 Today's book talk is Jessica Gordon-Nembaard, a professor in our Africana Studies Department. She's going to be formally introduced by her colleague and fellow economist, Michelle Holder, who's a professor in our Economics Department. And she's going to be accompanied by Tyler White, who is a student here at John Jay College, a senior and a second-year scholar with John Jay's McNair post-baccalaureate achievement program. Her current research focuses on the media's rule in legislation and looks specifically at the events surrounding the US Patriot Act. She's set to graduate December 2015. Congratulations, Tyler. We're the bachelors in economics. The applause is definitely appropriate, then. Out of a dissatisfaction with the current state of the world, she is pursuing a PhD in public policy to provide a solid foundation to become a source of positive change in the world. How many PhDs out there are sources of positive change in the world? Good. Very good. Every day is a learning opportunity that helps her develop the best method of affecting change shaped by our observations of the world around her. Thanks, Tyler, for joining us. And Tyler is going to act as an interviewer and discussant for the second part of the talk. And the third part will be audience Q&A. So hopefully you all will develop some questions based on Professor Gordon M. Hart's presentation. Hi, good afternoon, everybody. We have a bunch of introducers. Dan is introducing me. I'm introducing Jessica. Dan has introduced you. It's a lot of introductions going around. So let me get mine in. So as Dan Stegeman said, my name is Michelle Holder, I'm an assistant professor of economics here at John Jay College, as he also said. It's a distinct pleasure for me to once again introduce Professor Jessica Gordon-Nemhard for her book talk on her latest book, Collective Courage, a History of African-American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. And also, as Dan mentioned, the format is going to be slightly different than a formal book talk. I think there will be some dialogue, which is great with a student. And I think that's awesome for the students in the audience. But my task is to simply introduce Dr. Nemhard. And so much of what I said the first time I introduced her for a book talk on this publication, which was just about a year ago, I will say again, because it bears repeating and why it reinvent the wheel. However, at the end, I will relay a personal story that was shared between Jessica and myself that has occurred since the last time I introduced her, making this introduction slightly different, not just a repeat, straight up repeat. But first and foremost, about Dr. Nemhard. She is a political economist and professor of community justice and social economic development in John Jay College's Africana Studies Department. Also, as Dan mentioned, you stole a lot of my thunder, Dan. But this was pre-written before I knew what you were going to say. Professor Nemhard also teaches courses that are cross-listed in both the Africana Studies and Economic Departments, for which the econ department is extremely fortunate. Professor Nemhard is an affiliate scholar for the Center for the Study of Cooperatives at the University of Saskatchewan, which is in Canada. Can I take it? Yes? I'm not Canadian, but I believe that's Canada. And she is also an affiliate scholar at the Center on Race and Wealth in the Department of Economics at Howard University, where she was formerly a professor. Among Dr. Nemhard's many recognitions, she was the recipient of an ONI award from the International Black Women's Congress. The ONI award, quote, symbolizes the essence of all that is good in African people, unquote. And I can attest to that, because when I was applying for a faculty position here at John Jay about two years ago, many people I spoke to who were also economists said that I must contact Jessica Gordon-Nemhard, not even the people within the econ department. They said, talk to Dr. Nemhard. And this recommendation was always accompanied by the person telling me that she is, quote, good people. Time and time and time again, that's what I was told, that Jessica Gordon-Nemhard is good people. And that's what the ONI is about, symbolizes the essence of all that is good in African people. So now, here's a personal story I'd like to share about Professor Nemhard. So I have a preschool daughter. She's four years old. And I happen to be the primary caregiver for my daughter. Now, I remember at one time lamenting to Jessica, that's what I call her, because she lets me do that. I remember lamenting to her that when, which was recent about a couple months ago, that when I have to present at conferences, it's sometimes difficult for me, because I have to try and seek out a colleague at the conference willing to watch my daughter, who I have to take along with me, because I'm her primary caregiver. And so upon me telling this story to Jessica, she shared with me her own story, which was this. That there was one time, and it might have been at John Jay, I'm not sure if Jessica could clarify that, she conducted an entire class while holding her grandson in her arms, because at that time, she was looking after her grandson. And I was amazed at this story. That would be possible to hold your child or grandson while teaching a class or presenting at a conference. But then, lo and behold, this past summer, I was presenting at a conference where, once again, I asked a colleague in the audience, usually a female colleague. Let's be real, right? Usually a female colleague, because they would more probably be mothers, right? I asked her, would she agree to watch my daughter while I did my thing, my talk? But come the time for me to do my presentation, my daughter wasn't having any of that. She's four years old, and she just wasn't having it. She insisted that she wanted to sit on mommy's lap. Having remembered the story that Professor Nemhard relayed to me, I went on ahead, and I gave my presentation with my daughter sitting on my lap the entire time. Now, the esteemed audience of highly accomplished economists that I was presenting to were basically most of them smiling the whole time that I gave my presentation, recognizing what I came to realize later that it does take a village to raise a child. So I wanted to personally thank you, Jessica, for sharing your experience with me to let me know it really is all about the collective being there for you. And by the way, speaking of my daughter, Jessica, and everyone, I do need to slip out a bit early because I have to pick her up from school today. But for my students who are here, you cannot follow me. You must stay until the very end. So without further ado, Professor Nemhard will discuss her book, Collective Courage, A History of African-American Cooperative Thought and Practice, along with the dialogue she will have with her student later. And here is the very good, as the only award attested to, courageous and collective thinker, Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nemhard. Please welcome her. Thank you so much. That was really great, probably one of my best intros. So thanks. Good afternoon, everybody. And I apologize. I did, of course, get a cold over the weekend. So hopefully, I'm not too nasal here. So what we want to do is I just want to give you about a 15-minute overview of the book. And I was sighing about that because actually, I could take over an hour to tell you about this research. And I have done that in the past. Sometimes I've taken longer. But I did really want to make it more interactive. And so I was really excited that Tyler agreed to talk with me about the book and to ask some questions and dialogue with me. So I want to make sure to have time for that and to have time for you to ask me questions. So I'm going to give you a real overview. But you can ask me more details. You can also read the book. There also is a lot of stuff now on social media, other speeches of mine, interviews, written and video. So there's lots of ways you can get more information. But at least this will give you some idea of what I was doing and how and why I did the research and that kind of thing. And now I'm also going to try to see if I can make this thing work. Hey, work so far. So I want to start actually by acknowledging first the original occupants of the land because land ownership and collective ownership is such a huge part of the research I did. And then, of course, to also acknowledge all the ancestors and struggled of enslaved laborers, those who labored without compensation, and the people whose shoulders I stand on, those who used cooperative ownership as an effort for liberation. I decided to start this time to talk about one of the leaders in the Black Collot Movement, who was W. E. B. Du Bois, who, those of you who know anything about Black scholarship should have heard of his name. He's a famous Black intellectual historian, first Black PhD from Harvard. He also almost got a PhD in economics from the University of Berlin. This would have been in the 1880s, if I believe. And he's well known actually for being an advocate for African-American rights and social research. He's also a founder of sociology or urban sociology. But most people don't realize he was also an advocate for cooperative economics. And I had about five really good quotes of his. And I decided that this one, I don't talk about as much as some of the other quotes. So I decided we would start with this one. So this is actually an editorial that he wrote in the Crisis Magazine. He was the editor and founder of that magazine. It's the NAACP's magazine. In 1933, he wrote this. And he ended, I think this was the end of the speech or the editorial, sorry. He said, by consumers and producers' cooperation, in a minute I'll actually explain what a co-op is and what consumer and producer cooperatives are. We can, by consumer and producers' cooperation, establish a progressively self-supporting economy that will wield the majority of our people into an impregnable economic failing. And why is that necessary? Because remember, he was studying the African-American experience. And what was he finding all through his 100-year life that African-Americans were on the bottom of the economic ladder, right? Trying to figure out what would be a way to get us out of the bottom, stop us from being the mules of the economy, that kind of thing. And so when he found, started to study cooperative economics and found cooperative economics, he realized that that could be a way that people could pool their resources, leverage those pooled resources, have more control over their economy, and have a better chance of having some kind of prosperous life that would support the whole community, not just individuals making it. So there's a picture of Du Bois, and here's more of an explanation for his economic strategy. So he advocated for what I'm calling a racial economic cooperation, or a group economy movement. And he really talked about this, I say from 1907 to 1963, but actually he was writing about Black Cooperative Business Ownership from 1898. And in 1907 he actually wrote a book on it, and his is the only other book besides mine on this topic, and I actually obviously used his book for a lot of my early understanding. I combined what he had already written with some other work, and then I tried to sort of update his book with my book. And he really still has probably the most sophisticated theory and analysis of cooperative racial economic development that I've seen. His book called The Economic Cooperation Among Negro Americans, documented 154 African-American-owned cooperatives, which is actually a lot. In a minute, again, I'll explain to you what a cooperative is, but well, it's more widely used than we think, but it's not so widely used that 154 is a small number, is the best way I can say it. And then I broke out all the different kinds of cooperatives, and again, in a minute I have a definition, and you'll know what producer cooperatives are more with usually agricultural cooperatives, meaning the producers, the farmers, are the owners of a cooperative, and they usually own the cooperative in order to market or distribute or sell or process their foreign products. Transportation cooperatives would be like sharing a tractor or having a taxi co-op, that kind of thing. Distribution or consumer co-ops are what we normally know of a food store. Those are usually consumer co-ops. The people who want good, healthy food come together to create that co-op. Also, credit union, even though he has that separately, the 34 real estate and credit unions, but credit unions are also consumer co-ops, but they're financial cooperatives. Other consumer co-ops would be rural electric co-ops, where people who can't get electricity because they live so far apart form a co-op to give them the electricity they need. So I really, this is the picture of my book, I kind of started with Du Bois' understanding of cooperative economics and his initial research, and then I went back and tried to find other examples and other discussions of co-ops from the years that Du Bois covered, and then I went forward to after 1907 to the present to try to understand what happened since Du Bois wrote his book, and even maybe to understand why there hadn't really been much research or discussion since he wrote his book. And also, his book is not one of the things he's widely known for. Everybody knows souls of black folk. Everyone knows that in the souls of black folk, he had an essay where he said the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. Everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people know he did research on the Civil War, and on the slave trade, but we really don't know about his co-op work, and we don't really know that at the same time at the turn of the century that he was talking about the color line and racism being a problem, he was also talking about economics, and that economic inequality and wealth inequality were a huge problem, and that we needed a way to solve it. And I came to the issue, sort of from a similar perspective, thinking about, it's about 15 years now that I started studying cooperative economics, and I was really concerned about community economic development, black economic prosperity, and ways that the whole community could prosper economically, not just individuals who could get rich, right? And that's how I discovered co-ops and realized that Du Bois was thinking of co-ops in a similar way. So when I first started out, actually, everybody, black community people and co-op people told me that there is no African American co-op history, that African Americans don't practice co-ops, they're not interested in it, they don't know how to share, and that only white Europeans do cooperatives, which turns out is actually a liar, a myth, I guess I should say a myth, right? It's not good to call people liars. And sometimes they're not lying because it's not on purpose, right? They didn't know. And yet, I'm still actually doing research, even though I published the book last year, I'm still doing research on this topic because right now, as far as I'm concerned, it's a never-ending topic. Everywhere I go, more people tell me about stuff that's missing from the book. I continue to find out more information, there's more ways to look at and study it. And also, it shouldn't just be about African American co-ops, we should be studying Latino co-ops, Native American co-ops, Asian American co-ops because every group, especially marginalized groups, have used this notion of collective economics, economic cooperation in order to both survive and sometimes as a base to get enough prosperity and independence to fight for their political rights as well. And you'll see that there's those two parallel strands in the African American history. Sometimes, especially during really bad economic times, the co-ops are really just survival mechanisms. Just pull our resources, get whatever we can what we can do as a group and help ourselves to survive. But sometimes it was a strategy toward we need to, what's the word? Use solidarity, consolidate ourselves, pull together so that we can all prosper together so that then we can't be preyed upon by other people and then we can make our own decisions and conduct ourselves in the way that's important for our people and for our culture, that kind of thing. I named the book Collective Courage for two main reasons. The first one was because in doing this research, not only did I find examples that people had forgotten about or that we hadn't focused on or that had been forgotten, but I also found out that a lot of the problems with black cooperative ownership was that there was sabotage and terrorism against them. White supremacists like the Ku Klux Klan and white competitors like banks and other competitive businesses were relentless against trying to make sure those co-ops failed. And so the courage to persist, even when your members are being shot at, lynched when your businesses are being burned down, when no bank will lend to your co-op, when the railroads won't transport your goods, to keep persisting. And even if one co-op fails to try another one, was just a theme that I kept finding. And so that courage, I realized I needed to have courage in the title. And the other thing is because co-ops are an alternative strategy, it's really important to have the courage of persistence, to keep trying it, to make sure you learn how to do it, to keep trying it, even though we live in a society that doesn't really promote cooperative economics, right? We don't learn it in school. In fact, we're discouraged to cooperate in any way in school. We don't actually know how to make collective decisions, especially not about money, even though we also sometimes do that as families, right? So there's lots of barriers in the way of doing this. And so that kind of courage and persistence was also why I tried to use that in the title. And one of the sheroes of this story, Ella Jo Baker, who of course you all know from SNCC and she was a civil rights activist and a field worker for the NAACP, but she was also an early co-op developer. And she has a newsletter in the 30s when she was head of the Young Negro's Cooperative League where she talks about the courage to persist. So I wanted to also recognize her in the title. And the final thing I have on that slide is about the way that the African-American co-op movement was really turns out to be a silent partner to the Long Civil Rights Movement. What do I mean by that? The Long Civil Rights Movement is all the efforts from when we were brought here illegally and forcibly from Africa to the US to be enslaved to now arguing for our political and social rights. And that long history parallel to that, almost all the leaders were also talking about economic cooperation and engaging in practices that would help the whole community and not just some people. And so even though we don't know it and we know more about the civil rights movement, the co-op movement has been a parallel movement all along. And so African-Americans created communities and black enclaves, black businesses, other economic activity that they tried to insulate from racial discrimination and neglect. That's where the cooperation and collective power through economic co-op ownership, even freedmen established mutual aid societies to help cover costs of illness and death and other needs when they couldn't be covered in other ways. They would all put in dues and then if somebody died, the mutual aid society could pay them to bury their dead, that kind of thing. And they established cooperatives to help them buy goods, to get high quality goods at an affordable price, to share tools, to share land, to lend money to each other so they wouldn't be beholden to what we would call predatory lenders. They weren't always called that but basically it was always that and also so they could have businesses together. So that's sort of the overview of this history that I found. Here's a picture of a black grocery co-op in Buffalo, New York in 1927. And then I promised you 15 minutes so I need to rush a little bit. And I did sort of tell you what a cooperative was but I had a couple slides. There are companies that are owned by the people who come together because they need or want the service or the product or to do the work together. They're created to satisfy a need rather than to make a profit even though to stay in business you have to have some kind of surplus. They're democratically governed. That means each member, each person who owns part of the co-op has one vote as opposed to a share corporation where it depends on how many shares you bought. So in a share corporation, your vote is about how much dollars you have, right? So if you bought 100 shares, you have 100 votes. If you bought 10 shares, you have 10 votes. In a co-op, it doesn't matter how much money you put into the business. Everybody has one vote and that's the democratic part of it. The International Cooperative Alliance says it's an autonomous association of people united to meet their economic, social and cultural needs. And they can be very small from three people to five people and small scale to multi-million. Some of the larger co-ops are thousands of people in them. And there's about 800 million people around the world who are engaged in some kind of co-op. Oh good, this is still working. So I have like three more things to do and then I'm gonna sit down so that Tyler and I can talk, actually. That means I have to skip a few things but I'm gonna skip. Because I said some of this stuff already. So I explained the economic democratic participation a little bit. I explained co-ops as grassroots community development tools. I sort of explained that they're universal right because I said people thought it was only Europeans who practice it but actually that's not true. That 1844 is the official start of the International Cooperative Movement with the Rochdale pioneers in England who set out the first five principles that are now seven internationally recognized principles but it's actually true that Africans practice cooperative economics. Native Americans did, everybody did even before the 1844. And then I think I already said this about the parallel to the civil rights movement. I just wanna name a few black leaders and give you a couple of quotes from them and then I'll sit down with Tyler. So here's a short list of some African American women co-op leaders. I told you Ella Jo Baker, she was executive director of the Young Negro's Cooperative League. Nanny Helen Burrows who those of you who do religious history would know. She was also the founder and first director of the cooperative industries of DC. Helena Wilson who nobody's ever heard of was president for 30 years of the ladies auxiliary to the brotherhood of sleeping car porters which you have heard of. That was the first official black independent union run by a Philip Randolph. Estelle Witherspoon who you probably never heard of with freedom quilting bee in Alabama and one of the founders of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and Fannie Lou Hamer who maybe you know because of her civil rights activity and SNCC activity actually started freedom farm co-op. There's a picture of Ella Baker in her co-op years and her SNCC years. There's Fannie Lou Hamer and I also have a quote from Fannie Lou Hamer. She says cooperative ownership of land opens the door to many opportunities for group development of economic enterprises which develop the total community rather than create monopolies that monopolize resources of a community. So you get the picture. This is why I say most of our African-American leaders have in some way either used or practiced cooperative economics because they understood that. The men and some of the other black organizations would be Du Bois, a Philip Randolph, George Schuyler was the president of the Young Niggers Cooperative League and columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier in the 30s. Jacob Reddix who becomes the president of Jackson State for about 17 years. Before that lived in Gary, Indiana and started a very important co-op there. The Black Panther Party advocated and had co-ops. The Nation of Islam had co-ops, SNCC had co-ops and in fact the Black Manifesto that James Foreman wrote wanted reparations money to go to co-op development in the South and in Africa and John Lewis who was one of the last presidents of SNCC who's now in Congress. Actually his first jobs were creating co-ops and doing community organizing to do co-op development in Alabama and Louisiana and then one of our major black co-op organizations or one of our only black co-op organizations is the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. There's a Philip Randolph, Jacob Reddix and the Federation of Southern Co-ops logo. So I will stop there and Tyler has some questions. It's not comfortable. Hi guys, hopefully I'll ask some questions you may have thought of and may not have thought of and there'll be some time for everybody to ask some questions afterwards. So one thing that really struck me here and was one of my questions before but just got reinforced is no one's talked about this since 1907, like over 100 years. So like why is there so little information about this topic in general? So can you hear me? Yes, instead of me holding it I'll lean forward but I might move again. I mean I asked that question too and it's not that absolutely nobody talked about it because we did have black organizations doing co-op development like the Young Negro's Cooperative League in the 30s was about for about four years it actually had a couple conferences it's first conference 600 people attended so it's not like nothing happened. There are a couple of articles written about black co-ops over the years that Gary, people, Reddix in fact, wrote an article about his efforts in Gary and Deanna for his co-op. But for some reason it's, how should I put this? We don't, we have it, we don't continue that legacy in terms of talking about it. I know that I didn't really know when I was growing up I know one told me that this existed. I also have a bachelor's in African American studies and I didn't study it. None of the history books that I had talked about it. So when I said, you know, and then as I said when I started to talk to community groups about practicing co-ops and doing co-ops everybody said, oh no we don't do it. So it's an interesting mix that the activity is there. There's even some history but you have to find it like it took me 15 years to find some of this stuff. I had to really search really hard like look at black magazines and newspapers and have I had a student look through the microfiche and just look for any time the word co-op or cooperation showed up in a black newspaper, right? Like the crisis or the black world or a black worker which is really tedious work. But we didn't have it in the standard history books don't really talk about that kind of thing. So what I figured out after I studied it I think there's probably about three or four major reasons why we don't know this stuff. I think the first one is about ideology. We live not just in a capitalist society but you know since 1950s we live in a society that demonizes anything like socialism, communism and co-ops are kind of considered a kind of socialism or communism. So especially right by the 60s and stuff even though a lot of the black groups were practicing co-ops they weren't talking about it because they didn't want to be red baited meaning they didn't want to be called communists or socialists. They were afraid that would ruin their reputations and actually they were right because especially in the 50s people could lose their job and never get another job if they were labeled a socialist or whatever. Some of the early, not early, some of the, we actually have some of the civil rights organizers saying that they shied away from talking about economics and economic democracy because they didn't want to, they didn't want to get labeled and they didn't want there to be any division in the message and they wanted the message to really be about voting rights and civil rights. So there's that kind of ideology that got in the way. But also remember I told you about all the sabotage. The other thing that gets in the way here is that a lot of the efforts were sabotaged and didn't last very long. And so then the memory is failure. And I really actually tried not to talk, use the word failure in my book except in the first paragraph where I say the only memory we have is a failure because when I looked at it most of those co-ops even the ones that were short-lived were not failures because they actually helped people to do something, right? They, people coalesced. They learned about how to run a co-op. They learned about how to run a business. They had the business running. They served a need and they learned from that experience. So even if the co-op failed or went under or they had to disband it, they went on to do other better things. Sometimes they got, they had more skills. Sometimes they're able to start a different co-op or a different business or whatever. But it seemed like a failure because it got shut down because the banks wouldn't give them a loan or it got shut down because it got fire bombed by the clan or something. So then people wouldn't talk about it because they didn't want to talk about the failure. So I think there's those kind of combination of things. And then we just don't always know how to do a co-op. That would be the third thing, right? We don't have enough education to have to run a co-op. Well, how would you describe a successful or unsuccessful co-op? And what would be the environment for a successful co-op? Right, so it's easier to start with the unsuccessful. The unsuccessful ones don't last long, right? They can't do what they say. If you wanted to have a food co-op and you can't get enough sales to cover your costs until you go under or you don't last very long. But again, often you couldn't get your sales because the white competitor next door down the street was actually undercutting you on purpose and they could last longer than you, right? So often, as I said, the failure was really one of sabotage and not one of actual not being able to do it. But the successful ones, and as I said, I actually consider all the ones in my book and I forgot to add up the number of how many co-ops I mentioned in my book, but it's probably, I don't know, 500 or something. How, what's the range of time? Oh, from 1700s to 2008. The successes are about people being able to pool meager resources, like sometimes they could only pay 10 cents a month to pay their part of the co-op because the other thing about a co-op is everybody's supposed to put in something, right? It's called equity. Everybody puts in some kind of money to be part of a member. They try to keep it small like in the old days, like in the 30s and 20s, the price was usually $5 per share, right? But sometimes people didn't have $5, but they could pay 10 cents this week or 10 cents this month. So pooling those resources, first of all, I think was that's a success. That people were able to realize that they could put the money together and do something with it. Because then the money involved could then help you buy the food you wanted and then everybody could share that food or could help if you lent, if you all put in money and then lent that out one month, lent it to one person who could then put a down payment on some property and then the next month somebody else could use that money that everybody pooled to put a down payment on some other property. You could get property without having to depend on a bank which was really just trying to gouge you so they could foreclose on you later because there was so much racism about that. So that's an example. One of the co-ops was actually a shipyard and in that case the blacks couldn't get the black shipyard, skilled paupers and stupadors could not get work in the white shipyards. So that co-op actually provided work for the black skilled workers that nobody else would hire. That one actually lasted 18 years. So it was no way a failure and in fact it hired about 200 workers, sometimes black and white workers at a time this would be the 1860s to 1880s at a time when there was still a lot of segregation. And that Du Bois considered as a failure because it could have lasted longer. It went under because the rent for the property went up and they couldn't afford the rent and they also had some trouble managing a democratic organization. But they managed, but in those 18 years not only did they hire 200 people a year but they also integrated the Stubador and Caucus Union which hadn't been integrated when they started. So you get the idea. There's another group, Freedom Quilting Bee in Alabama in the 1960s and 70s. Those are women sharecroppers from sharecropping families. And remember sharecropping is when you rent farmland from basically the old master plantation owner. And then you farm it and then in order to pay the rent and to pay the supplies that you needed while you were farming, you owe the landlord money. The landlord takes your harvest and then gives you a little bit of a back if you're lucky but usually says you owe it all. So it's basically a debt managed situation. Well these women found that they could sell the quilts that they make in the winter and make some extra money from it. So they started a quilting co-op called Freedom Quilting Bee and with that co-op they actually made enough money to buy 23 acres of land. They built a sewing plant. Some of that land they were able to sell to other sharecroppers so that they could own their own land instead of sharecropping. It was especially important because in the late 60s a lot of those sharecroppers got thrown off the property that they were sharecropping on when they went to register to vote. And so this way with Freedom Quilting Bee having that money and having that land owned they then allowed people not to have to be worried about sharecropping they could still register to vote and now they wouldn't be thrown off the land because they were either renting from the co-op or they had bought some land from the co-op. The co-op also created a daycare center and after school program and a summer program because now of course the women were quilting in the factory, in their own factory and so what do they do with their children? So they have childcare services. Oh, Michelle just left but that's an example of connecting what you do with childcare. So you started to get the idea that what these co-ops can accomplish. Yeah it seems like it's necessary to recognize the potential to combine the meager resources and successfully pool and manage the resources to prevent any outside forces from, you know, I guess undermining the success of it. I'm undermining you, right. But and also to control your own economic well-being. You mentioned women both right now and on the slide show. What was the role of women and youth in this movement especially considering how little women and young people are spoken of in history? Right, so it turns out there was a large role for both especially for black women in the black co-op movement. I don't think it's as strong in the white co-op movement as someone the other day asked me about that. For black women it seems like they really played the role of doing much of the organizing and a lot of the background work even though men were often still the recognized leaders. So even the young Negro's cooperative league, Ella Jo Baker is the executive director who basically does all the work but the president was the man, George Skyler, who didn't do as much of the work but he was the president. But the women also had been very much involved in those mutual aid societies which I briefly mentioned which are the precursors to the co-ops. So many of the mutual aid societies in the black community were actually run and owned by women because often it was the services that the family, the social services that the family needed that were considered women's work or whatever were what's associated with the mutual aid societies. The thing that was really interesting to me for the co-op movement was how seemed seamlessly though, I'm sure there was struggle about it, how seamlessly it seemed that women were able to take leadership in the co-op movement at least for the black co-op movement and so I was able to find time after time women who may have been involved in other things like a mutual aid society or other social things just moving into the co-op movement and becoming leaders in the co-ops. Sometimes some of the co-ops were women only co-ops like cooperative industries that I mentioned with Nanny Helen Burroughs or you have something like the ladies auxiliary to the brotherhood of sleeping car porters. Now the brotherhood is mostly men, it's male railroad porters in the sleeping railroad cars and it's run by a very charismatic man, a Philip Randolph for almost everybody knows who he is. He started the March on Washington movement as well as founded this, right? And he actually, before he even did the brotherhood, he was talking about co-ops in 1914 in his magazine, black, no sorry, the messenger. But anyway, but what's interesting is while the men are fighting the good union fight, the ladies auxiliary are the wives and also the maids who work in the railroads. They're worried about the rest of life, not just fighting for labor rights but what do we do when we go home, right? They were worried about now that we're making good union wages, what happens with that money? How can we keep it circulating in the black community? How can we use it to help elevate the black community? Well what do we do? We use co-ops, right? If we had consumer co-ops, if we had credit unions, right? Then our money, we could keep our money in the community controlled by the community and use. And so it seemed to be their task to start to educate people about co-ops and that kind of thing. So I think women ended up with that kind of a role and sorry, youth you were asking about. Oh wait, before you go on, just you mentioned mutual aid societies and credit unions, are those all synonyms for co-ops? Well mutual aid society would be a precursor, it's not as formalized as a co-op. And a credit union is a financial co-op. And most of you don't know that even if you're in a credit union, you don't realize it's a financial co-op. It's a consumer co-op so everybody who has a deposit in a credit union is actually a member and you have the right to vote for the board of directors and to vote on policy. Most of us don't exercise that right. Oh like MCU, like municipal credit union? That's a scam. Oh, well I'm a part of that and I didn't even know. You're a member and you have a right to vote every year to attend the annual meeting, to vote on the policies and to vote for the board. And then for youth, I'll use first Young Negro's Cooperative League again. Young Negro's Cooperative League is interesting because it's in the height of the depression, great depression and they actually said it's the job of young black people to make economic changes. That our elders were kind of old fogies and they tried civil rights and all kinds of other things and look, you know, we're here in the Great Depression and we're the bottom of the bottom, the lowest of the low. Nothing's really happened. We need a change in paradigm. We really need to think about co-ops instead of capitalism and it's gonna be the young people that do it. So that was their mantra, their motto. They didn't last but about four or five years but remember what I told you, the first conference in 1931, the height of the Great Depression, it's in Pittsburgh. They have 25 delegates, people who are representing the chapters of the Young Negro's Cooperative League but they have 600 participants in the conference. Come on, even today that's a huge thing for a co-op conference run by young black people, right? So they're no small thing even though they don't necessarily, they have a big plan. They don't necessarily get a lot of co-ops off the ground but they do get some co-ops off the ground. They do a lot of co-op education and they say we need young people to control things and we need women on par with men in this movement. So they're a real important and I believe a real precursor. We know Ella Jo Baker was all about young people's empowerment and grassroots leadership development in the 50s and 60s but I believe she really learned all that because of the co-op movement that she was involved in in the 30s. So you can also see how it helped propel young people to do other things into leadership roles later in their life. I've been looking at some really exciting co-ops among young blacks in the late 20th, early 21st century. There's one, I don't believe it's lasted now but it lasted for about 12 years from 1992 to whatever that would be 2004 or something. It's called Food from the Hood. It started out at Crenshaw High School in LA right after the Rodney King Revolution riots, rebellions, students in that high school started a school garden and they originally were gonna use the produce just to help some of the homeless and the poor in their neighborhood just to give them some fresh food. Then they learned about farmers markets and they realized they could actually sell some of the food that they raised in their gardens so they started a business model and they thought, okay, how could they sell a product that added value to the raw food and they found they could make salad dressing fairly easily so they bottled salad dressing made from herbs from their garden and sold it and then sold it over the Amazon. This was when Amazon was just beginning in the mid 1990s and they actually made a lot of money and they ran the whole business as a co-op. They ran it almost as a school business project like sometimes we used to talk about junior achievement which is all about individual ownership but this was collective ownership. Over 10 years, they, well, they made a decision that half of their earnings, proceeds, would be saved for scholarships for the graduating members to go on to college and then the other half, some of it went back into the business and some of it went to pay the worker owners. Over 10 years, they were able to send about 77 of their youth who graduated from high school who had been in the co-op, had enough money, I forget how much, I think I have a slide on it, how much money they made, $180,000 or something and scholarships went to their graduating members so they could go to college. And even better, if anything could be better than that because they now had students in the school who could afford to go to college, the school actually started a college prep program. You can see again the power of young people doing things and even if they never started another co-op, just what their co-op accomplished and just the things that they learned and the leadership they developed, they stayed in school, they understood why, they might now, math might make more sense to them because they're trying to run their own business and so they need to understand the finances, why, how to write and communicate better might make sense to them because they have to market their produce, that kind of thing. So there's all these connections which keep them in school, keep them interested in going to college, give them the resources to go to college and give them leadership development. So I've looked at those kind of things and I've been advocating that we should do more to promote young people starting their own co-op. There seems to be a lot of benefits to doing a cooperative system and it looks like it works on a small and a large scale and considering how we've gone through feudalism and attempts at communism and democratic socialism and now in capitalism, do you see this as a potential for a future of an economic system? I do. I think that we've already shown that co-ops can coexist with capitalism, especially the smaller ones but I actually think that we could create what some people call a co-op commonwealth and it's sort of the Du Bois idea of a whole interlocking system of co-ops and I think it could work. Now it's true that not everybody wants to be an owner because you do have to put time and effort into, especially if you're a democratic member of a business, you actually have to put enough time in to understand how the business works and to pay attention, to have meetings and that kind of thing. So not everybody wants to put in all that time. So maybe not every single business or every single economic activity would be a co-op but I do think we could do with some kind of co-op commonwealth which would interlock systems. So worker co-ops which are owned by the employees so you run your own company, you own a share of the company's equity, you get to help make the rules of the company and you get a good job. That's important. A credit union could maybe help to do the financing for a worker co-op. We could all live in co-op housing and co-op housing doesn't have to be a condo like sharing apartment house. Sometimes there's co-op housing where everybody owns their individual unit but the housing co-op owns the land underneath it or people come together to do maintenance together and that kind of thing in the housing. So there's ways to do housing co-ops. Then the consumer co-ops, the food co-ops, the supermarkets, the retail if we all bought things together so we had the kind of quality food and things we wanted. You can have co-op construction companies, co-op health insurance, co-op daycare centers, co-op schools even where either the parents own the co-op or the teachers own the co-op. So there's so much variety of ways. I do think it's a viable system but it will take a lot more, it's gonna take a lot more education. We've got to break through the prevailing ideologies and we've got to have enough financing connecting. And then one last question before I open it to the floor. Who should read this book and why? Everybody. Well, I definitely think young people because I hope it will give them ideas for what to do. I definitely think people of color particularly African Americans so they can understand more about this rich legacy and history that we haven't really been able to share as well as the people. I think the co-op movement that exists now because it's actually a worldwide movement, they need to know a little bit better about the non-European parts of the movement. And then I actually am hoping that lawmakers and co-op and community developers would read this book because I really think if they understand the model, they'd be more likely to try to figure out how to promote it more and get more money toward it. And the good thing is almost all those groups have already either asked me to come for a book talk or connected with me in some way. I just started talking to some of the Black Lives Matter groups because they're interested in trying to figure out what's the next wave, how do they move towards solution? Right, and they see co-ops as fitting in with their understanding of what needs to happen and that kind of thing. So my ideal is that we all get really excited about co-ops and demand and create as many co-ops as we can but we need to do it not as a fad but we need to do it from a position of understanding the strengths and the weaknesses, the challenges as well as the benefits and educating ourselves as much as we can so we go into it very much for the long-term and very much from a position of understanding both its power but also its pitfalls and how do we protect it? All right, so does anyone else have any questions? Hi, good afternoon. Good afternoon. So I just wanted to ask you, did you find in your research any collective action problems, meaning people would be inclined to contribute less to the co-op but still be able to get the benefits from being part of it? Yeah, so the question was about collective action issues meaning some people kind of free ride and don't do much but want to still take the benefits and yes and no. So I would say the yes part is there's always a chance that you have people who either deliberately want a free ride meaning just say, yeah, yeah, I'll do it and then make everybody else do it but most of the examples I found were not about people deliberately either trying to undermine or take advantage but people who might do less because of circumstances. So people who really either had illness or mental illness problems or a lot of family issues and just didn't have the time to put into the co-op sometimes they would be the ones struggling or straggling or not putting in their whole thing but not really on purpose trying to just take advantage. So oftentimes the problem was how do you deal with people's existing traumas and challenges because they can't really leave those at the door when they come into a co-op. So sometimes the co-op has to also try to help figure out what else to do. So some of the co-ops more recently have worked a lot with immigrant women and so some of the co-ops have found that in part of the training and start up for a co-op they also have to teach the women English. Some of them realize that they also have to figure out how to help the women get food on their table now even while they're waiting for the co-op to start. Some of them realize they have to allow women to bring their children to the meetings or something because otherwise the women can't participate and it's not that they don't want to but they can't. So oftentimes the co-ops have to figure out what are the barriers and then address those. Sometimes another barrier has been especially in worker co-ops has been the time it takes to do participatory economics. Meaning sit in a meeting where you have to make decisions or whatever. So some of the best co-ops actually have really honed in on how do we have good meeting facilitation. How do we keep meetings to the point and as short as possible but still make sure people feel like they're participating. How do we explain people how to do conflict resolution and how to come to consensus. So they actually don't assume that people know how to do those things and they have a relatively long orientation and training process where not only do they teach you about the business itself but they teach you all these other pieces about how to operate as an association, as a collective. And so when they do that, they reduce a lot of the time that people would either not come to a meeting or not participate because often it turns out that they didn't participate because they didn't feel they were being heard or they felt the process was too long and drawn out or wasting their time or that kind of thing. So I've been studying worker co-ops a lot and the ones that have really perfected this orientation and training from all the perspectives really getting people to hone in on how to have a good meeting, how to participate well, how to come to consensus, how to hear all the voices, those are the co-ops that actually do better. Almost regardless of whether they have the best business plan or not, even though a business plan, meaning being able to run your business well is also important but to be a co-op, you also have to have that association side and I think that helps to reduce that shirking part. It helps to know that you're in a co-op too. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Jonathan Trinidad. It's a pleasure to be here. I kind of wanted to know what are the legalities of establishing a co-op? I mean, is it like cooperation? Would it be a small business or would it depend on the members? And when you do bring more members in, if you start like very small, then does it change over to a different kind of entity? Okay, so there are legal structures for co-ops. Unfortunately, right now they're state level, so it depends what state you're in, what kind of co-op you can have. Luckily, New York state actually has very good co-op laws and actually has good co-op lawyers. The Akuni Law School has a community development law clinic that specializes in co-ops, so does Fordham Law School. So there's lawyers there. One of my organizations called Grassroots Economic Organizing has an article by the lawyers in New York. On the different legal structures for a co-op. So you can actually have a co-op under state co-op law, which also there's federal tax credits for being a co-op. But you can also be an LLC, which is a limited liability corporation and be a co-op. For a limited liability corporation, you need co-op bylaws, which means the bylaws have to represent all the seven principles of a co-op, which are back to what I was telling you about the Democratic Economic Participation and one person, one vote and all that kind of stuff. Those lawyers can help you show you what the bylaws would look like. And the LLC is actually the easiest thing to start. Under co-op law, it's a little bit harder to start it, but those are a little bit harder to dissolve. So some people say it's better to go through co-op law, but a lot of people start with an LLC. If you start small and build, almost all those co-op structures can accommodate that. You don't have to not be a co-op because you get bigger. And bigger co-ops just have different strategies to keep that Democratic involvement. So sometimes they have more committee structures. Some of the small co-ops, especially the worker co-ops, everybody's on the board. But then if you get bigger, you vote for people to be on the board, but you still have mechanisms through committees and things for people to have a say. So there's a lot of examples. Dr. Mulder in the back just did a book with what, 10 co-ops? Six co-ops, case studies. So she really goes into detail for those six. I have some detail in my book. And then there's a lot of stuff now online. If you go to geo.coopgeo.coop, that's that organization I told you I work with grassroots economic organizing. We have a bunch of material online and a lot of links to other co-op groups so you can see the different strategies. And then there's some groups that do interlocking. Like if they get too big, they might break off into two different co-ops but all under one banner. So sometimes like a holding company that everybody connects through the holding company, but each smaller co-op stays smaller. So there's a lot of ways that you can deal with scale and keep that democratic thing going. But we do know a lot about legal structures now. You just, as I said, you need to know what technical assistance to get and where to go. And luckily New York City has a lot of supports. Hello, my name is Chastity Garcia. I am a freshman at John Jay. So I am taking Economics 101 or Rebekah Hollander. And my question to you is that I know in the beginning I recognize a very familiar word that we actually talked about in class is economic inequality. Do you feel like economic inequality affects maybe your research and also the co-ops that are developing now? Oh, sure. So I really started my research because I was worried about economic inequality, particularly economic racial inequality. And I was trying to find strategies and structures that black communities could use in order to get better control over their economic lives and to own businesses together that could give them some prosperity. So that's actually how I even got involved in the co-op movement. But also, as I was doing the research, I think there was issues, one, because some of the co-ops are very small. And as I said, because many of the co-ops had been under a lot of sabotage, it was hard to find information. So the economic inequality also came in in that it was hard to even find information about these co-ops. And then most of the co-ops actually suffered still, even though they were trying to solve economic inequality by becoming a co-op. They also suffered from economic inequality sometimes because of the ways the banks treated or wouldn't treat the co-op, sometimes the way other competitors treated the co-op. And so that's why I said about naming the book Collective Courage because so many of the stories were about how much courage it took just to try to keep the doors open to that co-op because of all the racial oppression and economic sabotage that was happening because both the capitalist society as well as the racist society didn't want those co-ops to survive. And yet the co-ops started because people didn't want to hire blacks or didn't want to pay them well or didn't want to provide certain goods and services to blacks. So it's on both sides, right? You created the co-op to address some of the inequality but the co-op also suffered because they were under siege. Time for one more burning question. My name is Eliano. My question is that you talk about sabotage and when I was thinking about sabotage, I was thinking about how not people could familiar with the Black Wall Street, the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, which was one of the most master of black economic neighborhood. So how do minorities, you know, black Latinos get over the fear of creating co-ops and maintaining one? Right, it's a great question. So I mean, we like to think that some of those horrible sabotages were beyond that in our society but of course we aren't really, there's still examples, maybe not as wild but then when you see all the police brutality, we know that the sum of it still exists maybe not about your economics but the way I try to answer that question is I guess two parts. The first thing is the co-ops that seem to last longest especially in the face of some of the sabotage were the ones that were most connected to their communities. So meaning more community people were members, more community people understood what the co-op was, why it was there, what it was doing. The co-op actually went door to door and talked to people about their co-op or they signed up people from the community to either use their co-op or help them in some way so that connection to community in some ways, community actually protected the co-op. Now that, you know, if you're gonna fire bomb like they did at Tulsa, there's not really much protection, right? They're just, they're flying over and dropping incendiaries and there's not much you can do but hopefully you can still recover from that. So sometimes it's protecting you from stopping the harassment but sometimes it's recovering from it. When it's the economics sabotage, it's a little easier when you have community help because then if the bank won't loan you money, maybe you can get community loans from community members or community organizations, that kind of thing. So I think the community part is really important, that connection to community providing a service or a good that the community also wants not just your co-op, that kind of thing. I do also think though that we have to think about policy and some of the co-ops also have worked with policy makers in order to protect the co-op better. So in the South Bronx here in New York, Cooperative Home Care Associates, Latina and Black women mostly home care workers who own their own co-op. One of the strategies they used early on was to change city and state policy around Medicare money. I guess it's Medicare money, Medicaid, Medicare, right? Not the one for the elderly, the one for... Medicaid. Medicaid, right. Medicaid money because Medicaid allocates a certain amount for home healthcare. When they got the city and the state to allocate more of Medicaid money for home healthcare, that meant they could charge higher prices for their workers because their purpose was to give living wage jobs and quality work to home care workers. So again, that policy side. And then they even joined with other home care workers who weren't co-ops to get those policies passed and to do high level training. And so again, that kind of strategy of trying to work with your legislators, get certain policies to protect you is another way. But we do have to, you're right, we have to be eternally vigilant as they say to try to figure out, especially in a hostile situation, how to do this better.