The Future Of Work Events Calendar (2024)

Wednesday, May 15, 2024 at 06:00 PM PDT · 26 rsvps

Virtual, Pre-recorded

Capitalism separated the physical location of waged work and unwaged work. The idea of the home, the idea of the private family household, and zoning law cemented this division. When we care for waged work, we care for its governance, for its ownership, for its internal workings. If we’re to care for unwaged work, then we have to care about something else: the home - its location, its architecture, and its ownership; the family - its private nature, its relation to inheritance, its privilege in property ownership. What insights does adopting a holistic “labor” approach focused on both waged and unwaged “labor” afford us at the Law Center? What are the movement and legal tools we feel are immediately available to us?

This discussion will be pre-recorded and made available to the public via Youtube on Wednesday May 15th. RSVP to the event to get the video direct to your email inbox!

Facilitator:

Ari Pomerantz

At the Law Center, Ari's work focuses on land and housing, specifically working with groups that are liberating land and creating homes and healing spaces for unhoused and BIPOC people. He's drawn to this work through his relationships with elders who've spent their lives providing mutual aid, housing others, and bringing people together around warm meals.

Participants:

Jay Cumberland

Jay believes political theory, social movement theory, and an international perspective must inform his work supporting housing cooperative conversions and worker cooperative conversions. These conversions are, after all, political exercises happening in social spaces around the globe. Learning about Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi somewhat immediately propelled Jay into this work. He believes there’s a thick relationship between that introduction to cooperative economics and politics and the way he approaches his present work. Jay’s approach finds less excitement in creating things from scratch than in making existing things different. In a world without unoccupied political space, he believes it is not only exciting but also necessary to learn to travel through what exists to arrive at our imagined futures.

Mwende Hinojosa

Mwende is leading the Law Center’s effort to refine and envision the story of the Law Center. She coordinates the Law Centers social media channels, newsletter, and blog and co-manages the Law Center's online educational materials and website. She holds operational roles in the Internal Resilience, Abundance, and Finance Circles. She also contributes to programmatic work within the Food and Farm Circle.

Veryl Pow

Veryl aspires to be, in the words of Joy James, a “guerrilla” teacher and scholar. Veryl’s politics developed from his grassroots organizing experiences in Seattle around Palestine and Third World solidarity, abolition, and anti-austerity campaigns; and refined through his rebellious lawyering experiences in South Los Angeles around traffic court debt. As a teacher of law, Veryl challenges his students to critique black letter legal doctrines in their origins and material outcomes, while simultaneously reimagine and repurpose the law towards collective liberation. His scholarly musings center on racial capitalism, critical race theory, and destituent power.

A lawyer by training, Veryl’s conception of movement lawyering has been inspired by his tenure in Baltimore, where grassroots community members have creatively and resiliently built urban farms, cooperatives, and community land trusts in response to neoliberal conditions of disinvestment, immiseration, and death.

The Future of Work: Nourishing Life Giving Labor Sponsors

rsvp

Wednesday, May 22, 2024 at 11:00 AM PDT · 42 rsvps

Virtual

Many worker self-directed nonprofits draw inspiration from the quote, which I first heard from Gopal Dayaneni formerly with Movement Generation, that "If we are not prepared to govern, we are not prepared to win." However, simply preparing ourselves to govern in our 501c3 nonprofit organizations won't necessarily produce "wins" on a movement scale. Why does practicing worker self-direction matter in this political moment?

Join representatives from seven worker self-directed nonprofits to explore this question and others, as we consider the liberatory potential, challenges, and limitations of worker self-direction in this movement moment. What does worker self-direction teach us about ourselves and our movement organizations? What does it teach us about what is needed to build the more beautiful world we know is possible?

This is part two of a discussion series co-hosted with Nonprofit Quarterly, based on the recently released article "Want Democratic Leadership at Your Nonprofit? Here Are Some Do’s and Don’ts" and the accompany case studies created by Faye Christoforo, researcher with the Nonprofit Democracy Network. Register for Part One, hosted by NPQ, here.

Bring your own questions for a lively, engaged discussion!

Nicole Wires

Nicole Wires (she/her) was born on Arapahoe, Cheyenne and Ute land in the beautiful Rocky Mountains and is a mountain creature through and through. The majority of her political awakening happened on Ohlone land, through prison abolition, anti-mass incarceration, and racial justice movement organizing with the movement for Black lives, the Anti-Police Terror Project, DefundOPD, and the Bay Area Solidarity Action Team.

After spending ten years supporting folks returning from San Quentin Prison at Planting Justice, Nicole comes to SELC to facilitate collective self-governance to dismantle the Nonprofit Industrial Complex with the Nonprofit Democracy Network. To this role she brings a passion and curiosity for individual and collective transformation through trauma healing, spiritual fortification, a deep read and grassroots scholarship of our movement histories, and the ongoing exercise of our radical imaginations.

The Future of Work: Nourishing Life Giving Labor Sponsors

rsvp

Thursday, May 23, 2024 at 10:00 AM PDT · $5.00 USD · 2 rsvps

Virtual

This MCLE examines how cooperatives led by incarcerated individuals can serve as a transformative abolitionist strategy. The workshop will delve into the California Prison Industry Authority's (CALPIA) Joint Venture Program, as well as efforts to draft legislation supportive of these cooperatives. We will also examine case studies and examples from around the world of models of incarcerated-led cooperatives, illustrating their effectiveness in societal benefits, and reduced recidivism. The panel will include Kelton O'Connor from Earth Equity, currently imprisoned in San Quentin, who will highlight the work being done to create cooperatives at San Quentin and the critical intersection of law, economic empowerment, and social justice.

If you need Spanish Language interpretation, please email Hope ([emailprotected]) with Subject Line "Interpretation Request - for [mm/dd/yyyy] event." We will do our best to accommodate your request.

This activity has been approved for 1 MCLE credit by the California Bar.

Hasmik Geghamyam
Hasmik Geghamyan has joined the Sustainable Economies Law Center as a Staff Attorney, deepening her relationship with the organization where she has been a fellow since 2014 and the Board's Secretary since 2020. An interdisciplinary and community-focused lawyer, Hasmik's practice areas include democratic transitions of land into various models of community ownership, general labor law compliance, and services tailored to cooperatives, small democratically-led businesses, and nonprofits. She believes that a cross-functional model of activism, policy, organizing, and law, led by frontline communities, can be effectively used to bring about a just and ecological society.

Kelton O'Connor
Kelton O’Connor is an incarcerated person who writes about the modern day asylum, the friends he has made in these places, and a range of public policy issues. He is a co-founder of Earth Equity, Ambassador of Food Policy for The People In Blue (T-PIB), and the creator of the Diabetes Justice Workshop curriculum – a course designed to help incarcerated people explore links between healing foods and healing the planet. He is also the author of the Right 2 Heal (R2H) Strategy, a food justice proposal he was invited to submit as part of T-PIB’s advisory report to California Governor Gavin Newsom’s current prison reform project.

Ricardo Nuñez

Veryl Pow

Veryl aspires to be, in the words of Joy James, a “guerrilla” teacher and scholar. Veryl’s politics developed from his grassroots organizing experiences in Seattle around Palestine and Third World solidarity, abolition, and anti-austerity campaigns; and refined through his rebellious lawyering experiences in South Los Angeles around traffic court debt. As a teacher of law, Veryl challenges his students to critique black letter legal doctrines in their origins and material outcomes, while simultaneously reimagine and repurpose the law towards collective liberation. His scholarly musings center on racial capitalism, critical race theory, and destituent power.

A lawyer by training, Veryl’s conception of movement lawyering has been inspired by his tenure in Baltimore, where grassroots community members have creatively and resiliently built urban farms, cooperatives, and community land trusts in response to neoliberal conditions of disinvestment, immiseration, and death.

The Future of Work: Nourishing Life Giving Labor Sponsors

rsvp