Stacey Sutton, Director of Applied Research & Strategic Partnerships at UIC’s Social Justice Initiative Discusses Real Black Utopias, her Cooperative City Research Study

VERNON OAKES: Morning everybody, this is Vernon Oakes. Welcome to Everything Cooperative this Thursday morning. I am in Washington, D.C., and we have Dr. Stacey Sutton on with us this morning. Good morning, Dr. Sutton.

STACEY SUTTON: Good morning.

VERNON OAKES: How are you this morning?

STACEY SUTTON: I’m doing well. How are you?

VERNON OAKES: Great, and where are you located in the world?

STACEY SUTTON: I am in Chicago, Illinois.

VERNON OAKES: And what do you do there?

STACEY SUTTON: I’m a Professor of Urban Planning & Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago, where I do a lot of research on cooperatives and economic democracy and solidarity economy.

VERNON OAKES: Lots and lots of research. Let me ask you this question right off. Do you like what you do?

STACEY SUTTON: I do, I quite like what I do. I like doing research, but that’s one part of my life. I also do community organizing, work in community and use the research. So it’s applied research, not just scholarship for scholarship’s sake, but applied research. One part is building knowledge, the other is applying the knowledge.

VERNON OAKES: Building the knowledge and then using it, all right. Do you teach it at all?

STACEY SUTTON: I do. Yeah, I forgot that part. That’s what I teach, and I actually have a graduate course on solidarity economy where I get to teach 20 graduate students in urban planning and policy about worker-owned cooperatives and solidarity economy and community land trusts and all of the things that create a robust community.

VERNON OAKES: A robust community, I love it. I wish the audience could have seen your smile when I asked you do you like what you do? You just brightened right up. I got it, you love what you do. Research, using the research, the knowledge that’s gained, and then teaching it to folks, so it sounds wonderful. What’s the research that you’re doing or you just did?

STACEY SUTTON: I’ve done a couple of projects. I first began with trying to understand what’s happening in cities across the county with regard to worker-owned cooperatives. How are cities — and when I say cities I do mean within city government — how are cities supporting cooperatives? In that study I was really looking for evidence that they’re supporting, not just the rhetoric that they’re supporting. So I was able to identify 12 cities. In this study, I define cities as having populations of at least 100,000. So 12 cities that are using their power, everything from land distribution to changing regulations to changing legal frameworks to support worker ownership.

So those cities vary from Cleveland and Richmond, Virginia to New York City, Madison, Wisconsin, some out of Minneapolis, and then a bunch of other cities like Austin, Berkeley, Boston, Philadelphia. Who else is in there? Oakland. Trying to remember off the top of my head. There are a number of cities, but those are the cities that I characterize as cooperative cities because there’s strong evidence that the city, at least at the time I was doing this study, that the city was engaged. Some cities were putting a lot of money, some cities were providing technical assistance or support and building public awareness, but all of them were doing something that helped build this cooperative ecosystem and build worker-owned cooperatives.

VERNON OAKES: Cooperative ecosystem and what was the other one?

STACEY SUTTON: And cooperative results. You can have an ecosystem, but if you don’t have worker-owned cooperatives, then the ecosystem, in my mind, is not particularly effective. In these cities there’s evidence of worker-owned cooperatives. As we know, they need particular support. How is the city building that into their frame?

VERNON OAKES: I didn’t hear Chicago or Washington, D.C.

STACEY SUTTON: You did not, you did not. But I think in all fairness, this paper came out in 2019, so the data was collected probably a year earlier. As I say, this has changed quite a bit. Thankfully, some of it has to do with the dissemination of this work so the cities can see that this is legitimate, that cooperatives are ways of building community wealth. So since this paper was published, I would say Chicago is surely well up there. They just allocated $15 million to community wealth-building.

VERNON OAKES: Wait, wait, $15 million?

STACEY SUTTON: Fifteen million.

VERNON OAKES: Over how many years?

STACEY SUTTON: Well, we have to spend it by 2026. It’s the ARPA money, so there is quite a bit of money given to cities for recovery. Through advocacy, we were able to create what we call a community wealth-building initiative. The people within the mayor’s office, the Office of Racial Equity [overlap] —

VERNON OAKES: Inclusion?

STACEY SUTTON: — justice, something, one of these offices within the mayor’s office, they were extremely successful in putting together an advisory board and advocating for an allocation. It’s a small sliver of what the city gets in terms of the ARPA resources, but it’s a huge pot of money for this kind of work. Now that just happened. It was inserted in the recent budget, and we hope to start disseminating the resources within the next few months, but we’re developing the process by which we’re doing that. So it’s for worker-owned cooperatives, it’s for other elements of the ecosystem. It’s for housing cooperatives and community land trusts. Those are the elements that we’re really focusing on.

VERNON OAKES: The types of co-ops are worker co-ops and housing co-ops, and then there’s the community land trust in that they get land and put it in trust — I think when you combine a community land trust with a housing co-op, particularly a limited equity housing co-op, you have affordable housing for here on out. When you just have a limited equity co-op, after 40, 50 years, whatever is in their lending documents, they can decide to not have that be a limited equity co-op anymore. I like combining those two, that’s wonderful, and then housing co-ops. But that’s like $3 million a year, $3-4 million a year. That’s up with the same as New York City. Madison was about a million a year.

STACEY SUTTON: Right, and I don’t think we’re approaching it the same as New York in the sense that we’re really trying to see which projects make sense. We’re trying to build what we call scalable worker cooperatives, and then support the worker cooperatives that already exist, as well as the broader ecosystem. Surely you can’t build affordable housing with just that, so it’s also leveraging resources, bringing philanthropy to the table.

The idea is that the $15 million can leverage additional resources at the same time that we’re actually investing in entities. There are a number of cooperative developers in Chicago that need to build their capacity. A few persons within each entity that with resources they can train more people to do co-op development. I train maybe, as I said, my class every spring I have 20 graduate students. Some of them actually end up working with some of these developers. We just need to build capacity, so with resources you can do that.

We’ve been working on this for years. It’s not just me, but I remember walking into a meeting in the mayor’s office with my paper like hey, you just have to read this. Nobody read it, of course.

VERNON OAKES: But you got it done.

STACEY SUTTON: Eventually. Just as you said, when they did their name, when we did not see Chicago on the list, comes oh, why not us, right? It wasn’t that things were not happening in Chicago. Grassroots, absolutely, have been for decades. The infrastructure in terms of from the city and investment from the city perspective, that’s very different. I would say the same thing for D.C. D.C. has a robust, or at least it had and now it’s growing once again, a robust grassroots movement around cooperatives, as does Baltimore. But I didn’t see evidence within city government at the time I was doing this research that the city was putting money, changing legislation, changing ordinances or resolutions or allocating land, any of the things I was looking for. I have about 25 to 30 things that I was looking for to suggest the municipality is committed to worker-owned.

VERNON OAKES: I would really like to get those 25 or 30 things that you’re looking at to see what you say and what your research says is important that a city is doing to help create co-ops, and particularly ecosystems. Shout-out to Anita Bonds is our city councilmember that created a limited equity housing co-op task force. We found out there are 99 limited equity housing co-ops in D.C. right now. What kinds of resources are needed? We talked about money and eliminating property taxes, having money in there for consistent, continuous training, money for rehab and so forth, and then money to create additional limited equity housing co-ops.

HUD hasn’t had that money. They used to in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and maybe even in the ‘70s, but they haven’t had money for housing co-ops, so we haven’t been able to look to them. I think with your research, we might be able to take some stuff to them.

STACEY SUTTON: But there’s also a lot of money right now with recovery money as it’s being allocated. That’s what we used for this, the ARPA money. However we’re defining build back better, it’s not just physical infrastructure. We have to build our social and economic infrastructure in our cities. Getting a small sliver — we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars that are going to community development within Chicago, and so just 15 is a small sliver. But they’re resources at this moment.

VERNON OAKES: I wish Herb Fisher — Herb was a lawyer in Chicago that helped develop housing co-ops. He’s in a nursing home in Florida right now with his son, but he would love to — I’m gonna try to reach out. He’s working at the Development and Preservation Committee at the National Association of Housing Co-Ops, and that group is doing to create affordable housing in the US total. So I wanna get this information to them and to him. I know he would just be happy pink to hear what you’re talking about right now. When we come back after our first break, I would like to talk about some of these cities, some of these variables that you’re talking about, what you saw. Before we finish this hour, really talk about some of your future research that you’re doing. We’ll be right back. Please don’t touch that dial.

VERNON OAKES: Welcome back, everybody. This is Vernon Oakes and the program is Everything Cooperative. We have Dr. Stacey Sutton on with us this morning talking about her research and her love for co-ops and building community wealth. Dr. Sutton, I would like to delve more into the cities that you work with and some of the variables that you’ve learned. What are a couple cities you’d like to talk about?

STACEY SUTTON: The cities that I characterize as cooperative cities, the municipalities, the local governments are doing stuff around cooperatives, I would probably start with New York City in terms of the scale of the work that they were doing. New York City, Minneapolis and Madison, all of those cities I call cultivator cities because they are both cultivating this ethic of cooperatives, they’re cultivating investments in cooperatives and they’re supporting the grassroots work that has been going on for quite some time.

So if we focus in New York, for instance, they implemented an initiative within the small business services, so within city government, they created I think it was called WBDCI — I’m trying to remember the acronym, what the acronym was for — but they created an initiative that was funded for five consecutive years, and each year it increased incrementally. So it started with a couple of million and I think by the time it ended, I think there was close to $4 million the last year. I shouldn’t say ended. I don’t know that it’s ended, but the last annual report that I saw.

This began, I believe, in about 2016 or ’17, so each year since then, they’ve been investing. The money is extremely important, but they also — they had a budget initiative, but they had explicit support from city council and from the mayor’s office. As I said, they implemented this within the department of small business services. It was called the Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative. But then in terms of other things, the cities had a lot of power to leverage funds from other sources, even if they don’t have the funds internally, so that’s extremely important. To be able to provide access to low-interest loans, revolving loan funds, and ideally non-extractive capital.

I don’t believe that’s what happened through the city, but the other elements of financing in terms of startup capital, low-interest loans, those are things that I saw in New York. They invested in the ecosystem. We know we have worker-owned cooperatives, but in order to establish a worker-owned cooperative, a lotta things have to happen. It’s not just an individual entrepreneur has an idea and files for an LLC. There’s a group of people that come together and really build a democratic process for starting an enterprise and maintaining that enterprise.

If you are starting a business, you and your peers, your colleagues, may know how to do that business. You may know how to make windows, for instance, but you don’t fully know how to govern the enterprise. You’re not fully clear about like the accounting systems and the legal systems and all of those things. Somebody has to offer that support, so in New York we saw a growth in the infrastructure that we call the ecosystem, the technical assistance providers, those co-op developers, even advocacy, so those things that are thinking about policy at the local level, at the state level, at the federal level that supports co-op development.

Building public awareness is a big component. I think it seems trivial, but the degree to which co-operators, those who are building the co-op, can go into a small business center and ask for support around something they don’t fully understand, the degree to which the people working at that center understand cooperatives is huge. What we see again and again is people go to the typical, traditional venues to get support or go to a bank to get support, and the people they’re engaging with do not understand cooperatives.

In some regards, cooperatives are just businesses, but in many regards there is a lot of nuance to running and sustaining and even growing a cooperative, which is different than a conventional business. So you have to build that awareness and it has to be normalized. There are different types of businesses. Just like there are corporations and sole proprietorships and so forth, cooperatives are another form of business. So folks need to understand that.

VERNON OAKES: When you start talking about building the ecosystem, building the policies, getting the resources for support, one of the key things that I find that you have to have in a co-op that you don’t have to have in a hierarchal system is how do you resolve conflict? That conflict resolution is critical, because you want everybody to have a voice and you want everybody to be heard. Not only be able to say something, but be heard and what they say is considered and debated and some conclusion is made. Once the conclusion is made, people go implement.

That takes training because that’s not how our system works. In the family it doesn’t work that way, in the church it doesn’t work that way. It’s all hierarchy, it’s somebody making the decision. The buck stops there. But in the co-op, everybody is in that decision process. So yeah, it’s a whole training process.

STACEY SUTTON: And it’s not easy. As you said, because we have not been trained in it since birth, we have not been trained in it through our educational process, kindergarten on up, we’ve been trained in hierarchy. So to relearn democracy, to really understand that democracy is not just what happens in the voting booth, but the democratic processes are exactly as you described. They have to work within cooperatives. Everybody has one vote. One person one vote. And so for that to be effective, everyone has to be heard and everyone has to feel that they’re heard and that they have equal power.

There are practices for doing that, whether you adopt a sociocracy or another governance practice, you have to learn it. There are people that are experts in training. Co-op developers, one of their expertise is often of governance. Not always. Sometimes it’s the legal support that co-ops get. Sometimes the legal scholars or legal technical assistance providers have training in governance, as well. Those are extremely important.

VERNON OAKES: I have it that co-ops are hard work. You have to do the job of whatever the business you’re in, putting in windows if that’s what, and making windows. Whatever it is around a window, you have to do that. Plus you have to govern the business. I’ve had some people on, like Eco Exchange, a worker cooperative where the guy said when he would be in a meeting — Rodney North was his name — he said he would be in a meeting, he was a chair of the board, and the manager, whoever the executive director, would be telling him what to do because he was in marketing.

That night when they had a board meeting, he and the board would be telling the manager what to do. The roles would flip and people have to understand that and stay in their lane depending on which role they’re in. It was interesting. So it’s hard work, but it’s extremely rewarding work. You talked about wealth-building, financial wealth. When you get voice — Dame Pauline Green said on this show co-ops help people come out of poverty with dignity. I think what that dignity is is voice. You have a voice. You can be heard, you can say something, you can contribute to a decision.

Sometimes your idea may be the decision, where normally if you work in the assembly line like I did at Ford, I have no voice in what happens, none whatsoever. So yeah, I love co-ops for all of those reasons. Please keep going.

STACEY SUTTON: No, that’s it. We use the terms of self-determination, but co-ops are perhaps the best manifestation of that or one of the best manifestations of that within an organizational form. People that have taken on that responsibility to be the workers and the owners are determining the trajectory of that enterprise. As you said, a kind of reward, it’s hard work, but most things that are hard work there’s some reward. There’s a reward, and that’s why we keep doing it. I think we hear that again and again. Not only is there a reward that is both emotional and economic, but we see reward in terms of the sustainability of the business.

Again, building the windows, you don’t just work in your lane. You get to learn the scope of what it takes to build windows and to manage the books. Open-book management is also a big component. Full transparency and accountability. In order to fully participate you have to understand — it doesn’t mean you have to become the accountant, but you have to understand how the whole system works and trust it. The degree to which you can look at the books and see okay, I understand what’s happening here and it makes sense, it resonates. You feel far more comfortable when somebody is asking or suggesting that the work process or the supplies that we buy might be a little different than you —

VERNON OAKES: I’m sorry, I have to cut you off because we have to go to our second break. We’ll continue talking about New York when we get back, and then one of the other cities. We’ll be right back.

VERNON OAKES: Welcome back everybody. This is Vernon Oakes. Everything Cooperative is the program. Right before we took break, Dr. Sutton was talking about co-ops, and without saying it, she was really talking about the values and principles of co-ops. Just real quickly, the values of cooperation are based on the values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. In the tradition of the founders of the cooperative members believe in the ethical values of honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others.

I like to say caring for one another is the golden rule. The principles of volunteer and open membership, democratic member control, and that’s that one member one vote, members’ economic participation — you normally put something in, but you get to share the profits. That’s where the real wealth comes in besides a fair salary, fair wage. Autonomy and independence, you have to have control Education, training and information, we’ve talked about that. We’ll continue to talk about that. Then there’s the ecosystem of cooperation among co-ops, which is a part of that ecosystem. And then the seventh one is concern for community.

Dr. Sutton, without stating it, anytime we talk about co-ops to a cooperator like yourself, who researches cooperations, implement cooperations, and then you do the teaching, these values and principles are already in the conversation without necessarily associating this is a value of co-ops and this is a principle of co-ops. I wanna go back to New York, particularly they put in from $2 million to $4 million over a five, six, seven-year period. You said Chicago was doing it differently from New York. How did New York implement their plan and their policies for creating co-ops in this ecosystem?

STACEY SUTTON: I would say I don’t want to speak too specifically to New York. What I studied were the policies and practices that were obvious or that were legible, I would say, in the city in terms of how much money they invested, starting in 2015 all the way through 2020. As I said, it was from $1 million to $3 or $4 million each year. In the sense they were different because they were one of the few cities that was actually doing that at the time. Chicago wasn’t. It hadn’t started at the city level.

Again, there were a number of cooperatives in the city, there were a number of co-op developers, there were technical assistance providers. All of that was happening at the grassroots level, but the city had not made any kind of grand gesture toward worker ownership. They had not invested or changed policy in any way that was legible in Chicago. That is changing now. I would say Chicago, the way they’re approaching it is through what we call community wealth-building.

The community wealth-building initiative was implemented in the last budget, and I guess it will be fully launched this summer. There’s an advisory group that has come together to support decision-making in terms of being a democratic process. The city has been able to allocate $15 million, so rather than year by year by year as New York did, kind of a lump sum to community wealth-building. By that, it’s worker-owned cooperatives and building the ecosystem, but it’s also thinking about community land trusts and housing cooperatives for affordable housing.

I would say that I don’t think that New York — there are tons of cooperatives in New York, housing cooperatives, but I don’t think that was part of their strategy. It was largely focusing on the business development side.

VERNON OAKES: I understand what they did was they allocated this money to the technical advisors, to the developers, and they went out and did the implementations in starting these co-ops and helping to get them started. I didn’t know if Chicago was doing it differently from that, if you all were particularly gonna create them yourselves or if you’re going through these intermediaries to get them done.

STACEY SUTTON: I think it’s a little of both, perhaps it’s all three. It’s surely supporting the ecosystems and supporting the co-op developers, those that are closest to the co-ops. I think those of us that are on the advisory committee were also saying we need to support the co-ops that exist directly. I think that was a challenge in New York, and part of that is a transaction cost. You give a lump sum of money to an organization and then they disseminate it. But there also needs to be a way in which co-ops can get access to some resources as quickly as they need it.

We’re also thinking about developing some new co-ops and trying to develop a model for co-ops that make most sense, especially for marginalized communities, Black and Latinx communities in Chicago. So it’s a little bit of both, supporting the ecosystem and developers, supporting the co-ops that exist, and helping to implement or design/develop new co-ops.

VERNON OAKES: Are you familiar with ChiFresh?

STACEY SUTTON: Yes.

VERNON OAKES: I really like them, and one of the reasons is that they are working with — I like the word, folks that have had a conflict with our legal system.

STACEY SUTTON: Indeed, the five women that started it had conflicts with the legal system.

VERNON OAKES: So they can start a co-op. You go out and try to find a job because that’s difficult. When you put down that you’ve had these conflicts with the legal system, too often people don’t wanna hire you. So start your own business. Learn how to do it, get with these developers and these technical providers and start your own business. In that case, what is ChiFresh? What do they do?

STACEY SUTTON: ChiFresh is the food manufacturer and distributor, so they make fresh food for institutions. Fast, fresh, healthy food for institutions. That is the worker-owned cooperative. They were supported by Upside Down Consulting, which was founded by a woman named Camille Kerr, who’s here in Chicago, and is working with the city and at this point on the advisory committee. I work with her in other capacities. She helped bring those folks together and helped form ChiFresh.

VERNON OAKES: I’ve had her on the show. She’s been on the show, Camille, has been on the show and is great. I got a real good sense of that and I loved what they were doing. Lori Lightfoot is your mayor. Is she involved in this? Do you get support from the mayor’s office?

STACEY SUTTON: Yeah. I haven’t engaged with Mayor Lightfoot directly, but this comes out of the mayor’s office. This community wealth-building initiative, I guess it was incubated in the mayor’s office through the Office of Economic and Racial Justice or Equity and Racial Justice, I think that’s what it is. That’s an office within the mayor’s office. The folks there really led the charge for this. Over the last year and a half, they really met with community and really determined what’s needed, and then advocated for the funds.

The mayor didn’t just decide that these funds — that’s the inside game, the game in which somebody on the inside has to really push because the money could go elsewhere. Fortunately, we have folks on the inside, within the mayor’s office and this Office of Equity and Racial Justice, that really supported this initiative.

VERNON OAKES: In D.C., Marion Barry was a cooperator. He liked co-ops. He helped to create policies and laws that helped to create co-ops. I think that’s one of the reasons he was called the Mayor for Life in the District. In 1967, the Federation of Worker Co-Ops in the South, in Georgia, they incorporated in D.C. because D.C. had the laws that could help them to incorporate. They didn’t have it in the southern 13 states. The reason I’m bringing up mayors is that’s interesting what the mayor’s office can do to help support co-ops and higher up. Same thing with the president. You get President Biden to support co-ops and maybe we can get federal funds and federal support, too. We have had it in the past, but not recently, by any stretch. So what’s another city besides New York you wanna talk about?

STACEY SUTTON: There are a bunch of them. I think New York, I spoke to that just because of the amount of money they’ve spent over the past five, six years. But I would say Philadelphia is also doing, I think, good work. While there’s not a lot of money coming from the city, the city is supporting and is supporting the development of the ecosystem and trying to — I would say they’re providing or at least amenable to providing some access to startup capital and low-interest loans, also supporting the developing of the ecosystem and the co-op developers that are there, like PACA. Building public awareness, those are also critical.

Boston has a similar strategy, although both Boston and Philadelphia have a robust landscape of worker-owned cooperatives and other elements. The city’s role is just to raise those up and to support them. In both cities, the grassroots movement is really, in my mind, leading that charge, but there’s no obstructions from the city. The city has either passed legislation or a resolution that has made co-ops and the development of co-ops part of the culture of the place.

That’s important. That was a major signifier for me in terms of what are cities doing? Is there an ordinance or a resolution, something that they’ve enacted that would say okay, we believe in this? Then I looked at a bunch of other little things.

VERNON OAKES: So it would be interesting what we could get personal here with Muriel Bowser, what we might be able to put in front of her and the city council to help create this ecosystem in D.C. Also Ron Hatch is a guy that’s been working, that’s how I met you through some of the conferences —

STACEY SUTTON: Yes, I saw him.

VERNON OAKES: He’s been working in the Baltimore area. How can we get those mayors or those city councils to help to create the kinds of ecosystems that you’ve found out with these other 12 cities in that first research. What is some research that you’re doing now? Future research? What does future research look like?

STACEY SUTTON: Over the last few months I’ve been focusing on Black-centered cooperatives. What that means is it’s co-ops that are either led by Black folks and/or supporting Black communities. It doesn’t mean that there are only Black folks within the cooperative, but their leadership in terms of either the vision, the large number of the people that are worker-owners are Black, and it’s typically facing a Black community. I was interested in not what the cities are doing and city government, but where can you identify formations, clusters of worker-owned cooperatives that are what I just called Black-centered or Black-led worker cooperatives.

I’ve identified about 25, I would say, places. So this summer —

VERNON OAKES: Let me stop you there. We’re gonna go into our final break. I got 25 different places that are Black-led cities or Black-led co-ops. I really wanna hear about this and see where they are, because there’s been a lot of racism in the co-op world, too. Even though it says the first, it’s open to anybody, no matter, but if you go back and look, it’s been white male-led through history, then white women, and now Blacks are getting very much involved in it. There’s been Black involvement all the time, but very much again, so I really wanna hear what research you will be looking at coming for at those other 25 places. We’ll be right back.

VERNON OAKES: Welcome back everybody. Everything Co-Op is the program. We’ve been supported by the National Cooperative Bank for the eight and a half years we’ve been on the air on WOL. NCB’s mission is to support and be an advocate for America’s cooperatives and their members, especially in low-income communities, by providing innovative financial and related services. Dr. Sutton, in your research have you come across NCB helping to provide any of this funding?

STACEY SUTTON: Somewhat. Well, I would say, where would I see it? I don’t know if I’ve seen it specifically within Black-led cooperatives, but I’ve seen NCB in terms of supporting I think it’s the food co-ops and some other — they’re a big name and big entity, a big force in the field, but I’m not always clear where their resources are going. I just haven’t looked into it.

VERNON OAKES: As you go around, particularly looking at these Black-led Black folks co-ops, if they need funding, most of them do, then I would suggest, and maybe we can find who the person is in NCB to hook them up with. I know they are very big in New York in housing markets, also big in D.C. with limited equity housing co-ops, have been for long periods of time. But this is their mission. They love it, they do a really great job at it. So yeah, if you find out let me know and we’ll try to hook up and find who’s the right contact there.

But in the meantime, what are these 25 different organizations, just a few of them that you’re —

STACEY SUTTON: They’re not organizations. These are cities, right? These are cities in which there’s at least some evidence that they’re Black-centered worker cooperatives. I’m trying to understand if that exists, what are the other support systems? What is the ecosystem around that formation? What is the vision and so forth? That’s the research that I’m doing, or I will be doing in the summer. In terms of I’m not going to focus on all 25, so surely I’ll focus on Chicago, Jackson, Baltimore, D.C., likely Atlanta, other places like Dayton, Oakland, Philadelphia, Minneapolis. There’s Detroit, St. Louis has some interesting work happening. That’s just a small sample of some of the places.

VERNON OAKES: The only name that you’ve said that surprised me is St. Louis. I didn’t know about St. Louis. I know about all those other places that you talked about. There’s a new food co-op started in Detroit. Capital Impact has put a lotta money into Detroit. Flint, Michigan also, they’re starting a food co-op and some other co-op work there. Jackson, Mississippi is huge in what they’re doing. Also Atlanta. But the Federation of Southern Co-Ops, have you worked with them at all?

STACEY SUTTON: Not directly. I know of them, they’re huge. It’s a legacy. But I haven’t worked with them directly.

VERNON OAKES: Because they’re in 13 southern states and they have offices, I believe, in five of those 13. Their whole goal is to do what you’re talking about, create co-ops that help Black, Brown, indigenous communities. Cornelius Blanding is the person that’s there if you wanna reach out to him. I can help put you guys together. What are some of the type of co-ops in these cities that are Black-led that you have found?

STACEY SUTTON: There’s a wide spectrum. I would say there are a number of food co-ops, but there are also service co-ops. Service, everything from cleaning to childcare. There are a number of designers and artistic types of enterprises. One that I don’t know, but I just learned about in Fletcher, Vermont, a wine cooperative, and an energy cooperative in Massachusetts. Of course, the UJIMA project in Massachusetts and Jamaica Plain.

VERNON OAKES: UJIMA?

STACEY SUTTON: UJIMA. The Boston UJIMA Project?

VERNON OAKES: I’m not familiar with that one, UJIMA.

STACEY SUTTON: Oh yeah, that’s big. They’re one of the first community-led democratic investment funds. They’ve been able to raise about $5 million from community investments to reinvest in Dorchester and Roxbury, largely along the commercial corridors and determining which businesses and supporting cooperatives and so forth.

VERNON OAKES: I thought you were talking about UJAMAA Collective in Pittsburgh.

STACEY SUTTON: Ah yes, UJAMAA Collective in Pittsburgh, they’re there as well. There’s some work in Houston. So there’s a lot, and again, this is my summer project. I’ve just been creating a database and trying to collect some information at this point so that I can identify the cities and go and meet with people and really understand what’s happening and understand the relationships within those places, understand the rationale for doing what they’re doing and their efficacy at this point.

VERNON OAKES: If there’s anything I can do to support you, even help give you any information I know about different Black-led co-ops throughout the US, I would be more than happy to do that. Also I bought an RV. Last year I traveled again and I’m gonna do that again this summer. If I can meet you anywhere, maybe even do a live show on a Thursday on whatever co-op you’re working with, that’s another possibility that I would absolutely love doing. I like meeting the cooperators. I really like meeting and hearing their stories.

The first live show I did was in Detroit with Malik when they were starting the food co-op. I went to look at their farm that they had taken part of a park and made it into a farm. A city-owned park had given them land so they created vegetable — I wanted to go out and cut the veggies and make my salad right there. It was really nice looking. I also visited a farm in Cincinnati, a lotta good stuff in Dayton and Cincinnati going on. So anything I can do to support you in that research, because it’s exciting. Maybe like everything else, you’ve got other cities saying my name is not on the 12 cities you looked at, maybe we can get other Blacks to say hey, this is something I can do.

STACEY SUTTON: I would love that. It’s really been through those processes that I’ve been able to develop this. Folks from the Movement for Black Lives, it started to aggregate some names. The US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, I had a research assistant. Through all of those folks, we’ve been able to put this small database together, but I know it doesn’t represent everything. So I would love offline to be in conversation with you to figure out how we can fill in and then perhaps meet in the field.

VERNON OAKES: I’ve been trying to figure out who at Movement for Black Lives I could get on the show, so you can help me, too, because of what they’re doing. I got their policies. There’s a research project I’m wanting to do to look at all these civil rights organizations and see what their policies are in housing and in education, healthcare, all of these, and then what they’ve been able to do and then if they had co-ops in their policies. W.E.B. DuBois had it, but did NAACP have it when they started?

I don’t see it in their policy now about co-ops, but looking at their policies. Also get those organizations to help to implement the kinds of things you’re doing the research on. I think that would be phenomenal if we could.

STACEY SUTTON: I think they started doing research. They hired someone to help understand what was happening. I’m advocating for them to make it a larger part of their policy platform. I think they did articulate it as an important area. I don’t know how far they’ve gone with it.

VERNON OAKES: And that’s Movement for Black Lives?

STACEY SUTTON: Mm-hmm.

VERNON OAKES: Okay, yeah, I really would like to get that contact and see how to support them in what they’re doing and get them on the air so they can talk about that. What are some of the lessons that you have learned in your research looking at cities and now what you’re beginning to research in looking at Black-led co-ops that you’d like to leave people with?

STACEY SUTTON: They’re very different lessons. One, the Black-led co-ops is new, so I haven’t really distilled lessons. But one of the things that I’ve learned by looking at the top-down approach, or at least looking at what cities are doing and philanthropies, more philanthropies getting into this, is the importance of not being paternalistic. The importance of providing the resource and stepping back. Providing the resource and letting the process unfold. I think cities and philanthropies are not typically accustomed to the long process. They’re focused on the outcome. They’re focused on how many businesses and how many jobs.

But if we use those as the primary or sole indicators of success, we will never rise to the occasion. We’ll never see these enterprises in the same way that we see conventional businesses, partly because they take a long time in terms of solidifying. But once they are, they’re far more resilient than conventional businesses. One thing I say to municipal leaders is that if we’re going to invest in this, it’s a long-term investment. It’s not just a political cycle, and it’s not investing so you can count the business next year and then hopefully more and more.

Once they do get established, they’re embedded in place. The ripple effects, both within that enterprise, the surrounding communities, the families of those who are worker-owners, and the broader community, it’s very rare that you have a cooperative that is only doing their business. They’re usually deeply engaged in community.

VERNON OAKES: We’ve gotta stop it there. Thank you so very much. Long-term and they’re embedded. Everybody out there, thank you so much for listening. We’ll be back next Thursday, and until then please live cooperatively.