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Solutions
(Image: Young woman make hairdressing for older woman via Shutterstock)When Farah Tanis began to meet with a group of low-income women to discuss their economic challenges, she found that nine out of ten were survivors of domestic violence or sexual assault.
“Most of us had grown up in poverty and we started looking at what were the systemic causes of poverty for us,” she said. “We started looking at economic security as a human right and an extension of the Civil Rights.”
Out of those conversations came the Black Women’s Blueprint, a group that now anchors a bartering network, a sou-sou (savings pool), and several other cooperative projects.
“Through our barter network we were able to barter food for the week, for a car ride for the week, and that’s what sustained many of us.
“It prevented homelessness, starvation and kids being left at home alone by themselves. The barter network builds community and it builds trust,” explained Tanis at a panel discussion co-sponsored by GRITtv.
From the Underground Railroad to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, cooperative strategies developed by African American women have played a leading role in helping communities survive hard times, said author, economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard, author of Collective Courage, a History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice.
“Like most women, black women have always been in the background,” Gordon Nembhard said. “Often the leaders and the spokespeople were men but the people doing all of the work and the strategizing were women.”
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
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