Solidarity Economy Organizers Gather in Atlanta to Build Toward Liberation

State of the Movements is a recurring NPQ column dedicated to tracking the pulse of social movements and the solidarity economy in 2025.

“Remembering our history allows us to build our futures.” So said Stephanie Guilloud of movement organization Project South in the initial plenary session of the Resist & Build Summit.

“When we say infrastructure, we mean systems that keep us alive.”

The scope taken on by conference attendees was very ambitious. Held in Atlanta the first weekend of May 2025 with the theme “Solidarity at Scale: Converging our Movements for System Change,” the conference brought together over 300 solidarity economy activists from across the United States, marking the largest gathering of network organizers to date.

Learning from Atlanta

The decision to come to Atlanta was intentional. Atlanta has played an outsized role in civil rights movement history and remains an important center of organizing today. In their session, “Atlanta, Black Reconstruction, and the Black Radical Tradition,” Guilloud and Summers emphasized the importance of creating community institutions in building economies and power—in a word, infrastructure. As Guilloud put it, “When we say infrastructure, we mean systems that keep us alive.”

What kind of infrastructure? In Atlanta’s case, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), such as Spelman College, Morehouse College, and Clark Atlanta University, are critical infrastructure. Other institutions built included Citizens Trust Bank, a Black-owned bank that opened in 1921; and Atlanta Life Insurance Company, a Black-owned insurer founded in 1905 by Alonzo Herndon, who was born enslaved but as an adult became a highly successful businessman.

During the Montgomery bus boycott of 1954 and 1955 in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. participated, Citizens Trust Bank was one of the two primary banks holding the funds of the bus boycott organizers and Atlanta Life Insurance Company, noted Guilloud, “supported the taxi drivers for a year.” If drivers did not have that backing, Guilloud elaborated, the boycott might have failed.

She described these entities as the foundation for movement infrastructure: “You build a bank, life insurance, they can start funding. This is the network that is underneath.” Among the primary elements that need to be built now, according to Guilloud and Summers, are education and training, land stewardship, and self-governance capacity.

Reinforcing Movement Infrastructure

Much of the gathering focused on structured conversations among movement activists about how to build on and expand existing movement infrastructure.

One group centered around building the solidarity economy itself—that is, developing cooperatives, community land trusts, and other instruments of democratic ownership of land and business. A second group focused on how to build a stronger social movement network to resist authoritarianism. A third group looked at resistance efforts at the policy level. Finally, a fourth group looked at the role arts and culture play both in building a solidarity economy and sustaining resistance.

Some key themes from each are lifted up below:

• Building a Solidarity Economy

The solidarity economy group emphasized the need to both build toward meeting basic needs and set the conditions for spiritual and emotional thriving. Creating tangible experiences of the solidarity economy, participants added, is vital to movement building—and to building trust in communities that a solidarity economy is possible.

Groups developed additional priorities including the need to build counter-institutions, such as popular education (freedom schools) and local democratic governance (people’s movement assemblies), as well as the need for systems of community safety, defense, and health that operate outside the state. Another recognized priority was the need to build capacity for “generative conflict.” Participants also noted the importance of developing narratives that inspire collective action, abundance, belonging, and self-determination while challenging narratives that impede solidarity such as the notion of “rugged individualism” or the “charity mindset” common to the nonprofit sector.

Scale, participants said, should be achieved through relationship rather than replication. Effectively, this means a focus on federation over franchising and also puts priority on building a material (economic) base for solidarity that can sustain a parallel economy rooted in such institutions as resilience hubs, community kitchens, time banks (labor hour exchange systems), collective childcare, and solidarity healthcare.

• Arts and Culture

Cultural abundance, participants agreed, is a cornerstone of the solidarity economy. Arts and culture were identified as strategic tools for political education, community defense, and envisioning post-capitalist futures.

But the role of art in a solidarity economy is broader than its instrumental value in organizing and movement building. Art, it was noted, is often misperceived as a luxury, but it actually meets a vital human need of self-expression. Public policy—through such means as universal basic income, subsidized childcare, wellness stipends, housing, and education) that sustains cultural workers and communities—can greatly expand access to the arts.

Through art, people can express both resistance and joy. Indeed, in this perspective, a central part of liberation is enabling everyone to access their own creative process. While present-day capitalist society gives most people very little time to develop their creative process, a central goal of solidarity economy organizing is to create the space and time for people to access their internal creativity.

Part of the work of art too is decolonization, which participants noted has both structural and personal components and includes decolonizing the media (who controls it, who’s represented), arts systems (changing norms of authorship, attribution, and access), as well as challenging internalized scarcity and elitism.

• Policy

Policy often tends to be narrowly defined as what local, state, or national governments do, but at the Resist & Build Summit discussion was broader than that and included forms of governance at the organizational and community level. Dual power strategies in governance seek to build parallel authority outside the system. The 1960s Black Panthers’ free breakfast program is an example of this; mutual aid is another. Co-governance, by contrast, operates inside the system; it embeds community groups in public systems to shift power internally.

Participants noted that which strategy makes sense varies by context. In using inside-the-system strategies, however, participants noted that accountability tools are needed, such as people’s budgets—in which movement groups set expectations regarding public expenditures—are vital tools.

In terms of direct policy work, groups identified priorities including creating policy libraries, better digital platforms, organizing toolkits (with a focus on the local level, also known as municipalism), and pipelines to train movement-aligned politicians and public officials. Several in the group also called for a more integrated policy framework that links a range of economic development policies together including co-ops, community land trusts, universal basic income, and other tools that can advance economic democracy.

• Movements

Political homes should offer more than analysis—they should provide belonging, nourishment, and stability.

Movements, participants agreed, should be grounded in autonomy, connection, and meaning. Central values that were identified included self-determination, participatory democracy, and deep relational care. The idea in short is to be transformative, not transactional, and create spaces where people grow, find meaning, and feel connected.

Participants acknowledged the central challenge of moving from issue-based organizing—as illustrated by the recent “Hands Off” protests against actions of the Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—to organizing for systemic change. One strategy for doing this is the idea of formação. In English, the word literally means “training” but in Brazil it’s used to mean bringing people into deeper understanding and collective action, not just accommodating current beliefs. This approach values growth and development with people, rather than treating organizing as customer service.

In the current moment, participants noted that movement organizations must go beyond individual learning and build organizational culture that supports ideological struggle, collective visioning, and long-term relationships. This means that political homes should offer more than analysis—they should provide belonging, nourishment, and stability. Participants also called for imagining beyond the nonprofit model—which it was widely noted is designed to constrain change.

The Role of Storytelling

In a presentation as part of a plenary panel on solidarity economy media and narrative change, Jasmine Banks of Generation Common Good set forth seven principles to guide solidarity economy-aligned storytelling. These were:

1. Define purpose, values, and political alignment.

In addition to setting forth the publication’s purpose and values, this should include clear guidelines that reject sensationalism, uphold truth telling, and center lived experience, especially from marginalized voices.

2. Build infrastructure collectively.

This means prioritizing community ownership (such as through cooperative structures) and using open-source platforms.

3. Center movement journalism and community media.

This can include training local storytellers to document stories.

4. Use sustainable and solidarity-based funding models.

This means, among other things, having sliding-scale membership for community-based and allied organizations and using cross-subsidization from more operations to fund grassroots work.

5. Build interdependence, not competition.

This includes sharing platforms and engaging in joint narrative campaigns around key political moments or crises.

6. Structure governance to center the people most impacted.

This includes using community councils to guide decision-making.

7. Amplify, archive, and educate.

This work encompasses archiving movement stories; conducting curricula and hosting workshops to develop critical media literacy, especially in working-class communities; and documenting solidarity economy movements in ways that affirm people’s agency, not just their pain.

Moving Forward

As one volunteer member of the planning team shared with conference organizer David Ferris, “This wasn’t just a conference—it was a living blueprint for liberation.”

“The brilliance of this gathering was its refusal to separate fighting back from building forward,” another participant told Ferris. “Every conversation about what we’re against was paired with robust discussions about what we’re for and how we’re building the world we envision.” In short, the conference combined a hard-headed appreciation of the nuances of power building with a full-hearted vision rooted in collective care and motivated by dreams of transformation.

That the challenges remain daunting was widely acknowledged. Nonetheless, the solidarity economy gathering that took place in Atlanta offers valuable pointers for how movements can build infrastructure for the long-term social change work ahead.