2019 Year in Review: Resistance and Reflection
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Greetings Friends and Supporters of Cooperation Jackson,
2019 was a banner year for Cooperation Jackson. After several years of sacrifice, saving and struggle, we made a few critical breakthroughs in the initiation of few of our long-term strategic initiatives. In addition, the base work of our established cooperatives also critically expanded across the board. We are looking forward to 2020 and reaching new heights going forward.
Highlights
Here are a few of the critical highlights from 2019.
We greatly expanded the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust by purchasing the West Park Mall. We acquired the Mall in May and we are in the process of transforming it into the Ida B. Wells Plaza. The Ida B. Wells Plaza will provide affordable and accessible commercial space for cooperatives and socially accountable community enterprises and institutions, and will serve as a hub for our food sovereignty, time banking, and mutual aid initiatives.
We also expanded our Community Land Trust to include a critical purchase in New Orleans. We worked with our sister organization, Survivors Village, to purchase the New Day Community Center. We are going to work in partnership to rehabilitate the New Day Center and turn it into a Community Center, Retreat Hub, Restaurant, and Community Farm in 2020 and beyond.
We officially opened the Imari Obadele Center for Community Production, which is the first operating home of our emerging Community Production Cooperative, in January. The Obadele Center will serve as a small scale production site as well as an education and training center in the arts of digital fabrication.
The Freedom Farms Cooperative had its most productive year to date, more than doubling its production from levels from 2017 and 2018, producing over one and half a tons of food that was sold and distributed at local farmers markets, restaurants, grocery stores and community events.
The Green Team Cooperative secured 10 ongoing lawn care contracts and expanded the number of worker owners and associated workers that support the cooperative from 3 to 5.
We conducted two major Community Arts Festivals in 2019. One in April that focused on beautifying the Community Production Center and the Monument Street Wall of the Ida B. Wells Plaza. And another in August, for Black August, that focused on beautifying the rest of the Ida B. Wells Plaza. Through this process a4ern Arts and Culture Cooperative is starting to emerge and is starting to plan for a major festival for Black August 2020.
Challenges
Because we work in the real, imperfect world, ever year always presents challenges. 2019 was no different. Here are some of the critical challenges we confronted in 2019 and will have to take some determined steps to address in 2020.
Two members of our Community Production Cooperative participated in the 2019 international Fab Academy, which is a course to teach people the arts and methods of digital fabrication. Unfortunately, neither of our members were able to complete the course this year. We underestimated how intense the course would be and we overburdened the workers with additional development tasks for their cooperatives development. However, the course taught us a lot and we are going to apply this learning to our next engagement with it, which is not projected to occur in 2021. In 2020 the Community Production Cooperative is going to focus on operating a small print company, while continuing to skill-up on the things learned from the academy course.
We encountered a fair degree of turnover in 2019. Unfortunately, we lost worker owners from Freedom Farms, the Green Team and the Community Production Cooperative. The reasons for their departure are varied, but they all involved struggling with the overall social conditions in Jackson, which are not easy, attrition from the ongoing struggles with old allies in the City Administration and elements of the radical social movement in town, and exhaustion from the high degree of self-exploitation that is involved in our work at its present stage of development. Of these three factors the one we can and will exert the greatest degree of agency is with the level of self-exploitation that is involved in our work. We are going to experiment with new forms of work distribution and team development in 2020 to help us address aspects of this problem, which is a problem for cooperatives the world over in general. The other challenges listed will be ongoing, as we are struggling actively to change conditions and dynamics in both those arenas.
Looking Forward
In order to build on our advances and to continue to improve our practice, we are focusing on implementing the following strategies and plans in 2020.
Continuing to consolidate and expand our non-profit board to ensure that all of our cooperatives and initiatives are fully included in all of the strategic decision making spaces within the organization. In November we brought on new board members from the Community Production Center and Freedom Farms. In 2020 we are going to bring on members to represent the Green Team and the Community Land Trust.
Continuing to “nativizing” all of our decision making processes and spaces. Cooperation Jackson started with a fair number of “transplants”, that is people not born and raised in Jackson, but folks who moved to Jackson to help advance the Jackson-Kush Plan. In order to move the organization further, which in part means going deeper into the Black working class community in Jackson, we have to bring more members drawn directly from these communities into our leadership bodies and we are making this transition by not only adding more people to our non-profit board, but also onto the Executive Committee, which guides the comprehensive coordination of the many moving parts of Cooperation Jackson. We will be welcoming two new members to our Executive Committee in January: Joshua Dedmond and Imani Olugbala, two long-term Jackson residents and organizers, who are already making valuable contributions to the organization.
We are going to continue standardizing our training and business development curriculum and turn these into a set of manuals that we are going to release to others in the social and solidarity economy movement to try and radicalize it from our perspective, and to introduce the notion of creating a non-capitalist business model.
We are going to rehabilitate the Ida B. Wells Plaza and move-in several new businesses and institutions throughout 2020. We are going to have to take out our first major loans to overall the plaza, but also to install a major aquaponic/hydroponic production center to bolster the productive capacity of the Freedom Farms Cooperative, but also to start engaging in our first major systemic efforts at food processing.
We are also going to spend a significant amount of time in 2020 engaged in strategic planning for the next 5 years of the organization. Parts of this will entail how to transition leadership in the organization, but also how to more concretely plan to be resilient in the face of the coming climate and economic disruptions that are going to place over the course of the next 5 to 10 years.
Shoutouts
Sadly, we have to report that one of our co-founders and long-term leaders, brandon king, is leaving us effective in December. He will be returning to his native Virginia to continue the work and struggle there. However, he will be joining us on our board and will continue to make valuable contributions to our work and to the struggle in general, of this we have no doubt. We want to honor brandon for all of his hard work and invaluable contributions over the years and we wish him all the best on the next stop on his journey.
Support Our Work and Growth
We aim to make 2020 one of our most productive and impactful years to date. But, to do so, we need your help. In order to expand the depth and scope of our work in 2020, we are looking to raise $250,000 in direct tax-deductible donations by the end of 2019. If we hit this target, we will be able to build out an aquaponic/hydroponic production facility in the grocery store parcel of the plaza and support the expansion of Freedom Farms overall operations on our Hughes and Ewing Street plots. This production facility will quadruple the productive capacity of our Freedom Farms Cooperative and help us move one step closer towards attaining our goal of food security, meaning the ability to provide the proper caloric intake for the residents of West Jackson from what we directly produce in West Jackson.
