of large-scale industries — higher production, more profits — trickles down to everyone through more jobs, higher wages, and cheaper goods. At a time of deepening wealth inequalities and potentially catastrophic environmental conditions, these supposed metrics of success could not seem more out of touch. That’s why community leaders around the world are now building economies rooted in something other than profit and exploitation.

These leaders are creating a world in which access to basic necessities such as food, electricity, and housing are not at the whims of speculative markets. They are launching enterprises based on collaboration and employing business practices that sustain the environment. At the Living the Next Economy Convergence which was held in Oakland, California, we got a glimpse into how these visionaries are building democratic, equitable, and sustainable businesses — and what challenges they face.

Last month’s convergence, which sought to address the systemic, pervasive racism in the U.S. that robs people of their dignity and prevents them from achieving economic prosperity, brought more than 300 leaders representing over 100 organizations together for three days of panel discussions, hands-on workshops, and talks. Event organizers also brought 100 youth and grassroots organizational leaders on scholarships. Among the highlights of the convergence was the first public dialogue between Black Panther activist Ericka Huggins and co-founder of the #BlackLivesMatter movement Alicia Garza.

One of the key tracks of the convergence was alternative business models, so there was a lot of open and revealing discussions about cooperatives and employee stock-owned plans (ESOP). There were participants from both nonprofit organizations and for-profit enterprises who offered insights into creating business and implementing business models that value rights of workers. They also shared some of the complex social, political, and financial roadblocks they face while helping to build this new economy.

The core organizers of the convergence, including Shareable’s Tom Llewellyn

The Potential and Pitfalls of Co-ops

Many of the conference participants touted the benefits of cooperatives, which tend to value labor rights, environmental protection, and product quality. One of the attendees was from the Democracy at Work Institute, a project of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC). The organization looks to address what’s called the “silver tsunami” problem, which is that 70 percent of baby boomers in the U.S. don’t have succession plans for their small businesses. That means we are headed for a mass closure of locally-owned enterprises in the years ahead. To prevent this from happening, the group is organizing meetings in cities across the U.S. to find viable ways to help these businesses convert to worker-owned cooperatives. The organization believes this problem is connected to displacement and gentrification. Since ownership and leadership in a majority of existing small businesses do not reflect the diversity of where they are based, co-op conversions are one way to expand ownership and entrepreneurship to people from marginalized backgrounds.

Founders and representatives from several co-ops, including New Hope Farms, Loconomics, and Project Equity shared stories about how they organize themselves to divide wealth and ownership and promote community resilience. While much was said about the benefits of co-ops, there were also frank discussions about their limitations:

They can be slow and inflexible in ways that top-down companies are not.
They may not fully erase pre-existing forms of oppression, especially if their members are not actively addressing them.

To counter the second issue, the participants said co-ops can pledge themselves to equity and diversity by implementing organizational bylaws that embed such commitments into the DNA of the enterprise. They said written social contracts could go far in establishing community norms, which are so vital to maintaining a healthy collaborative environment at a cooperative.

Tara Marchant, event co-organizer and director of Emerald Cities Oakland with Oakland City Councilmember, Lynette McElhaney.

Mission Driven For-Profit Enterprises

At least two founders of traditional for-profit corporations gave presentations about their businesses. One was Bay Area-based House Kombucha, a family-run fermented beverage company. Their story centered around the challenges of maintaining a triple bottom line — people, planet, and profit — in an economically competitive region.

The Body is Not an Apology is another enterprise incorporated as a for-profit business, but is dedicated to its mission of cultivating self-love and body empowerment. It is a global network that disseminates information about how to love and embrace one’s body, and enables personal and social transformation projects through trainings and webinars. Its founder Sonya Renee Taylor spoke about the constant barrage of shameful and discriminatory stories about our bodies in the media, and how the $60 billion beauty industry exploits these insecurities for profit. She called all of this “body terrorism.” The company’s platform is a way for people to protect themselves from this negativity and learn about how to use radical self-love as a basis for social, political, and economic change.

In both presentations, the entrepreneurs expressed how they have been able to create good companies through a strong commitment to their respective missions. They admitted that hierarchical enterprises can sometimes be a much more nimble and flexible model for social enterprises.

One of the panel discussions

The Environment and Disenfranchised Communities

The relationship between climate change and capitalism is undeniable. An economic system that prioritizes profit leads to reckless extraction of natural resources. At the convergence, many participants pointed to renewable energy as a way to disrupt this economic cycle that’s destroying the planet. Whereas fossil fuels require massive centralized infrastructure to extract, transport, and process its energy, solar and wind power can be decentralized. The representatives from energy enterprises emphasized the potential of clean energy as a means to exercise economic and political empowerment for disenfranchised communities.

Staff from several renewable energy enterprises talked about their models for democratizing access and governance over energy infrastructure. Shiva Patel, the founder of the Energy Solidarity Cooperative (ESC), an Oakland-based multi-stakeholder co-op, discussed how the organization designs and builds solar energy projects and political education programs. The group’s mission is to build community-owned clean energy systems in underserved communities and mobilize non-extractive financing for these projects. ESC works on helping communities move their renewable projects forward, from the initial energy auditing stage through installation and developing financing strategies.

Founder of Native Renewables, Wahleah Johns.

The founder of Native Renewables, an indigenous-led organization working to promote affordable clean energy for Native American communities across the U.S, shared a stunning fact: More than 18,000 homes on the Navajo reservation in Arizona don’t have access to electricity. To address this problem, the organization’s aim is to for tribes to own, manage, and provide renewable energy for themselves. Through partnerships with federal agencies, utilities, foundations, and investors, Native Renewables deploys solar energy projects where it’s needed the most. The group’s mission is to not only provide clean energy to Native Americans and creative sustainable economic models for power, but also strive to champion the sovereignty and the socio-economic and cultural values of tribal nations.

The discussions about community-controlled energy systems also touched upon how to finance the infrastructure. The current financial system prioritizes investment in big oil projects rather than in decentralized community-oriented renewable initiatives. In order to fix this, the general consensus was that there is an urgent need for more creative models of financing and community financing programs, such as investment crowdfunding, to make renewable power projects viable in the coming years.

A New Way Forward is Possible

Douglas Rushkoff, a media theorist and author of “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus,” often refers to the economy as society’s operating system, in that it determines how the main components of our social systems function and establishes the basic rules about how we all relate to each other. Many already recognize that our current operating system is broken, but many cannot imagine what could be put in its place.

To most people, this is an alarming problem. But the Living the Next Economy Convergence demonstrated that the failures of the current economy creates an opening. It is an opportunity to apply creative and imaginative solutions to create a better system from the ground up. These leaders are showing the way forward with community-based alternatives, one mission-driven enterprise at a time. They are building them based on a new operating system that runs on trust, resilience, and sustainability, and are showing that everyone can shape the future of the next economy.

Please consider making a contribution to support the growth of next economy initiatives in Oakland. Every little bit helps.

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Open the Omni-Commons, Oakland, Ca. https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/open-the-omni-commons-oakland-ca/2014/12/04 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/open-the-omni-commons-oakland-ca/2014/12/04#respond Thu, 04 Dec 2014 17:23:06 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=47193 Michel Bauwens says: “Please support this wonderful and important project in Oakland … ‘hackerspace’ would not even do remotely justice to it .. a true commons space, ‘free, sustainable and solidarity'”. We invite you to join us in building a place to pool resources for the shared use and stewardship of the greater community—a space... Continue reading

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Michel Bauwensomni commons building says: “Please support this wonderful and important project in Oakland … ‘hackerspace’ would not even do remotely justice to it .. a true commons space, ‘free, sustainable and solidarity'”.

We invite you to join us in building a place to pool resources for the shared use and stewardship of the greater community—a space rooted in an ethic of radical collaboration between people of different backgrounds and across disciplines, creating a replicable model for future public spaces outside of the market and the state. At 22,000 square feet, this large and flexible space can support the collaboration of many different groups working on a variety of projects and ideals. We are asking for your help in opening our building to the public!”

A collective space to empower creative life in Oakland, California

Too often, our creative initiatives that aim beyond profit and private interests lack the common space and resources to go deep.

Omni is a collective of collectives building an open community center and venue.

We want to invite you to join hundreds of volunteers in building, appreciating, and sharing a model for deep societal change that goes rise above limiting corporate structures.

Our effort is rooted in Oakland’s rich history of thought and action for better urban life. After organizing for almost a year, we all took a giant leap on July 1st, 2014 by pooling funds to lease a 22,000 square-foot space! As we prepare to open, the energy has been incredible, with all kinds of people and value coming together.

We need your help to fully open and build our vision for a more equitable commoning of the space and resources people need to thrive.

WHY OAKLAND NEEDS A COMMONS

Cities like Oakland need new community center models for open access to the space and resources that sustain cultural life. Too many initiatives exploit human need and take power through marketing. Too few share and cooperate through “commoning”.

Omni is a community center modeled as an open commons. We steward our shared space and resources to generate abundant value with anyone. Omni is an empowering response to the displacement and inequality threatening Oakland’s cultural heritage.

Our space welcomes acts of revolution and celebration. You can have 500-person parties and lectures in our grand ballroom, meditation and movement classes in our dance studio, and small and medium gatherings in a half-dozen other rooms.

Our resources make any idea possible. You can cook and brew, print in letterpress, silkscreen, and 3D, write, type, solder circuits, use free community WiFi, sew, embroider, repair bikes, and gather in many spaces to connect, ponder, heal, grow, work, and organize around any idea or project.

The Indiegogo campaign is here.

Here’s an article on Shareable.

Their excellent video about the project is here:

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