Two more days to raise $7,262
Hi friend,
I co-founded Solidarity Research Center in 2014 along with two colleagues from the IWW Survey and Research Committee. We didn’t just share the acronym from our old namesake, we also continued the ethic of solidarity research — we consider lived experience to be a form of knowledge. We blur the line between subject and object; we are not neutral. Anyone who professes to be objective is just shilling for the status quo.
We conduct research with the intent of challenging the normative social order and creating a new sense of who we are as individuals, with each other, and as a collective. We don’t hide our intentions — it’s pretty obvious from our website — and we are rigorous, meticulous, and careful in our research so fault cannot be found in our methods.
In movements, we follow the leadership of frontline actors, be they contingent workers, labor excluded from protection, bodies considered disposable within racialized and gendered capitalism, or life that continues despite a world that denies their being.
We also hoped from the bottom of our hearts to separate from the atomized existence under late capitalism. Instead, we wanted unity in our political aspirations and how we made our livelihoods. This is why in 2015 we established ourselves formally both as a nonprofit as well as a worker cooperative. We experimented with horizontal structures, flat wages, and replaced managers with mentors. We made mistakes along the way and learned lessons.
We were fortunate that we had emergent community. In 2015, we joined two national networks: the US Solidarity Economy Network and the New Economy Coalition. We proposed to develop a new website for USSEN late that year, and unveiled a new version in early 2016. The design and layout is essentially still used today.
In the middle of 2016, we partnered with the New Economy Coalition to complete the analysis of the membership survey conducted to inform narrative and story-based strategy. We were the primary author of a report released in November of that year, on new economy messaging, that informed the New Economies Reporting Project and the Movement Voices Fellowship.
2017 was the year that SRC imploded. The pressures of building a worker cooperative that was fully remote (before Zoom was commonplace) along with unacknowledged tensions around race, class, and gender came to a fore. We dissolved the worker cooperative, two co-founders left to start a new entity Research Action Cooperative. I stayed with the nonprofit and committed to an explicit focus on racial justice and the Third World in our work.
We launched two new projects that year: one was a partnership with the Dine Policy Institute to support their land reform study and to explore what solidarity economies looked like in the context of the Navajo Nation. The other was a project inspired by the work of my mentor Jessica Gordon-Nembhard and searched for the historical and cultural roots of solidarity economies in Asian American diasporic communities.
We facilitated a three-day workshop on research justice, participatory research methods, solidarity economies, data analysis, and GIS mapping and visualization for staff researchers and interns at the Dine Policy Institute. SRC board member and longtime friend Andrew Curley served as the interim research director for the institute based at the tribal college. You can read a summary of our training written by two Dine Policy Institute interns Ashley Claw and Ricki Draper.
The training was in support of a Navajo Nation land reform study, which returned to the Shonto community near the Black Mesa interviewed by ethnographers in the 1950s and then the 1970s. The study wanted to document the change in livelihoods and Navajo economies over time, and how land is used for both purposes.
In 2018, we facilitated a panel at the Red Nation conference that attempted to draw connections between land, liberty, and autonomous communities in the Navajo Nation, East Los Angeles, and Jackson, Mississippi. You can view a recording here.
I was also awarded the activist-in-residence fellowship that year by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. I used the opportunity and resources to build on a network we created with National CAPACD of Asian American immigrant and refugee organizations who incubated worker cooperatives for their members. With my colleague and friend Parag Khandhar, we facilitated a five-part webinar series, introducing solidarity and cooperative economics targeted towards the needs of Asian American communities. The recordings are archived here.
I summarized the historical and archival research I conducted through my fellowship at UCLA in this article for Yes magazine. I found that economic cooperation was how Asian American immigrants survived in this country hostile to their race. Cooperative labor and land ownership were ways that Asian Americans could get around exclusionary laws, initially passed to restrict Chinese workers but which later grew to apply to all Asians.
Reliance on solidarity and mutual aid isn’t limited to Asian Americans. This past year, my colleague Matthew Slaats and I conducted a global solidarity economy listening project where we interviewed over 40 leaders in 20+ countries to ascertain:
1. What is the alternative to capitalism they are developing?
2. What frameworks are they using?
3. What power and scale do their movements have?
Again and again, from Latin America to the former Soviet bloc countries, we found alternatives flourished within frontline communities who were excluded from the mainstream economy because they were indigenous, women, poor, low caste, informal workers, or lived in rural poverty. They survived by cooperating with each other and building relationships outside of wage labor and market transactions.
The frameworks were less important than their embodiment of values core to solidarity economies, including:
1. Solidarity
2. Equity in all dimensions
3. Primacy of social welfare over profits and the unfettered rule of the market
4. Sustainability
5. Democracy
6. Pluralism
The results of our listening project are forthcoming, and we need your support to ensure that this work and other projects such as the Municipalism Learning Series can continue. We raised $16,137 — which is 69% of our budget — but we still need $7,262 or else Solidarity Research Center will end this year in the red.
Please support our work as a birthday gift for me, for those excluded from power and resources, and for the alternatives being conceived.
Two more days to raise $7,262!
In deep appreciation,
Yvonne