In June, we helped co-convene the Movement Finance Forum, connecting social movement groups, non-extractive investors, funders, movement lawyers, financial technical experts, and other practitioners. NEC member Center for Economic Democracy anchored the forum, gathering around 130 people, many representing other NEC member organizations. Read our latest blog post to learn how we strove towards a shared understanding of “Capital Strategies” and deeper coordination within and across movement-anchored projects and campaigns advancing a Just Transition.
The goals of these connections? To build a shared understanding of “Capital Strategies,” and build deeper coordination within and across movement-anchored projects and campaigns advancing a Just Transition.
So what are “Capital Strategies,” you ask?
In short, Capital Strategies encompass all the different ‘levers’ of finance that we can use to fight against racial capitalism and build a solidarity economy. These levers include:
- Divesting from extraction: This includes selling stocks, consumer boycotts, etc.
- Investing in regeneration: This includes a lot of the work of NEC members, including non-extractive lending, building collectively governed land/housing projects, participatory budgeting, etc.
- Contesting the private, financial, and corporate forces that are wielding capital to harm our communities, with the goal of shifting more of these resources to community control: this is the most open-ended of the three, and includes the power-building work that undergirds the divest & invest levers. This can look like everything from filing lawsuits to campaigns that target private equity, to public policy campaigns, and more.
Let’s get into 5 key takeaways from the convening:
Photo by Anj Photographer
1.To build power, we need more coordination across Divest, Contest, and Invest levers: There’s a reason why “Resist” & “Build” go together like peaches and cream. And yet the Movement Finance Forum showed how there’s much more coordination to be built across different sectors of our movement. An example of coordination highlighted was technical-support organizations like New Left Accelerator and Movement Law Lab seeding collaborations with movement groups across the resist/build spectrum to support everything from navigating lawfare to creating new organizational structures outside of the 501(c)(3) box. In short, we need creative, movement-aligned wealth planners, lawyers, and accountants to help us undermine the system.
2. We can’t scale the solidarity economy movement without investing in the governance skills & education necessary for democratic management: We may capture the funds. We may get the landlord to sell the building. And we may get an amenable elected official in office. But as Movement Generation reminds us: “if we’re not prepared to govern, we’re not prepared to win”. And yet governance skills are often invisibilized and not invested in: “Skill often isn’t on the balance sheet”, as Esteban Kelly, executive director of U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, put it. Esteban expands on this point in a recent piece in Nonprofit Quarterly.
3. The solidarity economy movement needs to coordinate with the fight against land grabs: After the 2008 financial crisis, the idea that land is a “safe asset” became increasingly popular. Following suit, financial corporations initiated a massive move towards land grabs. A shared target across movements is TIAA (Teachers Insurance & Annuity Association of America, i.e., a pension fund & corporate landlord), which has been highly destructive to rural communities in the US South and Brazil. Collective/community land ownership can confront and disrupt corporate land grabs, as the Stop Land Grabs campaign taught us. This raises serious questions around how groups that are decommodifying land/housing can flank resistance-side campaigns.
4. The solidarity economy movement also needs deeper coordination with resistance-side strategies like shareholder activism: In an incredible recent blog post detailing their own learnings from MFF, Chordata Capital’s Kate Poole wrote about her shifting opinion on the power of shareholder advocacy. She wrote: “Though we divest our clients fully from the stock market, many of our clients have other points of leverage inside the system.” It’s this kind of leverage that binds opportunities between divesting, contesting, and investing. One promising example of shareholder activism is a campaign targeting Microsoft’s complicity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Recently, 60+ Microsoft shareholders filed a proposal for Microsoft to review its human rights processes. Dozens of those shareholders were mobilized directly as a result of the Movement Finance Forum.
5. We need to further step into practices that allow us to navigate the contradictions, tensions, & harm that can arise when organizing in cross-class spaces: MFF brought together movement groups (big & small, regional & national), and capital holders (funders, donors, etc.). Moving together as a cross-class space was at the heart of MFF’s organizing logic, but it raised tensions. Verbally addressing power dynamics (as we did at the beginning of the convening) didn’t make the interpersonal experience of them disappear. Some ideas that emerged to navigate these tensions next time around included (1) more direct transparency around the matrix of funding/investing that was in the room (e.g. who was funding who), (2) funder speed-dating opportunities, and (3) the creation of an offers & needs board. In real time, we created an offers and needs board that is now being shared across our networks.
Photo by Anj Photographer
NEC’s Movement Resourcing Working Group continues to process these takeaways and strategize about what action NEC can take network-wide. NEC members can join the Movement Resourcing Working Group by filling out this form. Interested in joining our membership? Fill out our interest form here.