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Creative Study introduces a new solidarity economy source, No Starving Artists! No Sellouts!: Introduction To Creative Work In The Solidarity Economy, The What And The Why In Four Parts in partnership with Art.coop. The free course, ” introduces you to a growing library of courses dedicated to creatives building their own worlds. It is a part of a living, breathing process created by people who know that values-aligned ways of working together can be joyful, impactful, and pay the bills. We have survived and thrived by being in community and we welcome you. Guided by Cooperative Journal podcast host Ebony Gustave and artist Rad Pereira, this first module sets the tone and lays the foundation for what will be shared.” Learn more about how to participate here.

“Adriana Griñó, Arts Program Officer, has announced she will leave the Kenneth Rainin Foundation effective January 20. Adriana joined the Foundation as Program Assistant in 2014. She was promoted to Program Associate, which was followed by her appointment to Program Officer in 2017,” said the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. “Her decision to leave the role comes after over eight years of service in advancing the Foundation’s goal of enabling Bay Area artists to thrive. Over the years, Adriana has developed meaningful connections with grantees, peer funders, partners and staff, and has strengthened the Foundation’s contributions and impact in the field.”

“Adriana has led the New & Experimental Works (NEW) Program, which provides unrestricted and support for artist fees to enable Bay Area artists to produce visionary projects relevant to the communities they serve. She also managed our Open Spaces Program, which funds temporary public art installations in San Francisco and Oakland. Adriana hosted over a dozen grant proposal workshops, processed hundreds of applications and stewarded over 150 grants over the past five years. Beyond grantmaking, Adriana supported the Arts Program’s strategic shifts to center individual artists. She helped launch the prestigious Rainin Fellowship in 2021 in partnership with United States Artists, which administers the program. Four Arts Fellows selected annually receive a grant of $100,000 plus tailored supplemental support in recognition of their superior artistic contributions and leadership in the Bay Area.”

“At the height of the COVID pandemic, Adriana worked with the Arts Team to provide emergency relief support to grantees and raised funds from peer foundations to enable three rounds of awards for individual artists through the East Bay/Oakland Relief Fund administered by the Center for Cultural Innovation. This program has distributed over $1.6 million to over 1,000 artists throughout the Bay Area over the past three years.”

Read the full farewell here.

“As the New Year promises to bring many changes to the social sector and beyond, one thing remains unchanged and top of mind for many: the economic climate in the U.S. With high levels of inflation persisting and the possibility of a recession looming, many are predicting what 2023’s economy will mean for today’s workforce,” said Guy Mika for Candid. “Unfortunately, there’s no crystal ball that can tell employees what to expect this year. However, we can revisit the topic of workers’ rights through a new lens by exploring the increasing role that a newer breed of labor organizations plays in the social sector.”

“The unique and dynamic needs of such workers have given rise to a new form of labor organizations. Meet the growing ‘alt-labor’ movement: today’s emerging ecosystem comprised of the latest variety of workers’ rights organizations. Unlike 501(c)(5) labor unions, most alt-labor organizations are 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Thus, they cannot engage in collective bargaining on behalf of workers or formally organize legal strikes. Instead, they pursue a variety of other strategies centering on litigation, education, and industry-wide advocacy.”

“For example, the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) undertook a six-year lobbying campaign in New York to pass better protections for domestic workers. Similarly, the Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) has pursued a legal strategy of suing restaurant owners for wage violations and used the legal settlement process as an opportunity to negotiate additional rights for workers.”

“While alt-labor nonprofits have secured an ever-growing presence in the workers’ rights movement, it’s too early to say if support for these workers’ rights organizations will continue to expand. The pandemic highlighted the importance of essential workers, and public support for unions reached an all-time high since the 1960s.”

“But for now, our Magic 8 Ball™ responds with, ‘Ask again later,’ to the question of whether the alt-labor movement will continue to build on its early momentum and further influence the future of labor organizing and advocacy. In the meantime, Candid will continue to collect data and track the role workers’ rights organizations play in the social sector and the economy at large.”

Read the full article here.

From Democracy and Belonging Forum: “Four days away from the Christmas of 1848, in the dark and occult hours before morning wakes, Ellen and William Craft beheld each other through tearful eyes for the last time. Minutes later, they collapsed to the floor, both falling into a writhing heap of limbs and agony, convulsing, trembling, and flailing until the strong brew they had ingested hours earlier passed through them. When the sun yawned awake to the sounds of the cock crow, his surveillant gaze travelled across the undulating fields of Georgia, across the cottonfields of one plantation in Macon, and fell through the cracks of the cabin where two lovers had spent their last human moments, and where a few obsidian-black feathers belonging to two fugitive crows now littered the log floor – tell-tale signs of a daring escape, a transformation too offensive for history to embrace.”

“Something about Black exile, about Black refusal, gestures at a generosity stranger than ‘truth’ can accommodate; it gestures at how things spill away from neat lines and steady identities; it gestures at the drunken, creolized promiscuity of ‘reality itself’. Black exile distrusts straight lines and loves zigzagging cartographies, meandering stories that do not care much for some Cartesian notion of a fixed truth. Black exile loves death and ghosts, moonlit dalliances, subterranean experiments, hybrid bodies, bacchanal aesthetics, perverse mixtures and spillages, monsters with phallic horns sprouting from their heads, grandmother concoctions, and stories of a promiscuous ‘world’ that won’t stay still long enough for us to paint its portrait. For Black exile, facts vibrate at the speed of mystery.”

“Voices are presumably discrete things, located firmly within the agential control of human subjects. Something that cannot be taken from us, synonymous with free will even. But such a view of voice, as an object of a stable human organism, displaces the roles the world around us and strange worlds within play in shaping speakability. Voices are not solely the products of individual or collective vocal folds: without oxygen, without the efforts of microbial communities that inhabit vocal fold mucosa, without a milieu that grants language such power – often investing it with a nobility denied others who cannot speak, without a politics that gives currency to speaking, without the mutuality of a (perceived) listening apparatus, speaking would be invisible. It would be no matter at all.”

Read the full article here.

Art.coop invites listeners to Remember the Future together by listening to the stories of artists and culture bearers who know that the practices of the Solidarity Economy are not some new technology, but actually are ways of being in relationship with people and planet that are as old as time. They are our ancestral practices. In this 7 episode narrative pilot, listeners learn: You don’t have to be a starving artist or a sell out. You can find work where you joyfully live your values and pay the bills. We meet QTBIPOC creatives who are firing their bosses, freeing the land, electing themselves, and building livelihoods based on care, cooperation, mutual aid, and solidarity. Every other episode grounds listeners in a practice-based offering to activate the solidarity economy in their body, in their community, and in their context today. Listen to the podcast here.

From Forbes” “Dr. Carmen Rojas, President and CEO of Marguerite Casey Foundation, is the youngest Latina to run a nationally endowed philanthropic foundation. Her colleague, Jonathan Jayes-Green, Vice President of Programs at the same foundation, is the first and only undocumented leader to serve in an executive role in a national private foundation in the U.S.. For the two, not only are they breaking the pale, stale and male stereotype of philanthropy, they are also challenging how philanthropy is being done.”

“Both the backgrounds of Dr. Rojas and Jayes-Green in advocating for racial justice have prepared them for strengthening the foundation’s focus in this area. ‘75% of the foundation’s funds went to organizations led by Black, Indigenous People of Color,’ says Dr. Rojas – in 2019, Marguerite Casey Foundation distributed $34 million in grants. ‘The foundation has always been a racial justice organization, pro-Black, pro-Native, pro-queer, instead of talking about justice more broadly. For us, justice can only be achieved if people of color are represented and control the power and resources to make their own decisions, and set the rules of the game.'”

“At a time in American history where future visions are being debated, the voices of funders and more importantly, social change leaders, should be heard alongside politicians. As Dr. Carmen Rojas reflected: ‘We are afforded a lot of authority as funders, but we need to make room for other people to show their full extent of brilliance. Funders should be the nurturing soil for social change efforts to take roots.'”

Read the full article here.

“My argument is because [right wing authoritarianism] is the central struggle of the day, we need the most effective, principled and impactful progressive organizations that are seeking to challenge that,” says Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. Mitchell is also an activist and co-founder of Blackbird, an organization that has provided infrastructure support for the Black Lives Matter movement and other groups around the country. The social movement strategist wrote a 6,000-word article for The Forge called “Building Resilient Organizations,” in which he described and shared potential solutions for overcoming some of the biggest problems within progressive spaces. He joins WITHpod to discuss the piece, roots of the longstanding political and social tensions within movements on the left and strategies for resetting.

Listen to the episode here.