# Links for Trinh
mike : 30apr2021
. . on the meet.coop community programme. Before we chat next week. Shared with Wouter too.
* Community categories @ [meet.coop Discourse **forum**](https://forum.meet.coop/c/community/25)
* **Readme** guide to the [community programme](https://cloud.meet.coop/s/MxPjQJyq5cxZpBm) intentions
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Related stuff, under discussion. A couple of items.
* 1 A slide deck [draft slide deck](https://cloud.meet.coop/s/wadWBjZrGHQoCkR) - work in progress.

> Relates to a grant proposal that meet.coop is preparing, for the European Cultural Forum's' grant programme: *Culture of solidarity*. Submissions due in two weeks. Slides highlight a significant role for the community programme - naturally, bcos 'culture' is what this programme is about.
• ECF [website](https://culturalfoundation.eu/about/)

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- 2 An email exchange with a fellow organiser, on strategy

On 16/04/2021 20:32 Mike Hales <[e-mail]> wrote to Pat Conaty:

Recent Kate Raworth presentation in the launch event of Cities for Change in Amsterdam.
https://citiesforchange.org/processes/news/f/17/posts/16?locale=en

It impresses me as a vision and a presentation. Although language is a problem - democracy, ownership, regenerative all need renaming I think. Or, actually, specifying in terms of relations of production. Rhetorics won’t suffice.

She (Kate Raworth) has a knack with visual schemas, which is good to imitate, I think. Like the doughnut itself. Actually, her visual language may be more rigorous - or at least, more to the point - than some of her verbal language?

Preston gets mentions. What d’you make of these? Did Preston eventually start to do enough on coops and commons, as distinct from municipal purchasing and anchor institutions?

===

From: Mike Hales <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Raworth soundbites on the doughnut and the city
Date: 28 April 2021 at 11:29:51 BST
To: pat conaty <[e-mail]>
Cc: Micky Metts <[e-mail]>, Jamie McClelland <[e-mail]>

Response below Pat. Copying Micky & Jamie @ MayFirst

On 27 Apr 2021, at 11:07, pat commonfutures <[e-mail]> wrote:

>Hi Mike
>
> From your discussions with Agaric and the Boston network, has your work on the meet.co-op opportunity opened up to other similar groups in other US cities. I am thinking of the work in Madison, Wisconsin on Mutual Aid Networks and some of the Solidarity Economy groups in other US cities.

For the meet.coop community programme I’m focused on UK solidarity economy, believing I have better contacts there and can thus dig down quicker to roots organisers and paid workers, rather than the 'umbrella entrepreneurs’, board members, propagandists, etc. My feeling is, the meet.coop programme should prominently feature workers at the roots alongside the usual suspects we see speaking and blogging on international circuits. They can be the same of course - and there *are* system-layers, in this world of organising, more local, and more global?

I have a hunch ‘care coops’ could be an important focus.

A core part of my rationale is to try to escape of the charmed circle of white male professional-class global-North activists, whose faces you see in all the meet.coop video calls. I assume that the nearer the roots in solidarity practice, the more BIPOC and working class and female it gets. Well, possibly :-§ Or does that not *really* start to happen, till we cross the colonial line, 'North-South’? Have both ‘class’ and ‘identity’ been too fucked-with in the North, thro generations of consumer cpaitalism?

My first hunch is, **solidarity economy is the central thread** for the programme - rather than, say intersectionalism (where women, for example, are very prominent) or colour or coops or free software or security/privacy etc - bcos ‘making the living economy’ thro a politics of commoning is **the story that joins everything up**. I think. You share this perception Pat, I think? And this then shifts into *making the **activist formations** that make the living economy* - aka *formaciòn*. Which is why you and I are both involved in ‘college-style’ projects?

My sense is that even MayFirst in the US - Micky @ Boston and US Solidarity Economy Network, Jamie @ NY - have to struggle constantly to develop wider-scale solidarity-economy networking at the level I’m thinking of (¿both have primary ’tech’ commitments?). MayFirst is still in process of rebuilding capability and roles and focus, following a big shift in their labour base (aka Alfredo Lopez!), end of last year.

When the dust settles, there will (?) be greater ‘economic’ focus on solidarity economy, alongside the ‘political’ orientation that MayFirst is traditionally centered in. Maybe, it might be ‘build back better’, post-Covid - which is !plenty political? As that focus develops @ MayFirst, I’d hope to weave this together with the meet.coop programme, thro joint sessions of some kind.

As always, the constraint is activist labour time. Too few hours in a lifetime! And fair to say, in the US broadly, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff needing to be attended to . .

My second hunch is **‘Follow the language'**. Like MayFirst does, with Hispanic networks. And that way, to begin to cross the global-North-South lines. From where I stand, Hispanic goes via Spain, to South America. meet.coop has a good solidarity economy/commons politicised base in Spain, but South America connections are few, and somewhat geeky, basically free-software sysadmin connections. I’ve not had the energy to start trying to work that thread. It’s a bit thin?

Languagewise, my hunch is, French is better. The francophone networks in solidarity and commons could be good - Jason Nardi @ RIPESS and Frederick Sultan @ Remix the Commons are both involved (a little!) in meet.coop. Those threads probably lead to Africa. And cross the Atlantic to francophone Canada too.

Collaborating across language communities is a difficult but core challenge for meet.coop, and my sense is, we ought to creep up on it carefully thro specific topics in solidarity economy collaboration (like Fairtrade, or care coops, or food. Or migrant labour) rather than try to engage it in a generic way, when it easily becomes a bit ’technical’ or technique-driven? However, MayFirst for example does have a good ’technique’ response to this - which is more social-technique than digital-technique, I think. They have a well-practised *facilitation discipline*, and give time to organise before meetings - which often are big meetings.

My third hunch is **‘Follow Fairtrade'**. Rachel, Albert and Nick from the Robin Murray network are ace freetraders. Nick lives in Nicaragua, Rachel & Albert are in frequent contact (and some visiting) with Siera Leone. Kerala connections too. Their connections are very material - nuts, cocoa, coffee. This trio are big on *multistakeholder coop forms*, and *1st-2nd-3rd-level inter-coop trade collaborations*. Hispanic language too, I would guess. I suspect this might be the ace up my sleeve, but I’ve been holding back for several weeks, after opening a conversation with them. As regards any contribution in the meet.coop programme, I’m aware that I’ll need to lead on that (they’re so heavily committed in practical trade stuff) and I haven’t screwed myself up yet to muster that time commitment.

For them to be genuinely willing, I feel we'll need to home-in on a topic that helps them directly in organising their global coop networks, rather than just ‘educating’ some global-North listeners. Otherwise, meet.coop would be exploiting (and maybe abusing) their instincts for solidarity thro mutual exchanges-of-views? I’m not sure that’s a reasonable view for me to take. It could be an excuse for not jumping in. But I’m just SO aware of how over-our-heads all we organisers are, in commitments. And how hard we should think, before trying to insert *yet another* focus into sombody’s life?

Even being ‘retired’ (!) and free to choose my commitments of time doesn’t resolve this in any simple way.

Would be great to get your thoughts coming back to me, on strategy . . for activist networks running on a tiny handful of volunteer contributors . . seeking to escape the global-North gravitational pull of plantation capitalism. Somehow, cities *are* a way to focus this, Raworth-style? Could that be ’the answer’?

Where is SEA at in the UK for example, on this? Heavy Oxford local-municipalism commitment? Sustaining a Rojava connection (‘just talk’ or practical material linkages?)? Euro meta-level work on mapping connections across the economy? Do these all add up, or do they tend to be fragments?

**I wonder - should we have a meet.coop programme session on this?**

Love & solidarity / mike

>**PS:** The whole of the above would be shifted in some way, if women and patriarchy were properly in the fabric. Women's work, women’s networks, women’s perspectives and contra-patriarchy are basic in making the living economy. I doubt ‘feminist economics’ can carry the load, but in DisCO, for example, it underpins ‘care work’ which absolutely is a central field of revolutionary transformation and commons transition.
>
>Myself, I’d take *care work* as the **generative feminised focus**, rather than ‘women in leadership’ or genderedness or patriarchy; I think it runs deeper - and ¿embraces? violence and extractivism per se which, for example, are foundations of colonialism-racism.
>
>Not sure how ‘care work' runs in North-South terms. Maybe, it doesn’t need to? It has its own intersectional, systemic work to do, ‘here’ (ie any location, in any relationship), in North or South?