Elements for Regional Solidarity Economies is a new five-month cohort training on Solidarity Economy Regional Organizing that will launch in 2025. The training supports Solidarity Economy groups to connect movement theory, values, and skills to their own regional contexts in order to establish functioning Solidarity Economy ecosystems that meet community needs. Please note, this new cohort training will only be open to groups, not individuals.

This information session will present a program overview, review details for how to apply, and answer questions. If your group is already engaged in Solidarity Economy work please join us to learn more!

‍The Information Session is available in both English and Spanish, but the first cohort in 2025 will be English only. Bilingual cohorts will follow.

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About Elements for Regional Solidarity Economies

A cohort-based online training series for groups 

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What are the assumptions behind this training? 

• Relationships: Growing regional solidarity economies requires intentional organizing to create both economic and political relationships between groups that are meeting community material needs through cooperation. (More on this analysis at solidarityeconomyprinciples.org.)

• Associations: The most successful solidarity economies around the world, and in the United States, all have an association or network that is a membership organization made up of various groups engaged in solidarity economy. These associations focus on building the economic and political relationships necessary for the growth and resilience of solidarity economies. This training will help to create, renew, or expand existing association-type organizations.

• Training: There are frameworks and skills required to build the kinds of economic and political relationships (often expressed as through supply chains and federations, for example), but those are absent from community organizing, community development, and cooperative development training in the United States. This series will provide organizers of solidarity economy associations with the methodology for organizing solidarity economies at the local or regional scale that they define.

• Popular Education: Political education and economic education are both critical for deep social transformation and building power. We are using a Popular Education approach, building from participants’ experience as much as possible, as a means to observing patterns, absorbing and integrating new concepts, and applying them iteratively to create knowledge. 

• 2025 Pilot: This training is a collection of histories, experiences and effort put forth by us and others. We don’t take the commitment of time and resources lightly and also ask for grace for the mistakes we’ll inevitably make in piloting this program. Everyone involved will be in this together for the first time and we will evolve in real time and sharpen what we do going forward from what we learn together, with this cohort being an integral part of the evolution.  

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Who are the trainers and what is their experience?

• People: The people creating and facilitating this program are founders of the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City (CEANYC), a democratically-controlled solidarity economy association for the five boroughs. This training builds on our experience creating CEANYC, including making the first public map of New York City’s solidarity economy models and tools and building economic and political relationships between the groups on that map. We are also movement-aligned academics and active participants in the making of solidarity economies at the local level through our membership in co-ops and collectives. The trainers for the 2025 cohort will be Lauren Taylor Hudson and Evan Casper-Futterman.

• Past Trainings: The training is also drawn from the successful Cooperative Leadership Intensive run by CEANYC, (which originally was created from a template provided by the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance), and the Mapping Our Futures curriculum that was a joint project of PeoplesHub, Highlander Institute, US Solidarity Economy Network, and Center for Popular Economics. 

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Who is this for?

• Associations: This training is for longstanding or just forming solidarity economy place-based networks, collectives, associations, and/or coalitions that are democratic and membership-based. It will work well for either: those seeking to deepen their alignment to Solidarity Economy frameworks and practices; or those who are already oriented to SE principles and wish to develop their strategic capacity and planning skills. 

• Size: a cohort should be between 6-15 people, drawn from member organizations of the association, or the people in leadership of the association.

• Preparation: A cohort should have at least a basic understanding of the movement and solidarity economy landscape in their area. This means you already know what solidarity economy models and tools are being used in the area you wish to organize, and ideally you already have some relationship if you are just forming an association.

• Commitment: A cohort must be able to meet online consistently over zoom, with one 90-minute session every week for 18 weeks (which is about 4.25 months).

• Language justice: We are piloting this program in 2025 in English only. In the future we plan to offer a bilingual Spanish/English program. 

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What does it cost?

What will we learn or walk away with?

• Deeper relationships and trust among cohort participants

• Greater clarity about your “place:” its boundaries, scale, and history

• Asset mapping skills for leveraging place-based resources for SE ecosystem/infrastructure development

• Geographic mapping skills for visualizing assets, places, or points in your place

• Shared understanding of core concepts: some text
  • Solidarity economy tools, infrastructure, and ecosystems 
  • Racial capitalism
  • Value chains
  • Types of capitalists and ownership structures in current system
  • Theories of social change and political power
  • Economic cooperation and economic power 
  • A coherent, integrated understanding of Solidarity Economy components and methodologies

• A final collective work product and/or work plan as determined by the priorities and needs identified by your group

• An opportunity to share your final work product and group’s vision with invited guests and partners from your place to build new relationships or strengthen existing partnerships

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What will we *NOT* be doing?

• This program will not be a program focused on understanding all of the dynamics and foundations of capitalism and economics. 

• This program will not cover the details of various tools of cooperative development and ownership as part of a broader solidarity economy. It is not a cooperative development training.

• This cohort program will not be a deep dive into the Solidarity Economy Principles or focus on individual and group leadership characteristics and dynamics. 

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