Upstream - The Solidarity Economy with Cheyenna Weber

Episode Date: January 30, 2017

In this Upstream Conversation with spoke with Cheyenna Weber, co-founder of SolidarityNYC and a lead organizer of the Cooperative Economics Alliance of NYC. We spoke with her about the solidarity economy, where it came from, where it is right now, and where it might be headed. How did solidarity manifest during the Occupy Wall Street movement? Why is it important that we view co-operatives, credit unions, and other forms of alternative economics as part of a broader movement? What is the role of personal and cultural transformation in the movement? This interview is a part of our exploration of the Solidarity Economy. To listen to our Episode on The Solidarity Economy, visit upstreampodcast.org/solidarityeconomy For more information: Solidarity NYC: solidaritynyc.org CEANYC: https://gocoopnyc.com/ This episode of Upstream was made possible with support from listeners like you. Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

You are listening to an Upstream Conversation with Cheyenne Weber. Cheyenne is a Brooklyn-based writer, community organizer, and educator. She is a co-founder and member of Solidarity NYC and a lead organizer of the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City. We spoke with her as part of our exploration of the solidarity economy. I'm a co-founder of Solidarity NYC, and we are an all-volunteer collective, actually. We are unfunded. We've been around since 2009. We formed after the U.S. Solidarity Economy Forum that was hosted by the U.S. Solidarity Economy

Network in Amherst in 2009. And the purpose of that group has been to support and connect New York City's solidarity economy organizations and organizers and people who are interested in this work. And the primary vehicle for that has been a mapping project where we've demonstrated the ways that people are connected to the Solidarity Economy Framework and made that possible for people to search based on where they are in the city or good or service that they're looking for. And we've also conducted a lot of research. project, which has culminated in the creation of a cross-sectoral solidarity economy network in the city that goes by the name Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City, or CENIC, as we call it. So Solidarity NYC as a collective has been mostly focused on getting that network off the ground for about seven years. And this year, we finally did, we launched it. And Scenic

now has its own board and is democratically controlled and is building its programs. And so Solidarity NYC is a collective of artists, media makers, organizers, and researchers, is in a bit of a transition. And you mentioned it started, Solidarity NYC started in 2009, and it was after a conference that happened. So is that timing at all related to the economic crash that happened in 2008? Because we've seen that solidarity economy can really pick up and be a really major player in communities after recessions or crises? Yeah, I think it was an accident in terms of the timing. That said, I think that a lot of the

interest in solidarity economics is certainly connected to any downturn in the economy. And, you know, around the time of the housing bubble, in particular, people were pointing at credit unions as being a shining example of responsible banking and responsible investment, since most credit unions were not involved in the risky investments. And in fact, we're on the other side of it, we're doing what they could to help people save their homes and stay in their homes. So we did see an interest there. And even prior to that, you know, in the US, there's been a food movement that really came into its own around that same time, 2008, 2009. And that delivered a lot of interest in CSAs, community supported agriculture, in food cooperatives, in community land trusts and farmland and, you know, other strategies to try to maintain access to quality, organic, good, affordable,

local food, which is a systemic issue. So it was sort of those two things were going on at the time. Now the energy has shifted away to worker cooperatives, which is partly because of issues with the recession and folks not having access to quality jobs. It's become the new it, the new thing, the trendy thing, the answer to poverty. And usually it's seen in isolation, right? It's not seen as a solidarity economy practice as part of a larger economic transition. It's seen as a jobs program, a workforce development program in a very neoliberal context. So we see that. And now we're back to move your money again, partly because of the financing of the Dakota Access Pipeline and folks realizing that the fossil fuel divestment

movement is quite strong, gaining steam. They've been organizing on that for a while. And as folks are jumping ship, moving their money into other investment vehicles, they're back to solidarity finance and community-controlled institutions. How would you describe the solidarity economy to someone who has never heard the term before? So Solidarity NYC describes it as economic activity and describe economic activity as anything you're doing to meet your material needs that adheres to five values. And those values are social and racial justice, cooperation, mutualism, environmental sustainability, and democracy. And what it means to adhere to those values differs depending on the practice

and the context. It's meant to be very loose. The other piece of solidarity economy is that it's not a one-size-fits-all framework or idea in part because it's also an organizing strategy and it's a way to bring really an approach to stewarding the commons that has these more formalized elements such as credit unions and co-ops that are very highly regulated as well as more informal arrangements that would be more in line with what you do at home or the kind of care that you provide to other people or things that might not be monetized in your life which you might not think of as economic activity but in fact you know as soon as somebody creates a job for it right and it goes on the market we realize it we call that economic activity so there's a basic tension about kind of what counts.

But for us, it's been pretty broad. It's anything meeting material needs and that is adhering to those five values. And those five values were created, is that part of the Rochdale principles or what is that from? Those are from the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network. And they, theirs are a little different from ours. You know, I think they use more of the language of pluralism and equity. And we found that those terms didn't, those weren't the terms that the social justice movement were using. Those were academic terms.

And so we use social and racial justice, because that's what the people that are organizing in New York City use. And they know what we mean when we say that. So what would be one of the quintessential examples of the solidarity economy in New York City? What's kind of one of the maybe long standing or just really successful to paint the picture of what one example is? Yeah, we have a bunch. We're very lucky. We actually just conducted a census at Scenic. And, you know, there's many thousands of co-ops. It's been pretty amazing and democratically controlled institutions in this city. So one of the most successful examples is the Park Slope Food Co-op, which has been around for 40 years, now has close to 18,000 members.

It outsells in terms of square footage, Whole Foods every year. There's a very high turnover of product on the floor. It makes some $40 million a year. And it's a member owned and run cooperative. So you become a member of the Park Slope Food Cooperative, and you put in some cash as your member investment, which if you decide to leave, you take with you. I believe it's still $100. And then you're required also to work 13 shifts a year. The shifts are two and three-quarter hours, And they can be anything. You can run a cash register, you can sweep, you can stock floors, you can perform childcare duties for people who are shopping. It's a very long list. And the Park Slope Food Co-op has found a way to really

take advantage of its economic power and even its political power to leverage solidarity in a number of different ways. So for example, all of the waste that's produced is packaged in various ways in a solidarity economy way. So compost goes to the democratically controlled community gardens, excess food that's still good goes to a food pantry just down the block. There's other recycling initiatives that have gone on that are working with social enterprises that are designed to reduce waste. One of the other big things is they've created a relationship with a credit union and encouraged people to join the credit union.

There's a newsletter and in the newsletter, they regularly feature worker cooperatives and other cooperative businesses that Park Slope food co-op members could be using. So they're very supportive and whenever possible, they source cooperative products. They have relationships with farmers that they've now had for decades that has allowed farmers to keep access to their land and to preserve family businesses. Part of that has meant forming very close relationships where, you know, Park Slope might give money to someone in advance to someone so that they can get what they need. They did that for a berry farmer at one point. And things of that sort, right, that don't necessarily fit into maybe a formal space

of solidarity economy literature, but that are activities that you see coming out of these values. And of course, Park Slope Food Co-op is also using the seven cooperative principles, which is also a very important lens for what they're doing. The last thing I'll say about them and why I chose them as an example is that because they have this member work requirement and they have so many people, they had excess labor and that has allowed them to support very directly other cooperative efforts. So for example, you can maintain your membership at Park Slope by working to start another food co-op in another neighborhood. Or you can maintain your membership

by doing graphic design for a worker co-op. We have a relationship as Scenic with Park Slope where almost all of our labor is coming from this pool of members. So that's one of the ways that we've been able to do as much as we've been able to do with very little funding. Because we have this pool of people who are interested in supporting co-ops and have this time that they're obligated to give and they want to give it to this. And that's partially how I'm paid as a part-time staff person at Scenic. So there's ways that you can do it. You know what I mean? It's not just that it's a co-op business. There's all these different ways that

you can support a broader economy that is really transformative in building community and values aligned. One of your aims of Solidarity NYC is to make the solidarity economy in New York City visible. And I'm wondering, and you've talked about the way that you do this through the mapping project and through the videos, which are little vignettes of different examples. So why is visibility important? And talk a little bit more about how you're doing that? One of the things that we realized after the forum in 2009 is that there had to be hundreds, if not thousands of groups participating in a solidarity economy in New York, and yet they weren't talking to each other. There was no visible campaign on the consumer side. There wasn't a website that I could go to to do some research, to find out where to purchase things, to meet my

needs. There certainly wasn't any economic data. And there's all sorts of corporate data, GDP, this, that, and the other metrics and indicators. There's nothing on this stuff. And so we were really blown away by that, that there was all this activity taking place, you know, more or less below the surface, and wanted to dig into why that was. I now can talk at length about why that is because there's a lot of different reasons. But one of the things we thought we could do right away was link these things together in a visual way. So that was the mapping project. And once groups were on the map, then we knew that was who we wanted to follow more closely. So we attended everybody's meetings, we got on

everybody's mailing list, you know, we followed all the social media, we built relationships with all of the groups, or as many of them as we possibly could, but most of them, we did our best. And this allowed us to have a better understanding of what the work was on the ground. And specifically, why wasn't it growing? Why wasn't it growing to really challenge corporate power in the city? What could we do about that since this was so obviously a superior way of controlling and allocating resources and meeting needs? visibility piece, you know, that in addition to having a map, people needed to understand what these alternatives were and needed to, to really get grounded in stories. So the maps, the videos, I'm sorry, were a attempt to tell more stories so that, you know, it wasn't some unicorn or fairy that was off living in this solidarity economy, that it was real people with real lives being impacted by it who were finding success and meeting their needs in this solidarity economy, that it was real people with real lives being impacted by it

who were finding success and meeting their needs in this way and building community in this way. A big part of why we wanted to start Scenic and have the community controlled is that we believe that the people participating should be in control of their stories and should be telling these stories from the grassroots. So that was one part. And then the other part is there's a real need for a very comprehensive umbrella marketing campaign

that is much larger than anything a little volunteer collective could do. However, a solidarity economy cross-sectoral network could do a lot more and get the resources to do that. So telling this story and this alternative vision, not only to people in neighborhoods that might want to join in or start their own things, but also to the politicians who are setting policies that have a huge impact, not just on the institutions that we're building, but on the communities that we're serving.

And I think this is an example where with the worker co-op work in New York City, because it is grounded in this neoliberal framework and is divorced from the solidarity economy, you can really see how if it's just co-ops, just for the sake of co-ops, that doesn't get us where we want to go. It has to be this much deeper idea of transition that's really about people having control over resources, not just in one little area of their life, but in all areas of their lives. That's really about not just economic democracy, but participatory democracy writ large. Another thing from your website is that Solidarity NYC also tries to unite movements under the Solidarity Economy banner.

And you've spoken a little bit about this. And because I have seen and experienced kind of divisions in terms of terminology or in terms of, you know, different movements. And so what are some of the barriers or challenges that you've found in kind of uniting different organizations or different movements under the banner solidarity economy? You know, this has shifted over time. When we first started, there was very little understanding of what a solidarity economy would look like and what it was comprised of and what it meant. And in New York City, at least,

this has really shifted. It's a much larger pool of people that are engaging with this idea. And I think part of that is because of us and work that we've done. And I think it's also part of just a larger post-Occupy Wall Street shift in national conversation about what this is. So the movements part has been really interesting. I think the first real example that we had and the first opportunity we had to really try to bring a resistance movement into direct relationship with the solidarity economy was Occupy Wall Street, which of course happened right here in our backyard. And so I was very active at the park, you know, going down just to learn more about it. I had never participated in all of my years of community organizing in

anything quite like that action. And so as it took shape, I was spending a lot of time there researching and meeting people and learning what this was and what it meant and how existing institutions could relate to it, what it meant to have these existing institutions to be part of it, given that it was designed to govern in a way that was really different than how these institutions usually govern and participate, because they're part of a longer term history that's part of it and also they have a different relationship to capitalism than a direct action in a park would obviously so how how to finagle that was an ongoing concern but um one of the things i noticed about the park is that it was its own solidarity economy

so i would try to talk about that with people and we would would bring a giant printout poster of our map to the park and we would table and talk to people about this. And out of that, we formed an alternative economies working group and then we formed a worker cooperative working group. And both of those contained not only brand new people who were showing up at Occupy excited about this kind of change, but also many people that were part of long-term institutions, cooperatives and nonprofits that are in the solidarity economy space. And that was really important because we had a good mix, and that meant we could bring resources and technical assistance and knowledge to folks who were really hungry to do something now. Solidarity NYC hosted a worker co-op teach-in with a bunch of

national and regional leaders and then held a series of mentoring meetings, basically, as that working group for these different cooperators to learn from each other. We started, I believe, five businesses, five worker co-ops out of Occupy. And yeah, I mean, that was an interesting thing, right, to try to bring this longstanding tradition of co-ops into a space as dynamic and shifting as what was happening at Occupy. And that was a good learning experience. And from there, we did the same thing during Occupy Sandy and the response to the hurricane here. How could we work with groups that wanted to use solidarity economy strategies for that? And even now, a big part of what Scenic does, the reason that Scenic is not just an association of co-ops is because there's this much wider lens where we've got community-based organizations that are engaged in social and racial justice who are members because they're working with the same communities that the solidarity economy institutions are serving. So it's all the same people. And it doesn't mean that you've necessarily campaigned in exactly the same way because you sit in different places in

the movement, but we all need to be part of the same general conversation of how are we advancing social and racial justice in this city? How are we addressing the real threat of climate change and food insecurity? And you can't do that without being in dialogue with both parts. And I would even argue that there's a third part, which is sort of where all the attention is right now in this country, right, which is on the electoral organizing and the party structure and all of that. You know, that's been completely left out. But one of the reasons that we were excited about Scenic was to actually build not just this economic power, but that political power so that we could be having, you know, town

halls that the mayoral candidates are expected to attend, you know, and we could be organizing in a way that would give voice to these economic concerns with real solutions at hand, and do that in a way that is directly accountable to the communities that we're serving, which are those that are most marginalized in the city. The solidarity economy in New York City is almost entirely women of color, immigrants and low income people. So given that, it made a lot of sense that we would stay in relationship in this way. And so you obviously have a long background with solidarity economics and a long history, both personally and professionally. I'm wondering, what was it that really inspired you to go down this route in your life? Was it like an example or a membership in

some co-op or organization? What was it that made you feel like this feels important? This feels like what I want to do? I'm originally from rural West Virginia. My parents were part of the hippie movement to head back and live in the woods. And I saw a great deal of violence as a child of all sorts, both in my home, physical and emotional violence, but also around me, environmental, spiritual, and economic violence. And it was a very bewildering, chaotic place to be and to grow up. And one of the things that I felt very strongly from an early age was that not only was it unjust, what was happening to me and also what was happening to the people around me, but that it seemed to me that something should be done about it.

And initially I looked to the government. I started as an activist in high school. Prior to that, I did animal rights. But anyway, in high school, I started working on democracy and campaign finance reform and that kind of thing and looking at the control that corporations held and thinking, okay, what can we do about that? That led me very quickly to a career in labor. So I did both solidarity labor work and then I was in unions for a little while. That wasn't a good fit for me culturally. So I left that. I pursued a graduate degree. I taught radical history for a while in the City University of New York system. The labor issue there caught up with me very quickly and I left to go back to organizing because I couldn't make a living as an adjunct in

that system. So when I went back to organizing, I wanted to challenge corporate power. So I was doing that primarily through organizing college students to resist the ways that university endowments were being invested in all sorts of heinous things, and instead push for that money to be moved into the community and into cleaner investments. And I started to feel really pretty burnt out and sad doing that work. You know, I remember waking up the morning that we won, we won this big victory against McDonald's where, you know, we eliminated this particular kind of pesticide use in their supply chain of potatoes. And it was very exciting because it was going to have a large impact. It was so strategic.

You know, we were working with some of the best people doing that kind of environmental justice work. And at the same time, I just thought, I just do not want to be the person changing pesticide policies at McDonald's I don't want to do this I want to be doing something that really has my heart and is building community around me and around that time I met somebody who was active in the U.S. economy network because he was also in the responsible investment space. He was working with community development credit unions. And we had a long conversation one night, where he was describing the Solidarity Economy Framework to me. And I said, this is it. This is what I'm looking for. This is the relationship to resistance that I want. This is the kind of building that I want.

This has got all of the different values that I want to hold there. I've never heard of it. And he was explaining to me its history in Brazil and where it was coming from and the global justice movement and it all just, which I had been active in. And it just really spoke to me. And at that point, I knew I wanted to go to the conference. And from there, I knew that I wanted to, this is what I wanted to spend my time doing in New York, you know, was uniting a kind of solidarity economy movement in the city. And yeah, that led me to found Solidarity NYC and from there to chart a course for the Foundation of Scenic and now deep in the weeds of building that organization and raising the money and pulling the people together and doing all the work. And it still has my heart. It's still very close in the way that it was when I first saw it. But I'm also less naive at this point about how these things play out about the real ways that, you know, it's a challenge for groups to work in coalition with

each other, whether that's personality or culture or whatever. Scarcity usually is at the root of it. And I've become a lot more interested in the role of personal transformation in cultural transformation and how we can work to create emotionally just organizations and really support people to do the healing they need so that they can actually do this other work. And that's a solidarity economy piece that I think doesn't get talked about as much as the healing and the emotional justice. And that's an area that I'm excited to be working on with Solidarity NYC somewhat, but also with an organization called the Icarus Project, which is a mental health network of mutual aid focused peer to peer. And a lot of my thinking about solidarity economy and emotional justice has moved over over there, actually, while scenic is still being held very loosely by Solidarity NYC. If that makes sense. I know it's like a answer, but

no, that's a wonderful answer. I have a few thoughts on that, if I could just share briefly. One of them is, are you familiar with the transition town movement? You just made me think of how they really started as outer transition, you know, going away from fossil fuels, but then they shortly realized the importance of inner transition and having, you know, heart spaces and really sharing. And so this kind of emotional justice and this really cultivating good workplaces where we can bring our full selves is so important. So I really resonate with that point. And then the other thing I was thinking, have you heard of Joanna Macy's work at all? Sure. Yeah. The work that

we've done. Yeah. yeah. You made me think about the three areas of the Great Turning, you know, the holding actions, which it sounds like you were doing with McDonald's, and then the shift in consciousness and the systems change, or the other two areas. And you just made me realize that really the solidarity economy is almost an example of all three areas of the Great Turning working at the same time. Because as you've talked about, the solidarity economy has this social and racial justice component. It does have a holding action component. It's helping people meet their basic material needs, like you said, and certainly support people who are suffering, either food or need money for something or whatever, or work.

And then it also is creating the shift in consciousness by its nature, by the cooperative nature, the working together, the mutual support. And then, of course, it's creating systems change. It's creating new ways of feeding ourselves, clothing ourselves, housing ourselves, you know, supporting our finances. So, yeah, there was just a realization as you were speaking that you kind of moved in to this that is part of the reason why it feels so much better to be in kind of this solidarity economy role instead of just the kind of holding actions, which can often be relentless and can lead to burnout. I've been doing this for 18 years and I've been burned out several times. And I do workshops on burnout for young people and do some coaching as well. So yeah, I think that's true. And I also think it's really underexplored. And this is one of the areas I think that I'm saddest about when I see this sort of neoliberal take on solidarity economy work,

where some piece of it gets parsed by either, you know, elected officials or a party or even movement folks that are doing it because they're trying to get resources, whatever it is. You know, that just kind of breaks my heart, because to me, it really misses the point. This is so much more than just a structure. Any structure can be oppressive. I've been in plenty of collectives and movement spaces that were horribly oppressive, far more so than jobs I've held where I've worked for a sole proprietor or a manager that I liked or whatever. And I think that that's something that needs to be brought in more directly, this sort of cultural shift and the personal work that we do to become more cooperative.

Because I've seen real growth and changes in myself and in other people through years of doing this work. And it's not easy, and you can't go to school for it. And there's not one way to do it. And, you know, you kind of just have to get in and try to try to do this. But so much of our work is so small that it's often hard for people to get involved, you know, and to learn to do this, to learn to become cooperative. So I think a lot about that in terms of like, how do we scale conversation? You know, how do we scale the personal change that's required to support the organizational

change that's required to support the larger cultural change? You know, I've gotten very interested in meditation personally. That's something that I'm learning about. But yeah, I think that's why, you know, organizations like the Icarus Project or Generative Somatics or some of these other groups that are very concerned about the body and emotions and how it connects to your behavior and actions. places it in relationship to oppression is very, is very key. And that's an area that I think the prior generation of cooperators, the boomers, some of them have that, but a lot of them don't. But I think that the incoming generation, the millennials that are active in solidarity economy work and co-op work are really interested in this intersectional analysis and really thinking about power differently and thinking about this change differently.

And that's very exciting to me to be part of and also to help support. Because a lot of these folks actually at this point are younger than me that are pushing it. And we've got very good ideas. And it's an opportunity for us. But not everybody's on board with that, of course, as generational shifts often go.

So this really feels like an area of really exciting, an exciting area in the solidarity economy and an area of potential growth and movement. This kind of bringing in the more inner transition or emotional healing side of it. Yeah, I think it's the intersectional analysis and the emotional healing. Yeah, I think it's the two. It's really important. You know, a lot of all white groups that, you know, haven't thought very much about, they might have thought about gender, and they might even maybe they thought about class, maybe, but they definitely haven't spent much time on race. And that's very common in the co-op space. It's segregated the same way everything is segregated in our society. And so we have to be confronting that all the time. much time on race and that's very common in the co-op space it's segregated the same way everything

is segregated in our society and so we have to be confronting that all the time and i'm just yeah i mean i'm pleased to see there's energy around that and scenic has a partnering organization in philadelphia a sister organization called the philadelphia area cooperative alliance and the folks at paca are very concerned about this as well. So again, like, and they're only they've been around for only a few years as well. So there's this new generation of even these co-op networks that are more focused on this, which to me, yeah, is really exciting, because I think that's where you start to see some leadership develop. So I found this flyer on the Solidarity NYC website that I want to read because I really like it and then hear your response.

So the flyer says, sometimes New York can seem like the center of cutthroat competition, but there are many New Yorkers thriving in mutual benefit. They say, I don't have a boss. I'm in a worker-owned cooperative business. I don't have a landlord. I'm a member of a housing co-op or international community. I don't need to buy more stuff. I take part in tool shares, barter clubs, and clothing swaps. I know where my food came from. I'm a member of a food co-op, CSA, and community garden.

And I don't want my bank to make profit for the sake of profit. I joined a credit union, so my money stays in the community. And I just really like this flyer because it really shares just all the different areas of one's life that can be impacted or in which one can live within the solidarity economy. And so one thing that Robert and I are exploring is, is the solidarity economy kind of the next system or is it a bridge? Because sometimes the solidarity economy can feel like it's helping alleviate suffering. It's helping people kind of live within the capitalist neoliberal

economy just a little bit easier. But other times we can feel like, wow, no, this is the next system. This is where it's transitioning to. And you even use the word transition. So I'm wondering, how do you see it? Do you see it as we're building a new system or it's something that's helping with a transition or i don't know what what your thoughts are on that you know i don't know what full communism will feel like you know what i mean um i don't know what what full collective liberation will feel like but i do know that the experiences that I have in the solidarity economy get me as close to that as I've come in my life beyond in very intimate settings. So I'm not talking about a feeling of solidarity and mutual aid and cooperation and justice with close friends.

I mean, with strangers and on a broader scale. So I definitely think it's part of moving. I think there's been, you know, the scholarship with, and I tend to not put too much in store with scholarship and research and the like. I like to practice and work with practitioners, but my understanding is that the role of the state is really debated in Solidarity Economy Scholarship. And, you know, to me, it's always struck me as kind of funny because I lived in a place where the state was doing active destruction to people very near and dear to me who weren't very far removed. And I think that people have that experience in various places. But because I had that experience so early on, to me, it was always not the state that was the problem. It was that we didn't have control of the state. It was that the state wasn't democratic, actually, that it was this oligarchy. And to me, the practices in an economic democracy, learning to cooperate,

learning to represent your own interests, and then to be able to hold those while hearing somebody else's interests, and then find an agreement for how you're both going to meet them with that given pull that happens, knowing that some people need something at one time, you might need something different at another, that there's going to be an ebb and flow, but you're going to be in reciprocity with each other. That to me is the revolution. And, you know, whatever system we put in place, regardless of whether it's a tech based solution, like what's going on with the sunflower movement in Taiwan, or, you know, using using Lumio or that's face-to-face meetings or that's collectivization, whatever it is, I kind of don't care. I think we'll cross

that bridge when we get there. We're going to develop the structures as we go and that's going to determine the system. But the heart of it is going to be people understanding that they have to act in a democratic way and that this democratic piece is all about being responsible for meeting your own needs, voicing your own needs, and hearing that other people have needs and dealing with that in an appropriate manner. So I've just seen a lot of people grow in that way in co-ops, community gardens and the like. And I think it's possible for people to get there. I think consensus, while it's a challenge, really builds capacity for people to

have empathy with each other and to learn these negotiation skills, basically, and compromise skills. So I just, I think that we have to do this solidarity economy work, not only because it alleviates the suffering, as you said, but also because it's building the skills, it's practice. So that as the structures emerge, as we understand what we need to do, whether it's neighborhood councils, or taking over existing community councils and city councils, you know, whatever it is, participatory budgeting, all of that, that we're developing the skills that we need to govern ourselves. Because you don't learn that anywhere else in our society. You're not going to learn it in the workplace or in a cultural institution or in a school. It's just not how our society is organized. So you're only going to

learn those skills through either community organizing and movement work or through economic democracy. And to's, to me, that's very dynamic and exciting that this is a place that people can come in and build the skills they need in order to govern. Wonderful. That was really, really amazing, Cheyenne. Thank you.