2020 Annual Report
Mini Garden Installation August 2020 photo by Katie Rodriguez
Our Mission Cooperation Humboldt helps to build a Solidarity Economy on California’s North Coast. We support existing cooperative efforts and create new solutions where needed. A Solidarity Economy empowers us to meet our needs in harmony with nature, without exploiting anyone. It puts people and planet over profit by prioritizing collaboration over competition and cooperation over domination.
What is a Solidarity Economy? EXTRACTIVE ECONOMY
Artists Dismantling Capitalism February 2020 photo by Johnathon DeSoto
vs.
SOLIDARITY ECONOMY
• Power over
• Power with
• Domination
• Cooperation
• Competitive
• Collaborative
• Commodity based
• Needs based
2020 Highlights » Hosted County Supervisors candidate forum in collaboration with other local community groups
Winter
» Produced 3rd Annual Artists Dismantling Capitalism » Planted 56 free community fruit trees in publicly accessible spaces » Launched mutual aid coalition to respond to COVID » Began installing free mini gardens for low income residents
Spring
» Launched monthly Rolling Justice Caravans with other allied groups to advocate for tenants’ rights, public banking, and police accountability » Launched Worker Owned Humboldt with online training and support to incubate worker owned cooperative business startups and conversions
Summer
» Established the Community Health Worker Collaborative to provide workforce training and job placement for underserved populations with valuable life experience » Installed 78 mini gardens in one day through our ‘Mini Garden Extravaganza,’ bringing total for the season to more than 260 gardens » Enrolled more than 80 people in our free Solidarity Economy and social justice study groups
Fall
» Hosted online candidate forums for city councils and service districts in collaboration with other local community groups » Created a Disaster Response & Resilience program area » Hosted workshop on Emerging Fascism to confront the reality of this historic moment » Installed 11 more Little Free Pantries, bringing our county-wide total to 23
Mini Garden July 2020
Community Partnerships OUR COMMITMENT TO COLLABORATION
RELATIONSHIPS WITH INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
Collaboration is a central value to our organization, and we prioritize it in every area of our work. We build partnerships with organizations both locally and nationally to further the work of creating a Solidarity Econoomy.
The entire greater Wigi (Humboldt Bay) area is the ancestral homeland of the Wiyot, who have stewarded this land since time immemorial.
These relationships not only empower each organization to more effectively implement its mission; they actually increase the impact of our work exponentially while reducing duplication of services and other inefficiencies common to social change work. We strive to create networks that are not just transactional but truly transformational, built on trust and understanding.
Wiyot Dedication Ceremony at College of the Redwoods March 2020
To respect the sovereignty of the Wiyot, we pay 1% of our annual budget to the Wiyot Tribe as an Honor Tax. We partner with the Wiyot on several of our projects and are actively working to build relationships with other Indigenous groups including the Hoopa, Yurok, Karuk, United Indian Health Services and Two Feathers. We are also in the early stages of helping to create a Truth & Reconciliation Commission to allow for a public process to confront the violent history of settler colonialism and to imagine what restorative justice could look like.
DISASTER RESPONSE When COVID-19 hit we quickly mobilized to form a working group that included 18 local organizations. Together we worked to meet immediate needs including cleaning supplies, grocery shopping and deliveries, hot meals, camping supplies and more. Rolling Justice Caravan September 2020 photo by Mario Fernandez
ROLLING JUSTICE Since May of 2020 Cooperation Humboldt has worked with Centro del Pueblo, Humboldt-Del Norte Central Labor Council, the North Coast People’s Alliance and other groups and organizations to coordinate peaceful, artful public demonstrations every month to demand rent protection, police accountability and economic justice. Participants drive decorated autos or ride bicycles or roller skates and stock our Little Free Pantries as part of a food drive and culminates with an organizing teach-in.
COMMUNITY HEALTH WORKER COLLABORATIVE Our Community Health Worker (CHW) Collaborative is developing job training and placement services for chronically underserved populations in Humboldt, Del Norte, and Trinity Counties. The CHW Collaborative includes Open Door Community Health Centers, College of the Redwoods, Wiyot Tribe, Yurok Tribal Wellness Court, Native American Pathways, Arcata Police Department, Hmong community representative Pata Vang, All Are Welcome, AJ’s Transitional Living, Justin Maxon and Humboldt Area Center for Harm Reduction.
In response to the 2020 wildfires, we are working closely with the American Red Cross, Humboldt Area Foundation, and other local agencies and organizations to support fire evacuees.
WORKER OWNED HUMBOLDT Worker Owned Humboldt (WOH) is collaborating with the North Coast Small Business Development Center to provide new worker owned businesses with essential business training and with Project Equity to provide feasibility studies for existing businesses considering converting to worker ownership. WOH participants also receive free peer mentorship and technical assistance from our partners at the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives.
REGIONAL/NATIONAL LEVEL NETWORKING Cooperation Humboldt is a local initiative of Transition US. We are also members of the California Progressive Alliance, the California Public Banking Alliance, the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives and the US Solidarity Economy Network. These relationships allow us to share what we are learning with others, to learn best practices from them and to be an active part of the growing “movement of movements” to go beyond individual issues and help nurture systemic social change.
Program Updates ARTS & CULTURE Artists Dismantling Capitalism, February 2020 photo by Johnathon DeSoto
We also incubated several new projects this year. Our Imaginal Services Bureaux opened The Land Office and created 19 radical leftist imagined futures for individual properties in Humboldt County leading to the production of seven episodes of “The Future is Now: Imagining What’s Next,” an interactive virtual video call where local guests connect with time travelers searching for the artifacts from our time that predict life in the future. The Whiteness Within: Challenging White Supremacy Culture is a workshop first presented at this year’s ADC by Open Art, which uses story sharing, reflection and physical expression to give participants the opportunity to recognize and shift away from racism. Open Art has offered this workshop online several more times throughout 2020.
Systemic culture shift manifests itself through artistic expression. We engage with artists who share our vision of a cooperative society. We hosted our third annual Artists Dismantling Capitalism (ADC) symposium in February. Over 150 artists, students, residents and guests, including representatives from Cooperation Jackson, came together to examine the role of art and culture in social change and to share their liberatory practices in 17 workshops offered over the course of the day. We’ve begun planning for the 4th annual convergence to be held online in 2021.
Field Guide to a Crisis is a new project working with folks in recovery to help prepare them to be teachers in resiliency using the skills they learned in their own recovery. Regenerative Theater is another project launched this year that grew from a group of theatre artists unable to perform under COVID restrictions who envision a theater free from a capitalist extraction model. Cartographic Somatics is intended for artists and body-based practitioners racialized as white or biracial with white skin passing privilege to explore and examine the construct of race. We also collaborated on a Performing Arts Resilience plan this year alongside Humboldt Creative Alliance and will continue in 2021 to see that plan to fruition.
CARE & WELLNESS Health, wellness, and care are fundamental human rights. We create education, services, and community partnerships to remove the profit motive from healthcare. Our Care Team empowers people to care for others and to actively participate in their own well being. A major focus for the team this year was COVID response; we coordinated mask making, sanitation
supply procurement and delivery, grocery shopping and delivery, and hot meal distribution. The other main focus for the team was to assemble a collaborative of organizations that serve people experiencing substance use disorder, at-risk youth, people with extremely low or no income, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ identifying people, and people experiencing mental illness and homelessness. Together we are working to develop a Community Health Worker program that creates roles for people across communities to exchange care with one another in the form of skills, knowledge and resources.
ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY Our Economic Democracy program helps transition our local economy away from current unsustainable extraction-oriented practices to a regenerative Solidarity Economy by focusing on worker owned cooperatives and public banking. Worker cooperatives are simply a better way to do business. They empower workers to make the decisions that impact their lives and allow them to share equally in a business’s profits. They are more stable than traditional businesses, have lower employee turnover and lower rates of business closure, and pay better wages. This year we offered free introductory webinars attended by 65 people. We also offered a Worker Owned Academy twice in 2020. These were a series of four 90 minute classes on the foundations of worker co-op development including how to build a steering committee, how to make and implement decisions democratically and an introduction to legal issues. A total of 33 people participated.
A public bank is a bank operated in the public interest. They invest in Main Street not Wall Street, and promote a transparent, publicly governed finance system. Costs of public infrastructure projects can be literally halved, saving taxpayer money and doubling community investment power. Our Exexutive Director is active with the California Public Banking Alliance. He helped to pass AB 857, an historic law that enables the creation of local and regional public banks in California. When the pandemic hit he focused on building support for a statewide Public Bank of California and helped to facilitate the passage of local resolutions of support.
Ordinary people must control the fundamental decisions about how our society is structured - including economics.
Program Updates DISASTER RESPONSE As current systems continue to fail us, what we create in their place must not replicate old patterns. We build systems that increase our ability to meet our own needs through a Solidarity Economy lens before, during, and after disaster.
Our Disaster Response & Resilience Team builds community power through disaster relief and creates long term resilience for communities. The work of this team can be broken down into a few phases - disaster mitigation/preparedness, disaster response, immediate recovery and long term resilience. Our ultimate goal is to restructure our local economy to guarantee that everyone’s basic needs are met without exploiting anyone and without harming the environment, both during periods of disaster and beyond. Some of the resources we have provided as immediate disaster response (COVID and 2020 wildfires) have included mask making, delivering sanitation supplies, grocery shopping, meal preparation and delivery, and installing and stocking Little Free Pantries. Cooperation Humboldt has actively implemented community resilience projects since its inception. We are working daily to create the world we so desperately need and so richly deserve.
HOUSING We believe housing is a human right and we work to make that vision a reality in our community. In collaboration with a group of impact investors, we are exploring several possible housing projects. We are providing staff support to a group of local folks who are interested in developing and living in a multi-generational ecovillage of 10 to 25 people. The current founders group envisions tiny homes and shared common facilities, a maker space, gardens, and an arts and media production center. Over time, we hope to nurture a network of ecovillages across our region, each with its own unique design and culture created by those who live there. We are also exploring the development of housing cooperatives, in which property is collectively owned and/or managed by residents. It might be a large house with multiple rooms or an entire apartment building. We are currently exploring possibilities with the Wiyot Tribe and Dell’ Arte International.
Access to safe, secure, and affordable housing is a human right. No one should ever be without a roof over their head.
EDUCATION We provide educational opportunities for both our own volunteers and the broader community. We host free 12-week study group cohorts to explore topics including Solidarity Economy theory and practice, race, hetero-patriarchy, and local history of settler colonialism in a small group setting. These sessions not only increase participants’ individual understanding of the topics discussed, they also build social solidarity and a shared analysis of where we are, where we want to go and how we might get there.
In 2020, we facilitated eight study groups with approximately 80 participants. We also conducted several workshops on Nonviolent Communication for members of our leadership team.
Everyone has the right to education. We are all teachers and learners. Collective education empowers us as organizers.
FOOD As we face climate crisis, we know that reconnecting with traditional food cultivation skills is critical – not only to our happiness and well-being – but to our very survival. Our Food Team’s activities this year have focused on empowering new gardeners to grow food and on strengthening neighborhood-scale sharing networks. Early this year, we planted 56 community fruit trees in public locations. We also installed 11 more Little Free Pantries this year (for a total of 23 now in operation). Anyone can donate non-perishable foods or personal care items and anyone can take what they need – 24 hours a day, no questions asked. After completing several lawn conversions early in 2020, we made a quick shift when the pandemic hit to get food resources to the most vulnerable people in our community. Our volunteers delivered and installed over 250 free mini gardens for our low income neighbors. We also provide simple educational resources to empower the recipients of these gardens to make the most of their new setup, and provide ongoing support with replacement starts and/or other materials as needed.
Our Food Team has also agreed to take on production of the annual Local Food Guide, so that will be our focus this winter. We look forward to working with under-served and under-resourced populations in our community to make the Guide even more useful, engaging and accessible.
Mini Garden Extravaganza August 2020 photo by Katie Rodriguez
Nutritious food is a fundamental human right that should never be dependent on wealth or income.
Who We Are We are engaged in an ongoing process to create an intentional culture of participant empowerment and to democratize our organizational structure. To comply with legal requirements, we do have a Board of Directors that oversees our finances and operations; however, much autonomy is given to those on the ground doing the work - that is where most ideas originate and decisions are made. Our leadership circle is comprised of our six-person Board plus our Core Team, which is made up of about 40 people who have completed our study group curriculum and committed to some form of leadership.
BOARD
STAFF
Argy manages our Tool Lending Library. She is passionate about working with Indigenous communities fighting for environmental justice and food sovereignty.
Ron White is a Board Member. He is active with fundraising and our Economic Democracy work. He is the father of two activist adult children.
Tamara McFarland is our bookkeeper and coordinates our food related work. She is a lifelong resident of Humboldt, an animal lover, and a parent to two children in local schools.
Tobin McKee is our grant writer and is active on our Economic Democracy, Care & Wellness, and Education teams. Their purpose in life is to create opportunities for all to live with compassion.
Sabrina Miller works with our Community Health Worker Collaborative and Disaster Response projects. She is passionate about incorporating authentic relational connection into all of her work.
Ruthi Engelke is active with our Arts & Culture and Education work. Ruthi believes that everyone is an artist and that creative expression is a basic human need.
David Cobb helps us connect to national efforts, and focuses locally on Economic Democracy and Education. He believes we can restructure society based on the values of love, compassion and sharing.
Marina Lopez is active with our Arts & Culture work and she enjoys exploring the intersections of person, space, and place.
Cynthia Martell is our staffer focused on donor engagement. She is also a Tony nominated actress active with our Arts & Culture team.
Oscar Mogollon works with our Community Health Worker Collaborative and Disaster Response. He is a Spanish speaker who enjoys connecting with other groups and organizations.
Financials Income & Expenses January - September 2020
Expense Detail by Category
Income Donations-Individuals Monthly Sustaining Donations Non-Recurring Donations Total Donations-Individuals Event Admission Donations Grant Income Interest-Savings, Short-term CD
5,285 59,725 65,010 658 102,100 58
Paycheck Protection Act
9,607
Program Income
2,210
Total Income
Admin Fundraising Program
179,643 Admin
Expenses
Fundraising
Program
Accounting & Other Contract Services
2,673
363
2,000
310
Advertising and Promotion
1,050
315
170
565
Automotive Expenses
1,803
-
-
1,803
Facilities/Equipment (includes rent, utilities)
5,449
1,635
545
3,269
Operations (bank service charges, website, software, dues/memberships, staff/volunteer development, postage, office supplies)
7,294
2,837
1,636
2,821
Insurance
1,381
1,131
-
60,670 (26,000)
19,244 -
12,702 -
195
195
Direct Program Expenses (includes Program related wages) Arts & Culture 700 Disaster Response to Resilience 13,522 Care & Wellness 11,210 Economic Democracy 6,825 Education 5,558 Housing 125 Food 26,002 Total Direct Program Expenses 63,942
-
-
700 13,522 11,210 6,825 5,558 125 26,002 63,942
Public Educational Events
-
-
442
-
1,610
-
-
1,441
25,728
17,248
79,371
Payroll Expenses - Total Wages Recategorized to Program Areas Printing and Copying
584
442
Travel and Meetings
1,620
Wiyot Honor Tax
1,441
Total Expense Net Income
122,347 57,295
10
250 28,724 (26,000) 195
What We Believe M IS AL RI
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PA HET TR ER IA O RC HY
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• We believe that our current institutions are racist, sexist, and class oppressive.
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• We believe it is possible to create new institutions that incentivize cooperation, love, compassion and kindness. • We believe in lifting up and supporting groups that are doing grassroots organizing with working class people and people of color, creating new models for a joyous and collaborative new future.
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N LO CO DE
• We believe we can work with you (or your organization) even if you do not believe these things.
TI M AN CIS RA
Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and at http://cooperationhumboldt.org. SO EC LID ON A OMRIT Y Y
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GE IN ND CL ER USI EQ VE UI TY
• We believe our current economic system is based upon exploitation and oppression, and that it will destroy the planet if we do not shift to a cooperative and sustainable model.
cooperationhumboldt@gmail.com PO Box 7248 Eureka, CA 95502
Building a Solidarity Economy on California’s North Coast