A Prototype School for
the Solidarity Economy:

Chicago Students

Meet With Italian

Worker Coop Leader

Austin High School
Chicago IL
January, 2008

Solidarity with New Orleans

More than 200 protesters crowded the street in front of Dianne Feinstein's estate Saturday afternoon calling for an end to disaster capitalism and neo-liberalism New Orleans, Louisiana.

Protesters were participating in the World Social Forum's Global Day of Action, which brings together national and international movements for human rights, economic and social justice and was part many of nationwide solidarity actions for Gulf Coast recovery.

Empowerment for Girls:

Kibera Girls Soccer

Academy in Kenya’s

Worse Slum

By Shaun Lamory

March 6, 2008

The recent eruption of violence in Kenya has put the country in the international spotlight. Over 250,000 people were displaced, over 1,000 people were killed, homes were burnt to the ground, and countless livelihoods were destroyed. However, now that some sense of peace has been restored, the gruesome face of urban poverty continues to be an acceptable norm throughout Kenya. Kibera is the largest slum in Kenya and the second largest in the world. Amidst Kibera's deplorable living conditions, local residents created the Kibera Girls Soccer Academy to provide female youth with the tools to empower themselves both physically and intellectually in a world where girls often have the least opportunities and face the starkest futures.

King's Legacy Grows

Green In Memphis

By Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello, and Brendan Smith

Portside.org
March 31, 2008

Today they'd be called "green-collar jobs" cleaning up the environment. Back then, the workers who performed those jobs were just garbage men. And they were treated like garbage. Martin Luther King, Jr. died fighting to make their green-collar jobs be good jobs.

On the 40th anniversary of King's assassination, the green-collar jobs group Green for All is bringing people from all over the country to Memphis, Tennessee April 4-6 for The Dream Reborn, a celebration of the life of Dr. King -- and a call to create millions of good green-collar jobs as a pathway out of poverty.

The Dream Reborn will "bring together a generation of new leaders who are taking on the chief moral obligation of the 21st century, building a green economy for all."

Photo: Brazil's Landless
Farmers Meet Venezuela Coop
Sugar Workers' Coop
Supports 4,300
Families at 48 Mills
By Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 11 (IPS) - The Harmony Agricultural Company has become Brazil’s largest worker-managed business in the solidarity economy. It provides employment for 4,300 families who work 26,000 hectares of land, and its main activity is producing sugar at 48 mills.

When the company was in crisis in 1993, the first reaction of the workers and their unions was the usual one of trying to ensure that the 2,300 workers who were dismissed received back pay and severance pay. But two years later, the unions took another approach.

Their goal was to win back the lost jobs and maintain the remaining ones, while continuing an activity essential to the economy of Catende, in the northeastern state of Pernambuco.

They applied for the owners of the company to be forced to declare bankruptcy, and took over the firm’s administration, under the supervision of the justice system. Since then, they have resumed sugar production and diversified into other agricultural and industrial activities.

Photo: Denise Obregon, Sewing Cooperativista

Venezuela's Experiments
in the Solidarity Economy

By Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Nov 17 (IPS) - "I used to be a buhonera (street vendor), but I got tired of working in all weather conditions, rain or shine, so I joined the Venezuela Avanza (Venezuela Advances) cooperative. Here I earn less money and the heat in the warehouse is stifling, but we hope our working conditions will improve with time," Ana Ortiz, a mother of seven, told IPS as she sat at her sewing machine.

State-financed cooperatives are mushrooming in Venezuela, hand-in-hand with the boom in oil prices, and are supposed to be laying the foundations of a new socioeconomic model. However, some weaknesses are showing through, such as the creation of "phantom cooperatives" and a lack of self-financing.

Building Alternatives

for People and Planet

Edited by Jenna Allard,
Carl Davidson and Julie Matthaei

ChangeMaker Publications.
pp. 427, $25.00.

http://www.lulu.com/changemaker

Review by Jerry Harris
Global Studies Association

We finally have a book that gives a clear and partisan voice to the solidarity economy. While not so widely known within the continental U.S., this important and growing movement has deep historic roots in the international experience of cooperative economics, especially in the third world. It has especially gained in strength and depth over the last two decades.

The movement covers a broad range of alternatives in the realm of political economy that promote the social control of capital. It has no one platform or framework; rather, it has grown in opposition to the hardships caused by neoliberalism and "low road, race-to-the-bottom" capitalism.

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