Andrea Germanos: Tackling ‘Urgency and Scale” of Crisis, Oakland, Calif. Declares Climate Emergency. City council passed resolution Tuesday endorsing declaration of a climate emergency and calling for just transition.

The Oakland Climate Action Coalition claimed victory Tuesday night after the California city passed a resolution declaring a climate emergency and committing it to urgent action to tackle the crisis.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. In this time we must go both fast and far, together,” said Colin Cook-Miller, coordinator for the coalition. “Our movement for a rapid Just Transition mobilization must be coordinated, strategic, and unified, with leadership from the most-impacted frontline communities who are at the forefront of change.”

The “Declaration of a Climate Emergency and Requesting Regional Collaboration on an Immediate Just Transition and Emergency Mobilization Effort to Restore a Safe Climate” resolution commits the city to:  an “urgent climate mobilization” to slash emissions, moving towards zero net emissions; building resilience strategies for the coming climate impacts; a just transition, making vulnerable communities central to such a shift; and calling on other states, the federal government, and other nations to make a similar mobilization towards climate action and a just transition.

In a letter to city council members on Tuesday, local organizational leaders including Miller, as well as Greg Jackson of Sustainable Economies Law Center, Miya Yoshitani of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and Bonnie Borucki of Transition Berkeley, and Kemba Shakur of Urban Releaf, noted that climate emergency resolutions have already been in the California cities of Richmond and Berkeley passed and wrote that the measure before the Oakland city council  “matches the urgency and scale of the ecological, economic and climate crisis that we face.”

“At this time in history,” they wrote, “a livable future for any of our children is far from guaranteed. We must do everything in our power today to create a safe, just, and healthy world for ourselves, for our children, and for future generations.”

Photo: Takver/flickr/cc

The post Oakland, California Declares Climate Emergency appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Robert Raymond: Lying a few miles south of Marin County and just across the bay from San Francisco, the city of Richmond, California, is situated within two of the wealthiest regions of the United States. Richmond, however, does not share in this wealth. Its downtown has been largely abandoned and its northern periphery is on the front lines of the Chevron Richmond Refinery, processing over 240,000 barrels of crude oil every single day and creating a toxic environment to those living in the surrounding vicinity. It’s an example of what we know as a “sacrifice zone” — a community that has been largely incapacitated by environmental damage and economic neglect.

But in the shadow of the looming refinery, and within the spaces between boarded up storefronts and abandoned lots, something is stirring in Richmond. Residents, organizers, and activists have come together to create an incubation hub for community revitalization and resilience. They call themselves Cooperation Richmond, and their aim is to empower the marginalized and exploited residents of this city to build community-controlled wealth and wellbeing.

Founded in October of 2017, Cooperation Richmond is plugged into a broader national movement that includes similar initiatives like Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi. These initiatives have largely been inspired by the Mondragon cooperatives, a highly integrated network of cooperatives that form a self-supporting ecosystem in the Basque region of northern Spain. Like these other initiatives, Cooperation Richmond’s mission is to build a cooperative economy that puts people and planet before profit. It does this through providing education, coaching, and both credit and capital development to cooperative businesses in Richmond.

Robert Raymond spoke with Doria Robinson and Gopal Dayaneni of Cooperation Richmond about their work and the importance of the growing cooperative movement in Richmond and beyond.

Robert Raymond: There’s been a buzz around a new book recently written by Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson titled “Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi.” I actually found out about Cooperation Richmond when I heard that one of your board members, Najari Smith, was going to be interviewing Kali Akuno during a book tour stop in Oakland. Can you tell us about Cooperation Richmond, what you see as your mission, and how you are connected to a broader cooperative ecosystem that includes, among others, Cooperation Jackson?

Gopal Dayaneni: Cooperation Richmond is a really good example of what we call trans-local organizing — autonomist, place-based organizing with a unifying vision, shared strategies, and common frames. We are connected with many other organizations who are doing or supporting cooperative development and who are all connected by a common vision. It’s a movement that is trying to build meaningful infrastructure for economic democracy in order to build a new kind of political power. We want to actually transform the very nature of the economy and of governance in our communities — that’s what we’re engaged in.

And so Cooperation Richmond is an organization that we have developed for the purpose of supporting worker-owned and community-owned cooperatives in Richmond, California, which is one of the poorest parts of the Bay Area — a majority people of color community. We provide coaching, connections, and capital. We’re focused on folks who are most excluded from the dominant economy, folks who we think should be the foundation of building the next economy.

Doria Robinson: The idea behind Cooperation Richmond is that we’re taking somebody from a place where they’re just getting started, somebody at the point where they really want to make an impact, and they want to take charge of their lives, but need some help making it happen. Maybe they have an idea for a business, but they don’t have much more than that idea. We’ve structured Cooperation Richmond to basically take it from there, to help them take it to the next stage.

You launched Cooperation Richmond less than a year ago, but you’ve already played an important role in fostering cooperative workplaces and community engagement in Richmond. Can you tell us about your first initiative?

Doria Robinson: Our pilot project was Rich City Rides, a bike and skate shop. It’s a really powerful story. It’s a small bike and skateboard shop in Richmond, a place that had no real bike shop. Before Rich City Rides, if you wanted to do any repairs to your bike, you had to go to Walmart or Target, which are not exactly bike repair places. That was it.

You know oftentimes bikes are associated with gentrification, or kind of an elitist kind of thing you do on the weekends. In Richmond, it’s really different. People can’t afford cars. Not a lot of people in low income communities have cars, or if they do, their car is constantly breaking down. So they’ll default to riding a bike just to get to work or just to get to the store, just to go get around. So people actually really needed to have a good place to be able to fix their bike. And so people mostly just threw out their bike if they got a flat — they would literally throw their bike out. It was painful to see. Or it would just sit in the garage once it had something wrong with it, and that was it. There was no access to any kind of bike tools or anything like that — people literally had no way to fix their bikes.

So three young men started to run a loosely associated collective bike shop out of different spaces that they could find. They worked out of a storage space for a while, they had a kind of pop-up bike shop going on for a while. They were finally able to get into a retail space across from the Richmond BART station, a space on the main street that had been boarded up for years. Rich City Rides was the first place that really started to revitalize the main street. I think it was one of the only places that’s locally owned on that block as well. But they were really running a pretty substantial business at that point with very little resources, and they needed capital. They also needed a facelift — the shop looked like somebody’s garage.

So we took them on and worked with them to create an action plan to strengthen the business. We got them their first loan and helped them incorporate as a California Cooperative. So now Rich City Rides is leading the effort to completely transform and revitalize the downtown, to create this opportunity for people to have healthy transportation; healthy in terms of environment and in terms of your own body. So yeah, it’s kind of an honor to just see them carry this vision forward.

And why is the cooperatives structure important? What role do they play in the broader mission of creating the next economy?

Gopal Dayaneni: Well there’s a few different pieces of that. So the first is that bosses just suck. You don’t need them. All wealth is generated through the work of the living world. Making money off the movement of money is just extraction of wealth from other people. So the idea of all of us being able to voluntarily co-participate and control our own labor to meet our needs — and the needs of our communities — is very important.

It’s also important to share that wealth. Creating commons of wealth and commons of resources is a necessary element of the transition that we need to be in. The dominant economy extracts wealth from the living world, and it begins with extracting wealth from our own work. And so in order to both confront that, but also to build a new kind of muscle memory, a knowledge of how to be in the world, to actually practice self-government on a daily basis, we need institutions and infrastructure that can do that.

The second part of it is really that cooperatives allow us to do things that the extractive economy won’t do. For example, we would never exclude folks because they were formerly incarcerated — because we don’t believe humans belong in cages. We would never exclude folks based on their their status as documented or undocumented because we recognize the border as an enclosure enforced through violence that fragments ecosystems and communities. So we are able through cooperation to actually live our values in a way that is foreclosed upon in the dominant economy, and particularly for those who are most excluded by the dominant economy.

Doria Robinson: I think that there’s some really vital things that being in a worker owned cooperative can provide. Democratization of the workplace is something that can’t be underestimated. In a worker cooperative, that’s really run through democracy, folks are voting through each owner having a say in the day to day decisions as well as the trajectory of the enterprise. That’s a really big deal, especially in communities like Richmond where power has really been taken out of the hands of the people. This transition of decision-making and profit-making back to the people — the transition of accountability and responsibility — is truly transformative.

If you take somebody who has never been in a place where what they do actually matters, where their whole livelihood actually depends on them completely showing up and making decisions — that’s transformative. And then once you start to get a taste of that it spreads and you don’t want to stop. As soon as people really get a taste of being in a position to make decisions that impact themselves and their community, it begins to extend out to other things. It doesn’t just stay within the realm of the workplace. You begin to realize that, for example, the city government impacts you. Or that decisions made around the streets impact you. You start to realize that you actually do have a voice in shaping the things that impact you, and that you can stand up and advocate for things. I think that is one of the most powerful and important reasons why we chose to focus on cooperatives. We want to thoroughly empower people in every place and in every way.

Gopal Dayaneni: Like I said earlier, Cooperation Richmond is part of a larger “just transition” vision and process taking place in Richmond but also in lots of other places in the United States and around the world. The idea is that for there to be meaningful political democracy, there has to be economic democracy. So the idea is not only about creating sustainable livelihoods in the workplace but also being able to reimagine the very nature of the work that we do and how we do it. So we could support worker-owned cooperatives that just do absolutely anything, or we could prioritize those that have ecological and social value. We do the latter. So Rich City Rides, for example, is not just a bike shop, it’s not just a bike shop run by folks who are normally excluded from the economy — you know, young men of color from Richmond — but it’s also an organized bike shop that supports community bike rides, transit justice, and bike safety. It’s really committed to a larger vision of reimagining our relationship to place, to home, and to the economy itself.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header image of Doria Robinson and Gopal Dayaneni by Robert Raymond/Shareable

The post How Cooperation Richmond is empowering marginalized communities to build an equitable economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

At the Sustainable Economies Law Center, we support creativity and innovation in many ways, one of which is to uplift homemade food enterprises. So, it wasn’t easy to come to our decision to not support AB 626. AB 626 is a bill that was drafted at the behest of tech company executives and lobbyists to prioritize their interests above the interests of home cooks and consumers. After being stalled for several months, the bill passed a vote of the full Assembly in January and will soon be up for a vote in the Senate Health Committee.

The media has been reporting a lot lately on “the dark side of the tech revolution” (KQED) as you may have noticed. The New York Times Magazine described typical strategy among tech start-ups as striving to “metastasize from transaction enablers to, with sufficient success, participation gatekeepers.” An example of this is food-delivery apps like Seamless which tout convenient ways for customers to get food delivered from local restaurants, but in some cities the app has become so pervasive that “its customer base becomes too big to ignore, even for restaurants that struggle to afford its steep commissions” so a consumer-friendly app becomes just another means for consolidated corporate control of the food system.

We recognize that the fundamental paradigm of Big Tech is a problem: this paradigm which revolves around extremely rapid growth, monopolization, exploitation of workers and user data, disregard for important public safety and worker protection laws, and inhumane and unsustainable profit maximization.

So what’s the solution?

Our friends and allies have repeatedly called for a new revolution in tech that would make tech platforms democratically owned and controlled by users, proposing to make Facebook a regulated utility or a platform cooperative and proposals to buy Twitter to make it a cooperative. People have wondered: what if Uber were owned by the Uber drivers? Spoiler alert: venture capitalists, business executives, and absentee shareholders who own and control these tech giants tend to disapprove of such proposals so while they are exciting visionary ideas that stimulate important conversations, they are not likely to be realized in the near future.

But while an established tech giant becoming a user-owned cooperative seems far fetched, we’ve been engaged in another opportunity to change the paradigm of Big Tech and support the creation of more community-owned tech platforms. That brings us back to AB 626, the California bill that proposes to dramatically change the regulation of homemade food sales to be much more permissive; a bill that would represent a major shift in food safety regulations and likely set new precedent around the country.

The bill is backed by tech companies, including Airbnb and executives of the soon-to-be retired tech start-up Josephine, among other venture capital backed tech companies. There are numerous reasons to support the general concept of the bill: legalizing an industry that’s already active, creating more opportunities for small business ownership, supporting local food systems, and more. One reason we’ve historically supported legalizing homemade food enterprises is that this provides opportunities to challenge concentrated corporate control of the food system.

However, tech company executives and lobbyists have been making the decisions on the direction of this bill. The bill has been amended several times and more amendments could be on the way, but each version of the bill has failed to place serious responsibilities on the tech companies involved in transacting sales of homemade food and each version has failed to ensure adequate worker protections. We fear the imminent Uberization of homemade food if nothing is done to change course.

We have proposed a policy that would allow more sales of fresh homemade foods made in home kitchens with reasonable food safety requirements (such as safe food handling training, kitchen inspections, sanitary standards) and with the important condition that only certain types of legal entities could operate a web application or web platform that promotes sales of homemade food and takes a cut of each transaction. This is very similar to how California law has restricted certified farmers’ markets for decades: only certified farmers, nonprofits, and local governments may manage farmers’ markets (for-profit non-farm enterprises such as Walmart and Whole Foods cannot operate a farmers’ market) which helps protect the integrity of the farmers’ market as supporting farmers by providing a venue for direct producer to consumer sales of fresh agricultural products.

This is an opportunity to change the paradigm of tech: if this alternative vision were incorporated into California’s next expansion of homemade food legislation it could set a huge precedent in tech across sectors and around the globe.

We need your help! Forms of support needed range from simple letter writing to more active participation in a working group, community outreach, and more.

Read our much more detailed policy paper here.

Read more about the evolving political landscape of homemade food in California here.

Photo by siwiaszczyk

The post Supporting new cooperative tech paradigms to protect the homemade food economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The complex issues arising out of Silicon Valley are numerous, from sexual harassment in the workplace to exclusion of women and people of color from career opportunities to dismissing impacts of the tech industry on gentrification.

And these issues are not isolated, they are deeply connected by a pervasive and insular start-up culture and an economic paradigm over-reliant on venture capital. The false promises of the “gig economy” that these companies celebrate must be faced head on, including in the food system.

That’s why we cannot support AB 626, the homemade food bill that has been pending in the California Legislature for the past year. After being stalled for several months, the bill passed a vote of the full Assembly last week. At the Sustainable Economies Law Center, we work to support creativity and innovation in many ways, including by supporting homemade food enterprises. So, it wasn’t easy to come to our decision to not support AB 626.

Here’s the thing about legislation: it reflects the people who write it, and this bill was written by a tech start-up. . The most recent changes to the bill make it so that home cooks carry all of the liability while the tech platforms that promote the transaction and take a cut of cooks’ incomes cannot be held liable if anything goes wrong. Tech platforms wanting to take profits but avoid all liability is essentially the same story we’ve seen play out with Uber and Lyft denying any responsibility for liability when their passengers have been injured or even killed by negligent drivers. But AB 626 proposes unprecedented protections against liability for gig economy apps: it expressly shields web platforms from liability for any illness or injury associated with food purchased through its platform. As a point of comparison, since 2013, California law requires ride apps such as Uber and Lyft to carry $1 million per incident liability insurance to cover their drivers (separate from any insurance individual drivers may carry). Some cities, such as San Francisco, require Airbnb hosts to carry liability insurance.

Food system workers are already among the lowest paid and the most vulnerable workers in our economy and we need to rethink what the future of work looks like in a healthy, resilient community, especially in our food and farming systems. We don’t need a technological quick fix, we need a new paradigm that values all workers, regardless of their status as employees or contractors. We need a new paradigm for workers that protects their rights in balance with consumer preference for fast and convenient service. We need a new paradigm in our economy that provides real economic opportunities for everyone, not just the elite. And we need a new paradigm in policymaking, where grassroots food justice and workers’ rights organizations are at the table, not on the menu.

So we are urging the California Legislature to set a new course for homemade food sales through tech platforms, starting with rejecting AB 626 and bringing home cooks and community based organizations to the table to craft a bill that truly empowers workers of the next economy. We’ve put forth a proposal for an equitable homemade food economy that includes a new type of “gig economy” platform that is owned and controlled by the very users and workers that give the company its value: a platform cooperative.

Incidentally, last week on the heels of the pro-tech platform amendments, the start-up behind AB 626, Josephine, announced it will be closing down in the next few months. This opens the door to an even higher likelihood that some other entity, with far less of an interest as Josephine in supporting home cooks, will dominate the homemade food economy. There is no guarantee that the preferred platform for homemade food will prioritize workers’ rights, food safety, and economic justice. Unless we act soon.

Take action today!

• If you have not yet written to your legislator, find a template letter here. This is an easy and helpful way to get involved.
• Please sign up here if you have time to volunteer during the next few months.
• Read our detailed policy proposal here.

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Photo by nicubunu.photo

The post The Future of Homemade Food is at Risk appeared first on P2P Foundation.

When I started volunteering for the Sustainable Economies Law Center in 2011, I was under-employed and struggling to pay rent. A friend of mine and I were operating an underground supper club hoping to earn some extra cash to make ends meet. Having previously worked in commercial kitchens, I had witnessed firsthand some of the pitfalls of our food regulatory system. That’s why I was so energized to become one of the architects of the California Homemade Food Act, aka the “Cottage Food Law.”  As I started working on a bill proposal and putting the word out that I was working on a cottage food law for California, I was thrilled to meet so many other people who were as passionate about creating thriving local food systems as I was. We organized a truly grassroots campaign around the state. After the Homemade Food Act was passed, literally thousands of new businesses were lawfully permitted in California within the first year. The passage of the law was incredibly empowering for low income community members and under-employed folks to start their own micro-food business with very little overhead. We’ve always envisioned a future law that would allow a greater variety of foods to be made in a home kitchen and sold on a neighborhood scale, furthering community-ownership of the food system.

However, the bill introduced in February is “sponsored” by a Bay Area tech company that operates a platform for advertising and payment processing of homemade meals. We are both intrigued by the power of new tech platforms to transform the economy and also nervous about the unintended side effects of apps like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb with regards to evasion of employment laws, various safety laws, and tax laws, plus the concentration of profits and power in the hands of a few elite tech entrepreneurs and investors. Our mission is all about creating people-powered economies, not absentee shareholder-owned economies. It’s important to us that any homemade food legislation be about creating thriving local food economies and empowering food system workers and eaters.

We are worried that this homemade food legislation may ultimately be designed to meet the needs of tech companies above the needs of home cooks, eaters, and other stakeholders, but we are optimistic that if we work hard to share our vision for a better food system with lawmakers, that we can help ensure the bill works for the people of California, not just a few tech companies and their investors.

What our Law Center is proposing is for California to adopt a greatly expanded homemade food law with a stipulation about management of sales channels similar to California farmers’ market law, but tailored to the realities of the internet age. We are proposing that any web platforms selling homemade food under a new regulatory landscape would have to be legally structured as nonprofit organizations, government entities, or as cook-owned or eater-owned cooperatives.

Check out our new policy proposal overview and background here.

We’ll continue to write and speak out about our vision for a community-controlled food economy. I hope you’ll join us.

The post Do Not Make an “Uber Mistake” with Homemade Food Laws! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Numerous technology start-ups have developed web-based platforms that advertise home cooked meals for sale. Some offer consumers the chance to dine at the cook’s home, while others invite consumers to pick up a take-out meal from the cook’s home. Some tech platforms focus on providing deliveries of food — whether homemade or not. These platforms have been called “the Airbnb of food” or “the Uber for food” such as in The Atlantic. Many of these start-ups have received large investments from private investors who likely hope to receive large profits from the enterprise despite the fact that these home-based food enterprises are not exactly legal.

The Sustainable Economies Law Center proposes a regulatory scheme that promotes food safety and economic opportunity for home cooks while ensuring community ownership of our food economy — not more absentee shareholder controlled economic development.

Certified Farmers’ Markets in California: A Model for Community-Serving Food Systems

The policy proposal below was inspired in part by the recent flourishing of farmers’ markets. In California, farmers’ markets are regulated to ensure food safety and to ensure transparent and direct, farmer-to-consumer transactions. Among numerous rules, a certified farmers’ market may only be operated by farmers, by a nonprofit organization, or by a local government agency. In other words, the central organization or enterprise that manages a certified farmers’ market must be a government agency, a nonprofit, a farmer, or a group of farmers. No other entities are allowed to operate a certified farmers’ market in California.

Policy Proposal For Legalizing Sales of Homemade Food in California

Without altering the regulatory framework already established by the California Homemade Food Act for “cottage food” enterprises, the state Health and Safety Code could additionally allow homemade food to be offered for sale under a separate but similar regulatory framework designed for sales of hot meals and other more perishable foods. Like under the existing law, environmental health departments would provide permits to home cooks that would ensure any cook has undergone robust, safe food handling training and that their home kitchen is maintained in a sanitary condition. Kitchen inspections would be conducted once per year, or as needed, at the discretion of local environmental health departments.

Selling through web platforms: If a home cook sells meals through a third-party web platform that is designed specifically for selling food, it must be one that is permitted and structured as follows:

• Worker cooperative
• Consumer cooperative
• Nonprofit mutual benefit corporation
• Nonprofit public benefit corporation

Regular shareholder-owned corporations would not be permitted to operate web platforms dedicated to selling homemade food.

Why Limit the Ownership Structure of Web Platforms to Cooperatives, Nonprofits, and Government?

In the tech economy, third party web intermediaries tend to hold a large amount of power over both workers and consumers, particularly because the dominant business model of tech companies is to raise a large amount of money that enable to company to grow rapidly and quickly control the lion’s share of their market. This keeps competition at bay and provides lucrative return to shareholders, if the enterprise is successful.

Last year in Austin, Texas, the third largest worker cooperative in the country was launched. This came at the culmination of two years of cab drivers organizing against exploitative practices by the taxi companies, and lack of cooperation on the part of Uber and Lyft with regards to simple proposed regulations such as background checks and fingerprinting. The cab drivers ultimately organized a ballot initiative, which passed successfully, effectively kicking Uber and Lyft out of Austin. Once Uber and Lyft were out of the picture, cab drivers launched ATX Coop Taxi — a driver-owned cooperative — which competes with other taxi companies in the Austin area. The cooperative came to control one-third of the taxi permits on the market just one month after launching. A key takeaway from this story is that had Uber and Lyft not been driven out by local organizing, the cab drivers may not have had the time and space to develop such a successful cooperative. Once international corporations such as Uber and Lyft become so large and control so much of the market, it becomes nearly impossible for local, community-based solutions to emerge and thrive in their shadows without government intervention.

Similarly, in Belgium a few years ago, a food delivery app called Take Eat Easy secured millions in venture capital and seemed to be the “latest and greatest” app. However, it suddenly went bankrupt last year. Many of the food delivery couriers (who deliver by bike!) organized a cooperative delivery app of their own, addressing many of the shortcomings in service of the old app and the market opportunity that was left unfilled. The organization of the cooperative was enabled by the collapse of the regular capitalist delivery app. Read more about it on the platform.coop blog here.

Even more stories about developing platform cooperatives can be found in “11 Platform Cooperatives Creating a Real Sharing Economy” by Cat Johnson. California can look at these “sharing economy” stories and learn from them to develop sensible policies in the homemade food sector, among other areas of the economies dominated by web platforms.

Full policy proposal available here.

Article re-posted from SELC. Header photo of Brentwood Farmers Market in California by David Wilson via Flickr. 

The post What Would a Community-Owned Food System Look Like? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

AB 1810, which was introduced by Assembly member Marc Levine, exempts non-commercial seed sharing activities from industrial labeling, testing, and permitting requirements. This means that local seed libraries and seed sharing activities aren’t held to the same cost-prohibitive testing required of big, commercial seed enterprises. The law allows seed sharing and saving to continue on a local level, which supports food security, urban agriculture, climate resilience, healthy eating, and a stronger local seed systems.

Seed sharing gained mainstream attention in 2014 when agriculture officials in Pennsylvania cracked down on the Joseph T. Simpson public library’s seed library. The event served as a catalyst for the seed sharing movement. Last year, Shareable partnered with the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), Richmond Grows, Seed Matters, SeedSavers Exchange and several other organizations in the Save Seed Sharing campaign designed to:

• Educate stakeholders about how seed laws apply to seed sharing through seed libraries
• Build public awareness and grassroots support for seed libraries
• Empower local stakeholders to engage in policy advocacy to support seed sharing
• Remove legal barriers to seed sharing through seed libraries
• Support seed libraries that face regulation under seed laws

Since that time, bills that exempt non-commercial seed sharing from commercial seed laws were signed into law in Minnesota, Illinois and Nebraska, the Association of American Seed Control Officials (AASCO) created a working group to create a compromise recommendation, and now California has a new seed sharing law.

Leading advocacy efforts for AB 1810 was a class of 4th grade (now 5th grade) students at Olive Elementary School in Novato, CA. that “testified to the importance of seed saving and sharing and biodiversity at the Assembly and Senate Agriculture Committees,” reports SELC, who partnered with a number of organizations, including California Climate & Agriculture Network, California Guild, Center for Food Safety, Community Alliance with Family Farmers, Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, Pesticide Action Network – North America, Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library, Seed Library of Los Angeles, Slow Food California, California FarmLink, Transition Palo Alto, the Ecology Center, and more to advocate for the bill.

As Neil Thapar, Food & Farm Attorney at SELC noted, “the success of this legislation is due in large part to the collaborative efforts of all the individual and organizational advocates coming together. We share a common belief that a resilient food system starts with a resilient seed system based on locally adapted varieties that represent genetic diversity and a longstanding cultural heritage and tradition of seed saving and sharing.”

Photo credit: Christian Joudrey (CC 0)

Cross-posted from Shareable

The post California Seed Sharing Bill Signed into Law appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this article – penned by Cat Johnson and originally published in Shareable – our good friends at the Sustainable Economies Law Center take us for us ride in their fabulous community-supported time machine. Theirs is a constructive and inspiring vision of the future that is fully aligned with the ideals of the P2P Foundation and, as you will soon see, the good people at SELC are working hard to achieve it.  Watch out for some joint P2P Foundation/SELC projects and campaigns in the near future.

On Tuesday, the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) hosted its annual Fall Celebration and Showcase. Now in its fifth year, SELC is a driving force for the new economy, doing pioneering work around worker cooperatives, home-based food businesses, alternative currencies, legal guides for sharing, legal apprenticeships, accessible legal cafes, renewable energy, the commons, seed libraries and more.

At the celebration, the SELC team gave an overview of what they’ve accomplished this year, including removing many legal barriers to people growing and selling home-based food; legalizing alternative currencies in California; removing one of the biggest barriers to cooperative housing; and launching the Worker Coop Academy. As Executive Director Janelle Orsi put it, “This September, the governor was just signing our bills left and right.”

Shareable and SELC recently partnered up to support seed sharing and seed libraries. With a grant from the Clif Bar Family Foundation, SELC and Shareable are launching a nationwide campaign to educate legislators and the public about the essential need for and legality of seed libraries, and to clarify and protect the legal status of seed libraries, which have come under pressure from regulators recently. Shareable will be publishing articles on seed issues, including seed sharing, seed libraries, seed saving and more. We will also promote the campaign, activate grassroots networks, and advocate for a seed library exemption law in California.

On Tuesday, the SELC team also painted a picture of a very bright future; and they did so in true SELC form with lots of laughs, cartoons, smarts and silliness. With the help of a community-supported time machine, we traveled into a future complete with healthy, thriving, sustainable communities. Here’s how it plays out:

2015: The Year of the Seed

In 2015, there are seed libraries in almost every city in the country. From these libraries people can check out free seeds, grow them, harvest the food, eat it, and share seeds back to the library. People have free access to seeds, there are thriving local food systems, and we have a diverse seed commons. SELC contributed to this bright seed future by creating a seed law tool shed, launching a national seed law petition, and legalizing seed.

2016: The Year of Local Investing

In 2014, communities realized that they needed to move money out of Wall Street and divest from fossil fuels, but there weren’t many options to invest elsewhere, due in large part to legal barriers preventing investing in local businesses. In 2016, investment portfolios include cooperatives, credit unions and small businesses. SELC’s Sustainable Economies Securities Act enabled people to invest locally and became a model for other states throughout the country.

2017: The Year of Home-Based Food Business

In 2014, giant corporations with underpaid workers controlled much of the nations agriculture. People who wanted to start a small food business couldn’t because there were so many legal barriers. By 2017, SELC has made it possible for just about anyone to start their own farm or home-based food business by legalizing these entities, pioneering legal structures that help new farmers obtain access to land, and supporting the growth of worker owned farms.

2018: The Year of the Worker Cooperative

In 2014 there were only 300 to 400 worker cooperatives, and many barriers to creating them. Businesses and law schools didn’t educate their students how to advise or operate worker owned businesses, business incubators and development agencies didn’t provide resources to worker cooperatives, and, in fact, most people didn’t even know what a worker cooperative was.

In 2018 there are thousands of worker cooperatives because of SELC’s pioneering research, education and advocacy. SELC remains at the forefront of building an ecosystem of support services and laying the legal foundation for community ownership and democracy in the workplace. They partnered with the East Bay Community Law Center and Project Equity to create the first ever Worker Coop Academy in the Bay Area; there are now accredited worker cooperative courses in colleges across California and the country; and SELC’s model city policies, that prioritize worker coops, have been passed in cities across the country.

2019: The Year of the Transformed Legal Profession

In 2014, no one could afford an attorney because most attorneys were working for the very rich. The attorneys that came out of law school couldn’t find a job in 2014 and attorneys working for corporations were helping people build bigger and bigger corporations which was ruining the planet and widening the wealth gap. This was a failure of the legal system which is supposed to help people build a just and equitable society. By 2019, SELC’sResilient Communities Legal Cafes, which offer down to earth legal help for people doing real things in real communities, have caught on all across the country and there are legal cafes everywhere. SELC also supports individuals who are opening their own legal practices to build sustainable societies, and there’s a network of a million lawyers, all over the world, who are helping to build sustainable societies.

2020: The Year of Apprenticeships

In 2014, attorneys were graduating from law school $200,000 in debt—not a good position to be in if they wanted to serve society’s needs. By 2020, because of widespread legal apprenticeships however, a new generation of legal attorneys are able to roll up their sleeves and help cultivate sustainable societies. Legal apprenticeships have revolutionized the legal system and legal professionals now have a deep culture of teaching and learning. SELC created resources for legal apprentices to navigate their way through the legal apprenticeship, they blogged about their experiences, and they got the word out. They were even featured in the New York Times. They also introduced legal apprenticeships laws all over the US, so people everywhere can take the apprentice route to becoming an attorney.

2021: Year of the Awesome Nonprofit

In 2014, there were tons of big nonprofits where things happened very slowly. Funding sources diminished, organizations spent more on fundraising than they did on programs, staffers were overworked and always buried in paperwork, and highly paid executives and administrative staff were weighing nonprofits down. With all this, nonprofits weren’t changing our communities as fast as we needed them to. In 2021, the age of the agile nonprofit, tens of thousands of nonprofits have adopted SELC’s organizational model:

• Everyone gets paid the same living wage
• Every staff member is a leader and takes sense of own over the organization’s work
• Everyone has the flexibility to continue to build their skills and knowledge
• Everyone can bring proposals on ways to improve the impact of the organization
• Staff are encouraged to work 30 hour work weeks, to be creative, and, of course, to put on silly shows.

2022: The Year of Renewable Energy

In 2014, people were doing crazy stuff: injecting poisonous chemicals into the ground to extract gas, cutting mountaintops, burning everything and taking over land with industrial-scale solar farms. By 2022, communities have placed solar systems on every possible rooftop. People and communities now own and control their energy needs. SELC helped pass regulation to make sure people could actually invest in things that sustain these community solar, and other renewable energy, projects. SELC also developed legal structures to enable community solar projects and cooperatively owned solar projects that brought energy independence to every community across America.

2023: The Year of the Freelance Owned Cooperative

In 2014, freelancers were forced to bid on jobs and giant companies such as Task Rabbit and Uber were making millions off of freelancers. In 2023, there are freelancer-owned cooperatives, including Bay Area-based freelancer-owned cooperative Loconomics, everywhere. It’s because of the legal blueprint that Loconomics and SELC created that freelancers are allowed to share in profits, decision making power, tools and resources.

2024: The Year of the Commons

Before global capitalism, most land and water resources were managed by the people who used them. Communities everywhere managed their land and water resources as a commons. In 2014, these resources were highly concentrated in the hands of large corporations. But we learned from commoners and researchers including Elinor Ostrom, the principles to manage our commons. SELC created the first legal structure to collectively own and manage our farmland as a commons and has started creating more commons-based legal structures for land, water, housing, the Internet, banks and more—all things can be managed as a commons. In 2024, they’re stewarded forever in the commons legal structures.

The Wrap

As the SELC staff and the audience were all basking in the glow of the vibrant, thriving future of sustainable communities, Orsi offered a reminder.

“You guys could stay here in the future,” she says, “but if you don’t go back and do your work, then none of this will exist.”

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We invite you to join us in building a place to pool resources for the shared use and stewardship of the greater community—a space rooted in an ethic of radical collaboration between people of different backgrounds and across disciplines, creating a replicable model for future public spaces outside of the market and the state. At 22,000 square feet, this large and flexible space can support the collaboration of many different groups working on a variety of projects and ideals. We are asking for your help in opening our building to the public!”

A collective space to empower creative life in Oakland, California

Too often, our creative initiatives that aim beyond profit and private interests lack the common space and resources to go deep.

Omni is a collective of collectives building an open community center and venue.

We want to invite you to join hundreds of volunteers in building, appreciating, and sharing a model for deep societal change that goes rise above limiting corporate structures.

Our effort is rooted in Oakland’s rich history of thought and action for better urban life. After organizing for almost a year, we all took a giant leap on July 1st, 2014 by pooling funds to lease a 22,000 square-foot space! As we prepare to open, the energy has been incredible, with all kinds of people and value coming together.

We need your help to fully open and build our vision for a more equitable commoning of the space and resources people need to thrive.

WHY OAKLAND NEEDS A COMMONS

Cities like Oakland need new community center models for open access to the space and resources that sustain cultural life. Too many initiatives exploit human need and take power through marketing. Too few share and cooperate through “commoning”.

Omni is a community center modeled as an open commons. We steward our shared space and resources to generate abundant value with anyone. Omni is an empowering response to the displacement and inequality threatening Oakland’s cultural heritage.

Our space welcomes acts of revolution and celebration. You can have 500-person parties and lectures in our grand ballroom, meditation and movement classes in our dance studio, and small and medium gatherings in a half-dozen other rooms.

Our resources make any idea possible. You can cook and brew, print in letterpress, silkscreen, and 3D, write, type, solder circuits, use free community WiFi, sew, embroider, repair bikes, and gather in many spaces to connect, ponder, heal, grow, work, and organize around any idea or project.

The Indiegogo campaign is here.

Here’s an article on Shareable.

Their excellent video about the project is here:

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