You might have seen the slogan on NEC’s t-shirts or bumper stickers: “Fire the bosses, Free the Land, Care for the People & Build a Solidarity Economy.” It sounds great, but what do we actually mean — what lineages and struggles do we evoke and build upon — when we use these phrases? We’re here to break it down: 

 FIRE THE BOSSES

We believe in a world where workers democratically run our workplaces, and profits are reinvested into our communities, instead of lining the pockets of executives and investors. To achieve this, we can build on the centuries of struggle led by Black, Indigenous, immigrant and working-class communities, who not only formed unions, but also built economies of cooperation, mutual aid, and care to survive.

As a worker self-directed nonprofit, we don’t have bosses at NEC: we steward the organization together, making collective decisions about our working conditions, the nature of our programs, and our strategic direction. This is how we live out the values of the solidarity economy from our corner of the movement, inspired by many of our members like Co-op Cincy, Co-op Dayton, and the Sustainable Economies Law Center  who are building worker power and community wealth through unions and cooperative models. 

♡ Check out these resources on building worker power, including NEC’s resource lists on union coops, collective governance, and this union toolkit for cooperative solutions by the Community & Worker Ownership Project.

FREE THE LAND

As our friends at NEC member Movement Generation remind us, “Free the Land” was originally used by the New Afrikan Independence Movement to express the struggle for Black land reparations and to honor the land liberation work led by Indigenous people.

For generations, Indigenous, Black, and land-rooted communities have shown us what it means to live in right relationship with the Earth, what it means to care for the people, free the land, and build the economy on our own terms. Land is life, it feeds us, connects us, and roots us in both history and possibility. And that’s exactly why occupying forces, colonizers, and corporations fight so hard to control it.

At New Economy Coalition, we know that building a solidarity economy means uprooting extractive and colonial systems that treat land as a commodity, and sowing new systems rooted in care, cooperation, and community control. Across our coalition and globally, people are defending life, reclaiming land, and organizing for food, housing, and ecological justice, all rooted in self-determination. 

♡ Learn about the amazing work NEC members are doing to free the land: 

• Dishgamu Humboldt: the Wiyot Tribe’s community land trust in Northern California
• Black Oregon Land Trust: reconnecting Black communities with land and food sovereignty
• Land Justice Futures: organizing spiritual communities for land reparations and rematriation 

CARE FOR THE PEOPLE

Care is political. Who we care for and how we go about practicing care shapes our world. Care is an expression of economics. The current economic system invests our money and resources into endless wars, instead of providing for our basic needs—this is what Ruthie Wilson Gilmore so aptly calls organized abandonment. But we can refuse to abandon each other. 

As the Black Panthers taught us—through their Free Food Program, emergency ambulance service, and community health clinics—we have the power to meet each other’s needs, and our power is in how we care for each other. An economy that provides for all living beings will be built by people who feel deeply responsible for one another. Collective care disrupts our dependency on exploitative, extractive institutions and reminds us of our humanity and power. Ultimately, care is a prerequisite for solidarity.

Through mutual aid initiatives, food justice projects, and culture shift work, the solidarity economy movement is building systems centered on care for people and the planet.

♡ Check out our We Care For Us resource list, bimonthly “Care for the People” series, and soon-to-launch Wellness Fund to learn more about how we practice collective care at NEC. 

BUILD A SOLIDARITY ECONOMY

Growing out of social movements in Latin America and the Global South, the solidarity economy (SE) movement provides real alternatives to capitalism, where communities govern themselves through participatory democracy, cooperative and public ownership, a culture of solidarity, repair, and respect for the earth. In our vision, all of the things a community needs — from housing, schools, food, local governance, art, healing, and transportation — can be controlled and governed by everyday people.

Solidarity economies can look many different ways and go by many different names around the world. These practices aren’t new, but build upon many traditions and ancestral practices of collective decision-making and resource sharing.

Members in our network are building local and regional solidarity economies with worker-owned cooperatives, community land trusts, timebanks, community lending, participatory budgeting, people’s assemblies, mutual aid networks, and so much more. 

♡ Check out our Solidarity Economy 101 Resources.