COOPERATION
BE THE PATH
Jessica Gordon-Nembhard on abolition and why incarceration can’t stop collective courage.
ISSUE 1: THE UN/MAKING ISSUE
Jessica Gordon Nembhard: My research interests include community economics, cooperative economics, and Black political economy. I also study how practices and theories in these fields intersect with Black feminist critical theory—all in service of community-based economic development. I consider myself an engaged and applied scholar: I use and explore knowledge for it to be of service to society, to help us move forward, to make the kinds of changes we need to make. I also use participatory action research to collaborate with those most impacted by racial and economic exploitation, and to learn from those who are engaged in movement- and institution-building in the solidarity economy, cooperative economics, and economic and racial justice movements—particularly in the worker co-op sector. My interactions with practitioners and activists inspire shared research agendas and choices of methodologies.
How did you arrive at cooperation as the bedrock of your research?
I actually am self-taught in community economics and cooperative/solidarity economics. I got interested in community-level economics when I got a job with the Children’s Defense Fund [a Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit organization] after earning my PhD in economics. I was hired as the economic development analyst for their national Black Community Crusade for Children in the 1990s, working out of the headquarters in Washington, D.C. My task there was to explore community-based economic development strategies that were family- and children-friendly. That includes community and cooperative ownership of businesses and housing, social entrepreneurship, community-owned affordable child care, affordable family-size housing, community-based youth development, community involvement in public education, local initiatives for family-friendly living wages and/or universal guaranteed income, etc.
Studying and learning about community-controlled economic development led me to look at different ownership structures—community ownership and cooperative ownership, in particular—for housing and businesses. I started going to co-op conferences and workshops; I asked a colleague of mine who had studied [W.E.B.] Du Bois’s co-op thought when we were in grad school about cooperative economics; I learned everything I could. I was involved in the US Social Forum movement, which came out of the World Social Forums from Brazil, and then became a national movement.1 The first US Social Forum was in Atlanta [in 2007]. A group of us from worker co-op and economic justice organizations formed the Solidarity Economy Working Group. Our goal was to support the US Social Forum with workshops focused more specifically on economic justice, not just socio-political liberation. In addition to workshops on local control, anti-imperialism, political democracy, social justice rights, and human rights already planned for the US Social Forum, our Solidarity Economy Working Group added a track of workshops focused on solidarity economics, community-controlled economic development, and worker co-ops.2 At that first US Social Forum, our caucus agreed to form the US Solidarity Economy Network.3
My interest in co-op development as a community economic development strategy got me more and more involved in the solidarity economy. I joined a North American collective of activists, researchers, and educators called Grassroots Economic Organizing, which had been involved with starting the US solidarity economy sector, and I started working with other practitioners to found the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy, so that worker co-ops and their supporters in the Eastern region of the US could learn together and start to exchange best practices that they could bring back to their communities or co-ops. The Eastern Conference, together with the Western Worker Co-op Conference, ended up putting together activities and a national conference that led to the formation of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives.4
While I was involved as a scholar-activist, practitioner, and institution builder, I was listening to where the research needs were in the movement. One need was to understand the roles of Black folks in the US cooperative movement and to find contemporary and historical examples of Black co-ops—ones established, owned, and operated by a majority of Black people. Almost no other Black people were involved with me in the co-op movement in the 1990s, except for staff of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, who showed up mostly at rural conferences or when there was a convening in the South. I had not yet found Black urban cooperators. So we didn't know other Black folks were in the co-op movement in Northeast, West, or Midwest; and no one in the co-op movement was talking about the Black co-op movement or could tell me anything about it when I asked. So two and a half decades ago I took it upon myself to research all of this, and I became one of the experts on the Black co-op movement in the US. That led me to other research about the benefits of co-ops to communities, community wealth creation through cooperatives, and credit unions as community assets.
That’s why I say I do participatory action research. I’m involved in the actions of practitioners, but I also study the things that the practitioners say: Can we claim that? How do we explain that? I go back and do the research, and then the research feeds into the action. For me, it’s kind of seamless. I call myself a scholar-activist or an activist-scholar because the scholarship and the activism really go together. It’s all part of the same thing, which is to use knowledge to help transform society to do better, be better.
We engage in economics to solve the problems of survival, and we do that best by sharing the risks, opportunities, and the successes.
I may have started my Black co-op movement investigations by myself, but very quickly I was joined by many different colleagues and friends on this journey and in this movement, to explore and study urban and worker cooperatives, and especially to understand and promote Black co-ops—all as part of solidarity economics. For example, for more than twenty years I’ve been assisted by and have collaborated with staff and members of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund.5 Several years ago the Partnership Fund along with The National Black Food and Justice Alliance and Piece by Piece Strategies created the Collective Courage Fund to support policy advocacy among Black land and food security co-ops, 6 And now there is the emerging National Association of Black Cooperators. In addition, all my colleagues at Grassroots Economic Organizing [GEO], the collective I am part of, disseminate information and convene conference sessions about worker co-ops and the solidarity economy.7 Through such organizations, I’ve met and learned from cooperators throughout the US, especially localized worker co-op networks.8
Among many other influential individuals, one of my colleagues and friends at Grassroots Economic Organizing is Ajowa Nzinga Ifateyo, who is also a worker co-op peer developer, and co-founder of the Ella Jo Baker Intentional Community Housing Co-op [in Washington, D.C.]. Curtis Haynes, the person I turned to when I started this research, is a Black co-op theorist, practitioner, and consultant, and an economics professor at Buffalo State University, who teaches democratic economics to high school students. I met him when we were graduate students together in the Economics PhD program [at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst].9
Let’s talk about the theme of this magazine, un-making. You were excited when you heard about it—you said, this is exactly what I want to talk about. Does it elicit any questions?
Lately I’ve been feeling the urgency to talk more openly and directly about how traumatizing capitalism is and why it’s both important and natural for us to do that remaking. To me, the Sankofa image is one of remaking: We’re looking forward, but we’re also looking back. I feel that one of the contributions I have made is that, through Collective Courage, [Black communities] can look back and say, “Oh, we were able to organize cooperatively.” We were right, even when we were enslaved, to assert our humanity however we could. We didn’t own our own bodies, but we gardened together, we helped each other feed our children and bury our dead properly through mutual aid and collective activity. We figured out ways to be human.
Even under Jim Crow, we worked together. We sometimes disengaged from that horribly exploitative economy and created our own organizations and businesses, and defended ourselves as best we could. We created the kind of society we wanted to be in. Even in the sixties, when we were fighting for civil rights and everyone was focused on voting rights, some of us were engaging, again, in cooperative economics, collective activities to help us model the kind of world we want to live in. And to show that it’s not just about political rights; it’s about economic justice as well—and addressing our economic needs in collective and democratic ways.
So as we remake things, we can look back and see where and how, under the worst conditions or sometimes worse conditions than we’re in now, we were still able to do these things because we’re human beings. And that’s the other thing that I’ve been stressing so much: Under capitalism, we [are conditioned to] forget that we’re human beings because capitalism strips us of that. It alienates us from that. For me, the only way we’re going to move forward is if we remember that we’re human beings and that human beings work together, love together, and help each other. We engage in economics to solve the problems of survival, and we do that best by sharing the risks, opportunities, and the successes.
I’m trying to turn our thoughts around because, again, capitalism has so stifled us. We just think about making money to survive in this world—we think that we can’t all get it, but I’ll by God get my little piece. That’s not how human beings operate. That’s not how we operated in the past. Capitalism is a new system in human history; it’s only 400 years old at most. We’ve been alive as human beings for, what, millions of years? [laughter] Or at least thousands of years. Much of what we did in all those years before capitalism, especially the very early years, was about collectivity: working together, helping each other, sharing, providing mutual aid. We’ve been doing it all throughout capitalism as best we can.
So I love talking now about us regaining our understanding of economic cooperation and solidarity, looking at all the everyday solidarity economic activities we do as family members, as human beings, as members of communities. And realizing that we can expand that to more formal and bigger economic activities to create the world we want to create. And that world can help us with environmental sustainability, because capitalism has also ruined our planet. It exploits human beings, and it exploits natural resources. Right now, we have to address both [types of exploitation]. And again, solidarity and cooperative economics addresses both of those things. So this theme of “un-making” is right in line with my thinking about how we have to take control over the power of language to remind ourselves of who we are, why we’re here, what we want to do, and why it matters.
For incarcerated people, the primary justice issue is that they are still enslaved.
The next frontier I’ve been doing my own research on is for incarcerated and previously incarcerated workers. My college, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has a prison-to-college pipeline program [in which passing students can attend CUNY upon release], and I’ve had the privilege of teaching in one of the New York State prisons. John Jay is known as a criminal justice school and a police college, even though the school focuses more generally on teaching for justice.
For incarcerated people, the primary justice issue is that they are still enslaved. The Thirteenth Amendment says slavery is abolished—except as punishment for those convicted of crimes—meaning people who are in prison can be enslaved. Figuring out strategies for what we do on the way to abolish such a system is crucial. What liberatory changes can we make with incarcerated people while we work on larger-scale abolition projects?
I have been finding information about worker co-ops inside prisons, totally owned by incarcerated people themselves. Being a worker-owner makes a meaningful difference, even while you're behind bars and technically a slave. It can humanize you, help you provide income for your families, change the way you connect with other people, and even shift how you approach your years in prison. When I interview previous members about what a difference it made for them while they were behind bars, they talk about it changing their lives, not just economically, but even spiritually and psychosocially. We know that previously incarcerated workers have a difficult time finding jobs and not being exploited, so we have to foster cooperative ownership with previously incarcerated people once they’re out.
With incarcerated workers’ co-ops, how do they or can they arise? And what are the added snares or tangles that might come with trying to implement co-ops in prison systems?
The examples I’ve been drawing on are the Mekelle Prison Project in [the state of Tigray in] northern Ethiopia, and four or five prisons in Puerto Rico, inside which incarcerated people have organized workers’ co-ops with support from La Liga de Cooperativas de Puerto Rico. I have the most information about Cooperativa de Servicios ARIGOS,10 some of whose former members I have interviewed.
These co-ops each started differently. In Mekelle Prison, the administration embarked on a project to empower women and youth in their prisons in 201211 by providing general education, financial education, and economic opportunity. They ended up creating a partnership with Dedebit Credit and Savings Institution and the International Labour Organization’s office in Ethiopia, and then they consulted with the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation,12 because Italy had been pioneering a social co-op model where incarcerated people were allowed to become members.13 The social co-ops in Italy, however, were not wholly owned by incarcerated people, nor did they solely operate in the prisons. Instead, they operated largely outside of prisons. Prisoners were considered part of a disadvantaged population that was targeted for social co-op employment and membership to support them, both while they were incarcerated and once they were released.
The Mekelle Prison got advice from the Italians on how they were working with prisoners, but they went further by helping incarcerated members start, run, and own their own co-ops. Essentially, the prison became a co-op developer. And that included training some of their corrections officers and guards to provide co-op education—specifically in business and co-op economics—to prisoners. They allowed their financial partner to have a branch in the prison to fund the new co-ops that their incarcerated members were creating. They also allowed their incarcerated members to communicate with the outside world once they formed a co-op. So they had customers, which is also an exemption, because most prisoners can’t have any real contact with the outside world—especially not to conduct financial business. Those released from Mekelle Prison could reverse-commute back to the prison to keep working in their co-op. This model enabled a seamless relationship between people and their co-ops, regardless of whether they were in or out of prison.
Being a worker-owner makes a meaningful difference, even while you're behind bars and technically a slave. It can humanize you, help you provide income for your families, change the way you connect with other people, and even shift how you approach your years in prison.
They requested cooperative economics business education, and luckily the Puerto Rican League of Cooperatives sent them a free educator, so they were able to learn enough about how to legally incorporate. But they found out that Puerto Rican law had a clause that said if you were incarcerated or previously incarcerated, you could not be in a co-op, especially not on the board of a co-op. So they ended up having to petition the governor at the time and the state assembly to get rid of that clause, and the governor was responsive and worked with the legislature to amend the law.
They were then able to incorporate their own co-op in 2003, Cooperativa de Servicios ARIGOS. The co-op signed an MOU [Memorandum of Understanding, a nonbinding formal agreement] with the prison to pay for all the services they were using—the electricity, an office, and a room to do their art—in return for about fifteen to twenty-five percent of the co-op’s revenue. They even bought their own supplies once they sold their first few sculptures.
The other thing that’s really fascinating about this model is how the co-op community in Puerto Rico supported them, not just with the free educator from the league, but also with establishing connections. They got some free equipment, and most of their clients were members of Puerto Rican co-ops. Cooperativa ARIGOS sold their art at co-op meetings and through co-op contacts; they had a built-in clientele. They didn’t have to do a lot of marketing—so much so that the prison also allowed one or two of the members to go out with a guard (whom they paid extra for) so that they could attend those co-op meetings to sell their wares in person. It’s a really interesting model because of these connections and how they were able to win these exceptions.’’
In 2023, I was able to interview several of the past co-op presidents who are now out of prison. Both the Mekelle co-ops and the Cooperativa ARIGOS examples have very low recidivism rates, which is what criminal justice people care about. But I cared about what it meant for incarcerated workers to own their own businesses, to control their own work, and to work in a non-exploitative place, even though, as I said, at least in the US and Puerto Rico, they were considered slaves. And most of what these leaders talked about was not even the economic liberation it provided for them, but the spiritual and psychosocial benefits and transformations, and how wonderful it was to own their own business together with other like-minded people with similar experiences. They learned how to make joint decisions and be respectful of others. They talked about how important it was to see that there was a business model that was in service of the people—that’s how one interviewee put it. “We had a business model now that helped us relate better to each other,” is the way another interviewee put it.
One leader talked about how it felt to go to the co-op marketplaces to sell their goods. He said, “You know, when we were out there selling our wares at these co-ops, we were there as artists and as co-op leaders. We weren’t thieves; we weren’t degenerates. We saw ourselves differently, but they saw us differently also.” That brought tears to my eyes. You can’t replicate that sense of control, ownership, and being human beings again—and other people seeing them as human beings—by just allowing them to have a business in prison.
The first members of that artist co-op, while still incarcerated, then helped train some of the incarcerated people who were starting other co-ops, such as a sewing co-op in a women’s prison. The women’s co-op was much harder to form, because the women’s prisons have even less support for innovative programs. And then, just before COVID-19, they opened a café in another of the men’s prisons. This was really interesting because the café was outside the prison walls. The cafe worker-owners were allowed to leave the prison during the day to serve breakfast and lunch to non-inmates, and then go back into prison after work. Most of the café’s products were from other co-ops around Puerto Rico, and they also sold the crafts that the women’s sewing co-op made. So there were lots of interesting connections and support throughout that system.14 Unfortunately, all the co-ops in Puerto Rican prisons were closed down during COVID-19, and they haven’t been able to reopen again yet. So the new challenge is to get them reopened.
There are two connections for me when I hear about the worker co-ops inside prisons: I'm thinking of the impact on the guards and about communities here in the U.S. where, unfortunately, a prison might be the only industry in that community, so people will advocate for maintaining a prison—or even introducing a prison—in a community.
They get very excited about it. Yeah.
If, for example, people who see themselves as having a personal stake in maintaining this practice could be trained in other possibilities, that could lessen that stake. I’m also thinking about this notion of—again, in the US, because we’re not so sure about what the law says elsewhere—prisoners as enslaved people. This takes us back to what you talk about in your book Collective Courage, which is that even under enslavement, even under Jim Crow, our communities came together to cooperate, to survive, and to care for each other. It’s unfortunate, both historical and contemporary at the same time.
Absolutely. And the potential to do things differently, even under the most oppressive systems, right? That takes us back to Sankofa!
Right.
We’re looking and moving forward, but we’re looking backward also because we can see how it was done. We could certainly do things even better in the future, but we can at least see that these things are possible to do under the worst conditions.
In some ways we’re taking the bricks from these horrible death places that we call prisons and rebuilding worker co-ops and a worker co-op structure.
So let’s learn from what worked, learn from what didn’t work, keep moving forward, and do it better.
I want to get back to the issue about the guards and corrections officers. I found one article by Greg McElligott [a professor at Humber College in Ontario, Canada], who actually suggested that we should organize prison guards to have their own worker co-ops.15 Wouldn’t having them in a worker co-op be better, if we have to have prison guards at all? Because worker co-ops can teach you about democracy, about learning how to work humanely, about respecting each other, etc. So what if they were members of worker co-ops? And that made me think back to the Mekelle Prison in Ethiopia—what if they were not just in co-ops, but were also co-op developers? What if their job was not guarding the bodies, but guarding and protecting the people’s right to economic justice and to create worker co-ops, and helping them to create worker co-ops? It could really help us rethink what a prison needs or doesn’t need to be—as I said earlier in this interview, on the way to abolishment. How could we do this without a prison? And meanwhile, how could we do it while we’re still imprisoning people, on the way to figuring out new strategies for how to abolish the prison-industrial complex?
So I do think there are lots of possibilities in all these pieces: if the prison officers and guards are in their own worker co-ops, if they’re helping incarcerated people create worker co-ops, and if the incarcerated people are in worker co-ops. All the different exploitative structures are being unbuilt and unmade. So that’s another reason why I feel like this is the frontier. In some ways we’re taking the bricks from these horrible death places that we call prisons and rebuilding worker co-ops and a worker co-op structure. Even if we’re using the same bricks from the old building, we’re making a different structure.
I appreciate that you said “on the way to abolition” earlier, because as you were talking about the prison worker co-ops, the initial thought I had was, here’s a situation where it seems like we’re starting off with economic justice. And then we have to think about a policy component that fully realizes that, including behind the walls. Because we’re talking about incarceration, and we already know all the reasons why the way we do incarceration in the US, and quite possibly incarceration in general, is an issue. So you already answered that part for me—that fully-realized policy component would be abolition, moving beyond the prison system.
Abolition, yes. And I’ve been struggling with that. Because when I first started talking about these co-op ideas, some abolitionists didn’t even want to talk about it because they felt like it was just a reform; it was just going to make prison more livable. And I was having trouble with that, because I still really believe in the strategy as being transformative and humanizing for people, whether in or out of prison. Then I learned about the notion of non-reformist reforms that can take us on the road to abolition, that can show us the way to some aspects of reaching abolition.16 And I feel like this is an example of a non-reformist reform because I also believe, like Ella Jo Baker, that we have to figure out how to deal with people’s immediate needs as we’re transforming the system and fighting for change.
So for me, this is a way to do that. Yes, it’s a reform, in that we’re addressing some immediate needs, but it should be a non-reformist reform. So I just started using the language of “on the road to abolition.” Actually, you might be the first one I’ve said that to specifically.
I really believe that this could help us move toward abolition. But we have to be deliberate about it, right? It’s not going to automatically move us toward abolition, but it can. We can use worker ownership as an anchor for how we change the experiences of incarcerated people. Using worker co-ops, we might not need cages, for example. If we start with a non-exploitative model of how people relate to each other, and allow that human dignity, then we can remake prisons so we can abolish them.
You’ve been talking about this throughout, but it feels appropriate to end on how we might re-center our conversations about work and labor toward joy and love.
Capitalism has ruined us in terms of our understanding of labor and work. Capitalism makes us hate work. We hate to go to work, hate to do what is called work. And yet to me, especially when I study economic solidarity and cooperative activities, work is really what sustains us. If we don’t produce or do work or expend human energy, we can’t survive physically. We have to do work to find food, to make food, to share food to eat, to take care of our children, right? That’s all work, whether it’s caring, sustaining, or substance work. But we hate all of it because it’s under capitalist control and our work is exploited. And that’s not right.
We’re not going to be good members of worker co-ops if we hate work and if we see labor as something we’re not supposed to do. But if we see labor as how we expend human energy to provide and produce—materially, spiritually, culturally—and see that we’re doing it together, it’s not a chore. It solves our everyday survival challenges. It activates our creativity to do more than just survive. It helps us help our families and neighbors to thrive.
I found one study that said that human beings develop endorphins from cooperating.17 And who doesn’t want endorphins? The more we cooperate, they found, the stronger and more long-lasting the endorphins. So to me, that means that if we can solve this issue about how to cooperate, we will be developing joy. Humans are social beings; we want to be around other people. If we’re doing it not for “the man” nor the dollar, but for humanity—to develop us all for the common good—we can create abundance for all, live better, so Mother Nature can survive. If we’re joyous and joyful about working together, that will also mean more of us will want to be in these kinds of organizations that allow us to enjoy our work and enjoy being together. Which means more and more co-ops will be starting, and people will be demanding policies to support them. However, if we just see co-ops as a stopgap measure—a slight improvement to "working for the man"—I don't think it's going to be a sustainable model.
We need to not just talk about how cooperation helps us to produce better, give ourselves a little bit better income, and give back to our families, but also about how it’s going to help us be better and more happy human beings. I think that, in the long run, is what’s going to get us further, in starting and sustaining co-ops and in creating more and more of them. Part of that larger transition to the just economy is paying attention not just to self-determination, democratization, production for our needs, and ecological sustainability, but finding ways to humanize work, to make it joyful. That’s where the real sustainability is going to come from.
1. Rooted in the longer legacy of people’s assemblies and participatory democracy in Brazil, emanating from Porto Alegre (a city that led the first participatory budgeting initiative in 1989), the World Social Forum first met in Porto Alegre in 2001 to oppose neoliberal economic development as led by international financial institutions like the World Bank/IMF, in the wake of successful organizing against free trade agreements meant to serve such imperial, dominative, and exploitative measures. The World Social Forum held a variety of organizing interests, including anti-war imperial action and worker cooperative development. The US Social Forum took up a similarly wide variety of issues (with less initial emphasis on economic democracy).
2. Solidarity economics focuses on all forms of values-based people-centered economic activity and entrepreneurship that is democratic, inclusive, caring, and collective; that addresses all kinds of oppressions to reduce power inequities; that is environmentally friendly and focused on the grassroots; and that operates against neo-liberal and capitalist economics and politics. Community-controlled economic development is an aspect of solidarity economics that focuses on local economic development owned and controlled by community members with the purpose of strengthening the community and improving people’s lives (people over profit). Co-ops, especially worker cooperatives, are a type of solidarity economic enterprise focused on collective democratic ownership, where owners are members who join together to solve an economic challenge through joint ownership of, and democratic decision-making for, a local business; this is more focused on addressing needs and giving back to the community than on making a profit. Worker co-ops are cooperatively owned businesses whose members are all workers/employees of the company. In other types of co-ops, the members may be consumers who use/need the goods or services of the enterprise (like housing or food or banking) for access to more affordable and higher quality goods and services; or members may be the producers, like farmers or artisans who form a co-op to get better prices for their products, to more easily market or distribute their products, or get fairer access to supplies.
3. US Solidarity Economy Network website: www.ussen.org.
4. US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC) website: www.usworker.coop
5. Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund (FSCLAF) website: www.federation.coop
6. The Collective Courage Fund website:
https://www.thepartnershipfund.net/project-1-the-collective-courage-fund.
7. Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) website: www.geo.coop.
8. This also includes Organizing Neighborhood Equity in Washington, DC (www.onedconline.org) and co-op developers at Green Worker Cooperatives (www.greenworker.coop), as well as the NCBA’s Committee on Cooperative Economics. Internationally, co-op educators meet through the Association of Cooperative Educators (www.ace.coop), the Canadian Association for Studies in Co-operation, the International Co-operative Business Education Consortium (https://www.smu.ca/iccm/partnerships/icbec/), and the International Cooperative Alliance Committee on Cooperative Research.
9. I also have several Black co-op lawyer colleagues who have taught me a lot and work with me: the late Clark Arrington, who was at the Working World before he joined the ancestors; Renee Hatcher, professor in the UIC law school; Jerome Hughes, professor at University of the District of Columbia Law school; and Julian Hill, professor at Georgia State University Law School. Other influential colleagues and collaborators include Ed Whitfield, formerly with the Fund for Democratic Communities and the Southern Reparations Loan Funds, now with Seed Commons; Stacey Sutton, a co-op and solidarity economics scholar/activist and professor of Urban Planning at University of Illinois, Chicago; L. A. Simons, a member of Columinate Consulting Co-op and co-director of the Georgia Cooperative Development Center, who started the “women in cooperation” dialogues and podcasts; Caroline S. Hossein at the University of Toronto; Lou Hammond Ketilson and Isabel Findlay at the University of Saskatchewan; and Judith Harris at the University of Winnipeg.
10. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, “How Prisoner Co-ops Reduce Recidivism: Lessons from Puerto Rico and Beyond,” Nonprofit Quarterly, 2020.
11. Flaminia Battistelli, “Italy and ILO for empowerment of Mekelle inmates,” Tigrai Online, 2013.
12. Teddy Studio et al., “The Mekelle Prison Project: Creating sustainable livelihood opportunities for women and youth,” International Labour Organization Country Office for Ethiopia and Somalia, 2013.
13. The Giotto social cooperative began work at the Due Palazzi Prison Of Padua in 1990, and more social cooperatives with an emphasis on incarcerated membership followed; the model of social cooperatives in Italy functions to integrate disadvantaged populations into the labor market. From Andrea Perrone et al., “Working and Forgiveness Behind Bars: Giotto in the Due Palazzi Prison of Padua,” Percorsi Di Secondo Welfare, 2015.
14. For more about co-op ecosystem support for incarcerated worker co-ops, see this recently published article: Gordon-Nembhard, Jessica, and Esther West “Ecosystem Supports for Incarcerated Worker Co-ops,” International Review of Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis, 2024.
15. McElligott, Greg. (2018). “Beyond service, beyond coercion?: Prisoner co-ops and the path to democratic administration,” in Gray, P.C. (ed.),
From the Streets to the State: Changing the World by Taking Power,
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018)
16. See, for example, David Cobb, and Emily Kawano, “How to Build a Solidarity Economy: The Logic of Non-Reformist Reforms,” NonProfit Quarterly, 2024.
17. Natalie Angier, “Why We’re So Nice: We’re Wired to Cooperate,” The New York Times, 2002. See also Martin Lang et al. “Sync to link: Endorphin-mediated synchrony effects on cooperation,” Biological Psychology, 2017.