10th Anniversary Fundraising Appeal: Launching Development Phase Three
/
Capacity Building, Local Scaling, and Bioregional Development
Wednesday, May 1, 2024 marks the 10 year anniversary of Cooperation Jackson. We launched the organization on Thursday, May 1st, 2014, a day before the historic Jackson Rising Conference, which sought to roll out the solidarity economy component of the Jackson-Kush Plan on a comprehensive scale. Our objective in officially launching the organization on May Day, or International Workers Day, was to declaratively link ourselves to the international struggle of workers, toilers, peasants, and oppressed people’s fighting for liberation and emancipation from exploitation. To this end, we were making a conscious and deliberate attempt to reunite the cooperative movement with all of the autonomous forms of self-organization amongst the toilers of the world in order to help turn a fractured subject into a coherent and unstoppable whole.
Over the past 10 years we have made some decent strides in this direction. But, we still have a long way to go to weave all of the sections of the working class movement in Jackson and beyond together again, to build the transformative movement we need to “socialize production, democratize society, regenerate the ecosystems, and Free the Land”. That said, without question, our first decade was intense. We’ve gone through many trials and tribulations, many ups and downs, advances and setbacks. But, we’re still here, still struggling, still building, and still moving the mission forward.
We are now happy to report that we are ready to initiate Phase Three of our development. As we noted in our August 2023 fundraising appeal, “The third phase of our work, which we are eagerly looking forward to over the course of the next several years, will entail the rollout of a number of cooperatives that are likely to employ dozens of people, we project on average over 20 per cooperative in arenas like the grocery store, recycling operations, cannabis production and retail, food processing, housing construction, and more.” We are happy to report that after successfully completing the construction work for phase two in March of 2024, we are ready to press headlong into Phase Three.
In order to successfully launch Phase Three, we are seeking to raise $500,000 by the end of July. Unlike our last appeal, which largely focused on construction costs, this appeal focuses on programmatic costs, specifically adding and training specific personnel to take on some specialized labor tasks that are going to be essential to the success of Phase Three of our development. Some of these specialized tasks and capacities include:
Getting two of our members trained in how to manage an energy efficient, waste free, multi-stakeholder owned and operated cooperative grocery store.
Getting two of our members trained in how to manage and conduct a multimillion dollar medicinal cannabis and industrial hemp producing farm operation.
Getting two of our members trained in how to process and properly package and distribute various herbs and oils.
Getting two of our members trained in how to manage an ecovillage, based upon studying the best practices of existing eco-villages throughout the world, particularly those in urban and/or suburban settings, that provide goods and services to their surrounding environments, as ours aims to do in the provision of solar energy, clean drinking water, and various health services.
Getting several of our members trained in how to code, design and administer our own community inclusive currency (CIC) system by receiving training from a host of partners like Grassroots Economics, the Economic Space Agency, and the One Project.
Securing enough resources to successfully support and administer these members in receiving these trainings and conducting the community programming to educate our community about their necessity in order to advance our model and reach our collective goals.
We need your help to enable Cooperation Jackson to take the next great step in our evolution. We are seeking to advance these objectives through donations in order to continue developing our cooperatives on as much of a debt free basis as possible. We are going to be taking on loans and seeking non-extractive investors for all of the key developments of Phase Three, as all of the core initiatives in this phase are multimillion dollar projects that will be hard to attain through our self-financing initiatives at this point in our development, or through grants and donations alone. But, our objective is to build and fortify a market protected ecosystem that will provide us with some competitive advantages in our quest to overcome the ruthlessness of the capitalist system, and replace it with a more cooperative and ecologically regenerative one. With your help, we will be in position to continue to serve as one of the largest and most strategic radical, Black led, land-based, solidarity economy initiatives in the United States.
The vision of the Jackson-Kush Plan is continuing to advance through our “Build and Fight” initiatives. But, we need your help to see them through to fruition. Please donate as generously as you can and spread the word to your family, friends, cooperators and comrades and encourage them to support us in these strategic pursuits.
You can donate at https://cooperationjackson.org/donate. Please designate “2024 Phase Three Development” in the designation. You can also write a check or send a money order. Make the check out to “Cooperation Jackson”. Please put in the check/money order note “Phase 3”. Please mail the check and/or money order to Cooperation Jackson at P.O. Box 1932, Jackson, MS 39215.
