Building on BCI’s webinar with Nonprofit Quarterly and New Economy Coalition that looked at the national movement for solidarity economies in February 2024, BCI’s Program Director Bianca Vazquez facilitated an online conversation on March 27th about what it takes to build a regional solidarity economy in the DC area, and what’s possible when we focus locally on the well-being of people rather than profit.
Many of us live and work in places where gentrification, displacement of local businesses and families, and low-wage extractive work are par for the course. Over the past several years Beloved Community Incubator has dreamed and organized to build a different kind of city and region — one that prioritizes community accountability, collective and democratic planning, and equitable production and distribution of everything that people need to live, rather than maximum extraction, endless growth, and unchecked profit.
It can often be difficult for people interested in anticapitalism, cooperatives, or collective models to figure out how to plug into the work happening at the regional level. Our conversation brought together people from different cooperatives, both operational and in incubation, union members, funders, other regional cooperative incubators, and people generally interested in building solidarity economies in their regions.
During the call we shared practical models that we can use to evaluate and map the needs of our solidarity economy ecosystem, and collaboratively mapped our resources and needs in the DC area.We envision this regional conversation and skill-share as the first of many, as we weave together our collective vision for the DC area. We invite you to watch this call and reach out to us with questions, resources, and other needs you’d like to add to our regional solidarity economy ecosystem map!