Changemakers Creating Community Wealth Across the U.S.
Prepare to Abandon Your Pessimism
Communities are transforming by taking ownership and control of their assets while nurturing a cooperative economy, homeownership, viable local food production, schools’ integration into core curricula the cultural heritage of the students in their classrooms, universities engagement in local and state social and economic development and encouragement of artists in strengthening community connections and taking care of the Earth.
The History of African American Cooperative Economy
Dr. Nembhard chronicles African American cooperative business ownership and its place in the movements for Black civil rights and economic equality. Adding the mutual aid and cooperative movement, which began with Africans chained together aboard slave ships, to Black history results in a retelling of the African American experience, with an increased understanding of African American collective economic agency and grassroots economic organizing. Gordon Nembhard]s painstaking research over a period of ten years included a variety of newspapers, period magazines, and journals; co-ops’ articles of incorporation, minutes from annual meetings, newsletters, budgets, and income statements; and scholarly books, memoirs, and biographies. These sources reveal the achievements and challenges of Black co-ops, collective economic action, and social entrepreneurship. Gordon Nembhard finds that African Americans, as well as other people of color and low-income people, have benefitted greatly from cooperative ownership and democratic economic participation throughout the nation’s history
Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Ph.D. is a political economist, Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College, of the City University of New York (CUNY) and author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice.
A Path Towards Equal Justice in the Courtroom
Civil Rights Attorney Steve Hanlon has proven with data and analytics that America’s criminal processing system is systemically unconstitutional and unethical. After a decade of devotion and hard work, he announced the new National Public Defense Workload Standards (NPDWS) and his formation of the Quality Defense Alliance (QDA) to enforce the NPDWS across the nation. He as been the Project Leader for ABA public defender workload studies done in seven states and was a consultant on the Texas study. The ABA Journal Magazine has called him “the Oracle” for public defender workload studies. https://lawyerhanlon.com/