Our mission is to strengthen the solidarity economy movement in New Orleans, centering Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, prioritizing people and planet over profit. We do this by organizing educational resources, honoring people’s stories, base building, and technical assistance that supports building economic alternatives to meet our needs.​

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Solidarity and Cooperation come from the Black and Indigenous practice of collective work to meet collective needs. Cooperation can look like community childcare, feeding one another, pooling together our resources to meet our needs, practicing mutual aid in our daily lives or in the face of a disaster, owning our own work through a cooperative business, and so on.  Cooperative businesses and projects use practices that our communities have been using for centuries, along with the7 Cooperative Principles to allow workers to have ownership of their work, and ultimately care for themselves and others.

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Solidarity economies center the needs of a region or community over monetary gain. Part of building a solidarity economy movement is shifting our expectations as working class people of how the economy is a resource that should benefit us--not exploit us--and that we can work in alignment with our values without sacrificing our basic needs.

Fueled by the brilliance, needs, and offers of our base of Black and Indigenous working New Orleanians, the movement thrives off of an ecosystemic relationship amongst workers, small businesses and local marketplaces, non-profits, mutual aid groups and other solidarity economy practitioners, community leaders and educators, donors and resourced allies, and our regional/national coalition partners.

See some of the groups and coops we consider a part of our ecosystem below.

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Check out our resource library to learn more about the Solidarity Economy movement, and click here to see how you can get involved.