How Can Cooperative Economics Help Us Build Collective Power?

We are at 9227 Goodwin at the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm located in the north end part of Detroit. I'm Amanda Alexander, founding executive director at the Detroit Justice Center. And I'm Kase Rache to the communications manager at DJC. And this is Freedom Dreams. The podcast where we believe another world is possible and we're talking to the people who are building it. I'm just somebody doing a providing the service, but they call me an activist, Jerry Ann Hebron, executive director of the North and Christian Community Development Corporation and the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm. So today we're talking about land and building sustainable communities. We're walking around the farm here at Oakland Ave. And I'm sure most people have heard about the urban farming movement in Detroit, how grocery stores left the city, but people didn't want to leave, obviously, so they began to farm. 2009, we built this out as our beginning gardening space. The nonprofit keep growing Detroit estimates that they're supporting 2000 small farms and gardens in Detroit. Each year we started adding. So 2009, we started here, 2010, we expanded over there. Well, what happens when that land becomes valuable to developers in a way that it wasn't before? It becomes a classic fight over land and power. Who belongs in the city and who doesn't? And too often it can end in gentrification and displacement, as so many people know in so many cities. It's a story as old as settlers displacing indigenous people from the land that would become Detroit. We're like seven minutes north of a downtown Detroit. We're right at I-75, the latch, the Davison. What we're at Avenue? So it's kind of like we're right in the middle. Well here in Detroit, especially in the north end, people are fighting back. They're asking now that we have the land, what kinds of communities do we want to create on it? How can we arrange an economy around that? And that's where Cooperative Economics comes in. We have six acres in our portfolio. And it's vacant land and structures. And it's all a part of our Detroit cultivator community land trust. Detroit is home to so many experiments in Cooperative Economics. Do you have a favorite example, Casey? I personally love Halima. Coussell has a free store. Yes. And I love that just as a model because it's like, I got some stuff that other people might want. And I can bring it to the free store and they can just take it and then I can produce the free store and, you know, like find an old coat that I really like. It's like a the best kind of vintage shopping. Yes. I remember the first time I saw that Halima's pop up free store. She just said, you know, take something that brings you joy. It's so beautiful. Yeah. Also a huge fan of the Detroit Community Technology Project and others have set up a series of mesh networks, which sort of like an isolated ability to get like Wi-Fi through connected through like your literal neighbors. And I as someone who loves the internet, it is so cool to think about my friends sitting these up. Absolutely. Probably my one of my favorite examples is all the examples of time banking in the city. So time banking is basically a barter system where neighbors have figured out even though it may seem like we're cash poor or asset poor. We're certainly not poor in our resources and our ability to support ourselves in each other. So you have neighborhoods where people have, you know, they have set up these elaborate systems to be able to say, I can pay in an hour of plumbing services. And I can take out an hour of babysitting, whatever it is, but it's a way of valuing people and what they bring outside of traditional capitalist systems. So the Detroit Justice Center's economic equity practice was set up to support these types of community led experiments in cooperative economics like community land trust and work around cooperatives. And today we're going to talk to one of the staff attorneys in the economic equity practice, Whitley Grandberry. And we'll also be talking with one of our clients. He've already heard a little bit from Jerry Hebron of Oakland Avenue Urban Farm. But first, another freedom dreams history minute, actually several minutes. So before we dive in with Jerry Hebron and her work here in the North End in Detroit, I wanted to give a little bit of historical context to these kinds of community experiments. Because they can be kind of busy in terms of the way we talk about them. And there's actually a really long history of our community is building systems like this for us else. But I wanted to focus in specifically on Fannie Lou Hamers Freedom Farm Cooperative. Because I think it gives us a really good illustration of a historical example of this how this kind of setup works. So when we think historically about how we think about shared land, one of the big things that I think about is the context of black folks living in the south as the second great migration is happening. So so many people are leaving because there's big opportunities and the factories here in Detroit and throughout the rest belt. So the second great migration happens 1940 to 1960 there about. And the people who are sort of stay behind in the south. So I'm thinking specifically for Fannie Lou Hamer. This is in rural Ville Mississippi in Sunflower County. And so they lost about 20% of their population during the Great Migration. But the folks who stayed behind faced malnourishment, unemployment, a lack of education, poor housing conditions, and voting disenfranchisement. Fannie Lou Hamer herself was told by she sharecropped on a farm for 15 years. The landowner said to her, look, you either don't register to vote and you can keep your job and you can keep your land. Or you register to vote and you got to get out of here. And she chose to register to vote and continue to fight for the right for others to register to vote. It was the 31st of all of us in 1962 that 18 of us traveled 26 miles to the county courthouse in Inlandola to try to register to become first class citizens. So we know a lot about sort of her fight with snake and for voting rights. But I think one of the craziest stories that I or like most inspiring stories to me is this Freedom Farm Cooperative, which exists from 1967 to 1976, which she started in her local community. So when I say piggy bank, what comes to your mind? A few things. I mean, I think of those work kiddos store their coins. But I think you might be thinking about a pig bank here. And Fannie Lou Hamer's version of the pig farm? Yes. So I love this story. So essentially what happens is it's a collective of all these families who have been disenfranchised and sort of left off their land automation is happening. And they get donated, I think it's like 135 pigs. And the idea is 100 different families each get a pig. And it's it'll be a female pig and it's not they can eventually, you know, like sell it for me use it for me whatever they want. But at first they breed the pigs and then they have to give two piglets back to the pig bank. So within three years they go from, you know, the low over 100 pigs to like 850 families having pigs. So it was just a wild sort of need, especially because at this point, the Freedom Farm Collective is sustenance farming. They're really making sure that everybody who's part of their community can get fed, whether or not they can work on the farm. And so to me, that's really coming out of is seeing what the need is and meeting it in a way that makes sense and can be regenerative. I think of it as like the way we think of like a revolving bail fund. This is like a revolving pig fund. They also had a housing initiative with about 80 houses for people because for the most part that housing conditions weren't great. So they built about 80 houses and they were also able to through the sustenance farming. This really remind me actually of Jerry. Any surplus food they had they would not only give it to the farm. folks in their community, but they were able to ship it to folks who had moved during the Great Migration. So they're sending vegetables as far away as Chicago to make sure that their people still get fed, even though they've moved away. Why it reminded me of Jerry as I was just thinking about how she's been taking food from restaurants that can't sell it right now during the pandemic and just making sure that it doesn't go to waste and it goes to people who need it. After a break, our conversation with Whitley Grandbury of the Economic Equity Practice at the Detroit Justice Center and our client Jerry Hebron of Oakland Avenue Urban Farm. Hello, I'm Douglas Managulti-Thur and I'm the Associate Director of Development at the Detroit Justice Center. As a fundraiser, I enjoy connecting people with the DJC's mission. What's unique about this organization? We directly represent clients and also advocate for legal and policy changes that would benefit them. We run a restorative justice network, help detraitors appeal their property tax assessment, and help create community land trusts. We even have an artist residency program. We understand that incarceration impacts every single aspect of our lives, so it takes a robust and diverse team to combat the criminal punishment system. Join us in the fight to create truly just cities where every life is held in equal regard by visiting DetroitJustice.org/donate. So our first question, which I think is for both of you, is what is cooperative economics and how does it apply to your work? Okay, so I'm old school. Here's Jerry. So what I mean by old school is cooperative economics is not a new term or a new model for me because growing up at a time when I did in the '50s and the '60s, cooperative economics was very much so a part of my community. And what I mean by that is we lived in black bottom and then we moved into the North and part of Detroit where I live in work now. People grew their food in their backyards and they shared their foods up and down the street around the corner. So hunger was not necessarily something that I was familiar with. Our neighbors who had children the same ages us, we share clothing. You know, so if I grew out of something, one of my neighbors got my clothes or you know what I'm saying. So it was always a matter of sharing and caring within our community with what we had. In terms of cooperative economics as I look at it today, I think differently about it and that we're able to come together and build, you know, shared decision making, shared resources, shared experiences, shared skills. And then those tools are used to build those business that supports a community. So I don't know if that makes sense, but that's kind of the lens that I look at it from today. Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense, Jerry. Cooperative economics is like a big term sometimes to kind of break down for everyone to understand. But so you hear a lot of things that kind of play together in this world of cooperative economics and the sharing economy, solidarity economics. But basically it's sort of an anti-capitalist form of economics based on sharing ownership and sharing ownership of land, right? Like it's the case with community land trusts, sharing ownership of businesses, right? So when you're making businesses, not only a few, the top few owners or the top few shareholders get profit that comes into the business, but everyone has the opportunity to become an owner and to share in that economy, to share in that economy, to share in those profits. It's about democratic governance too, is the key concept that kind of comes in there so that everybody has an equal vote and an equal say to what's happening. And when you get into cooperative economics, it really is about an anti-racist, an anti-capitalist economy. Awesome. Jerry, can you tell us the story of Oakland Ave Urban Farm? How did it come together and what led you down that path? Yeah, that's an interesting situation being as I come from that capitalistic background of being a realtor where I was chasing money and living my life in a way that I was not in a way that I could just about go wherever I wanted to go by whatever I wanted to buy. In 2008, the real estate market turned upside down and even prior to that in 2007, my daughter had a mess of stroke at 40. So I was already on the path to kind of changing and rethinking my life in terms of the next steps because I stopped to take care of her in 2007 and then the real estate market went upside down in 2008, causing my husband and I to close our office. We lost all of our realtor that we're working for us and took a big hit financially. People during that time, my mother, who is the president of the nonprofit, was seeking someone to come over to the nonprofit side to kind of re-engage the nonprofit in the community. The nonprofit had been dormant for about two years. My mother was aging and just didn't have the energy to do it. So we closed our real estate office, went home to lick our wounds and we thought that was going to be it. And I get the call from my mom saying, "Hey, I need you to come over and rent this nonprofit." And I'm like a nonprofit, really. When I came back to the North End and saw the devastation because we lived in another community, I saw the devastation and what I mean is that it was a very dangerous neighborhood. It was dark and gloomy. There was high unemployment, high crime, poor housing. And well, healthy food was not existent. And talking with people in the community, that's what they told me. We need food, housing and jobs. And I was heartbroken because this was not the neighborhood that I knew. This was not the neighborhood that I remember. And I had to ask myself, "What can I do to change the existence of this community?" "Reinvent this community." "What role do I play? Can I play and make a difference in this community?" And so after talking to a lot of people, I still have friends that live here. I started attending meetings and trying to connect to resources because the nonprofit did not have any money. And just to leverage relationships and collaborate with some folks. We didn't have organization planning or strategic planning to say, "Okay, we're going to do this, this, this, and this." We would just wait and see what the opportunities would be. And it became the desire and mission of the organization to secure as much land as possible. Because what we saw is that people who did not look like us were moving into the community. And they came with resources that people like us did not have. And we're changing not only the narrative of our community, but also the way that our community felt. There was a lack of culture and experiences. And so we were like, our neighborhood is becoming gentified and people are experiencing this placement. So we need to secure as much land as possible and figure out how can we do affordable housing, bring in some retail businesses that is affordable because businesses downtown Detroit, Midtown are being displaced and looking to the North End as maybe the next affordable community. for them and so that's the work that we kind of are doing now. That's the snapshot. Jerry, and then how did the idea for community land trust come about? It had been something that we had talked about, oh probably for about four years off and on and then I went to a workshop that Eric Williams gave over at Northwest activity center and I was blown away because the room was overflowed. There were people out wrapped around the hallway sitting on the floor, you know trying to hear what Eric was talking about and it was such an amazing response that I was like you know this really may be something that we could do at our organization and that same the next February I went to Albany, Georgia. I spent three days in a workshop down there with Shirley Sharad and you know learned about the work that she has done with the name and again I'm blacking but she has she she and her husband formed this community land trust like 50 years ago, over 50 years ago in Albany, Georgia to help rule farmers and people in the rural communities people of color hang onto their land and it was so inspiring to be with her to hear her story and the work that they are doing to uplift the rule farmers to help them get to the marketplace and how this land trust was developed and I was like this is basically the same thing that's happening and I'm Detroit with displacement with housing and retail you know and people being able to be a part of the marketplace. So I came back from Albany, Georgia and February just energized and we started our work and we reached out to the Detroit Justice Center and here we are today a year and a half later we are legally the Detroit Cultivator Community Land Trust and we are on our way to developing our first board. We have six acres of land so amazing. It is and thank you that's I think great context. Willie do you want to talk a little bit about your work in building community land trust as somebody who works for the Detroit Justice Center and this is sort of your willhouse? Yeah sure so Jerry mentioned also Eric Williams so shout out to Eric who is the senior staff attorney on in our practice group which is called the Economic Equity Practice. So I'm the by default junior staff attorney on the team. We've had some really monumental successes so far I would say we have a few different groups who are really piloting the way Detroit now has its first its first two official community community land trusts one of which is the Detroit Cultivator Community Land Trust which Jerry is a part of and helps lead its temporary board right now. So yeah I mean the work is interesting it's a lot of work talking to people right because these are real community members and actual neighborhoods it's a lot of community engagement because when you're dealing with property like this and land I mean it's just interesting that you need to know your neighbors your neighbors need to be on board. So our podcast is called Freedom Dreams and so we're wondering what are your freedom dreams for your work like what do you 20, 50, 100 years from now hope that the legacy of what you're doing is? Wow that's that's really deep for me when I look out that far I'm hoping that people have reconnected to their agricultural roots and what I mean by that is being born and Tennessee I was born in 11th of Tennessee. Everybody I knew in my family and in the town that I was born in had a garden and or a farm and they had chickens and they had all kind of other stuff and we got disconnected with a lot of that when we came to the north and became as my grandmother would call city fight you know and so becoming certified we weren't touching the soil we weren't feeling the healing values that come out of the soil and we were not utilizing the things that have grown in the soil to heal our body and I hope that 50 years from now we will go we will see that people have gone back to that and that they are utilizing the earth as God intended it to be you know and and and and and living a better quality of life that is my whole that is my dreams. I mean we have everything that we need and it's really simple and life can be so less complicated if you just appreciate those simple things that we have readily accessible to us so yeah. I have a lot of freedom dreams guys so I'm going to try to keep it short so that we're not here all day but what does it look like to so the first thing I said is it looks like long time residents of the city who were here before I don't know maybe before 2008 before the city got popular again before you know people wanted to redevelop it into what is it people started calling it like a blank slate all these mildly offensive terms people were using all people who were there before that I hope that in my freedom dream I see them being taken care of right so number one like city services that are working the way we want them to be working jobs provided to people that are paying living wages ideally right or every single person this told dream every single person has health care and benefits you know Switzerland just move their minimum wage up to 25 dollars an hour like we could hit you know $17 something like that local businesses right some money being spent being spent in being spent at businesses that are also in our community and then going being paid out to owners and employees that are living in our communities also what else does that look like it looks like everyone having a home it looks like food access right looks like more fresh food it looks like more Detroit cultivators it looks like more of the avenue urban farms around the city it looks like people valuing the voice of children and listening to them more and what they have to say as well as our elders and probably more if I kept thinking but I would say that's a starting point you just heard Whitley Grandbury an attorney at the Detroit Justice Center and Jerry Hebron who runs Oakland Ave Urban Farm in Detroit's North End. 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