Beautiful Solutions: A Conversation with Eli Feghali and Rachel Plattus

Truth to Power is a regular series of conversations with writers about the promises and pitfalls of movements for social justice. From the roots of racial capitalism to the psychic toll of poverty, from resource wars to popular uprisings, the interviews in this column focus on how to write about the myriad causes of oppression and the organized desire for a better world.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Steve Dubb: Beautiful Solutions emerged from earlier book projects, Beautiful Trouble (2012) and Beautiful Rising (2017). Can you talk more about the origins of Beautiful Solutions, which the two of you (along with Nathan Schneider and the late Elandria Williams) edited, and how it complements those earlier works?

Rachel Plattus: Early on, the Beautiful Trouble team came to Boston and did a training and book launch event. And we got to talking with the folks from that crew…about what would it be like if, in addition to Beautiful Trouble, which is kind of a compendium of creative resistance tactics and stories, there was also a collection of stories and solutions around the politics of yes—around building the world that we want.

At the same time that we were developing this project Beautiful Trouble was also sourcing stories from all over the world and particularly the Global South. So, Beautiful Solutions was, right from the beginning, designed to be learning from anywhere in the world where people were growing democratic economies and governance.

Early on, at a New Economy Coalition conference at CommonBound in Boston, Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis were working on This Changes Everything. Conversations started around how their project could really use something like Beautiful Solutions. So, we launched the first iteration of this project in partnership with them and developed a first-round set of stories, principles, and values. And from there, we were off and running.

What would it be like if…there was also a collection of stories and solutions around the politics of yes.

Eli Feghali: We understand that we are going to need movements that resist and say no, and we are going to need those same movements to offer up in practical ways what we are replacing these systems with.

We also understand that the solutions in Beautiful Solutions are resistance, too. So, it’s not just, “Here’s this wonderful example of the world we want.” We know these wonderful examples are a threat to systems of domination. And that historically systems of domination have taken steps to squash examples of flourishing without exploitation. We need the skills and experiences from all parts of the movement ecosystem.

SD: The book was developed through a partnership of four organizations—Beautiful Trouble itself, Highlander [Movement School], New Economy Coalition (NEC), and People’s Hub. What did each organization contribute?

RP: We started with Beautiful Trouble—the partnerships that Beautiful Trouble was already building in the Global South and around the world, many of those relationships opened us up to work with contributors who we might not otherwise have met.

Having pieces of the project out in the world that people are able to engage with has created these really beautiful feedback loops.

In terms of Highlander and People’s Hub, early on at the Jackson Rising [conference] in Jackson, MS, [in May 2014] and then at a Unitarian Universalist minister’s house in Boston, we found ourselves in partnership with Elandria Williams. They took it to the Highlander team and really built the will inside of that organization. Through Elandria’s work at Highlander, we did a lot of collaboration with many folks on the education team at Highlander in particular.

As Elandria and I moved to People’s Hub, the kind of commitment to popular education that is also deeply held at Highlander had a new life. And through the early years of the pandemic, the possibility to offer some of what we were developing inside of Beautiful Solutions as popular education that was accessible virtually to a lot of communities all over the world was a big part of how the project developed.

This pattern of having pieces of the project out in the world that people are able to engage with has created these really beautiful feedback loops, where we will offer some pieces of curriculum and through being with communities offering that curriculum, we also find out about new stories, new leaders doing interesting things, and their stories end up in the project.

As the content from the book ends up online, there will be the opportunity to add stories and solutions there.

EF: As for [the] New Economy Coalition’s role, NEC is a membership-based network of the solidarity economy movement in the United States. Several NEC members are featured in the book in different stories, solutions, and essays. Many more were involved in helping to edit, conceive, and organize the book.

It’s also important to mention that we are part of the Beautiful Trouble family. Rae Abileah [at Beautiful Trouble] helped us get the project across the finish line.

SD: The book is organized into topics divided into stories, solutions, a central principle, and, often, a key question. For example, the land and housing section highlights the organizing principle of “democratic citizenship” and its central question concerns borders and colonialism. What led you to this structure and how did you settle on a single principle or question for a topic as complicated as land and housing?

RP: We developed a collection of principles and questions and put them where it seemed they might flow. Each of the questions and principles, the hope is that they are lenses through which we can see any of this work.

EF: Just to emphasize that: We don’t think of them as central organizing principles for the sector….We made a choice—for readability, primarily—not to put the organizing principles together. That was an initial debate—do we put all the principles and values in a section, because that’s how we think of them holistically, or do we spread them out through the book? We chose the latter.

RP: [We thought] how do we make this incredibly accessible and understandable to a wide range of people?

Among the questions we asked ourselves were: What do [the stories] have in common in terms of the values that they embody, the principes of how people are working when they are growing them? What are some of the big contradictions of the work? I would say the questions invite people to hold big contradictions of how we do this work, which we may not be able to resolve but by going deep into the inquiry, we can begin to understand some of the choices that are in front of us.

SD: Could you name some of these contradictions?

RP: A big one for this moment is how to relate to government and state power. There are plenty of stories where policy advocacy and policy change play a huge role. There are also plenty of stories where unjust state power created the necessity for folks to essentially create their own governance outside of the state. That question is alive in so many of these stories.

The question of scale is one of these questions. We are not trying to create something marginal. We are trying to shift the values at the heart of how we do economy and governance. And in terms of the practices of solidarity economy, we run into so many challenges as we begin to scale up beyond the point where people can be in direct relationship with each other.

EF: I think there is a way to understand those kind of contradictions as creative tension. It is not an either/or. It is how do we hold both and make discernments that are contextual and grounded in our values—knowing that the choice we make today might be different than the one we make in 10 years based on the conditions, the context, and the needs.

The state is an obvious example. Everything is constantly changing. When you think about state power, who is in power, what the leverage points are, what resources are available—there is no one answer of how we relate to the state. Ultimately, this book is not about a strategy or an answer. It is about supporting people to bring a different kind of lens on how we organize to meet community needs.

SD: Could you lay out how you distinguish a “story” from a “solution”—and how those two narrative forms relate to each other?

EF: We thought about stories as case studies with a specific time, place, and location; solutions are more about what is the strategy that informs the story. The vision was that every story would have a solution that is directly paired with it. Ultimately, due to time constraints, some of them have that and some of them don’t in the book. Also…many of the solutions in one sector are applicable in many of the sectors. Many of the stories we could have put in two or three different sectors. We just had to make some choices.

SD: Do you have any favorite stories or solutions?

EF: In this moment, one of the things that has inspired me are the social solidarity clinics in Greece. In a moment of austerity and state contraction of social services, activists in the healthcare field organized clinics serving poor and marginalized migrants. Those clinics, some of which are still operating, were voluntary, had elements of democratic management that included both service providers and the folks that they were serving, and got medical care for folks who did not have it, and did not rely on the state. It was a form of mutual aid outside of the state. So many solidarity economy stories have that at their start.

RP: The way in which we talked about the landless workers’ movement in Brazil as a movement that has been able to, in the face of tremendous state repression, defend their right to use the land and to live on the land. It’s interesting because there is a way in which they have used government land use policy to their advantage in order to protect their right to live essentially autonomously and to create their own systems of education, their own autonomous communities at a pretty tremendous scale.

Another is tandas or savings circles….It’s a way in which people with fairly limited access to resources are really able to support one another to engage in small-scale enterprise and increase community wealth. It is a practice that is rooted in being led by women.

Similarly, there is a story in the book, the Seikatsu Club, that began as circles of women in the face of inflation and rising food co-ops coming together to be able to purchase milk and grew into hundreds of thousands of women with a sophisticated governance structure from the local level to the regional level. It is a huge consumer cooperative. The ways these seemingly small strategies can really scale in powerful ways—it makes me think of the mutual aid infrastructure that emerged in the pandemic and government repression that this country has been facing. Things that seem small have the capacity to grow in ways that actually maintain that small unit of relationship.

SD: Any of the 11 topics you cover—food justice, health, and so on—could have been a book on their own. So, you had to be selective. How did your team go about making the choices that you did?

RP: One particularly important thing for us was whether we were able to generate the piece with contributions and guidance of people who were involved in the project. There were plenty of examples we might have loved to include. But we didn’t want to write a story about something that we had no connection to.

One of the things that I feel most excited about is, as we relaunch a web platform that includes some of this content, some of those stories that didn’t make it into the book get to be featured.

And having a diversity of strategies was important. There may have been four or five excellent examples of consumer co-ops. We wanted to have space for some other ways.

EF: One thing I would add is that we tried our best to find stories that could bring to life more than one of the values that you find at the beginning of the book.

In the values section, we lay out our goal that the solutions embody all these values in some way. Most of what is in this book doesn’t meet that criteria. There is so much imperfection. There is so much that we are figuring out as we do these experiments.

We made choices about stories that have gotten a lot of attention. Maybe we don’t need a story about Mondragón. There are books where you can learn about Mondragón.

SD: How can movement leaders and activists best use the material covered in the book? 

RP: Read the book together and be in touch with us with your incredible stories that are not here but that belong in this collection.

There is a curriculum that is housed at Highlander called Mapping Our Futures that has coevolved with this project.

We tried to practice nonextractive storytelling…[partnering] with folks who are either directly connected to the story or have some accountability to the topic.

We are also happy to hear from folks and happy to make introductions so people can be connected to the folks who are doing this work where they are.

EF: Throughout the book, we designed this for organizers and educators. It is a book that supports people to go deep….You can read it form cover to cover, but it is also modular, and folks can pick up different sections. We would love to support books clubs or support getting this in classrooms.

SD: Is there anything else that you would like to add?

EF: The way that we developed these stories—we tried to practice nonextractive storytelling. It is not so much a journalistic book, as partnerships with folks who are either directly connected to the story or have some accountability to the topic.

Obviously, it is imperfect. But that is the intention. You’ll see there were guides and writers. Guides were given the opportunity to have final sign-off. The guides got to say, yes, this story feels true or accountable to the communities that I am accountable to. That was really important to us and differentiates this project from similar experiments out there in the world. It’s not a journalistic thing. It’s more an organizing project and storytelling project.

RP: This work is rooted in centuries and millennia of this kind of organizing and storytelling. In particular, as we honor our ancestors in this work, I want to lift up Elandria and the way Elandria’s vision about how this work is so alive inside every part of this project. Elandria’s commitment for this being for everyone and not just for some people. And Elandria’s absolute clarity that this isn’t just work we do when we are out of the woods and have the time and space to do it. In this moment, it feels particularly important to name that.