community led housing
We build our own.
On Saturday 6th July, 150 Black and POC healers, growers and educators took over Story Gardens in London for a celebration of BPOC-led solidarity economics.
Celebrating 5 years of Decolonising Economics, as led by Guppi Bola and Nonhlanhla Makuyana, the event was a showcase of our community of organisers and speakers from our Nourishing Economics programme.
The day was filled with talks and creative workshops, exploring the themes of resistance organising, collective resourcing, community ownership and self governance, international solidarity actions.
We held each other in joy and nourishment, gathering for a tasty lunch in the afternoon before singing our hearts out at karaoke to end the day.
Won't you celebrate with me,
What I have shaped into a kind of life?
I had no model.
Excerpt from the poem “Won’t you come and celebrate with me” by Lucile Clifton
IN CLAUDE’S OWN WORDS
“It’s about placing land in the hands of a collective with shared interests as a means to build solutions to wider systemic issues.”
WHY THE SOLIDARITY ECONOMY
Pushing back against the dominant capitalist approach to housing, which operates solely in pursuit of maximum profit - the varied methods and configurations of community-led housing offer us tools to return to the practice of building our own homes, with and for one another.
In their own ways, community-led housing initiatives bring us closer to collective practices that have been around for centuries, supporting us to better share and strengthen our resources and relationships with one another.
Through the political education series, we sought to clarify the varied approaches encompassed by the term ‘community-led housing’. Through site visits, we provide insights from the people and collectives currently working to bring these approaches to life.
Explore our Economics of Queerness events from 2023, where LGBTQ+ Black people and People of Colour explore the ways create alternative economic systems for our communities.
Watch the recording of our Economics From the Margins event at TWT 21 featuring discussions of strategies to survive racial capitalism rooted in the expertise of marginalised communities.
We collectively identified where we are in scarcity, be it our finances, time, skills and support.
We heard from our elders about how scarcity has shown up in our communities before, and how they’d rejected the narrative of lack to meet community needs collectively through solidarity economics organising.
We looked at where are were in abundance; knowledge, connection and the resources our communities had supported us to fundraise for this programme.
We designed a process for redistribution that would meet our immediate needs, and then practised naming our needs and asking each other for help.
Setting up an Open Collective page where the group could submit requests to create conditions that would enable their sustained participation in the programme such as access to healing modalities, utility costs, subsidised travel, technical equipment - and these were signed off by the group month by month.
We also designed a process for redistribution that would invest in our long term dreams as an ecosystem.
The Ecosystem Fund was a seed funding pot for each initiative within the collective to establish projects that they were dreaming of. The process involved people sharing their ideas with each other, asking for feedback and support, then participants signing off each other's proposals and then receiving up to £2000 to experiment and explore.
We collectively identified where we are in scarcity, be it our finances, time, skills and support.
We heard from our elders about how scarcity has shown up in our communities before, and how they’d rejected the narrative of lack to meet community needs collectively through solidarity economics organising.
We looked at where are were in abundance; knowledge, connection and the resources our communities had supported us to fundraise for this programme.
We designed a process for redistribution that would meet our immediate needs, and then practised naming our needs and asking each other for help.
Setting up an Open Collective page where the group could submit requests to create conditions that would enable their sustained participation in the programme such as access to healing modalities, utility costs, subsidised travel, technical equipment - and these were signed off by the group month by month.
We also designed a process for redistribution that would invest in our long term dreams as an ecosystem.
The Ecosystem Fund was a seed funding pot for each initiative within the collective to establish projects that they were dreaming of. The process involved people sharing their ideas with each other, asking for feedback and support, then participants signing off each other's proposals and then receiving up to £2000 to experiment and explore.
We spent the final retreat revisiting our collective dreams and the possibilities that could make them a reality. This included a conversation of how we deeply commit to the principles of organising necessary to bring around a Just Transition with guest speakers, Michelle Mascarenhas (formerly Movement Generation) and Stephanie Brobbey of Good Ancestor Movement.
We explored the creation of new forms of financial and organising infrastructure that would build effective oppositional power to the extractive economy to build conditions for the Solidarity Economy movement.
These conversations have fed into our continued development of a community-led organising infrastructure model, and a community-led advisory group that builds accountability and guidance in the movement of private wealth to community control
We spent time reflecting on the experiences of accessing resources through the Collective Pot and Seed Funding from Retreat 2 - unpacking what conditions enabled us to work with abundance, trust and interdependence, We explored the many other forms of pluralist economics available to us as a form of community self-provision.