NYC's Solidarity Economy: Lessons and Challenges w/ Lauren Hudson
Channel: Half Past Capitalism
Date: 2021-02-09

Half Past Capitalism Episode 002 – NYC's Solidarity Economy Movement 

Dru talks to Lauren Hudson, an organizer with SolidarityNYC, feminist geographer, PhD grad and lecturer at John Jay College (full bio below). She discusses her direct experience of capitalism, the differences in pandemic response among solidarity economy institutions she's involved in, effects of cooperation on family and kinship structures, and theories of the state – among other topics. (The continuous interventions from the one-year-old in the background are due to thin walls in the host's apartment.)

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Highlights:

0:00:45 - What was your most recent experience of capitalism? Discussion of Lauren's experience working at a university, and the acute stress of the pandemic
0:09:49 - SolidarityNYC and the creation of CEANYC
0:17:20 - Central Brooklyn Food Co-op organizing
0:21:30 - Contrast with Park Slope Food Co-op
0:35:40 - How cooperative structures reshape family and kinship networks
0:41:30 - Housing cooperatives and gentrification -- how it's complicated
0:43:50 - "Cut-rate welfare state for poor people through cooperation"
0:47:38 - Popular education work in CEANYC -- beyond business development skills
0:55:00 - How does a solidarity economy movement relate to the state?
1:00:50 - Get the money and keep the analysis!
1:04:30 - What's on the horizon? (Being a critical actor; building movement capacity; the meaning of "solidarity economy" being eroded)
1:08:00 - Build solidarity with people who are close by

More info:

• Solidarity NYC on the web: http://solidaritynyc.org/
• Solidarity NYC on Twitter: https://twitter.com/solidaritynyc
• CEANYC on the web: https://gocoopnyc.com/
• Lauren on Twitter: https://twitter.com/blactivist

Lauren Hudson is a recent Ph.D in earth and environmental sciences at the City University of New York-Graduate Center. Her dissertation, "Defining 'Movement Space' in New York City's Solidarity Economy," is an ethnographic project about women who engage in collective forms of labor throughout the city. Using both interviews and sketch maps from participants, her research asks how in doing such work - which includes cooperative finance, community gardens, and food cooperatives - women are redrawing the boundaries of the city and creating a movement geography based on collective values.

Lauren is also a peer educator with the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York, an organization that she and other collective members of SolidarityNYC, a solidarity economy advocacy organization, co-founded. She is a lecturer with ThinkOlio, were she teaches subjects related to feminist urban geography, and an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College. She lives in Brooklyn.