Early last week, when Republican Lt. Gov. of Texas, Dan Patrick, suggested that the elderly should be willing to die from COVID-19 to get the economy back in action, something major shifted. If just briefly, the mask came off. Here was an elected official explicitly offering human sacrifices to appease the market. 

Texas Lt Gov Dan Patrick went on national tv & argued elderly people should die for the health of the market. Capitalism is a system that priorities profits over people. This fight is literally a matter of life or death. Battle lines are being drawn. Which side are you on?

“Capitalism has always been willing to sacrifice life,” author and activist Naomi Klein told an audience of 14,000 people last week on an online teach-in hosted by Haymarket Books. “[It’s an] economic model soaked in blood. This is not a more radical version of capitalism; what is more radical is the scale.”

It’s unfortunate that it’s taking a global pandemic to reveal it, but the unprecedented crisis catalyzed by the coronavirus has exposed our capitalist economic system for what it has always been. From the early history of colonialism, slavery, the enclosure of the commons to the ravages of industrial capitalism, and into modern austerity regimes, capitalism has always put profit over people.

This is exactly why any calls for “returning to normal” are so misguided. “Normal is deadly, normal was a massive crisis,” Klein emphasized last week. “We don’t need to stimulate the death economy, we need to catalyze a massive transformation into an economy that is based on protecting life.”

In 2007, Klein presented her thesis of disaster capitalism to the world in her groundbreaking book, “The Shock Doctrine.” Her ideas seemed to perfectly explain much of what was — and still is — taking place globally. The thesis is fairly simple: When a crisis unfolds, disaster capitalists will try to create an opportunity to advance their nefarious agendas. One obvious example of this is the stimulus bill signed into law late last week which showers trillions of dollars onto Wall Street and giant corporations with minimal oversight or regulation. Nothing suggests a “return to normal” more than another corporate bailout that will never “trickle-down” to the rest of us. 

Instead, what Klein and others demand is a bottom-up bailout that goes well beyond simply surviving this acute crisis. Throughout the teach-in, Klein and her co-panelists Astra Taylor and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, offered a variety of solutions that could be applied to both the short- and long-term crises of the coronavirus and capitalism — both relief and recovery. An example of immediate relief would be a moratorium on rent until the crisis is over, while an example of recovery would be passing policies that would guarantee affordable housing to everybody living in the United States. The former is a stopgap measure to mitigate immediate harm; the latter is systemic transformation.

Part of the economic recovery package which just passed congress includes a one-time payment of $1,200 to individuals making less than $75,000 annually. There has been quite a bit of criticism coming from many different communities suggesting the figure of $1,200 is too low. The number was likely derived from the federal minimum wage wherein a full-time worker making $7.25/hr grosses $1,160 per month. Rounded up, this explains the $1,200 figure that the Republicans and Democrats agreed upon. 

If we utilize the framing encouraged by Klein and others we can begin to see how the coronavirus pandemic simply reveals the more chronic disaster that is the Federal minimum wage. If $1,200 is not enough in an acute crisis, then it’s certainly not enough during “normal” times. 

Of course, affordable housing and an increase in the minimum wage are not new ideas. In fact, many of the structural policy proposals put forth by Klein and her co-panelists are ideas that have been on the agenda of the left for quite some time. “We need to reimagine in this moment,” Klein argued. “And the good news is that we aren’t starting from scratch.”

Policy proposals like the Green New Deal, universal health care, universal basic income, and labor protections such as raising the minimum wage to $15/hr and democratizing the economy, for example, have all — as Klein puts it — been “lying around” for quite some time. She borrows this phrase from the economist Milton Friedman, who argued that radical transformation can only take place during periods of acute crisis. It’s during these periods that the ideas “already lying around” will step in to fill the gaps. 

Friedman was an American right-wing economist whose ideas are largely responsible for the rise of neoliberalism and austerity politics that have shaped the last 40 years. He utilized a crisis in capitalism during the late 1970s to help usher in a sweeping transformation that ended the Keynesian, New Deal-era in the United States. 

“The scale of the coronavirus crisis is so profound that there is now an opportunity to remake our society for the greater good, while rejecting the pernicious individualism that has left us utterly ill-equipped for the moment,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explained during the teach-in. “The class-driven hierarchy of our society will encourage the spread of this vicious virus, unless dramatic and previously unthinkable solutions are immediately put on the table.”

The coronavirus is an unprecedented event, but it’s the sharpening of class divides, the gutting of our social safety net and the mentality of selfish individualism encouraged by capitalism which have turned this pandemic into an unimaginable crisis. 

Things like eviction moratoriums, stimulus checks, or extended unemployment benefits will not fundamentally address the conditions which allowed the coronavirus to unfold so disastrously. They also won’t address the many chronic disasters that plague capitalist society on a daily basis. As Klein and others argue, these things can only be addressed through radical, systemic transformation. 

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This article is part of our reporting on the community response to the coronavirus crisis:

• The People’s COVID-19 Response needs you
• The coronavirus pandemic calls us to share more than ever
• 10 ways to share during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Coronavirus catalyzes growing wave of grassroots action despite social distancing
• 14 community-minded books to read during the 2020 quarantine
• Things got a whole lot more local than I expected due to coronavirus
• My new pandemic routine
• How these US immigrants are giving back to their new community during the COVID-19 crisis
• Open-source medical supplies battle COVID-19

Lead image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The post Coronavirus demands radical transformation, not a ‘return to normal’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Robert Raymond: The third episode of The Response travels to Northern California to provide a unique perspective on the topics of climate change and immigration. California’s climate-fueled weather conditions have left the state in an extreme condition that has led to an unprecedented number of wildfires that are burning hotter, faster, and ever more acreage. The largest wildfire in the state’s recorded history was the Mendocino Complex Fire, which scorched well over 400,000 acres during the summer of 2018. And the second largest fire in California burned just a year before that. As California Governor Jerry Brown says, “since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse.”

We’ve already reached a one degree celsius increase in average global temperatures, and we may be on track for four by the end of the century. As the reality of an increasingly chaotic climate begins to settle in, it must be viewed through a lens of social, economic, and political circumstances as well. What does the growing threat of climate-fueled disasters mean for the most vulnerable among us?

In this episode, we put the focus on last year’s Tubbs Fire in Santa Rosa, California — the state’s most destructive fire to date — and how it impacted the undocumented community. We explore how, in the face of ICE raids, labor violations, a housing crisis, and climate-fueled wildfires, the broader community is coming together to stand in solidarity with those who are being forced into the shadows.

Episode Credits:

• Senior producer, technical director, and designer: Robert Raymond
• Field producers: Ninna Gaensler-Debbs and Robert Raymond
• Host and executive producer: Tom Llewellyn
• Voiceover and narration: Luisa Cardoza

Music by:

• Chris Zabriskie
• Lanterns

Header illustration by Kane Lynch

Listen and subscribe with the app of your choice:

For a full list of episodes, resources to cultivate resilience in your community, or to share your experiences of disaster collectivism, visit www.theresponsepodcast.org.

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure.

[Chanting from Rise for Climate Justice march]

Crowd: What do we want? Climate Justice! When do we want it? Now! [Repeats]

Tom Llewellyn: It’s an unusually warm and sunny September day in San Francisco, and we’re standing right in the middle of Market street, within a sea of banners, megaphones, drums, and about thirty-thousand people. It’s the Rise for Climate, Jobs and Justice march — the anchor event preceding a week of official climate talks hosted by California governor Jerry Brown.

Within this crowd, There are groups representing all sorts of causes, from trade unions, to buddhists, to indigenous folks, and many more. And their message is clear: an end to fossil fuel production and justice for those impacted disproportionately by the effects of climate change.

Well in this episode of The Response, we put the spotlight on an especially vulnerable community here in California: undocumented immigrants. We’ll investigate how, in the face of ICE raids, labor violations, a housing crisis, and climate-fueled wildfires, the broader community is coming together to stand in solidarity with those who are being forced into the shadows. I’m your host, Tom Llewellyn.

Tom Llewellyn: Although still under investigation by CalFire, it’s likely, that at around 10pm on October 8th, 2017, power lines on Tubbs Lane in Calistoga, California, were downed by high winds. The live wires would have sent a shower of sparks through the air, thus starting the Tubbs Fire. Hurricane-force winds whipped the blaze southwest through the Mayacamas Mountains.

Fueled by this bone-dry landscape still recovering from a five year drought, it only took a few hours to reach the city limits of Santa Rosa, where, as the city slept, it jumped Highway 101 and continued its deadly march through the densely packed neighborhoods of Fountain Grove and Coffey Park.

Pastor Al: I was working in Healdsburg, I was coming back at eleven o’clock at night. And I came in, I just went right to bed. The kids were sleeping and I was sleeping and I was just tired. I just never thought that the fire would jump all those freeways.

Tom Llewellyn: This is Pastor Al. He was living in Coffey Park at the time of the fire. On his way home from work that night he saw an orange glow in the distance, but at that time it was still many miles away.

Pastor Al: A little bit after two o’clock, I heard the phone ringing. It was the police department saying, you know, “Get up and get out now.” The smoke was so thick that night. And, you know, I was like, “Okay,” I said, “We need to leave.”

Tom Llewellyn: Fifteen people had already died as the fire made its way down from Calistoga, and Coffey Park was just one of a long list of neighborhoods put on a mandatory evacuation notice that night.

Pastor Al: I opened the door and I was shocked, you know, and the wind, and the fire was all over the place and that was it. Survival was the only thing that I had in my mind.

Tom Llewellyn: Al woke up his wife and kids, and they rushed to get out. The only thing he had time to grab was his daughter’s asthma medication. As they made their way through the thick smoke and floating embers towards their car, he suddenly noticed that his wife was missing.

Pastor Al: And I started calling my wife, and then I heard my wife was knocking on one of our neighbors — he was about seventy-four, seventy-five. And all I remember, I heard my wife calling out, “Get up and get out!” And my wife went to four, five other houses she went to to knock on the doors. And I was like, “Man, get up and get out!” And so she came and we went.

Tom Llewellyn: As they scrambled through the smoke-laden streets, the houses around them were already starting to catch on fire. Eventually they made it out of the neighborhood, and headed south on Highway 101 where they ended up pulling into a Home Depot parking lot.

Pastor Al: So that’s where we hunkered down for the night and, you know, we were just waiting there until we see what we can do the next morning.

Tom Llewellyn: Like many of the twenty-thousand undocumented people living in the area, Pastor Al and his family avoided going to official shelters. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and deportations are something that this community has to deal with on a daily basis, and the possibility of federal agents at shelters made them nervous. Many folks ended up just sleeping on the beach or in their cars.

When Pastor Al and his family were finally able to make it back to their house, everything was gone.

Pastor Al: You know, all of it. I mean there’s nothing. We looked around, you know, we were shocked. I mean all you see there, you just stood there and cried. I mean, it’s like, my goodness. Everything was burned to the ground. I mean the metal, it is unreal. And I think to us it was that my son came up and showed me this ceramic was given to us by a friend of ours. And the only thing the reading on ceramic was Luke: 137, that “Nothing is impossible with God.” That was the only thing that survived the whole fire. I said, “This is the only thing that we’re going to hang on to.” And I guess that’s part of our story. So I walked out, I said, “Okay, it’s only thing I can hang on.” And that it was only thing that survived the fire. Everything else burnt.

Tom Llewellyn: The Tubbs Fire was the most destructive wildfire in California history. It burned almost 40,000 acres, taking the lives of 22 people along the way and incinerating almost 3,000 homes in Santa Rosa alone — five percent of the city’s housing stock.

Historically, wildfire has always been a normal part of California’s ecosystems. It clears out dead litter on the forest floor and plays an important part in helping certain plants reproduce themselves. But what’s not normal are the climate-fueled extreme weather conditions that have lengthened the fire season and are leading to massive wildfires that threaten major urban centers and can take months to contain.

The largest wildfire in the state’s recorded history was the Mendocino Complex Fire, which scorched well over 400,000 acres during the Summer of 2018 and was still not fully contained at the time of this recording. And the second largest fire in California history? Well, it burned just a year before that. Last year’s Thomas Fire in Southern California blazed across almost 300,000 acres. So, as you can see, there’s a disturbing trend. This is California Governor Jerry Brown.

California Governor Jerry Brown: We’re being surprised. Every year is teaching the fire authorities new lessons. We’re in uncharted territory. Since civilization emerged 10,000 years ago, we haven’t had this kind of heat condition, and it’s going to continue getting worse. I mean, that’s the way it is… We’re in for a really rough ride.

Tom Llewellyn: We’ve already reached a one degree celsius increase in average global temperatures, and we may be on track for four by the end of the century. As the reality of an increasingly chaotic climate begins to settle in, it must be viewed through a lens of social, economic, and political circumstances as well.

What does the growing threat of climate-fueled disasters mean for the most vulnerable among us? Here’s Irma Garcia, who, like Al, is an undocumented immigrant, and was also living in Coffey Park at the time of the fire.

Irma Garcia: We were asleep during the fires. We were asleep when my neighbor came and knocked on the door at three in the morning and told us there was a fire. We got up and just grabbed the basics and went to the veterans building.

Tom Llewellyn: The Santa Rosa Veterans building had been set up as an official shelter. When Irma and her family arrived, they quickly noticed that the whole system was a mess. They tried to offer their help, but the Red Cross staff brushed them aside. Still, they couldn’t just sit idly by. And so, despite everything that they were going through, they found ways to to make themselves useful. But even as they were helping to set up beds and clear out debris, they felt unwelcome. The Red Cross staff had begun ordering Irma around in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, and one of them actually yelled at her five year old daughter for being in one of the beds that Irma had helped to set up.

Irma Garcia: My daughter was 5 years old and she hadn’t slept, and she had behaved very well, so I told her to rest in a bed, and I said to the lady from the Red Cross, “Please do not talk to my daughter like that.” And she said again, “Get out of the bed and get out of here.” And then my husband said, “We’re leaving. We’re better off outside than here.”

So we left, and we were going to spend the night in our car because it was so sad to see what was going on in the shelter. And as I was leaving the building, we looked around and I realized that there were no immigrants, and that there were only Americans. There were just a few immigrants, but they were outside or in the corner. That was when I realized that our immigrant community was suffering a lot during this disaster. And to this day they’re still suffering.

Tom Llewellyn: The disrespect and hostility that Irma and her family were subjected to at the shelter was one of the most traumatic parts of their experience with the fire — particularly for her daughter. And though their house was spared by the flames, the hardships were really just getting started.

Irma Garcia: The fires had a big effect on us because we couldn’t work for three weeks. Imagine, three weeks without working. So we fell behind on our bills and on rent because rent is so high. And then, on top of that, we had to deal with the fear of ICE and that we wouldn’t be able to work or that if we did go to work, they’d show up and take us away.

—

Mara Ventura: The number one way that we saw undocumented folks impacted was actually through loss of wages.

Tom Llewellyn: Here’s Mara Ventura, the executive director of North Bay Jobs with Justice  — a community and labor coalition based out of Santa Rosa.

Mara Ventura: Either of their works burned down, or their works closed down because their bosses lost their homes or their bosses had to evacuate. And so, to give a brief picture for folks in other parts of the country, the main two neighborhoods that we really want to focus on when we’re talking about these fires is Coffey Park, which is a mostly residential area and home to mostly middle class families, but also were homes where two to three different undocumented families were sharing one home.

And then we also had another area, which is the area called Fountain Grove which was home to a lot of mansions. We’re talking multimillion dollar homes. And so there’s quite a differential in terms of the experience of the families, the income levels and so forth of the folks in between those areas. But in the places where undocumented families were impacted they either were losing their homes in Coffey Park or they were losing the places where they had more stable work up in the Fountain Grove area where many undocumented folks were doing landscaping work, were doing pool maintenance, were doing house cleaning, were doing domestic care, et cetera.

Tom Llewellyn: Unlike most people affected by the fire, the undocumented community had no access to federal relief funding to help offset any of their losses. They were largely on their own. Or, they would have been, if it wasn’t for a rapid grassroots mobilization coordinated by local organizations and activists.

—

Tom Llewellyn: We’re at the Santa Rosa Community College, where hundreds of volunteers and undocumented families have gathered as part of an application process for what is known as Undocufund.

Omar Medina: My name is Omar Medina and currently I am the coordinator for Undocufund. Undocufund arose out of the Northern California wildfires. It was a combination of three organizations that came together to address the issue of recovery for undocumented families that would not be eligible for a lot of the aid that was going to come out for the disaster. So we knew there was going to be a void and we decided that something needed to happen to help those families. And so Undocufund was developed to raise funds to help provide financial assistance.

Tom Llewellyn: Certain public services were available to undocumented families, but there was a lot of fear around actually accessing those services. For example, undocumented immigrants with naturalized children are eligible for federal relief funding — but many felt uneasy navigating the process or were just outright afraid.

The coordinators of Undocufund knew it would take a lot of grassroots organizing to build trust and to spread awareness for their relief fund. It helped that the three organizations involved — North Bay Jobs with Justice, the Graton Day Labor Center, and the North Bay Organizing Project — were already known by much of the immigrant community for their advocacy work. Here’s Irma again — she actually works with the North Bay Organizing Project and the North Bay Rapid Response Network, which tracks and monitors ICE raids.

Irma Garcia: We learned all about the experiences of people in our community during the fires, and realized that many undocumented immigrants were sleeping in their cars or were going to the beach at Bodega Bay because they didn’t feel safe in any of the shelters. They didn’t provide any help for us, and we didn’t trust anyone. We didn’t trust the law, much less in the police or the sheriff. And we didn’t trust FEMA because FEMA is very discriminatory.

So we went to seek out stories, and as we learned about the experiences of people in our community, we began to spread the word. We realized that our people were suffering a lot — and our children too. So that’s how Undocufund got started with Omar Medina — he was the one who helped a lot with all this, along with the rest of the community. They started fundraising, donating, and doing events. It helped a lot of people.

But many people didn’t trust it at first. It’s difficult to give your information when everything is connected to everything else, so the last thing we wanted to do was to give out our information, to keep ICE far away from us.

Tom Llewellyn: This fear was also present for Pastor Al. At first, he’d avoided applying for Undocufund as well.

Pastor Al: We were just worried about who’s going to be controlling that information? If we’re going to put our names out there, you know, where is it going to go? That’s the other side of it, that I kind of of withheld this whole idea of going to them. I just didn’t know what, you know, I know it’s undocumented fund but I just thought, you know, how are these things going to work out? Who’s handling your information?

Tom Llewellyn: But eventually, Al and has family applied. And so did almost 2,000 other families. Here’s Mara Ventura again.

Mara Ventura: We recognized that undocumented families automatically had less access to many different social services, but particularly ones that were set up to help families recover during times of natural disasters. And so we wanted to ensure that there were funds available for them. And we wanted to ensure that they were unrestricted funds. That people could use them for whatever they needed them for and that there was a sense of ownership and autonomy that families could decide for themselves what they needed, and we would have a process that helped them think through all the different needs that they had — both before the fires and during the fires.

And so we brought I think a very unique perspective to putting a fire relief fund together, one in which we thought about what were different systematic, operational pieces we needed to have in the fund to ensure that it was accessible and equitable and truly reached undocumented communities where they were at. But also from the get go have been thinking about not just the immediate needs but also the intermediate and long term needs.

And as we were going through the process of helping families get aid from the fire fund, incorporated in our conversations an understanding of what was happening in people’s lives. So an example of that is that we really tried to ensure that as people came and applied for aid they didn’t feel like they were at an agency filling out a bureaucratic application. So we wanted an application process where folks came in and sat down with a trained volunteer and just started off with a conversation. Really ensuring right away, our job is to be here to help you get as much aid as you can get for the things that you need. And tell me a little bit about what happened during the fires and and really thinking about questions that also got at the systems that they were up against.

So really trying to understand like what systematic barriers were people facing even in the moment. Because it’s not something that you you’re always thinking about when you’re in the moment of a natural disaster and you’re in a high anxiety, high stress mode. So I think being social justice organizations we brought that really unique experience to creating this Fire Relief Fund where we tried to identify systems.

Pastor Al: We were very grateful for the help — the help that helps my family especially get situated, the food, the clothing, and that part of, we were very grateful for the of the fund that was given to us. I think what I discovered is that in these kind of situations it’s nice to have a place where you can go and just, you could hear others. And by talking about I think it’s so therapeutic. It’s so healing when people can understand and then listen to your stories and even just, you know, that you can express your emotions, your feelings. I think it does something to all of us.

Tom Llewellyn: With donations coming from over eight thousand individuals, Undocufund was a powerful demonstration of solidarity in action. In the beginning they thought they’d raise maybe fifty, or a hundred-thousand dollars, if they were lucky.

Omar Medina: Never did we expect the six million we’ve raised so far. But the generosity of people as the disasters were happening, as the fires kept going, and the media kept covering it, and people learned about us, and they sympathized with the need. They understand the need based on everything that we’ve experienced lately, you know, on a national level as it relates to the undocumented community. And the generosity of people came in. And so that gave us the opportunity to help a lot more people.

Irma Garcia: Undocufund definitely did unite the community, because, as an undocumented immigrant, you realize that the police, the sheriff, the system — everything — we’re outside of that. We’re totally excluded. But when Undocufund started and we saw so many people helping from all kinds of different places, we realized that although we’re outside the system, we’re not outside the community. And that the community supports us. We know now that at least we are not alone.

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Tom Llewellyn: Like we learned in our previous two episodes on Hurricanes Maria and Sandy, when disasters strike in vulnerable communities, they tend to merely intensify issues that are already happening. For example, the loss in wages that resulted from the Tubbs Fire was a serious challenge to many in the undocumented community — but the truth is that their wages before the fire were already almost impossible to live off of in the Bay Area. Not to mention ongoing labor violations, sexual harassment and assault, and a housing crisis that was only exacerbated by the fire. Here’s Davin Cardenas, the co-director of the North Bay Organizing Project. He’s learned a lot more about these struggles during the time he spent coordinating Undocufund.

Davin Cardenas: You get your finger on the pulse of what’s happening with the immigrant community in terms of wages, living conditions, needs. And so it was really an experience of having your eyes open a little bit more. You know, I’d be in an interview one after the other after the other, speaking with local immigrant workers — women especially — who were being paid like ten dollars an hour for house cleaning jobs and that’s you know that’s below the minimum wage. And as an housecleaning is rigorous — it’s a very difficult job to do and it taxes your body. And so I think that being what it felt like was the norm — was severely underpaid workers working extremely hard to make our county beautiful. And so, for me, you know, we know some of these things but it’s also a stark reminder of the economic conditions that people are living in and trying to raise babies and trying to raise families here in the North Bay.

Tom Llewellyn: Because of these chronic struggles, the Undocufund coordinators didn’t want to focus their efforts only on immediate fire relief.

Davin Cardenas: I think the Undocufund becomes another space where we can talk about greater systemic issues. The fact that immigrants are subsidizing the way we live. They’re subsidizing the standard of living in Sonoma County. This is the wine country, and when people think about the wine country they think about kind of the iconic vineyard landscape. But we think about the workers who put the wine country on the map and the taxation that comes with the physical labor — the tax on your body, the tax on the land, the pesticides that are being pushed into our waterways and our rivers — those things are also an inherent part of what we call the wine country.

And so I think with the Undocufund it’s an opportunity to start talking about equity amongst working people, talk about new voices and the people who make this county actually function and flourish. And it’s an opportunity for workers to start having their voices heard on a broader scale. Not only through the Undocufund, but immigrant workers have also been putting proposals to the county supervisors about what disaster preparedness should look like for Spanish-speaking peoples in the county. And, I think, also immigrants are stepping in to talk about just the anxiety that comes with the federal immigration situation, the Immigrant and Customs Enforcement. So they’re finding new ways to communicate. And part of the Undocufund infrastructure is also to make sure we’re developing relationships and beginning to heighten the voices of workers in all of these issues.

Mara Ventura: Undocufund folks we’re now continuing to have this conversation of what really fueled this this outpouring of support and how do we capture it? How do we use it to enable and continue to empower undocumented community members here to really say, like, people from not just Sonoma County, not just California — we received donations from all over the country — folks all around the country are concerned about your livelihood, and your ability to stay in this community, and not continue to worry about the displacement and the lack of services and the lack of the ability to stay in your homes and all these things that you’re already facing.

They’re investing in you and they care about you. And how do we sort of capture that and empower them to also figure out what are other systematic changes that need to be made here in our community to ensure that they don’t just have money today to pay their rent but that there are systems that we’re changing that enable undocumented folks to make a living and to have livable wages, and health benefits, and all the things they need to continue to live here.

Tom Llewellyn: Organizers have launched a series of people’s assemblies and listening circles with Undocufund recipients to learn more about the challenges they’re facing and the kinds of changes they’d like to see.

Mara Ventura: That’s really the next step in thinking about our resiliency is that undocumented people are leading and making the decisions for the solutions they want to see, that they’re getting the skills and the training they need to help see through the solutions that they want to build, that their voices are the decision-makers, that we’re actually changing systems — or building new systems — to address long term needs. And really trying to recapture going back to folks that came together for them during the recovery and during the fires and saying, “Here’s a more long term way that you can invest in our undocumented community and hopefully build a model for folks to then do that for their own communities and for undocumented people in their own neighborhoods.”

Pastor Al: What happened was just the incredible sense of people, just the people wanting to help out. I think that’s one of the things that I was so blown away. That people were basically saying, “What can I do to help you in your situation?” The amount of help, the amount of willingness — the heart was so open. That’s one of the things that I was so blown away.

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Tom Llewellyn: This episode was written, produced, and edited by Robert Raymond. Interviews were recorded and conducted by our field producer Ninna Gaensler-Debbs and Robert Raymond. A big thanks to Chris Zabriskie and Lanterns for the music.

That’s it for the first season of The Response, we’ll see you again in 2019. Until then, be sure to subscribe on the podcast app of your choice in order to receive additional interviews and other bonus material.

This season of The Response is part of the “Stories to Action” project, a collaboration between Shareable, Post Carbon Institute, Transition US, Upstream Podcast, and NewStories, with distribution support from Making Contact. Funding was provided by the Threshold and Shift Foundations.

If you liked what you just heard, please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave us. It might not sound like much, but it’ll make a huge difference in helping others hear this story.

If you’ve been inspired by the themes and stories we’ve shared in this season of The Response, are interested in exploring how you can cultivate resilience in your own community, or would like to share your experiences of disaster collectivism, head on over to TheResonsePodcast.org. We wanna hear from you.

With an uncertain future ahead marked by deepening divisions and climate change, the many examples of collective relief and recovery efforts can serve as a blueprint for how to move forward and rebuild with a radical resilience. They can also provide a glimpse of another world, one marked by empowered communities filled with more connection, purpose, and meaning.

The post The Response 3: The impact of Northern California fires on the undocumented community appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Robert Raymond: In this second episode of our new radio documentary series The Response, we shine a spotlight on Puerto Rico. When Hurricane Maria slammed into the island about a year ago, it resulted in thousands of deaths and knocked out power for almost an entire year. The result was what many consider to be the worst disaster in the United States.

Further, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria exacerbated the ongoing debt crisis that has been crippling the country’s public services for years — a crisis that has forced many communities on the island abandon hope that the government will ever come to their assistance. And so when Hurricane Maria hit, it wasn’t a surprise to many of these already-abandoned communities when the official response was often nowhere to be seen.

This conversation has been told before by many mainstream news outlets. What you might not have heard, however, is the story of the grassroots response that arose after Maria. In the midst of all the austerity and hurricane-driven chaos, a quiet revolution has been slowly taking place on the island. What began as an impromptu community kitchen meant to help feed survivors in the town of Caguas has since grown into an island-wide network of mutual aid centers with the ultimate aim of restoring power — both electric and civic — to the people. We’ll hear from many of those involved in these centers and find out why they are growing so quickly and what they are doing to begin addressing both the acute and chronic disasters that Puerto Ricans are facing today.

Episode credits:

• Senior producer, technical director, and designer: Robert Raymond
• Field producer: Juan Carlos Dávila
• Host and executive producer: Tom Llewellyn
• Voiceover: Neda Raymond, Ellie Llewellyn, and Monique Hafen

Music by:

• Vladi (feat Skew.One)
• Papel Machete

Header illustration by Kane Lynch

Listen and subscribe with the app of your choice:

For a full list of episodes, resources to cultivate resilience in your community, or to share your experiences of disaster collectivism, visit www.theresponsepodcast.org.

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure.

Judith Rodriguez: My name is Judith Rodríguez. My experience of the hurricane wasn’t pleasant. I was sleeping, when I heard a whistling sound. That whistling sound was the ugliest thing I’ve heard in my life. A whistling that was never silent. It was endless, almost two days.

I thought that my house was in good condition — well, at least I thought that. When I woke up at 2:30 in the morning, I felt scared. The first scare was when the back door went flying off — a metal door that was in the kitchen and just went off flying. We’re still looking for it.

Tom Llewellyn: When Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico on September 20th, 2017, the mountain town of Cayey, where Judith Rodriguez lives, was, like much of the island, left without electricity for months on end. Winds reaching 175 miles per hour destroyed power lines and tore roofs off of houses. The result was the second longest blackout on record, and what many consider to be the worst natural disaster to ever hit the United States.

No electricity meant that people had no way of doing some of what we consider to be the most basic of things, like cooking food — and not just in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, but sometimes for months. This was true in towns all over the island, and it was a big problem. In the weeks after Maria hit, Judith had heard of an interesting place that had popped up — a kind of community kitchen in the neighboring town of Caguas. They were cooking food for people — and they needed help. She wanted to do something to pitch in. She didn’t have much, but she decided to go up anyways.

Judith Rodriguez: I first came here ’cause I had a lot of dishes in my house, and I said, “well, they’re cooking for a lot of people, what if I donate the dishes that are just lying around in a corner of my house?” I couldn’t do anything with them at the moment anyways. I said “well, how can I help since this project sounds beautiful? People cooperating with each other.”

Tom Llewellyn: Judith wasn’t the only one who had the thought to help. In the weeks after Maria, something sort of remarkable had happened. The community kitchen had taken on a whole new life, and what started perhaps as just a few plates and volunteer cooks had grown into a fully-fledged community center. And in just a matter of months, it grew into an island-wide network of mutual aid centers which, as we’ll see, is quickly turning into a movement to transform Puerto Rico, one person at a time.

You’re listening to The Response, a podcast documentary series that explores how communities come together in the aftermath of disaster. I’m your host, Tom Llewellyn, and we’ll spend our second episode in Puerto Rico.

Judith Rodriguez: I came here to offer the dishes, and I said, “well, I’m in a hurry, because I fell and have a hurt back.” They said, “we’ll help you with that.” That’s when I discovered the amazing experience of acupuncture.

Tom Llewellyn: In addition to providing food, the center in Caguas had started putting on weekly acupuncture clinics to help address some of the personal and collective shock felt throughout the community after the hurricane.

Judith Rodriguez: I thought it was just putting in a needle, telling you something and teaching you how to breathe, and that was it. But, this is much more than that, a kind of way of life. You learn how to live more relaxed, how to do things more calmly, how to have better judgement, and cooperating with others — because we’re a community. Whether we want it or not, human beings are a community. If we’re in China, in Puerto Rico, in Japan, wherever, we’re a community. We have to help each other here in Puerto Rico, which I call the boat. If this boat sinks, we all sink. I don’t sink alone, we all sink.

Tom Llewellyn: Now, almost a year later, the acupuncture clinics are still going on.

—

Giovanni Roberto: My name is Giovanni Roberto, I’m part of the organizing team here in the Mutual Aid Center of Caguas. Today we’re having the weekly acupuncture clinic. We work with stress and post-traumatic syndrome, addictions, and other health issues.

Tom Llewellyn: Puerto Rico’s healthcare situation wasn’t great before Maria — and the hurricane only made things worse. Many hospitals were left without electricity for months after the storm, and primary care became a luxury that few had access to. According to research published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the death toll, now estimated to be in the thousands, was primarily caused by interruptions in medical care.

And a less visible effect of the hurricane was the trauma it inflicted on the Puerto Rican psyche. Suicide prevention hotlines were getting up to five, even six hundred calls a day after the storm, and physicians were reporting unprecedented numbers of mental health hospitalizations. Acupuncture clinics, like the one here at the mutual aid center in Caguas, made a big difference for a lot of people. Giovanni told us about the experience of one of the women that came to the clinic.

Giovanni Roberto: When the first day she came here she was almost crying, like in a really stressful way. She was the last person that day and since that day, and have never been absent. She’s not crying anymore, she’s sleeping better, she say today to me that when she came here she feels that she’s in paradise. You know, like in a situation in which she feels so good that she forget about all the things in her normal life. And acupuncture did that to a lot of people.

Tom Llewellyn: Similar to how the Occupy Wall Street movement transformed into a disaster relief effort after Hurricane Sandy, the seeds for the center that Giovanni co-founded were also planted by a grassroots social movement. What began with community kitchens for low income students at the University of Puerto Rico quickly gained momentum with the historic strikes that took place in the spring of 2017, where thousands of university students gathered to resist massive budget cuts to the school system.

When Maria hit the island, that network of activists and organizers didn’t waste any time. They knew they had to do something to help, and so they began cooking food. Lots of it.

Giovanni Roberto: Yeah we were serving three hundred, four hundred, five hundred that first week of people in lunch. And sometimes two hundred or close to three hundred at breakfast.

Tom Llewellyn: But they also had a larger vision.

Giovanni Roberto: Instead of calling it just the Community Kitchen of Caguas, we tried to put a bigger name. Because we have an idea of building a center that could be more than just food.

We know that after the hurricane food was a strong necessity, but after a couple of weeks or maybe a month or two, other necessities like health issues arose and people have like, living issues, and medical issues, and other issues that were not related necessarily, directly related to Maria but they were there before Maria.

Tom Llewellyn: The larger vision that Giovanni and his fellow activists had was to create permanent projects that would go beyond basic disaster relief — a way of addressing some of the more chronic challenges people were facing on the island.

Giovanni Roberto: So that’s how we came with the idea of launching a community space called Mutual Aid Center. We did it here in Caguas, but also we were able to discuss the idea with other activists who were already doing things. And through that discussion we came with the idea of doing the same thing in different places. So can we can create a network to make the idea of the mutual aid more stronger in the island.

Tom Llewellyn: So, it’s probably a good time to unpack things a little bit. What exactly are those chronic struggles that exist in Puerto Rico? Where to begin…

If Puerto Rico was a state, it would be the poorest state in the U.S. Forty percent of the island lives below the U.S. poverty line. And maybe you’re thinking, it’s probably relatively cheaper to live in Puerto Rico? Not really. The cost of living in San Juan, the capital, is higher than it is in the average U.S. metropolitan area.

Then there’s the fact that one in ten Puerto Ricans are unemployed. And, of course, there’s the debt. Puerto Rico has been struggling with a potentially illegitimate debt that has crippled the country’s public services. For example, between 2010 and 2017, 340 schools were shut down. On top of that pensions are being cut, healthcare services are being cut… the island is in bad shape.

So, when Maria hit, it didn’t just the tear roofs off of buildings — it tore the lid off of an ongoing disaster. It woke people up. And Giovanni, like many other activists on the island, saw it as an opportunity. A chance to intervene.

Giovanni Roberto: We see our project as a political project. We want Puerto Rico to be different. We want society to transform in some way. That means to transform values, the way people relate, the way people trust each other. The way people see communities. So, we see this space as a way of organizing people to gain in those values, to gain that experience. In our long term vision we want Puerto Rico full of Mutual Aid Centers. If we are able to have an impact in the way people see these kind of spaces, we know we want to develop the concept of popular power which is not a concept developed here in any way yet.

—

Astrid Cruz Negrón: My name is Astrid Cruz Negrón. I am a high school teacher, I teach Spanish and History. And I am a member of the Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico. That is, I’m active in the teacher’s union. I’m an activist and have been very involved in political, social, and environmental struggles in Utuado for as long as I can remember.

Tom Llewellyn: We’re now in Utuado, all the way on the other side of the island, in the Central Mountain Range.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: Utuado was one of the towns most affected by the hurricane. The fact that we have so much water meant that the effects were more visible here, I think it is the town with the most aquifers, with the most water in Puerto Rico. And the floods were huge.

But it’s essential to look at the social aspect as well, which is that Utuado was abandoned by the state and federal governments a long time ago. Poverty in Utuado is very high, unemployment is high, the biggest employer in Utuado is the municipal government and the Department of Education — the schools.

Tom Llewellyn: But schools in Utuado are starting to disappear, just like on the rest of the island. Because of budget cuts, a quarter of the schools in Puerto Rico are shutting down, displacing tens of thousands of students and their teachers. Three schools in Utuado were closed just this year.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: And plus the school isn’t just a school. It is a support center, in the hurricane it was a refuge, it is a social center, it is the library in a neighborhood where there is only one, where the only social worker in the neighborhood is in that school. The school plays such an essential role, so we cannot say that the state government abandoned Utuado because of the hurricane, they had abandoned it long before, and the same goes for the federal government.

Tom Llewellyn: Actually, after the hurricane, the federal government did show up in Utuado. But it wasn’t exactly in the way Astrid had hoped for.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: And yet, during the hurricane, the lines at the gas stations and in the supermarkets after they opened, were controlled by the National Guard who came in and gave the order to close a supermarket. There were trucks filled with water heading to local shops and they seized them. The National Guard seized the water going to the shops, which you might think that if the state seizes essential goods they are going to distribute them around town because that would make sense, but it wasn’t like that. We didn’t see it getting to the community afterwards, they kept these materials that they seized. In the federal post office of Utuado, the National Guard even seized containers to store gasoline, they seized the basic goods that our families in the diaspora sent us so we could survive that difficult time.

Tom Llewellyn: It was in the midst of all this when Astrid and many others came to realize that if they were going to survive, they were going to have to do it on their own. So, she started meeting with other members of her community, thinking about ways to move forward.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: The natural response of each one of us was to ask “what can I do?” Beyond the temporary state assistance and outside of the hegemonic responses from governments and institutions that want to perpetuate the situation that existed before the hurricane. As an activist one hopes for a better world and then looks for ways to not only solve the emergency, but every step we take is aimed at building that world we have always been working towards.

Tom Llewellyn: It was around this time that Astrid ran into a group of community organizers who had just arrived in town from Caguas. They invited her to a meeting, and that’s when things started to really take shape.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: They had seen the example of the center that was emerging in Caguas, so they had stories to tell about this movement or phenomenon on the island. And when we got together there was’’t much to say, we were all on the same page: we had a job to do for the survival of the people, so that the construction of something new and political would transcend from it.

Tom Llewellyn: The Mutual Aid Center of Utuado emerged somewhat spontaneously out of this shared vision for a better Puerto Rico. For a while they didn’t even have a physical space to call their own, and they were just working off the cuff, trying to get donated supplies out as fast as possible and putting on activities in public squares, community centers, and schools.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: We’ve done a lot of activities with few resources. Many deliveries of supplies, health fairs, community kitchens.

We’ve had talks about water purification, filter distribution, civil rights and legal talks. There was a helpful lawyer who led a conversation about the FEMA procedures and the rights of community members. It was very effective and people got very excited. They asked a lot of questions, and we could see that it created a lot of awareness.

We also brought in artistic workshops, we saw the need and people asked us for things other than technology to occupy their time when there was no electricity, activities to relax, activities to promote culture or keep busy, and so there were mandala workshops, origami workshops, plena workshops, given by the members of Plena Combativa, who brought in political themes because the lyrics they used as an example for how to compose a plena were rhymes with a political meaning, and it was really wonderful as people began to compose their plena with a message about their situation, it’s an emotional outlet.

So we also handle the cultural and emotional part, I would say, because there was that outlet, for example we brought in workshops on engraving, healing, massage, acupuncture and natural medicine. We have really done a lot of activities.

Tom Llewellyn: One of their more recent events was a disaster preparation fair with the focus on community education — teaching people skills like rainwater collection and map reading, for example.

Maria isn’t the only hurricane that’s hit Puerto Rico, and it won’t be the last. The reality of stronger and more frequent storms fueled by climate change makes this kind of preparedness incredibly important. But the activists and organizers here also always have an eye on the broader vision.

Astrid Cruz Negrón: The Mutual Aid Center definitely does not want to stay in the emergency mindset of surviving Maria, we want everything we do to build towards a new world, a new, more just, more equal society. We want to empower people to build popular power and gain more skills in terms of education, preparation, and resistance so they can be in a better state for creating and proposing new ideas.

Tom Llewellyn: They also put on musical performances and plays.

—

Tom Llewellyn: We’re just outside the home of Ramonita Bonilla in the mountain town of Las Marias. A group of volunteers are installing cisterns to catch rainwater — it’s part of a an ongoing program put together by the Mutual Aid Center of Las Marias.

Ramonita Bonilla: They came to put the cistern. Because that cistern is very good, because it fills up of water and you can serve yourself from it. The kids are tremendous, they are tremendous putting the cisterns there and working.

Tom Llewellyn: Perched atop the Central mountain range, Las Marias is very difficult to access — there are steep mountain roads and frequent mudslides, making this area especially vulnerable to extreme weather — and Maria left it devastated. Residents were cut off from food, water, and electricity for weeks. Word spread around the island that Las Marias was in trouble, and volunteers came from all around to help, including a group all the way from San Juan, which is on the opposite side of the island.

Ramonita Bonilla: We, of course. We were here without water forever and then they brought us water. The people were very good the people that brought us water and food and everything, They brought rice, beans, they brought everything. If it wasn’t for them, we wouldn’t had eaten. We would’ve died, yes. And the many that did, was because of that.

Tom Llewellyn: One group of volunteers ended up staying long term. They founded the town’s mutual aid center, and two of them, José and Omar, are organizing today’s event.

José Bellaflores: My name’s José Bellafloras — I’m known as Guri. I’m from the city, from Rio Piedras, and I moved here after the hurricane Maria, to Bucarabones, in Las Marias, to help out with the community and started building from the bottom up a center where we could have cultural development and different types of opportunities for the community and us.

Tom Llewellyn: Before Maria hit, José was working three jobs in and around San Juan. He decided to give it all up to answer the call for help.

José Bellaflores: Once the hurricane passed, I don’t know what was it that my heart was beating fast. Every day, every hour when I went to sleep, just thinking that you know it’s the time. What time? I don’t know. But something was telling me that I needed to make a decision and just focus on the opportunity that we have right now. You know, other than Maria and the tragedy, the austerity measures that are been taken on our country. Well, I don’t know. I felt a drive and I and I just said, “Let’s sacrifice this and let’s see, if I put my strength, my focus, and all my energies on just organizing with the people. I think maybe I could kick off something that might become something bigger than what we’ve been imagining.”

Tom Llewellyn: Over the last few months, he’s seen that bigger vision take form in Las Marias, as community members have become more and more involved.

José Bellaflores: It’s very empowering, and to see people that maybe weren’t so active in life being active here in the center. Being active as a community leader. For me it’s beautiful and I couldn’t be happier to see that.

Tom Llewellyn: An here’s Omar Reyes. He also came all the way from San Juan in those first days, and helped found the mutual aid center here in Las Marias.

Omar Reyes: We have a better hope. Now we still had hope — we had hope before and we will have hope always. But now it’s a better hope. It’s a hope more clearly of our own. It’s our own option. It’s not the option that someone comes and just tell you that that’s your option. No. We are creating our own possibility and our own reality.

Tom Llewellyn: There are now mutual aid centers all around the island. But as their numbers continue to grow, so does the threat of more austerity and state negligence. In a chilling report recently released by FEMA, the agency acknowledged its poor response to Maria and essentially told Puerto Ricans to expect something similar this upcoming hurricane season. Here’s Giovanni Roberto, who we heard from at the beginning of the episode.

Giovanni Roberto: Now the government too here in Puerto Rico is selling the idea that people should do more self-management which is not to the same idea that we are talking. But self-management in the idea of the government is that you take care of yourself.

Tom Llewellyn: Many Puerto Ricans are careful not to let the government off the hook by assuming they’re just too incompetent or that they don’t have the resources to get anything done. And in many ways, there are no substitutes for the kind of large-scale recovery efforts and resource distribution that states can provide.

And the truth is, the government has been very active in many ways. Puerto Rican governor Ricardo Rosselló has been traveling around the U.S. in a kind of marketing campaign, promising to open the island up to foreign investors and selling off public infrastructure to the highest bidder. With this growing allegiance to a program of disaster capitalism, and after decades of neglect, it’s no wonder why many in Puerto Rico have little confidence that the administration will ever step up to the plate.

Giovanni Roberto: We don’t want the help of the state right now because, we don’t want it. We we want to build a project that can prove that we can do it without them. And then compete with them in the future, because they have the resources that we should have. So, we are not turning the back to the reality that we need to fight against the state. We are trying to build political power and social fabric so it makes sense to fight against the state. It makes sense because we have an opportunity. Right now we don’t have any opportunity against the state. Because we don’t have political power. No size, no number, no quality organization, values in society, you know, we — it’s gonna take time.

—

Christine Nieves: Mariana has been an example of a community that refuses to believe that we don’t have power.

Tom Llewellyn: This is Christine Nieves, she helped found the Mutual Aid Center in Mariana in the municipality of Humacao, just off the eastern coast of the island. She had visited the mutual aid center in Caguas in the week after Maria hit, and she immediately knew that she wanted to do something similar.

Christine Nieves: What I saw there just blew me away because I saw people that were together. I saw people that were smiling and happy. And there was color and there were artists playing guitars and there were signs with beautiful bright drawings. And I just took out my notebook and took out my camera and I started documenting everything that I saw.

Tom Llewellyn: Christine decided she was going to take a risk. She and her partner Luis quit their jobs and founded what’s now the Mutual Aid Project of Mariana.

Christine Nieves: So now we are being proactive about creating different economic models that create wealth for people in Mariana with people in Mariana in mind and in engagement, co-designing it. And everything that has been happening in the organizing has started from a place of dignity and saying we we know our rights, we know what we deserve, and we’re going to organize and we’re going to demand it and we’re not going to wait. And if we have to start making it ourselves, we’re going to do it.

So now what we are presenting is an actual example of how government must evolve in the presence of self-governed communities. What we’re doing is actually the government’s job and this is going to present something that’s at some point going to have to be dealt with because we’re building power. And when people are free and people are awake and people know what they’re worth then they’re not being manipulated anymore. And that’s our goal. And I firmly believe that the more of these communities that happen in Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico will change because it’s just a reflection of a different country. And so if we start from the individual the whole community changes. And so that’s where we have to begin.

—

Tom Llewellyn: This episode was written, produced, and edited by Robert Raymond. Interviews were conducted and recorded by our field producer Juan Carlos Dávila. A big thank you to Vladi, Skew.One, and Papel Machete for the music.

Join us for our next episode where we’ll travel to northern California and explore how the undocumented immigrant community there is organizing against a combination of climate-fueled wildfires, a housing crisis, labor exploitation, and the constant threat of ICE raids.

This season of The Response is part of the “Stories to Action” project, a collaboration between Shareable, Post Carbon Institute, Transition US, Upstream Podcast, and NewStories, with distribution support from Making Contact. Funding was provided by the Threshold and Shift Foundations.

If you liked what you just heard, please head over to Apple Podcasts and leave us. It might not sound like much, but it’ll make a huge difference in helping others hear this story.

The post The Response 2: How Puerto Ricans are restoring power to the people appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“That whistle was the ugliest I’ve heard in my life,” Rodriguez said. “A whistle that was never silent. It was endless. … I thought that my house was in good condition, at least I thought that. And as I woke up at 2:30am, I felt scared. The first scare was when the back door went flying off — a metal door in the kitchen.”

Like much of the island, the town of Cayey, where Rodriguez lives, was plunged into darkness for months, as winds reaching 175 mph destroyed power lines and tore roofs off houses. Already in the midst of a crippling debt crisis, and with no immediate relief in sight, communities like Cayey had to make due with the few resources they had.

“In my house I had a lot of plates,” Rodriguez says. “What if I donate my plates that are laying in a corner in my home?” She wasn’t the only one with that idea. In towns and cities all over the island, from Cayey to Caguas and Humacao to Las Marias, something began to stir. Plate donations grew into community kitchens which grew into community centers which grew into a movement. With its furiously whistling winds, Hurricane Maria had awakened something in the Puerto Rican people, something that storms, fires, earthquakes — and all manner of disasters and catastrophes — have awakened in communities all around the world.

“Human beings are a community. If we are in China, in Puerto Rico, in Japan, wherever,” says Rodriguez. “We are a community — we have to help each other here in Puerto Rico, which I call the boat. If this boat sinks, we all sink. I don’t sink alone, we all sink.”

In 2007, Naomi Klein presented her thesis of disaster capitalism to the world in her groundbreaking book, “The Shock Doctrine.” Klein’s ideas seemed to perfectly explain much of what was — and still is — taking place globally. The idea is fairly simple: Create market opportunities out of disasters. Klein sketched a picture of how powerful entities use political and economic crises to weaken the public sphere and strengthen the interests of private capital. The “shock” that comes after catastrophes presents the perfect opportunity for powerful interests to take advantage of disoriented communities with the hope of turning a profit.

Klein’s thesis has been helpful in contextualizing much of what we see happening around us, from the dismantling of the public school system in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina to the privatization of infrastructure in Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria. But when we look closer, we see that the “disaster capitalist” isn’t the only character to emerge out of crisis situations. In these tumultuous times it is crucial that we remember disaster capitalism is only part of the story. There is another story taking place; one based on altruism, solidarity, and social responsibility — and when we look closely, we can see it happening all around us. This is the story of disaster collectivism.

There are innumerable instances where storms have swept in a flood of mutualism, where wildfires have sown the seeds of solidarity, and where earthquakes have strengthened collective values and brought communities closer together. We see these explosions of generosity quite often. It happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when an armada of boats that comprised the volunteer-run Cajun Navy descended upon waterlogged neighborhoods to rescue stranded survivors. We saw it again, on a smaller-scale, in November 2017, when dozens of New Yorkers spontaneously rushed in to help dig out trapped survivors from a collapsed scaffolding structure in Lower Manhattan.

Why do people do this? Why do we see such heroic acts of self-sacrifice and self-endangerment on such a regular basis? It certainly doesn’t seem to align with the story about humanity that dominates many mainstream narratives. This story describes humanity as Homo economicus, a species characterized by selfishness and competition.

“When a disaster strikes, like the flooding in Houston [after Hurricane Harvey], for example, you see everyday people pouring out all this generosity and solidarity,” says Christian Parenti, associate professor of economics at John Jay College in New York City. “Suddenly the idea that everything should have a price on it, and the idea that selfishness and competition are good, all that just gets parked. Suddenly, everyone is celebrating cooperation, solidarity, bravery, sacrifice, and generosity.”

This idea is reinforced by author Rebecca Solnit in her landmark book, “A Paradise Built in Hell,” in which she explains that, “in the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones.”

We witnessed this recently in the aftermath of the Fuego Volcano eruption in Guatemala in June. In the face of inadequate government response, everyday people came together to take care of each other’s needs. On the night of the eruption, a church in a nearby town “immediately started sounding its bells at an odd time, calling the community to come out to the church where they started collecting materials, food and clothes, and other things,” says Walter Little, an anthropologist based out of the University at Albany at the State University of New York, who was on the ground during the crisis.

Most people won’t think twice when they hear the bells ring, Solnit says: “Decades of meticulous sociological research on behavior in disasters, from the bombings of World War II to floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and storms across the continent and around the world, have demonstrated this.”

After the Storm

But what is it about disasters specifically that inspire such acts of altruism? There is a thesis put forth by writers like Solnit, Parenti, and others, that has arisen around this question. It goes a little something like this: We’ve come to accept Homo economicus as the truth, perhaps not always consciously, but it haunts our dreams, our imagination. It confines our sense of possibility and imposes boundaries as arbitrary as those that carve up ecosystems and communities into nation-states. But, as we’ve seen, artificial borders cannot contain the flow of flora, fauna, and human generosity.

When a firestorm blazed through the northern Californian city of Santa Rosa in October 2017, the community came together to form a fund designed specifically for the undocumented community. Undocufund, as it became known, stood in direct opposition to the divide-and-conquer rhetoric that has been a staple of the contemporary political climate.

Tubbs Fire in Sonoma (CC BY-SA 4.0)

“[In] the beginning we didn’t know if we’d raise $50,000 or $100,000,” Omar Medina, the director of Undocufund, says. “Never did we expect the $6 million we’ve raised so far. But the generosity of people as the disasters were happening, as the fires kept going. … and [as] people learned about us — they sympathized with the need. They understand the need based on everything that we’ve experienced lately on a national level as it relates to the undocumented community.”

This kind of human kindness — often hemmed in by the myth of homo economicus perpetuated by mainstream institutions — is bursting at the seams, just waiting for a chance to emerge. Could it be that the collapse of normality that arises during and after calamity awakens something deep within us? Perhaps these moments open up a space, however briefly, for new forms of civic engagement and public life. But when it comes to the every day grind, those chances seem few and far between.

But there’s a deep need to connect. According to research published in the journal American Sociological Review, 25 percent of Americans report not having close friends or confidants. We are also seeing the number of individuals living alone rise sharply in recent years. As we become more and more isolated and atomized in everyday life, our craving for connection only increases. “Our species is a group species,” Parenti says. “There’s something deep and quite innate in us as a species to stick together.”

We saw this innate drive towards connection occur in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City, New York, on Oct. 29, 2012, killing 53 people and leading to $32 billion dollars in damage citywide. Places like the Rockaways, an exposed peninsula within the borough of Queens on Long Island, were hit especially hard. Yet even in a megacity like New York, often viewed as uniquely disconnected and unneighborly, disaster collectivism emerged in full force.

One major example of this kind of collective approach was the effort put forth by Occupy Sandy, a grassroots relief network that grew out of the networks and strategies developed by Occupy Wall Street. Filling in a vacuum left by the official response, Occupy Sandy volunteers worked in partnership with local community organizations and activist networks. Their grassroots efforts focused on empowering poor and working class communities and were based on mutual aid rather than charity. With nearly 60,000 volunteers at its height, its own Amazon relief registry, legal team, medical team, prescription drug deliveries, and meal deliveries everyday, it was able to make a significant impact in the days and weeks following the disaster.

Occupy Sandy image courtesy of Sofia Gallisá Muriente

Sal Lopizzo, a longtime resident of New York City, became involved with the Occupy Sandy recovery effort when a group of volunteers showed up at his flooded nonprofit and asked if they could convert it into a recovery hub. “People just showed up, gutted the office out, got everything out into the street,” Lopizzo says. “We started putting up tables, trucks just started showing up with supplies. Any supply you could think of. If you walked into Home Depot or into a Target store, it was in this office.”

Lopizzo’s building was just one of many hubs that emerged in the days and weeks after the Superstorm hit. It was fed by a dozen or more distribution hubs, which were located in areas that were not as heavily affected.

“There were churches in Brooklyn that were gathering supplies to put on vans and trucks and bringing them in here,” he says. “One time I saw a Greek Orthodox priest pull up in a minivan with a bunch of kids, and they had about one hundred pizzas. And he just showed up here, you know. I was like, ‘Holy mackerel’ — it was amazing.”

Lorena Giron, a Rockaways resident who was also part of the broader grassroots relief effort that emerged after Sandy, was similarly moved by what she saw.

“Just immediately seeing neighbors being worried about their next-door neighbors was something that really touched me, as well as the quick mobilization of the church and the willingness to bring in people into the church and then provide resources — whatever kind of help would be available,” Giron says. “Just seeing that and just the feeling of the fact that we were all watching over one another.”

Recovery hubs popped up all over the city, including at the Arverne Pilgrim Church, just a few miles from where Lopizzo’s converted nonprofit was located. Pastor Dennis Loncke, the owner of the church, explained how Hurricane Sandy created a space for the community to come together in a way that it hadn’t before.

“The storm really did unite in breaking some of the barriers down,” Loncke says. “Because most of us was living on opinion. We assumed that the other person had the grass greener on the other side, so they had no need for this one, and that had no need for the other one. But when the storm came everybody’s opinion just disappeared. We recognized that there are lots of people that had all different types of issues after the storm, and it was not just only the financial loss, or the the property loss. It awakened the community to what is going on inside the midst of us — what we have as neighbors.”

Once the door to another world is opened, it’s often difficult to close it. There are many instances of how the bonds and collective vision that are formed during the immediate aftermath of disasters have grown into broader projects that stretch far beyond immediate disaster relief.

For example, the focus around community empowerment encouraged by the Occupy Sandy relief efforts and organizations like The Working World, also based in New York City, inspired folks like Giron to help organize what has now become a worker cooperative incubation program that has helped to launch four cooperatives in New York City.

“This was very important and very exciting because the Rockaways and Far Rockaways [were] a very poor area, even before the storm,” Giron says. “The idea of a different way to promote work and promote employment [is] exciting. So my life, I feel it’s changed. The important thing for me has been this ability to help my community and to work with my community members.”

Another clear illustration of how grassroots disaster relief can lead to larger initiatives comes out of Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria, where what started in the town of Caguas as a volunteer-run community kitchen soon transformed into an island-wide network of community centers, known as Mutual Aid Centers. Today, these centers provide more than just meals — they offer all sorts of services related to art, education, and therapy.

Puerto Rico image courtesy of Juan C. Dávila

Giovanni Roberto, one of the founding members of the original Mutual Aid Center in Caguas, helps organize weekly acupuncture clinics for community members.

“This [clinic] happens every Tuesday,” Roberto says. “We work with acupuncture in the ear. We work with stress and post-traumatic syndrome, addictions, and other related issues — health issues,” adding that all services are provided for free.

The chaos wrought by Hurricane Maria went even further than the loss of life, injury, and property destruction — the storm had an impact on the Puerto Rican psyche which has had lasting and dire consequences. There are growing reports of a mental health crisis quietly unfolding on the island. It’s turning into a disaster of its own, especially since Puerto Rico’s already struggling healthcare system was weakened after the storm, leaving adequate healthcare inaccessible to many. But as Roberto’s work with the Mutual Aid Centers demonstrates, communities are coming together to tackle this epidemic in their own way. Roberto recounted the story of one of the regular volunteers at the center where he works who had been dealing with depression and post-disaster trauma.

“The first day she came here she was almost crying, you know, in a really stressful way,” Roberto says. “Since that day, she has never missed a single day of volunteer work. She has changed. She’s not crying anymore. She’s sleeping better. She says today to me that when she came here she feels that she’s in paradise.”

As Omar Reyes, another organizer at a different Mutual Aid Center in the remote town of Las Marias, says “we started our center as a community kitchen because that was what was going on in an urgent moment. People needed to eat. But once the problem changed the instrument changed too. It transformed. And now we have a center for the development of education, recreation, cultural skills, and opportunities.”

The same sentiment was expressed by Astrid Cruz Negón, an organizer at the Mutual Aid Center in the town of Utuado. “The Mutual Aid Center definitely does not want to stay in the emergency mindset of surviving Maria,” she says. “We want everything we do to build towards a new world, a new more just, more equal society.”

The first step to building a more just world might be guaranteeing that communities have the power to keep the lights on, but the ultimate goal is to ensure that communities have the power to begin growing a broad movement with the strength to make serious demands on a government that has largely abandoned them. But until then, they’re taking things into their own hands.

The instances of disaster collectivism outlined here did not happen in a vacuum. They occur oftentimes in an ongoing tension with the forces of disaster capitalism. New York City was a battleground of opposing forces for years after Sandy hit, as communities and power brokers fought for very different types of recovery. The Mutual Aid Centers in Puerto Rico are up against a set of forces — the United States government, the Puerto Rican government, and corporate interests — whose power leaves the future of their project in the balance.

In the best case scenario, disaster collectivism occurs in conjunction with government support, at the local, state, and national levels, for small and large-scale intervention that is essential in relief and reconstruction. The challenge, however, is that as the decisions driving policies fall more and more into the hands of a powerful few, official disaster response will, without social and political intervention, likely reflect preexisting stratification often shaped along race and class lines.

Yet hope lies in the vast repository of history documenting that in times of disasters, communities take care of each other and often form new solidarities that can lead to political engagement. Recovery hubs emerge spontaneously. Religious institutions step in to help. Improvised kitchens emerge, preparing not just meals, but a new vision of public life.

In these tumultuous and divisive times, amidst both the acute and chronic crises our society faces, we see glimmers of hope — a possibility for us to come together to take care of the most vulnerable within our communities.

“It’s trying to create solidarity in the midst of chaos,” Davin Cardenas, an organizer at Undocufund, says. “Trying to create a semblance of purpose in the midst of not knowing exactly what’s happening.” After the fires in California, “everybody had a feeling of like, ‘oh my gosh, what do I do? I’m not doing enough. How am I serving the people?’ You know, we’ve heard that so many times over. [Undocufund] gave people a sense of purpose. And that sense of purpose is critical in the midst of chaos — people’s instinct is to demonstrate love, to demonstrate care, and to demonstrate solidarity.”

With an uncertain future ahead marked by deepening divisions and climate change, the many examples of collective relief and recovery efforts can serve as a blueprint for how to move forward and rebuild with a radical resilience. They can also provide a glimpse of another world, one marked by empowered communities filled with more connection, purpose, and meaning.

We are interested in learning if you’ve been involved in any disaster relief efforts in your local community. No matter how small or large the extent of the disaster or your level of involvement in recovery efforts, we believe sharing these stories about how people collaboratively uplift their communities in the aftermath of natural disasters will inspire many others to do the same. Please take a few minutes to fill out this form.  

Republished from Shareable. Paige Ruane, Juan C. Dávila, and Ninna Gaensler-Debs contributed research and reporting for this piece. Some of the interviews were done in Spanish and have been translated to English.

This story is part of a series on disaster collectivism, which includes a podcast (The Response) exploring how communities respond to crises, both in their immediate aftermath and over a period of months and years.

For more information about the series or to listen to the podcast visit: www.theresponsepodcast.org 

Header image by Kane Lynch.

The post Disaster collectivism: How communities rise together to respond to crises appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Robert Raymond: We are witnessing the rise of a solidarity economy movement, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, including organizations like Cooperation Worcester in Massachusetts, Cooperation Humboldt and Cooperation Richmond in California, and Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi, among others. One of the leaders of this movement is Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, who recently wrote a book titled “Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi.” Akuno was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in a working-class community where he watched the devastation brought by deindustrialization and the gang wars that hit L.A. in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. His family was deeply involved in various social movements, particularly the Afrikan People’s Party. Akuno was raised in a world marked by violent poverty, as well as radical activism. Akuno moved around in California and eventually wound up in Jackson, Mississippi. We spoke with Akuno about his work with Cooperation Jackson, the broader solidarity economy in general, and what particular challenges working-class African American communities are experiencing in the deep south.

Robert Raymond, Shareable: So how did you end up in Jackson, Mississippi, as director of Cooperation Jackson, having been born and raised in California?

Kali Akuno, co-founder of Cooperation Jackson: So, I have a kind of varied background, particularly leading up to Cooperation Jackson. it really started in the early 2000s when I was the director of the School of Social Justice and Community Development in Oakland, California. During the second year of that project, I just woke up one night with a terrible nightmare. The nightmare was about, what were we really doing to prepare the kids we had recruited, in terms of a job, in terms of opportunity? Just kind of recognizing that given the shift of the economy that much of what we were preparing for was going to be rapidly becoming obsolete and that this was a population that was going to become increasingly more and more disposable.

I just woke up feeling like I kind of set these kids and their parents up with false hopes and false expectations. I just couldn’t live with that. So I started on a journey trying to figure out what could be done. What could working-class people — particularly black working-class people — what could we do to put more direct control and power in our own hands, toward shaping the economy, creating the economy that would serve us and serve our needs. That led me back to a road of really looking at and analyzing worker cooperatives and other types of solidarity economy institutions.

So then from that, I was a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and the New Afrikan People’s Organization, and it was in the course of mid-2000s where we developed what became known as the Jackson-Kush Plan [a vision, starting in 2007, put together by a number of different organizations, including the Jackson’s People Assembly, to create jobs with rights, dignity, and justice that generate wealth and distribute it equitably based on the principles of cooperation, sharing, solidarity, and democracy].

One of my major contributions to that plan was really incorporating the Solidarity Economy framework within it and contributing what I had studied from a deep, deep dive into a study of the Mondragon and Emilia Romangna cooperatives — as well as some of the work that was being done by that Zapatistas. So, I just really brought that to the fore and tried to incorporate that within the Jackson-Kush Plan, which eventually wound up becoming a core component of debate and study within that organization. As we launched a major phase of that plan’s execution in 2013 with the with the election of Chokwe Lamumba to Mayor of Jackson, one of the main things that we were trying to move and shift as a result of pursuing that office was changing some of the municipal policies to make it so that it would be easier for a grassroots communities, working-class communities, to actually develop cooperatives to make a contribution towards the local economy, but also to put more direct control in worker hands. Unfortunately, Chokwe died shortly after, too soon before we could really execute what we all had in mind in terms of those policies. But the plan to move forward and to try to execute that vision, that moved forward and that became Cooperation Jackson. So that’s kind of how I got involved, and that’s part of the core genesis of how Cooperation Jackson got started.

So how would you describe Cooperation Jackson today?

Cooperation Jackson is an emerging network of cooperatives supporting solidarity economy institutions that are working to transform Jackson, its economy, and the social relationships. It’s starting with the establishment of more equity in the community but overall it’s trying to end some of the old school, longstanding differentials in the power that exists in the economy here locally. But to also be a model of the transformation of a more ecologically and regenerative way of doing production and putting the means of production directly in the hands of members of the community. So that’s just a short bit of what we’re trying to do, what we’re aiming to do, and what we’re on the on the road to do.

What do we need to know about Jackson, Mississippi, to understand why this project is so important?

Some key things I think to understand about Jackson, Mississippi. Number one: it’s the capital of the state of Mississippi, it’s a city roughly about 200,000 people. It’s over 80 percent black. If you follow the federal regulations, it’s overwhelmingly poor with more than twenty percent officially below the federal poverty line. We would argue that the real unemployment rate is between forty and fifty percent.

And then we exist in the larger context. This is the largest city in Mississippi, but it exists as a progressive bubble in a very red and ultra-reactionary state. … I think to understand Jackson and what’s been going on here, and some of the success that we’ve had, is that we’ve been living with the politics that everyone else is now also experiencing with the Trump regime — the kind of virulent racism, the outright misogyny, you know the viciousness, we’ve been living with that for quite some time. That has been the norm and order of the day here in Mississippi for well over 50 years. Not much has really changed in that regard into the politics.

It produces a certain level of clarity that you have in the community’s minds about what their interests are, and who’s opposed to those interests, that I think has made some of the different aspects of the work that we’ve been trying to do somewhat simple. That clarity enables our work to really move in a way that may be a bit harder in other communities. That’s a critical thing to understand. That doesn’t mean that there’s still not a great deal of organizing work that has to happen, but for us, trying to convince people that there are problems is the easy part — that you don’t really have to sell to anybody. The challenging part is what is your solution and is it viable? That is where there’s a lot of organizing work that has to be done to convince people that doing economics in a different way is a viable alternative that can challenge the stranglehold of the powers that be. So, first and foremost, we’re putting forward as solid a vision as we can to get people to see a different future as possible, and then to work our way towards building the models and the institutions that we need — to actually live, breathe, practice, and embody the vision that we want to see.

What is the connection between cooperatives and economic democracy in Jackson? And what other new economics interventions are you exploring?

A core element that cooperatives speak to are questions of self-reliance and self-sufficiency, particularly regarding historically oppressed, exploited, and marginalized communities. In order to change that situation it has to start from within, and with the resources and the talents that you yourself possess. We’ve got to be very clear that there are no external saviors coming to save the day. And that our liberation is in our own hands ultimately. So just starting with the clear foundation which I think Mississippi brings to bear every day, that the search for solidarity really starts within, within your own community and folks who are sharing similar experiences. So that kind of foundation runs through the black community particularly here given the circumstances I just described.

Another key thing that I will say is that the solidarity economy is not something that we have to invent or parachute or convince people of. Given the vast majority of people’s economic situation, if there wasn’t some level of solidarity that people were practicing — particularly with their families and their extended loved ones — many people just wouldn’t make it through the day or the month. You know, paying bills, eating, providing child care support to each other. There’s a great deal of solidarity that already exists as an informal solidarity economy, and what we’re just trying to do in many respects is to build on that foundation and move it from an informal set of practices and relationships to a more formal set of practices and relationships, and create a dynamic wherein, you know, people can exchange, trade, and barter, and still share with each other across familial relationships or just basic communal relationships. And trying to scale that up so that we can do time-banking, perhaps throughout the city in the next couple of years. We’re also working on an alternative currency. You know, so this organic composition already exists in that community and our challenge is how to connect it much more explicitly to the formal piece.

It really sounds like Jackson is up against a lot, with the far right in political power and having been entrenched in a kind of structural racism for decades — centuries. Do you think that things like alternative currencies, or even cooperatives alone, can transform the economy of a place like Jackson?

So, that is where the politics have to come in very clearly, and where we try to interject them very clearly. It’s to say that we’re not just trying to build cooperatives for cooperatives’ sake. We’re trying to build vehicles, very explicitly and very intentionally, of social transformation. What we’re trying to do is fundamentally change the relations of production in our community. If people can create their own livelihood, I won’t say business, because it’s more than just business — but if we can create and control own livelihoods, it eliminates the long legacy of exploitation, of abuse, that people — particularly black people — have suffered in this community.

We believe that you have to have very explicit and intentional politics that goes along with the development of cooperative businesses and enterprises, so people are very clear on why they are trying to build a certain level of equity and what we hope that will lead to. You know, if we change the social relationships, we change the balance of power in this society and remove people from being in positions of dependency — particularly economic dependency — and move them to places of being able to exercise real strength because, say, they control their own resources and they’re not afraid of somebody kicking them out of their house, or they’re not afraid of somebody firing them from a job. That control gives you far more power to say what you want, and to do what you want, and to exercise your own will when you control those fundamental basics.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Hear more from Kali Akuno in Upstream’s latest episode — part two of their worker coop series. Listen to the episode here.

Header image of Kali Akuno courtesy of Cooperation Jackson. 

The post Cooperation Jackson’s Kali Akuno: ‘We’re trying to build vehicles of social transformation’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Robert Raymond: The state of precarity inherent to most forms of digital labor and the unchecked exploitation of workers on many gig economy platforms is a largely under covered issue. Although there are some conversations around regulating companies that perpertrate such practices, issues of ownership and governance as they relate to questionable practices of various digital platforms are rarely given much consideration. But this is beginning to change with the rise in what is known as the platform cooperative movement, a broad network of individuals and organizations pushing to bring the values of cooperative ownership, governance, and management, into the digital labor landscape.

Trebor Scholz is an associate professor of culture and media at The New School in New York City, New York, and chair of the conference series “The Politics of Digital Culture.” He’s been an advocate of the platform cooperativism movement for many years and launched the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (Shareable is part of the Consortium), which was awarded a $1 million dollar grant from Google.org, this week. The grant “focuses specifically on creating a critical analysis of the digital economy, and designing open source tools that will support platform co-ops working in sectors such as child care, elder care, home services, and recycling​ in the United States, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and India,” according to a press release by The New School. “This grant is a big win for the cooperative movement and for platform co-op pioneers all over the world,” Scholz said in a statement. “This Kit will make it easier to start and run platform co-ops. It will also provide an interactive map of the co-op ecosystem and essential community-edited resources.” We talked to Scholz as he was working on the project about the potential of platform cooperatives in addressing many of the challenges in the digital world today.

Robert Raymond, Shareable: You are in the process of launching an ambitious project around strengthening and spreading the platform cooperative movement. The project consists of many different elements and is structured as a kind of development kit for platform co-ops. I’ll let you tell us all about it in just a second, but first, can you explain what a platform cooperative is, and what problem or challenge they are addressing?

Trebor Scholz, associate professor of culture and media at The New School: Platform co-ops are really about the broad-based ownership and democratic governance of digital platforms. So, imagine that Uber is owned by its drivers, or something like TaskRabbit is owned and operated by the workers. Or, in Europe, that Deliveroo is operated by the couriers and owned by the couriers. What this model leads to is a fair pay and a higher quality of work,so there is a dignity that you will not get in the extractive sharing economy. Also, the research on worker cooperatives shows that they are actually more productive than traditional businesses.

There are all sorts of economic and tax advantages as well. So think about something like AirBnb. You might be staying at an AirBnb in Amsterdam, or Barcelona, and much of the money spent at that Airbnb is taken out of the community, and the revenue doesn’t go through taxes into your local community, but is transferred instead right to Silicon Valley. On top of that there are all of the illegal operations of platforms like Uber and Lyft. It’s been proven, with the recent study from MIT, that these businesses contribute to a congestion of cities.

So, what the platform cooperativism movement is pushing back against is what I would sum up as a broken social contract. There are unsustainably low wages, compromised data and privacy, edge populations that aren’t considered in the design — so it’s a sort of big ego design, a waterfall design of Silicon Valley that pushes software onto people instead of co-designing it. There’s a shift away from direct employment which means a loss of worker voice and rights and benefits and of course centralized data ownership. The intellectual North Star for the alternative of the platform co-op model is really democratic governance, broad-based platform ownership.

So, tell us a bit about the Development Kit project.

The first part of the project is just to explain what is actually the problem with a business model like Lyft and many of these other companies, TaskRabbit, Deliveroo — what’s actually the problem? So that’s part of it, because I think it’s very important to actually change people’s mindsets about that.

Once they are convinced and are interested in actually changing it, they can see this whole ecosystem that already exists. So we are building a map that will have a lot of information about all of these cooperative platform businesses, some 240, that already exist, and then we will invite people to participate themselves. We are working at the Harvard Business Law School on a platform co-op legal clinic that is starting to get at the legal issues that exist in starting platform co-ops specifically, not just co-ops but platform co-ops,and trying to get these legal issues out of the way.

My initial idea was to somehow perhaps automate this, so that you can click and create a platform co-op, almost like a click-through legal contract. But that seems to be quite unlikely to happen because there are just way too many different co-op laws in the United States. But you know, why is it that you can’t just do something similar to what corporations do in Delaware, for example? You know, the vast majority of corporations in the U.S. actually incorporate in the state of Delaware. It’s an example of how one model in one state can work for all corporations. A centralized model. Why wouldn’t that be possible for cooperatives as well — just to make it simple?

The second thing is that we are starting an international network of lawyers through the Harvard network so that you could basically have lawyers in many countries where platform co-ops emerge that could help them to get the legal issues out of the way.

Another thing is that we are trying to address issues of governance. We’re trying to co-create and co-design, in direct collaboration with the co-ops themselves, a model where co-op members can use the platform to have a voice in the co-op itself. We are working with a group in India, for example, where the women are really dispersed all over the state of Gujarat. And so they have a hard time actually being meaningful members of the co-op, and so we tried to change that.

The third thing is an open source labor platform. So, basically something that can be customized for various users. So anyone trying to build one only needs a small amount of money to be able to start a platform like that. And yeah, so these are just some of the many things we are working on co-designing as part of this project.

And so it sounds like the idea of co-designing, of co-creating this toolkit, in a collaborative and participatory way plays a central role in this project?

That’s right. This needs to be opened up to the whole community — like to really activate the community around it and really do this with the community and not just for the community.That’s the idea. I’d like to really activate groups and really work with people, alongside people, and do it with them. I think that’s the way to go. And yeah, the project starts in July and will run for two years. After which, of course, we hope to get more funding and also try to engage other foundations to build on this. We are laying the technical foundations now, and there will be all of this infrastructure that will exist, that will be built, and the hope is that now others can come in and say, “Can you do this in Georgia, can you do this in Ohio?” You name it.

Can you describe some of the projects, some of the communities that you are working with or hoping to work with?

There are babysitters in Illinois, for example, that were organized by the union, and now we are coming in and adding an onboarding tool for them and maybe helping with a labor platform. And then there are these women in Ahmedabad, India, that I mentioned earlier, who we are working with to bring beauty services to people’s houses — like a platform service for doing hair and makeup, you know. So they are training twenty-seven women right now and in the fall it will be seventy-five, and then it will grow from there. And they are already all organized in a co-op and they will basically bring this sort of service to urban, young professionals.

There are many other projects. We talked to these 2,000 Uber drivers in Cape Town who wanted to drop out and start a platform co-op, we talked with trash pickers in the informal economy in Cairo, Egypt. There is no trash collection there and so through the Coptic Church these people get organized and want to start a platform where people can order trash pick-ups from them, and they would get paid for them. All these very, very diverse applications.

What is your ultimate dream for this project?

Well the project itself is much bigger than what we have right now. So, the goal is really to go into what we call “pull markets” — so markets where you don’t need so much marketing. For example, social care. There you see basically what we are doing, what we’re addressing, and then also what is not funded, you know? The dream is basically like a full-cycle implementation of this model in various territories. So we have projects that we could do in Brazil, and Colombia with refugees, in Germany, and you know all over the place. It’s very exciting.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header illustration by Susie Cagle

The post Platform Cooperativism Consortium awarded $1 million Google.org grant appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Nobody gets to vote on the decisions made in the workplace, on who their boss is, on what they’re company produces or how it’s distributed. When it comes to democracy in modern society, economic control is notably absent. The Sustainable Economies Law Center is an organization based out of Oakland, California, that puts economic democracy front and center in its mission to support community resilience and grassroots economic empowerment. The organization provides legal tools, such as education, research, advice, and advocacy with the aim cultivating a new legal landscape that supports economic democracy in the broadest sense.

Robert Raymond spoke with Ricardo Nunez (Cooperatives Program Director) and Chris Tittle (Director of Organizational Resilience) of the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) about the organization’s work and the broader context within which it exists.

Robert Raymond, Shareable: What are the goals of the Sustainable Economies Law Center?

Chris Tittle, Sustainable Economies Law Center: The Sustainable Economies Law Center exists to cultivate a new legal landscape that supports communities to create and control their own sustainable sources of food, housing, farmland, water, renewable energy production, livelihoods — all the things that communities need to live thriving, resilient lives. We work at the intersection of economic, legal, and cultural change, and position ourselves at that sweet spot, realizing that the economy and legal system are mutually causative — that they are highly interrelated and that we actually can’t change one without changing both. And that ultimately, beneath both of those are cultural norms and values that are deeply tied to the type of world that we want to see. So we work to create equitable economies, cooperative cultures, and popular law and policy making. Everything we do is about enabling people in communities to come together and meet their own needs in ways that are just and that build local wealth and resilience.

Can you talk about the idea of economic democracy as it relates to the goals you just outlined? And what role do worker cooperatives play in this vision?

Ricardo Nuñez: Currently we live in a system where capital uses labor as a tool — labor as a mechanism to be exploited and to extract as much capital out of as possible. It’s holdover of a feudal perspective of how we should treat people — you know, this vestige of the corporation is basically a feudal system that continues into our democratic age. And so really figuring out a way to invert that, where instead of capital using labor as a tool, labor is using capital as a tool. I remember going to a lot of protests and marches when I was in college, and everybody was saying, you know, “People over profit.” It’s a great slogan. At the time I didn’t really know how we were going to actualize that, and so, that’s where cooperatives fit in. They are a structure, a tool that actually puts labor above capital in a real way. And so that’s what I believe economic democracy is, it’s really putting the economy back in the hands of the people to meet the needs of individuals and communities as opposed to what is legally mandated,which is if you’re a shareholder of a company the company’s legal obligation is to maximize your financial return. It’s not to protect the environment. It’s not to build wealth for communities. It’s to extract as much capital as possible from the people that you’re exploiting.

Something that underlines a lot of the work that the Sustainable Economies Law Center does is to think about the economy in the terms of the commons. And that not only are natural resources common pool resources for us to collectively manage, but that workplaces are too. Workplaces are commons of the community, and so we should figure out different ways to think about that. So, when we talk about worker cooperatives and worker ownership, you know, that’s something that I think a lot of people can understand. People understand generally what that means. But hopefully what we can move towards is stewardship, so that the workers are stewards within their workplaces. That they steward it not only for themselves but also for the people who are going to come after them. And so it’s that type of thinking that I think underlines a lot of the work that we do at the law center.

How is SELC plugged in to a broader national or even international movement?

Chris Tittle: It’s kind of an exciting moment in this broader movement of movements, that include things like the solidarity economy and the new economy, but also the Movement for Black Lives and Indigenous sovereignty movements. There’s sort of been, I think, over the last couple of years particularly, since the financial collapse, this blossoming of a thousand flowers. People are really open to rethinking some of the most foundational assumptions that the current society is based on. And with that there’s a lot of ways of thinking and framing and talking about it. As an organization we don’t necessarily subscribe to one framing around this. Certainly our organization has been associated with the sharing economy,back before that term was used by Uber and Airbnb in some of its more capitalist formations. But I think what we’re really interested in is a world in which all people and the ecosystems that they depend on are equitable, self-determined, resilient in the face of change, and free from oppression.

Personally, I think increasingly for our organization we’ve really been inspired and are taking leadership from frontline communities — the people who have sort of been under the boot of empire for a long time and who therefore actually know the solutions that need to come about in a much deeper and personal way. And so whether we call it the Solidarity Economy, or the Just Transition, or the Movement for Black Lives, think we all share some common commitments to justice and to democracy. Those two things inform all of the work that we do with transforming legal and economic structures. As Ricardo was saying, cooperatives are one way of embedding democracy into the workplace, and our organization tries to embody that too even as a nonprofit organization. To quote Richard Wolff, the Marxist economist, “If we want the economy to work for people, we have to put people in charge of the economy.” So that’s what we’re committed to at SELC. There’s a lot of different pathways to that vision and this is a particularly transitional moment in history. The end goal is something different than what we’re actually seeing right now and there’s going to be a lot of different pathways to get there.

What are your ultimate hopes for the work that you do? What is the transition that you are looking to be a part of?

Ricardo Nuñez: My day to day life is trying to figure out: How do we move away from that system that is fundamentally not reformable? That we need a different type of relationship with each other, and with ourselves. We might not have all the answers right now, but we have to do something better than what we have right now. We are not looking at climate change, for example, as something that’s going to be happening in a hundred years.We are in the midst of a climate catastrophe that is already affecting communities, and because of our privileged positions we might not feel it as much as others, but it’s real and it’s profound. And so I think there is a global context to remember and to think about, but also to really be living those values, to be figuring out different systems in our day to day experience to transform this system. And also to take people where they’re at and to realize that this isn’t something that everybody is going to jump on board with. There’s going to be different ways that people are going to engage with it, and the goal is really to understand where people are and how to get them to understand why it’s necessary to fundamentally transform how we live, how we work, how we relate to each other.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header image of Ricardo Nuñez and Chris Tittle by Robert Raymond.

This article was originally published by Shareable.

The post Workplaces are commons: a conversation with Sustainable Economies Law Center’s Ricardo Nuñez and Chris Tittle appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Robert Raymond: Lying a few miles south of Marin County and just across the bay from San Francisco, the city of Richmond, California, is situated within two of the wealthiest regions of the United States. Richmond, however, does not share in this wealth. Its downtown has been largely abandoned and its northern periphery is on the front lines of the Chevron Richmond Refinery, processing over 240,000 barrels of crude oil every single day and creating a toxic environment to those living in the surrounding vicinity. It’s an example of what we know as a “sacrifice zone” — a community that has been largely incapacitated by environmental damage and economic neglect.

But in the shadow of the looming refinery, and within the spaces between boarded up storefronts and abandoned lots, something is stirring in Richmond. Residents, organizers, and activists have come together to create an incubation hub for community revitalization and resilience. They call themselves Cooperation Richmond, and their aim is to empower the marginalized and exploited residents of this city to build community-controlled wealth and wellbeing.

Founded in October of 2017, Cooperation Richmond is plugged into a broader national movement that includes similar initiatives like Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi. These initiatives have largely been inspired by the Mondragon cooperatives, a highly integrated network of cooperatives that form a self-supporting ecosystem in the Basque region of northern Spain. Like these other initiatives, Cooperation Richmond’s mission is to build a cooperative economy that puts people and planet before profit. It does this through providing education, coaching, and both credit and capital development to cooperative businesses in Richmond.

Robert Raymond spoke with Doria Robinson and Gopal Dayaneni of Cooperation Richmond about their work and the importance of the growing cooperative movement in Richmond and beyond.

Robert Raymond: There’s been a buzz around a new book recently written by Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson titled “Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi.” I actually found out about Cooperation Richmond when I heard that one of your board members, Najari Smith, was going to be interviewing Kali Akuno during a book tour stop in Oakland. Can you tell us about Cooperation Richmond, what you see as your mission, and how you are connected to a broader cooperative ecosystem that includes, among others, Cooperation Jackson?

Gopal Dayaneni: Cooperation Richmond is a really good example of what we call trans-local organizing — autonomist, place-based organizing with a unifying vision, shared strategies, and common frames. We are connected with many other organizations who are doing or supporting cooperative development and who are all connected by a common vision. It’s a movement that is trying to build meaningful infrastructure for economic democracy in order to build a new kind of political power. We want to actually transform the very nature of the economy and of governance in our communities — that’s what we’re engaged in.

And so Cooperation Richmond is an organization that we have developed for the purpose of supporting worker-owned and community-owned cooperatives in Richmond, California, which is one of the poorest parts of the Bay Area — a majority people of color community. We provide coaching, connections, and capital. We’re focused on folks who are most excluded from the dominant economy, folks who we think should be the foundation of building the next economy.

Doria Robinson: The idea behind Cooperation Richmond is that we’re taking somebody from a place where they’re just getting started, somebody at the point where they really want to make an impact, and they want to take charge of their lives, but need some help making it happen. Maybe they have an idea for a business, but they don’t have much more than that idea. We’ve structured Cooperation Richmond to basically take it from there, to help them take it to the next stage.

You launched Cooperation Richmond less than a year ago, but you’ve already played an important role in fostering cooperative workplaces and community engagement in Richmond. Can you tell us about your first initiative?

Doria Robinson: Our pilot project was Rich City Rides, a bike and skate shop. It’s a really powerful story. It’s a small bike and skateboard shop in Richmond, a place that had no real bike shop. Before Rich City Rides, if you wanted to do any repairs to your bike, you had to go to Walmart or Target, which are not exactly bike repair places. That was it.

You know oftentimes bikes are associated with gentrification, or kind of an elitist kind of thing you do on the weekends. In Richmond, it’s really different. People can’t afford cars. Not a lot of people in low income communities have cars, or if they do, their car is constantly breaking down. So they’ll default to riding a bike just to get to work or just to get to the store, just to go get around. So people actually really needed to have a good place to be able to fix their bike. And so people mostly just threw out their bike if they got a flat — they would literally throw their bike out. It was painful to see. Or it would just sit in the garage once it had something wrong with it, and that was it. There was no access to any kind of bike tools or anything like that — people literally had no way to fix their bikes.

So three young men started to run a loosely associated collective bike shop out of different spaces that they could find. They worked out of a storage space for a while, they had a kind of pop-up bike shop going on for a while. They were finally able to get into a retail space across from the Richmond BART station, a space on the main street that had been boarded up for years. Rich City Rides was the first place that really started to revitalize the main street. I think it was one of the only places that’s locally owned on that block as well. But they were really running a pretty substantial business at that point with very little resources, and they needed capital. They also needed a facelift — the shop looked like somebody’s garage.

So we took them on and worked with them to create an action plan to strengthen the business. We got them their first loan and helped them incorporate as a California Cooperative. So now Rich City Rides is leading the effort to completely transform and revitalize the downtown, to create this opportunity for people to have healthy transportation; healthy in terms of environment and in terms of your own body. So yeah, it’s kind of an honor to just see them carry this vision forward.

And why is the cooperatives structure important? What role do they play in the broader mission of creating the next economy?

Gopal Dayaneni: Well there’s a few different pieces of that. So the first is that bosses just suck. You don’t need them. All wealth is generated through the work of the living world. Making money off the movement of money is just extraction of wealth from other people. So the idea of all of us being able to voluntarily co-participate and control our own labor to meet our needs — and the needs of our communities — is very important.

It’s also important to share that wealth. Creating commons of wealth and commons of resources is a necessary element of the transition that we need to be in. The dominant economy extracts wealth from the living world, and it begins with extracting wealth from our own work. And so in order to both confront that, but also to build a new kind of muscle memory, a knowledge of how to be in the world, to actually practice self-government on a daily basis, we need institutions and infrastructure that can do that.

The second part of it is really that cooperatives allow us to do things that the extractive economy won’t do. For example, we would never exclude folks because they were formerly incarcerated — because we don’t believe humans belong in cages. We would never exclude folks based on their their status as documented or undocumented because we recognize the border as an enclosure enforced through violence that fragments ecosystems and communities. So we are able through cooperation to actually live our values in a way that is foreclosed upon in the dominant economy, and particularly for those who are most excluded by the dominant economy.

Doria Robinson: I think that there’s some really vital things that being in a worker owned cooperative can provide. Democratization of the workplace is something that can’t be underestimated. In a worker cooperative, that’s really run through democracy, folks are voting through each owner having a say in the day to day decisions as well as the trajectory of the enterprise. That’s a really big deal, especially in communities like Richmond where power has really been taken out of the hands of the people. This transition of decision-making and profit-making back to the people — the transition of accountability and responsibility — is truly transformative.

If you take somebody who has never been in a place where what they do actually matters, where their whole livelihood actually depends on them completely showing up and making decisions — that’s transformative. And then once you start to get a taste of that it spreads and you don’t want to stop. As soon as people really get a taste of being in a position to make decisions that impact themselves and their community, it begins to extend out to other things. It doesn’t just stay within the realm of the workplace. You begin to realize that, for example, the city government impacts you. Or that decisions made around the streets impact you. You start to realize that you actually do have a voice in shaping the things that impact you, and that you can stand up and advocate for things. I think that is one of the most powerful and important reasons why we chose to focus on cooperatives. We want to thoroughly empower people in every place and in every way.

Gopal Dayaneni: Like I said earlier, Cooperation Richmond is part of a larger “just transition” vision and process taking place in Richmond but also in lots of other places in the United States and around the world. The idea is that for there to be meaningful political democracy, there has to be economic democracy. So the idea is not only about creating sustainable livelihoods in the workplace but also being able to reimagine the very nature of the work that we do and how we do it. So we could support worker-owned cooperatives that just do absolutely anything, or we could prioritize those that have ecological and social value. We do the latter. So Rich City Rides, for example, is not just a bike shop, it’s not just a bike shop run by folks who are normally excluded from the economy — you know, young men of color from Richmond — but it’s also an organized bike shop that supports community bike rides, transit justice, and bike safety. It’s really committed to a larger vision of reimagining our relationship to place, to home, and to the economy itself.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header image of Doria Robinson and Gopal Dayaneni by Robert Raymond/Shareable

The post How Cooperation Richmond is empowering marginalized communities to build an equitable economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.