Emotional Courage Counts Too

Imagine a world where men could dance together and be seen as stronger than ever! We women would love it! They could even dance with us and not be embarrassed for feeling joy in their bodies just for moving to music, for daring to know themselves fully!

Solutions Come Naturally

We LOVE this video, full of hope, not despair—and action is simpler than you think. Share this, talk about it, because everything counts, what YOU do counts!

Cooperatives and Credit Unions Deliver Economic Justice to Black America

Economist Jessica Gordon-Nembhard’s research into black history revealed a cooperative business model that had been largely forgotten, but is now being revitalized.

Building community assets through cooperatives is essential to repair the harm done by colonization and slavery in America. Cooperatives can regenerate poor communities that still suffer worst from white supremacy, pollution, monopolies, and financial extraction. Resilient people are tapping into ancient ways of collaborating through shared ownership. By participating in coops, individuals are more effectively stewarding resources and taking responsibility for meeting the needs of the community in mutually beneficial ways.

People are engaged in utility cooperatives, food and pharmaceutical coops, community-supported agriculture, and housing cooperatives to create more vibrant local economies. These decentralized networks of citizens contribute to a solidarity economy which is especially important in times of financial hardship. Decentralized organizations are more agile, because of the agency given to each participant to offer their unique intelligence.

With increasing climate chaos and the collapse of old-fashioned hierarchical systems, we need quick and efficient processes and structures to align a community’s actions with the health and well-being of living systems. Two African American women, Jessica Gordon-Nembhard and Ebony Perkins are each engaging predominantly black communities in a solidarity economy through the use of cooperatively owned structures. These women are changing hearts and minds of people, and increasing the well-being in some of the most disadvantaged populations in America. Listen for my podcast interviews of them at Money-Wise Women in early 2020.

Jessica Gordon-Nembhard has been a political economist for over three decades and is a professor who studies worker-owned cooperatives and credit unions. Her book is Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice . Jessica’s decades of research explores cooperative economic development and worker ownership, community economic development, wealth inequality, community-based asset building, and community-based approaches to justice.

She says, “I am more interested in decreasing poverty, democratizing capital, and re-distributing wealth than simply closing the wealth gaps.”

Ebony Perkins is the investor and community relations manager at Self-Help Credit Union. Last October, she was named a recipient of the “30 Under 30 Award,” at the 2019 Socially Responsible Investing Conference. Ebony wrote this recent article, “Plan for Tomorrow by Supporting Vulnerable Communities Today,” in the “Community Impact Investing” issue of the GreenMoney Journal .

Self-Help Credit Union finances underserved populations, including people of color, women, rural residents, and low-income families.They have made loans totaling over $386 million to projects with environmental benefits, including recycling businesses, land conservation, efficient affordable housing, and solar energy.

Ebony says, “If our goal is to achieve environmental and economic justice, we need to prepare for tomorrow by investing today in the communities that are most vulnerable to the shocks and stresses of climate change and most impacted by the burdens of pollution.”

More critical of the privately-owned non-cooperative banks, past Money-Wise Women guest Ellen Brown writes, “Banks are not serving the real economy. They are using public credit backed by public funds to feed their own private bottom lines. She quotes Pam and Russ Marten of “Wall Street on Parade,” who write: “‘According to its SEC filings, JPMorgan Chase is partly using federally-insured deposits made by moms and pops across the country in its more than 5,000 branches to prop up its share price with buybacks.’ Small businesses are being deprived of affordable loans because the liquidity necessary to back the loans is being used to prop up bank stock prices. Bank shares constitute a substantial portion of the pay of bank executives.”

Clearly, we need to remove our money from these predatory banks and use cooperative banking structures. My interviews with Jessica Gordon-Nembhard and Ebony Perkins will illuminate the way to circulate value locally through cooperative structures. Stay tuned!

—by Crystal Arnold, founder of Money-Morphosis, director of education at Post Growth Institute

For more: check out this video of a Truthout Laura Flanders interview with Dr. Gordon-Nembhard on the black radical tradition of economic solidarity.

Time to Break Up Race and Gender Monopolies

from Rickey Gard Diamond’s column in Ms. Magazine. See them all at msmagazine.com/tag/women-unscrewing-screwnomics-series/

In a demographically changing world, uniformity is not great for business, says research regularly reported by McKinsey and Forbes. A growing body of evidence shows diverse and inclusive companies outperform heterogeneous peers. There’s no simple, causal relationship, but across business sectors, research patterns show innovation and market-share increase in companies with more diverse leadership.

Because money talks even louder than white guys at the water cooler, diversity’s now a buzzword—and on every CEO’s radar.  But a common mistake is thinking that hiring a more diverse workforce is all there is to it. Any tokenism will be quickly detected, harming company retention rates, with training expensive and differences real. A recent research report from BCG on flawed approaches says, “Our data shows that most company leaders—primarily white, heterosexual males—still underestimate the challenges [their] diverse employees face.”

“No one has it all figured out yet,” says La’Wana Harris about the word diversity, to which she’s devoted her career. “Some talk about diversity as inclusion, or diversity as equity, but I like to think diversity is also about belonging. Belonging is a big one.” Harris is an ICF-credentialed coach who has created inclusion-awareness workshops, cultural competence programs and trainings in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, and South Africa. Her new book Diversity Beyond Lip Service from business publisher Berrett-Koehler is a corporate coaching guide for challenging bias, still too often denied within male-dominated business cultures.

In 2015, McKinsey & Company reported that corporate executive teams in the US averaged only 16 percent women.  According to Catalyst, an organization focused on women’s leadership in business and on corporate boards, by 2018 US women were nearly half the labor force but held only 40 percent of all management positions; often these are middle-management jobs. They noted that the higher up the corporate ladder you go, the fewer women you’ll find.

Like white men, white women still have an advantage, they note. Of the 40 percent of managers, nearly a third were white women, while Latinas were only six percent, black women under four percent, and Asians 2 percent. Far from universal, gender experience carries unique, intersectional stresses.

 Unless company leaders actively pursue issues of perception, inclusion, equity, and bias, work teams may only sort out into camps or fall apart. That’s the reason corporations hire diversity coaches like La’Wana Harris to raise awareness of race, culture, and gender, while discovering deeper values, beliefs, and motivations.

 In a recent interview Harris pointed out that talking diversity isn’t easy in today’s polarized political climate. People worry, she told Ms. Magazine, sharing things she’s heard from clients: “‘I won’t know what to say,’ or ‘What if I offend someone? Or ‘I kind of would like to express myself, but in this environment, I wouldn’t dare.’”

 Harris said one sensible reason for inaction and silence is that people don’t want to be called out or dropped from the favor and privilege of the dominant culture. “No one wants to be excluded. What’s important is that we examine privilege and how it plays out in the power construct.”

Keynoter at Human Capital Institute’s May 2019 conference, La’Wana Harris discusses Inclusion Coaching in a talk titled, “Exploring the Radical Truth and Transformative Power that Lives within Each of Us.”

She added, “When you talk about oppression and real bias, people will go into their own corners and come out swinging and fail to find common ground. But it isn’t ‘us’ and ‘them.’ The question is how do we begin to move forward as an organization? We don’t make excuses; we don’t deny privilege. People like to talk about this in one dimension—white heterosexual male privilege— but everyone has a measure of privilege.  I’m a black woman, and I’m a Christian, so I have religious privilege in America. In marginalized communities, I’m privileged by my education and my income.”  

She says privilege is part of a much larger system that exists to protect power, and the unconscious biases supporting it. “That said, the goal of coaching is not to remove workplace privilege and bias, impossible anyway. Rather, let’s meet people where they are, so that they can do the self-work necessary to acknowledge their truth and how it affects their decisions. I’ll want to understand your diversity and inclusion story as a white man, too.”

White male diversity?! Does it exist? Everyone inherits a DNA shaped by a set of expectations rooted in one’s cultural context. Influences can be resisted or embraced in conscious and unconscious ways depending on circumstances and personality. Harris’s program structures, described in her book, are rooted in deep questions and self-reflection. One of the most challenging is: “What is the story you are telling yourself about….?” Fill in the blank.

 Harris advises companies upfront to make room for controversy and conflict. “Tell the truth,” she says, “even when it hurts.” Just as white men don’t want their career judged as the product of unfair advantages, women and people of color don’t want to be judged as tokens to meet a quota. “As part of a team,” she says, “we all want to be acknowledged as qualified, valuable contributors. The question is, how can we use our talent and privileges to move the organization forward?”

 The politically correct management perspective might be: “I am a white male, and I know that we need to increase diversity and inclusion.”  But Harris insists on allowing more honest conversations, without shaming and blaming. What if mainstream management admitted something as true as: “I am a white male, and I know that in theory we need to increase diversity and inclusion. But the current power construct works for me. I’ve had a thriving career. Honestly, I don’t see what’s so wrong about that; I’m very comfortable.”

 Still honesty without action amounts to lip service, by Harris’s measure. While leaders can and do discover creative ways to self-reflect and share power by welcoming differences, in a competitive world, where time and money count, diversity’s more personal work can seem at odds with short-term business objectives. In 2016, for instance, Apple shareholders rejected a proposal to prioritize diversity efforts, saying changing their leadership team, 72 percent male, would be “unduly burdensome and not necessary.”

I much admire Harris’s work and worldview, but unable to be as noble, still shame and blame. I confess I threw up in my mouth a little when in August, 2019, our biggest 200 CEOs issued a Business Roundtable signed statement, declaring “shareholder interest” or profit is not all there is to business! Led by JP Morgan CEO Jerry Dimon, paid $31 million a year, and signed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who has already broken his pledge, the group’s shameless discovery of a new world of insight claims the environment and workers matter too.

Der. You think?

EconoMan's "Development" is Ecocide

The Amazon rainforest has been called the “lungs” of the world. Its conversion into feedlots for cattle to feed the “first world” for profit isn’t good for any humans, or for all life on earth.

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism just published an important piece by Juan Manuel Crespo, an Ecuadorian sociologist who coins an important new word, and asks an essential question: Who is responsible for the Amazon's ecocide?

Follow the money! We need to look closer at this misnamed thing called "development," which bags money for a few, but destroys whole species and ecosystems we all depend upon. Our present economic system is not really about numbers—it is ideology and lying language. But here’s good advice from Juan’s piece, too, linked above:

If you want to preserve the balance of life, look to indigenous people. Far from being “savages,” indigenous people have knowledge and wisdom to share, the reason even our protected wildlife sanctuaries are poorer in species than the lands where they still live.

 “The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends revisiting the native peoples for learning how to preserve critical territories. According to a study conducted by the IPCC, the areas managed or co-managed by native peoples have much higher rates of presence of birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles than any other areas (including protected areas), which indicates that this greater biodiversity is being achieved by the practices and land uses of native cultures.

Native peoples may not exceed 5% of the world’s population, but they have preserved up to nearly 80% of the highest biodiversity areas on the planet. Ironically, they are the ones who “slow down development”. It is through the native peoples of the Amazon, and borrowing knowledge from them, that we will find the key to stopping ecocide and development.”

It’s more ideology and misused language again. We have thought ourselves superior, when we were only better armed and more violent. Unless your people came from Mars, it is far past time we “civilized” humans remember how to become indigenous natives of planet Earth. An economy waged as war, and that imagines “winning,” discounts losers, namely all inferiors like bugs, microbes, birds, fungus, diversity—and oh yes, all females, including Gaia.  

Read more about the Amazon’s importance here; and while you are at it, read Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry’s new book, Nurturing Our Humanity. You’ll find fascinating information about indigenous people and a wider knowledge of peaceable, life-sustaining ways if only we’d look there, instead of studying war.