Episode 5 features Kali Akuno discussing Community Production as an aspect of the Build and Fight Forumla.
Register Now for the 2025 National Black Radical Organizing Conference’s “Base-Building for Collective Power” taking place May 30 to June 1, 2025 at Butler University located in Indianapolis, IN. Together, we’ll gather in community to strategize, organize, and build power toward Black liberation.
What’s on the Agenda:
Workshops That Empower: Dive into sessions on organizing tactics, community care, and actionable strategies.
Inspiring Keynotes: Hear from movement leaders who will ground us in shared vision and possibility.
Collective Action Opportunities: Build relationships and coalitions with comrades and collaborators.
Stay Connected:
Our work doesn’t stop when the conference ends. Join the conversation and amplify our shared mission by following us and using our hashtag #NBROC2025
Join us Tuesday, May 13th for the fourth installment of the Build and Fight Formula Education series. This one focuses on worker self-organization and self-management as transformative practices and programs to build a new society.
Join us Tuesday, April 8th for the third installment of the Build and Fight Formula Education series. This one focuses on food sovereignty, agroecology, ecological regeneration, and degrowth as transformative practices and programs.
The Dirty War: The Horrors of the Argentine Dictatorship
Friday, February 28, 2025
Balagoon Center - 939 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS
6 - 8 pm
Argentina's 1976-83 dictatorship was one of Latin America's most gruesome. Under the guise of a war on communism, the ruling Armed Forces tortured and "disappeared" thousands of young left-wing students, activists and militants, leaving a trail of devastation that would haunt the country for decades. But a soft-spoken journalist named Robert Cox had the courage to speak out.
Join us Saturday, February 15th, 2025
Ida B Wells Plaza
1128 W. Capitol Street
Jackson, MS
Join us for the first Really Really Free Market of 2025. Join us in building a vibrant culture of solidarity, mutual aid and mutual exchange in Jackson, Mississippi to meet the challenging times ahead and lay a foundation for the new world that we need.
Join us Monday, February 10th, 2025
Balagoon Center
939 W. Capitol Street
Jackson, MS
Join us in planning for the Really Really Free Market and thinking through how to improve and expand it and the systems that can support it. Help us meet more of the material needs that exist in our community without the need for monetary exchange. Get involved!
The Really, Really Free Market is a process of mutual aid and site of mutual exchange. We encourage anyone and everyone in Jackson to come get what you need, from items provided by the community.
A Panther in Africa: The Story of Pete and Charlotte O’Neal
Friday, October 22, 2025
6 pm
939 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS
On October 30, 1969, Pete O'Neal, a young Black Panther in Kansas City, Missouri, was arrested for transporting a gun across state lines. One year later, O'Neal fled the charge, and for over 30 years, he has lived in Tanzania as one of the last American exiles from an era when activists considered themselves at war with the U.S. government. Today, this community organizer confronts very different challenges and finds himself living between two worlds — America and Africa, his radical past and his uncertain future.
Kuwasi Balagoon Center
939 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS
Cooperation Jackson will be hosting our second Presidential Candidate Forum with Dr. Jill Stein from the Green Party. These Forums are to educate our community about the full complement of democratic choices that are available to people in Mississippi and throughout the United States. This is part of our educational mission to “socialize production and democratize society”.
Join us Friday, October 25, 2024 for Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror
939 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS
6 to 8 pm
Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror is a 2019 American documentary film directed by Xavier Burgin and based on the 2011 non-fiction book Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present by Robin R. Means Coleman.The film examines the evolution of the genre of black horror.
Saturday, October 19, 2024
8 am - 12 pm
1214 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS
The Really, Really Free Market is a process of mutual aid and site of mutual exchange. We encourage anyone and everyone in Jackson to come get what you need, from items provided by the community.
Join us in welcoming Mama Charlotte Hill O'Neal for the 27th UAACC Heal the Community Tour
6pm-8pm
Monday, September 30th, 2024
Kuwasi Balagoon Center
939 Capitol St. Jackson, MS 39203
Sharing Wisdom, Music, Poetry and Building the Global Community
Mama C, is an elder in the black liberation movement, from the Kansas City Black Panther Party to co-founding the United African Alliance Community Center (UAACC) in Tanzania. She is an internationally known Visual Artist, Musician, Filmmaker, Poet and Author.
Donations will be accepted to raise funds for the United African Alliance Community Center (UAACC) compound in Tanzania, East Africa and the Leaders of Tomorrow Children's Home.
September 2024 Movie Night - Jones Plantation
Friday, September 27, 2024
Kuwasi Balagoon Center
939 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS
6 pm
Join us for controversial, cult film classic.
You can control a man with brute violence but you can never truly OWN a man until he's convinced that your word is law, and obedience is a virtue. A film destined to be a cult classic, and at the forefront of American Dissident Cinema.
In a time of great hardship, an enslaved people yearn for freedom. Their desperate pleas seem to be answered when a charismatic stranger arrives, promising liberation. But behind his honeyed words and grand vision lurks a sinister agenda. Piece by piece, he spins an elaborate fiction, twisting their hopes into shackles to bind them.
https://www.traditionrolex.com/18
Caught in his intricate web, they fail to see the truth staring them in the face. The few who dare speak out are silenced through coercion and violence. Step by step, the sinister plan takes shape as the people are complicit in their own continued oppression. They cheer their captor and turn on the ones who urge them to open their eyes.
As the ruse reaches its climax, the ultimate price must be paid. Will the truth finally spark the rebellion so long suppressed or will the people remain imprisoned in their own minds? This harrowing tale explores the tangled roots of exploitation and control through one man's nefarious quest to maintain power through elaborate deception. But even the best cons must eventually come to light...
Remaking the Economy:
Escaping Corporate Capture
Wednesday, September 18th, 2024
2:00pm - 3:30pm ET
What is “corporate capture” and how can people escape its effects—in our politics, our culture, our daily life, and in the nonprofit sector? How do people, in short, build an actual everyday politics and economics of liberation?
This was the organizing question for the summer 2024 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly. To addresses this question and expand upon their contributions, three authors from NPQ’s summer economic justice magazine will explore the concept of corporate capture and how movement-based groups can build viable escape routes to advance economic justice. Our panelists are:
Kali Akuno is the cofounder and executive director of Cooperation Jackson, based in Jackson, Mississippi.
Hannah Appel is cofounder of the Debt Collective, a professor of anthropology, and associate director of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, based in Los Angeles, California.
Arlene Martinez is deputy executive director of Good Jobs First, based in Washington, DC.
Sara Myklebust is research director for Bargaining for the Common Good, based at Georgetown University's Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor in Washington, DC.
This webinar will explore:
What do we mean by corporate capture? How does it affect economic justice work?
How can debtors organize to build power and restrain the power of banks and financial institutions?
How can communities organize effectively to limit corporate tax breaks?
How can workers and labor unions leverage trillions of worker pension dollars to advance an economy that prioritizes the common good?
How does one build a solidarity economy on the ground?
What does it look like to transform racial capitalism? What are points of leverage and how do we engage for the long haul?
What is the role of cultural change in economic change work?
What are the democratic economic structures that people want and need—and are worth fighting for?
Whether you’re a social movement activist, nonprofit leader, board member, or engaged in community-based organizing, this webinar will provide you with real-life examples and lessons learned that can inform your work in your own community.
Register to learn how nonprofits and movement activists are advancing strategies to address the economic and social inequalities of our time!
The moderator for this webinar is NPQ senior editor of economic justice Steve Dubb. Steve has worked with cooperatives and nonprofits for over two decades and has been both a student and practitioner in the field of community economic development.
You can send your questions to webinar@npqmag.org to have them answered during the web event.
Presidential Candidate Forum with Claudia de la Cruz
Tuesday, September 17, 2024
Kuwasi Balagoon Center
939 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS
Cooperation Jackson will be hosting several Presidential Candidate forums in September and October to educate our community about the full complement of democratic choices that are available to people in Mississippi and throughout the United States. This is part of our educational mission to “socialize production and democratize society”. Our first candidate forum is with Socialist Presidential Candidate, Claudia de la Cruz, who represents the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). We are working to bring Cornel West and Jill Stein to Jackson to educate our community about their efforts to build alternatives to the political duopoly that dominates the United States political arena.
Socialist presidential candidate Claudia de la Cruz is coming to Jackson, Mississippi. If you’re frustrated by the two-party “lesser of two evil” politics that seems incapable of delivering transformative change for Black people in America, come to Cooperation Jackson on Tuesday, Sep. 17 at 6:30pm.
Mississippi is the poorest state in the country. Jackson—the only city in the state with a population exceeding 100k people—has experienced the largest population decline of any major US city in the last 10 years.
When it comes to Black economic and social freedom, we are told that our options are limited to a vote for Harris or for Trump, and affiliation with a blue or red political block, both led by ruling class elites and committed to exploitation and Empire. But is that true? Is there really no strategic vision outside of the two-party status quo?
Join the conversation with presidential candidate Claudia de la Cruz and Cooperation Jackson!
Black August Art Exhibition 2024
Saturday, August 31, 2024
512 N. State Street, Jackson, MS 39201
Join Cooperation Jackson for our annual Black August Art Exhibit focused on upholding and commemorating the courageous acts of resistance by our ancestors. Join us!
St. Bernard Reunion - Day 2 (New Orleans)
Saturday, August 31, 2024
4 pm - 9 pm
3820 Alfred Street (across from Columbia Park)
Join Cooperation Jackson and the New Day Collective to honor those memory of the St. Bernard Projects and those we lost on account of Hurricane Katrina and the Great Flood.
This is one of the critical steps towards rebuilding the New Day Center on Alfred Street.
Friday Night Film Night August 2024 - An Upright Man
Balagoon Center
939 W. Capitol Street
Jackson, MS 39203
6 pm
Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man is a 2006 documentary film about Thomas Sankara, former president of Burkina Faso. Sankara was known as "the African Che", and became famous in Africa due to his innovative ideas, his devastating humor, his spirit and his altruism. With a gun in one hand and Karl Marx's works in the other, Sankara became president at the age of 34 and served from 1983 to 1987. He immediately set out to shake the foundations of the country that he renamed from the French colonial Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, "Land of Upright Men." More than a classic biography, this film sheds light on the impact that this man and his politic made on Burkina Faso and Africa in general.
St. Bernard Reunion (New Orleans)
Friday, August 30, 2024
4 pm - 9 pm
3820 Alfred Street (across from Columbia Park)
Join Cooperation Jackson and the New Day Collective to honor those memory of the St. Bernard Projects and those we lost on account of Hurricane Katrina and the Great Flood.
This is one of the critical steps towards rebuilding the New Day Center on Alfred Street.
Join us in debates, conversations, and collaborations that pave the way to a more just and liberatory world.
Register Here: https://appserv7.admin.uillinois.edu/FormBuilderSurvey/Survey/UIC_Social_Justice_Initiative/General/ttpr/Survey
Build, Fight, Transform: Building a Regenerative Economy through the Practices of Solidarity, Decolonization, and Degrowth
Wolff Conference Room
As a prelude to Climate Week, the Tishman Environment Design Center will host our visiting scholar Kali Akuno for a second lunch and learn. Kali will build upon the last session by expanding on the Build and Fight Formula that Cooperation Jackson utilizes in its mission to build just communities in Jackson, MS.
As an environmental justice leader, Kali is working on a transformative book, The Build and Fight Formula. With this text, Kali aims to provide strategic suggestions for social movements in the US and beyond. These suggestions focus on building participatory democracy from the grassroots level and altering the commodity form of production to regenerate social relations. Ultimately, this transformation aims to end various forms of exploitation and extraction and reposition our communities in the right relationship with our ecologies. Kali's work is not just inspiring but also offers hope for a better future.
Kali Akuno is an organizer, educator, and writer for human rights and social justice. He is currently the co-founder and Executive Director of Cooperation Jackson, an emerging network of worker cooperatives and supporting institutions.
When: September 19th, 2024, Noon - 2pm EDT
Where: The New School, Wolff Conference Room
Albert and Vera List Academic Center, room D1103
6 East 16th Street, NY, NY
This is part of our 2024 Climate Week programming
Presented by the Tishman Environment and Design Center.
Really, Really Free Market
Saturday, August 17, 2025
Marcus Mosiah Garvey Day
Working step by step to enhance the productive capacity of our people to make every yard a farm, and every garage a factory. Join us in the effort. See you on August 17th in the memory of Marcus Mosiah Garvey. #BuildAndFight #GetOrganized #MutualAid #MutualExchange
Join Cooperation Jackson and local allies and partners for this exchange of mutual aid. Help us build a world of mutual exchange and solidarity to meet our communities needs.
Ida B. Wells Plaza
1128 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS
Saturday, June 15, 2024
8 am - 12 pm
May 2024 Movie Night - An Upright Man
Balagoon Center
939 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS
6 pm
Thomas Sankara: The Upright Man is a 2006 documentary film about Thomas Sankara, former president of Burkina Faso. Sankara was known as "the African Che", and became famous in Africa due to his innovative ideas, his devastating humor, his spirit and his altruism. With a gun in one hand and Karl Marx's works in the other, Sankara became president at the age of 34 and served from 1983 to 1987. He immediately set out to shake the foundations of the country that he renamed from the French colonial Upper Volta to Burkina Faso, "Land of Upright Men." More than a classic biography, this film sheds light on the impact that this man and his politic made on Burkina Faso and Africa in general.
Join Cooperation Jackson on Saturday, May 4th at the Kuwasi Balagoon Center from 1 to 6 pm to honor International Workers Day or May Day and the 10th Anniversary celebration of the launch of Cooperation Jackson.
Cooperation Jackson launched on Thursday, May 1st, 2014 to signal to the world that we were part and parcel of the International Working Class Movement to build a new world, an ecosocialist world. And that we were going to do our part to organize the Black working class of Jackson, the state of Mississippi, and the deep south to make a major contribution to the advance of this movement by building economic democracy in Jackson, through the means of worker cooperatives and other institutions of the solidarity economy.
The Balagoon Center is located at 939 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS 39203.
So, come join us for some good company, good food, good music, and good politics!
This 3-day virtual conference serves as a space to exchange experiences and information, strengthen alliances and networks, and to devise strategies to decenter colonial systems and implement concrete solutions to heal the land and people.
To view visit https://decolonizingeconomicssummit.org
April 2024 Movie Night: Stamped from the Beginning
A film by Ibram X. Kendi
Balagoon Center for Economic Democracy and Sustainable Development
939 W. Capital Street, Jackson, MS
6 pm
Dismantling Green Colonialism
Discussion with author and editor, Hamza Hamouchene
John Thompson Legacy Center
Tuesday, April 23, 2024
6 pm
1212 St. Bernard Ave, New Orleans
Co-Sponsored by the Transnational Institute
Dismantling Green Colonialism
Discussion with author and editor, Hamza Hamouchene
Balagoon Center for Economic Democracy and Sustainable Development
Monday, April 22, 2024
6 pm
939 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS
Co-Sponsored by the Transnational Institute
Organizing for Change: Fighting Poverty and Inequality in the US
Human Rights Center at the Columbia School of Law
Jerome Green Hall, Room 107
Thursday, April 11, 2024
12 - 1 pm
Featuring Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson, Ashely Hufnagel of United Workes, and Anthony Prince of the California Homeless Union
Building a solidarity economy in Jackson, Mississippi anchored by a network of cooperatives and other worker-owned and democratically self-managed enterprises.
