East Baltimore’s The Cube, created by and for Black mom entrepreneurs, set itself apart with on-site babysitting services. Its founders’ aim: To help women get stuff done – and build generational wealth.

Residents in South Los Angeles’ Crenshaw neighborhood are in the midst of a battle against developers—seeking to block the sale of the 41-acre Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza Mall to institutional investors that would turn the property into luxury housing and threaten to displace the city’s last majority-Black community. It’s a story that could occur in any hot-market city in the nation, except for one key detail: the Crenshaw community is equipped with over $28 million in donations and another $30 million in pledged impact financing to back up their efforts. Black organizers raised this money to purchase and develop the prime commercial real estate into mixed-income housing, worker-owned cooperatives, and new green space for community benefit. They are grounding their efforts in a larger “solidarity economy” movement

Over the past five years, the budget allocated an average of $15 million for projects in Baltimore neighborhoods where more than 75 percent of residents are white.

As kids, we were told to make it out of the hood. The hood is basically the worst place in the world, responsible for all of the trauma and pain that comes with being black. We aren’t taught about the systems that create that pain, the racist cops, the black sellouts.....

“If you own real estate, it’s something. It’s better than nothing. I don’t care if I own 2%, I can say it’s mine. … I could pass it down to my son,” Thompson said. “Saying that I own something [has] me feeling so good, because I never owned nothing.”

It’s been over a year since calls for anti-racist urban policies echoed in cities around the country. It was in this context—in the middle of a starkly inequitable pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and white supremacist counterprotests in Portland, Ore.—that a broad-based coalition of residents, activists, nonprofit leaders, public officials, and a private developer crafted an unprecedented community benefits agreement (CBA) for a 32-acre redevelopment project north of downtown.

Gentrification is a powerful force for economic change in our cities, but it is often accompanied by extreme and unnecessary cultural displacement. While gentrification increases the value of properties in areas that suffered from prolonged disinvestment, it also results in rising rents, home and property values

Working people in the U.S. have not seen a wage increase that matches the increased cost of housing, food, and transportation since the 1970’s. For Black and Brown working people, the impact of wage stagnation and inequality has proven to be a significant barrier to living lives of opportunity and mobility

The first ever presidential visit to the South Bronx took America’s chief executive to a multi-unit cooperative, a radical break from the nation’s housing norms that became a symbol of hope during the depths of the urban crisis.

Baltimore is the 30th-largest US city by population and is a study in contrasts. It has a low average income compared with other wealthy Northeast cities, has nine colleges and universities, and is a magnet for people pursuing higher education but has undergone decades of population loss.

“Collective Courage,” is about the forgotten history of cooperative economics in African American communities. It begins by expanding the definition of cooperatives to include the development of mutual aid societies.