Building the Solidarity Economy: A Decade’s Assessment

Author’s note: I have been connected to much of the work mentioned in this article as a facilitator, board member, educator, and researcher. I helped found the Solidarity Economy Initiative (SEI) and currently serve on the board of the Center for Economic Democracy (CED). I co-authored a 2017 report, Solidarity Rising in Massachusetts, and a 2022 report on SEI. Unless otherwise cited, all quotes are from interviews conducted by me and my research team within the last three years. Affiliations correspond to those people had when their interviews were conducted.

The solidarity economy is a movement that envisions an alternative to capitalism—one rooted in mutual aid, cooperation, and democratic ownership. It encompasses practices and organizations that prioritize people and the planet over profit, aiming to build an economy that is equitable, sustainable, and inclusive. After a decade of efforts in Massachusetts to build such an economy, it’s time to look back and assess the successes, challenges, and paths ahead.

A Call to Reimagine

On March 17, 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic shutdown, Elena Letona, then executive director of Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, wrote that we need to “let go of all that no longer serves us and the world” and reimagine a solidarity economy centered in mutual aid—that “we are well, when you are well.” Letona was writing to communities of color across the state where she had been organizing. She was exhorting them to not just see this new world, but to claim it through love.

“We’re working so hard to integrate into a burning building…can we build our own house?”

Looking back, the pandemic accelerated efforts to build a more robust ecosystem of movement organizations, worker-owned cooperatives, community land trusts, impact investors, and allies. Of course, these endeavors did not just spontaneously appear but rather were the culmination of years of organizing and struggle against systemic inequalities.

About a decade ago, those of us working toward social, racial, and economic justice in Boston and across Massachusetts were in fight mode. Gentrification and displacement were intensifying in working-class communities of color—the same ones most impacted by mass incarceration and overpolicing. A 2015 Federal Reserve Bank of Boston report documented a dramatic racial wealth gap: the average White household had a net worth of almost $250,000 compared to $8 for the average Black household.

Despite significant organizing victories led by these communities, such as a law enacted in 2010 to ban employers from asking about criminal records on job applications, structural barriers persisted, with many workers still stuck in low-wage, exploitative jobs. As Aaron Tanaka, a leader in this campaign when he was with the Boston Workers Alliance (BWA), reflected in a 2019 interview, “We’re working so hard to integrate into a burning building…can we build our own house?” This question became a catalyst for a growing movement to not only resist oppressive systems but to build alternatives.

Fighting for and Building Solidarity Economies

Over the last decade, this desire to “build our own house” has grown into a movement to fight for and build solidarity economies, beginning most visibly in the food sector. In 2014, BWA members teamed with Latine workers from Massachusetts Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (MassCOSH)’s immigrant worker center to launch CERO. This worker-owned co-op collects and composts food wastes from local businesses including the Dorchester Food Co-op—a community and worker-owned grocery that opened in 2023 after a decade of organizing. The co-op sources locally grown produce from urban farms, some of which are situated on the Boston Farms Community Land Trust. To close the loop, the compost made by CERO is used at some of these farms.

These co-ops and community land trusts (CLTs) are often the most recognized among “alternatives” to capitalism. Yet, they build on a history of ancestral practices. In modern times, these practices have persisted, especially in collective survival strategies of marginalized communities. From Occupy to Black Lives Matter and Just Transition, desires to build beyond capitalism have only grown. And the seeds and sprouts of solidarity economies are now being supported by a growing infrastructure to nurture democratic stewardship of land, labor, and capital.

For example, the Greater Boston Community Land Trust Network (GBCLTN) brings together seven land trusts, six of which have been formed since 2015. CLTs decommodify land—in other words, take land out of the market—through collective ownership to support community needs such as housing and food. In 2023, GBCLTN won $2 million from the city of Boston to establish a revolving loan fund for CLTs.

Organizations like the Center for Cooperative Development and Solidarity (CCDS) and Boston Center for Community Ownership provide resources and assistance to incubate worker cooperatives. The Coalition for Worker Ownership and Power (COWOP) is a coalition of more than 40 co-ops and allies from across Massachusetts advocating for policies and resources to support worker ownership. In 2023, COWOP won the establishment of a state office, Massachusetts Center for Employee Ownership (MassCEO).

To support these projects, a whole field of solidarity finance has emerged. The Boston Impact Initiative, founded in 2013, has invested more than $10 million into businesses, co-ops, and nonprofits led by entrepreneurs of color. The Boston Ujima Project, formed in 2017, manages a $4.5 million investment fund democratically allocated by its membership of over 900 working-class residents of color. Moreover, a successful campaign by the Better Budget Alliance led to a participatory budgeting process in Boston, empowering residents to decide how to spend $2 million in public funds.

Confronting Capitalism

How did all this solidarity economy field building happen? Part of the answer lies in the history of movements rooted in marginalized communities, particularly communities of color. For some, solidarity practices were already part of their ways of life and organizing work.

Lisa Owens, former director of the housing justice group City Life/Vida Urbana (CLVU) defined the solidarity economy as the “practices that mirror the world we wanted to live in—acting on values of anti-capitalism, cooperation, long-term sustainability, and interrelations between people and planet.”

[The creation of solidarity economies does not] follow the conventional capitalist paradigm of innovation, replication, and scale.

Meanwhile, Luz Zambrano of CCDS emphasizes in a 2023 interview how many immigrants “have lived and have survived because of the solidarity economy, because of cooperativism. This is not new. It is older than any economy that we have had.”

But skepticism of possibilities beyond capitalism persists. As Dwaign Tyndal, director of the environmental justice group Alternatives for Community & Environment, put it, “Capitalism reaches into how we think, how we feel.” Solidarity economies, by design, challenge the ingrained capitalist mindset, requiring a fundamental shift in how communities perceive ownership and work.

In 2014, the Solidarity Economy Initiative (SEI) was created by several progressive funders and eight community base-building groups. Recognizing the limitations of existing movements and the lack of vision beyond capitalism, SEI created a learning process to develop strategies and pilot projects. Maria Jobin-Leeds of SEI member Access Strategies Fund explained that “one of original aspirations was to invest in the projects, when they are investment ready…like an angel investor.”

Resist and Build

Solidarity economy movements typically emerge when groups resisting the harms of the dominant economy decide to take economy building into their own hands. This work is not linear, nor does it follow the conventional capitalist paradigm of innovation, replication, and scale. But different community groups are inspired by and build on the achievements of each other.

The first CLT in Boston was the (now nationally known) Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, formed in the late 1980s through its “Take a Stand, Own the Land” campaign. Residents in this neighborhood, which had experienced disinvestment and high rates of vacant land, created their own community revitalization plan. However, absentee landowners and the city of Boston still owned many of the vacant properties. Through organizing, they won the power of eminent domain from the city to take private land. Today, they own over 30 acres of land with 228 units of permanently affordable housing, urban farms, open spaces, and commercial buildings.

Similarly, the Chinatown Community Land Trust (CCLT) emerged from struggles in Boston’s Chinatown to preserve this immigrant enclave. The Chinese Progressive Association, founded in 2015, led tenant organizing and fought for community control over development. CCLT now owns three historic row houses and is working to protect community open spaces and develop a community-owned electric microgrid to save energy and enhance resiliency.

As the notion of a solidarity economy becomes more mainstream, movements are challenged to stay on the transformational road.

The Boston Neighborhood Community Land Trust (BNCLT) was born out of a coalition formed in 2008 to protect residents of foreclosed homes from being displaced. By organizing residents and pressuring landlords to sell, it now owns 11 properties with 32 units of permanently affordable housing across the Dorchester neighborhood.

Comunidades Enraizadas (CE), one of the newest CLTs in the region, began with a group of Latinas who came together in Chelsea to stave off foreclosures and secure stable housing for residents of this majority immigrant city. Supported by the environmental justice organization GreenRoots since 2017, CE is now an independent nonprofit and developing its first housing project.

In East Boston, CCDS emerged in 2015 from Latine residents’ concerns about displacement and gentrification. Cofounder and General Coordinator      Luz Zambrano explained, “I have been a community and labor organizer for 34 years. I got tired of fighting a system that I don’t see changing. It is better to put our energy, efforts, wisdom and experiences to create our own.” Since the pandemic, CCDS has seen a surge of interest in its work and is now incubating six co-ops, including childcare, eldercare, catering, sewing, cleaning, maintenance, and language services.

Making the Winding Road

As the notion of a solidarity economy becomes more mainstream, movements are challenged to stay on the transformational road. On the promising side, funders and investors are starting to commit capital. Solidarity economics is now integrated into the platforms of housing, climate, and racial justice movements (for example: Right to the City, Movement for Black Lives, Rising Majority, Climate Justice Alliance).

Of course, as the work advances, new challenges emerge. For instance, as efforts get past the startup phase, more permanent infrastructure is needed to sustain them. At the Hyams Foundation, where I chair the board, we have developed a Building Movement Infrastructure Project seeking to make these kinds of investments.

More groups also want to own land and buildings to provide physical space and economic stability. For example, the Movement Sustainability Commons is developing a new building to house a Neighborhood Birth Center and other movement groups. As these groups navigate the real estate development process, they are developing new templates for how to do so in more cooperative and collective ways, according to Miriam Gee of Co-Everything, a worker-owned planning and architecture co-op working with many similar solidarity economy building projects.

Another front is building governing power and creating more co-governance tools. As participatory budgeting launches in Boston this year, similar efforts are being advanced in other cities. How might these struggles advance a municipalism to refashion government as a resource for communities to govern themselves?

All of these are questions primarily of tactics, but there are deeper strategic challenges as well. One of the most profound is that capitalist mindsets are far too often embedded in efforts to grow and scale up. Tanaka has long maintained that we can’t “co-op our way out of capitalism” because the problems are not just economic.

As Owens has put it, “capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and imperialism are all connected. These systems of oppression are all interrelated and necessary for capitalism to exist.” While launching co-ops and CLTs more visibly shows possibilities beyond capitalism, solidarity economy movements also need to build political and governing power, as well as shift culture.

Among SEI participants, there was an initial hope that a multiyear process would fill a pipeline of investable projects. When those projects did not materialize in a linear fashion, there was some disappointment. But members began to recognize that solidarity economy work was less about specific “projects” and more about cultivating solidarity in all relations and our ways of being.

In short, SEI members began to embrace relational practices. Whereas the early years of SEI had prioritized the head (learning) and hands (projects), they now also centered the heart. Gloribell Mota of Neighbors United for a Better East Boston (NUBE) described SEI meetings as “mental, physical, emotional, spiritual alignment for the month.”

Deborah Frieze of SEI funding partner Boston Impact Initiative recounts that “it took a while to get that we were building a language field. We had a field to build in order to get to the action.”

In short, advocates face the deep challenge of trying to build the new while still entangled in the dominant world. This requires letting go of some attachments to the old world. For instance, most solidarity economy movement organizations are nonprofits—part of a nonprofit industrial complex that tends to tame radical movements and compel conformity with funder interests. While some groups have used the nonprofit structure to build more democratic and cooperative practices, this is not easy. Among coalition members, two had to close due to funding challenges.

Moreover, the challenges are not just institutional; they are deeply interpersonal. As Sarah Assefa, an organizer with COWOP, said, “The biggest challenge to cooperation is cooperation itself. Cooperatives are all about the powerful act of sharing decisions and benefits. But we’re generally not taught to make decisions together and have non-hierarchical relationships.” Almost everyone I interviewed speaks of similar interpersonal challenges.

The Paths Ahead

The work of building a solidarity economy is fundamentally relational. As Andres Del Castillo of CLVU observes, “Solidarity is not a way to show up in a moment, but a way to exist. It requires, especially for organizations, a lot of authenticity, a lot of vulnerability…being able to genuinely assess each other in ways that can feel uncomfortable. It just requires a deeper level of trust.”

We must continually deprogram ourselves from ways of thinking and feeling about work and development that are at the root of the exploitive and extractive harms of capitalism. These include getting caught up in notions of growth and scale, being stuck in identities of funder or grantee, or of being an owner or tenant.

As Jasmine Gomez, formerly of Access Strategies Fund, puts it, the master’s tools, alluding to the classic essay by Audre Lorde, “are what we have. Some people use them to try and dismantle. Some people use them to try and extend the life of systems so that they don’t hurt our communities as much as they can, and I think some people use those tools to try and build something completely new. Whether or not we can is the experiment. And in that process, the healing and the relationship building is something that will come, that are not the tools of the masters.”

The stories we tell about solidarity economies are an important part of defining this movement. We should avoid the simple, linear stories based on the capitalist production paradigm. We need to tell the stories of how the heart work happens with its joys and sorrows. We need accounts of the complexities of actual transformations. And we need to tell the stories of how we are creating the conditions for communities to remake themselves.