THE SOLIDARITY ECONOMY GIVING PROJECT (SEGP) was an offering for and by solidarity economy organizers in New York City coordinated through the Cooperative Economics Alliance of NYC. Our city has a growing number of democratic organizations that meet neighborhood needs in every area of the economy, from food to finance, housing to culture, and SEGP was envisioned as a resource for them. Worker co-ops, food co-ops, community development credit unions, community gardens, affordable housing co-ops, community land trusts, and co-op incubators in the five boroughs were all eligible to apply for grants between $500 — $5,000. The project ran for three calendar year cycles of grantmaking: 2018, 2019, and 2020.
Squeezed out of traditional philanthropy, underrepresented in policymaking, and generally ignored by traditional banks and lenders, solidarity economy organizers are used to making a way out of no way. While our efforts to crowdfund and share what we have with each other are often our best options, there remains a significant resource gap in New York City’s solidarity economy organizations run by people of color and low-income, migrant, women and LGBTQIA+ communities. Without reparations at a systemic level to return wealth accumulated from stolen labor (through slavery, wage discrimination, etc.) to the communities who were exploited, these groups will continue to experience a critical lack of capital and resources needed to advance solidarity economy work to scale. This is an emergency for our communities that is only just beginning to gain the attention of dominant institutions and allies. Rather than await reparations or a change in philanthropy’s attitude, we decided to tackle this growth-inhibiting scarcity and competition ourselves with a project to move resources from the wealthy to those who need them to grow a democratic and cooperative economy for all.
Enter the Solidarity Economy Giving Project, one of only two philanthropic initiatives in the United States dedicated to supporting the solidarity economy. It was a program of the Cooperative Economics Alliance of New York City (CEANYC), which is the democratically-managed membership organization for NYC’s co-ops and community gardens committed to social and racial justice.
SEGP raised funds through a Giving Circle and annual May Day party.
Founded on the premise of solidarity and mutual aid, of giving rather than charity, SEGP’s fundraising and grantmaking broke with philanthropic mechanisms for control and accumulation by the wealthy. Donors formed a community that built relationships to the solidarity economy while also deepening their understanding of the ways race, class, gender, and systemic oppression determine who benefits and who is left out of the benefits of capitalism. They also released control of the grantmaking to the community being served, with the understanding that those doing the work and most impacted by the issues best understand how to move resources and make
decisions. This is an act of trust and solidarity, a financial and spiritual investment in the capacity of New York City’s oppressed communities to do for themselves rather than being done for.
Grants were determined by the elected CEANYC Board of Directors on a rolling basis, and both application and reporting requirements were streamlined to move money quickly each month and without wasting unnecessary time and energy from folks on the ground. The CEANYC network is both deep and relational, and folks applying for grants understood that the SEGP was a shared resource. Folks applied for only what they needed, then left room for others, practicing cooperation that releases abundance rather than competition which creates scarcity.
THE SOLIDARITY ECONOMY GIVING PROJECT AND COOPERATIVE
ECONOMICS ALLIANCE OF NEW YORK CITY both seek to transform a culture of domination and oppression into one of interdependence and mutualism that respects the land and the people. Our work takes place in Lenapehoking, the traditional territory of the Lenni Lenape people, and a place of trade and gathering for many Native Peoples who flourished in the region prior to European colonization. We extend our gratitude to this land
that holds us, and to the original people of this place who are the rightful
stewards of the human relationship to this land. We continue to work to be in right relationship with Native Peoples, including supporting the Manna-hatta Fund. Thank you to all of the Native folks who share their knowledge with us so we can get free together.
The Solidarity Economy Giving Project has been a community of purpose and action since its inception in 2017, and as Elandria Williams taught us, we all sit in legacy of those who came before. The SEGP’s legacies include solidarity economy organizing, focusing on reciprocity and gifting, and radical philanthropy that seeks to redistribute the excess accumulated through stolen land and labor. We sought to create the kind of fund we wished to see in the world, which meant learning from the best of what already exists: the private community susus and kinship-based funding; social justice philanthropy that places decision-making with community members rather than donors; prioritizing requests from people of color, LGBTQIA+ folks, immigrants, and women; and engaging donors in deep and meaningful political education. There are generations of people whose names we’ll never know but whose labors made this project possible. To those movement ancestors, past and future, we take a breath now in your honor, aware of your presence, with gratitude flowing through us. We are only here because of you. We extend our thanks to the many groups whose work helped to inform ours: Resource Generation, Bread and Roses Fund, Regenerative Finance, North Star Fund, and the Social Justice Fund NW. Thank you especially to the organizers and staff who took time to help coach us through the early start-up phase.
We’d also like to thank our partners in the nonprofit industrial complex
who worked valiantly with us to find creative solutions to moving money in
solidarity: RSF Social Finance and Social Good Fund. Your staff have been
overwhelmingly supportive of our efforts, and pushed for the best possible
outcomes when we realized our anti-capitalist methods were sometimes
impossible under capitalism. Thank you for dreaming and doing with us.
Much of grantmaking would have been impossible without the labor of love
provided by Gowri Krishna and her legal scholars, who often worked very quickly and with no fuss to help fund a request that needed immediate attention. Thank you!
The SEGP leadership teams put in countless hours — as donor organizers developing political education programs, and as community members sitting on a grantmaking committee. Thank you especially to Ben Blackshear, Evan Casper-Futterman, Jay Saper, Lida Shao, Michael Sandmel, Elah Schilid, Amy Rosenthal, Evie Zavidow, Cheyenna Weber, Emilie Miyauchi, Sheryll Durrant, Raina Kennedy, Anne Schoenborn, Alex Roesch, Ali Issa, and Saduf Syal. Gratitude also to Raj Kottamasu for designing our reports, and to the rest of the Cooperative Economics Alliance of NYC board for supporting the teams doing this work. A big shout-out to the many donors, large and small, who contributed to the Fund. Especially when we were starting out, these folks were willing to take the risk of not knowing where their money was going, and trust that the community would put it to good use. Most donors won’t do that, and we deeply appreciate all who shared their abundance with the solidarity economy community.
And last, thank you to the folks who are seeding new futures with our people everyday. Your work growing a solidarity economy in NYC is often unrecognized by the dominant culture and its institutions, but you are sowing and reaping a harvest that we know will eventually feed and nourish us all in generations to come. It has been an honor to support you in the small ways the Solidarity Economy Giving Project could.
THE SOLIDARITY ECONOMY GIVING PROJECT RAISED $150,822 from dozens of donors from 2017 to 2020. Most of the gifts came from a Giving Circle comprised of wealthy young people associated with Resource Generation who were interested in redistributing their wealth to communities of color and organizing for systemic change. Most of the money went to groups with few, if any, options for unrestricted philanthropic support.
The political education and community building among donors was an
important component of the Solidarity Economy Giving Project. We did not want to replicate philanthropy’s usual model of glamorizing and sanitizing wealth accumulation that dehumanizes wealthy and broke folks alike. Instead, we sought to create spaces for vulnerable and real conversations about class, wealth, race, and economic development.
We believe we all have a stake in collective liberation, and the Giving
Circle program sought to illuminate this idea while also providing information about how solidarity economies operate at the grassroots and regional levels.
All told, 34 people joined the SEGP Giving Circle from 2017–2020. Sessions included solidarity economy and cooperative introductions, deeper dives into solidarity economy investing and how capitalism functions, and opportunities to hear from guest speakers who are part of cooperatives in NYC. The Giving Circle members also formed the core volunteer and promotion team for the Annual May Day dance party, which was held in 2018 and 2019 but cancelled due to the pandemic in 2020. The party was a chance to showcase all the wonderful foods made by worker co-ops in our city and celebrate May Day together with dancing and cocktails. It also gave members a chance to introduce solidarity economy ideas to their friends and recruit new folks to the next round of the Giving Circle.
We believe the way we raised money was as important as how we gave it away. Here are a few Giving Circle members describing its impact on them, in their own words:
WE LIVE BY RIHANNA’S WORDS: “NEVER A FAILURE, ALWAYS A LESSON.” All living beings grow, shift and evolve, and we change by doing. For those of us bent on social change, we are always experimenting, learning as we go, changing ourselves and each other even as we struggle to change our conditions. While traditional philanthropy and Western institutions value linear stories of cause and effect, that often isn’t the most useful lens for our social change experiments, which operate outside a scientific lab and interact with unknown variables. Instead we want to offer to you our observations of what we thought would happen, what we know happened, and what we learned from that, as well as what we don’t know. Many of the patterns, structures, and challenges we faced in the Solidarity Economy Giving Project will be familiar to community and solidarity economy organizers, as well as our allies in radical philanthropy. We hope what we share bolsters your work and brings your group more clarity and ease!
MANAGING SYSTEMIC OPPRESSION
We knew from direct experience that solidarity economy work is underfunded and under-resourced, so we were not surprised to find ourselves with a demand that exceeded our pool of funds. Unsurprisingly, start-up cooperatives in communities of color were among those with the greatest need in general, but during the pandemic we were inundated with requests from low-income housing cooperatives as unemployment rose. There are more low-income housing cooperatives than any other type of solidarity economy entity in NYC, so this was not unexpected. What perhaps is unexpected is that so many of the groups who wrote us had no other options even during the pandemic — there is no debt-free option for many of these groups to acquire the funds they need.
The need for reparations and immediate relief for our communities and solidarity economy efforts is obvious and dire. We understood that we would face structural barriers to grantmaking to solidarity economy groups, given that most nonprofits, their lawyers, and the IRS do not understand the solidarity economy landscape. Navigating IRS requirements for charitable giving by nonprofits required progressive co-op attorneys who could vet the grant recommendations and provide legal memos to our fiscal sponsor that explained how each grant fit IRS requirements. We are lucky in New York City to have a number of attorneys involved in worker cooperatives, and thanks to one champion in particular, we were able to meet the threshold for legal compliance set by our fiscal sponsor. Without this culturally competent, local, pro bono support we would have been unable to make any grants to groups that did not hold 501c3 status, as we could not afford the extra legal fees to work with distant legal teams our fiscal sponsor retained who did not understand the solidarity economy and local context. If you’re planning to engage in this kind of philanthropy, make sure you have legal support that understands your work and the IRS requirements! If you’re in a position to support continuing education for attorneys, or to introduce cooperatives and solidarity economy legal issues within law schools, please do so! There is a real need for this kind of expertise, and it is far outside what is taught in most law schools.
We also were unprepared for how much bureaucracy would be required to work within a donor-advised fund framework, where a distant Board of Directors needs to approve our grant recommendations. This set-up put the onus on us to meet their IRS requirement scrutiny and accept delays to our rapid response grantmaking, and leaving the final decision in some distant board’s hands rather than our own community. This violated some of the
fundamental principles of the SEGP, mainly that we wanted to maintain community control and respond quickly to grant requests. For this reason we ended up using the donor-advised fund only for grants to groups that had a 501c3 status — which were so few, we ended up moving the money to our fiscal sponsor and then making the grants, which meant we paid double the administrative fees on those grants. This was unsustainable and irresponsible, since it wasted money that could go to our community. Eventually we divested from the donor advised fund for this reason. This isn’t to say you might not find a donor advised fund that works better for your solidarity economy philanthropy, but to note that we were unable to find one that worked for us.
MANAGING MONEY
The owning class hoards wealth in a complex array of funds and investment vehicles. We understood that in order to work with wealthy people to redistribute their wealth we needed to have as much flexibility as possible in how we could accept and direct their donations. We wanted a credible vendor who could handle the complexities of money manager inquiries and requests, who could accept donations of stocks, as well as grants from family foundations, donor advised funds, and donations from family funds controlled by a money manager. Our fiscal sponsor could not handle those requests, so we sought out a values-aligned donor advised fund. Finding a donor advised fund that would work with us to support solidarity economy work was a challenge, but finding one that would work with a fund that expected to top out at $50,000 annually was even more difficult. Most required a much larger amount to even consider a contract. In hindsight, given what we learned about how little we could really use the donor advised fund given the constraints described above, it probably wasn’t worth it. Still, having it available for donors who otherwise would not be able to move any of their family money to us without the flexibility the donor advised fund provided did turn out to be useful for fundraising. Is there a better way to do it? Probably! We actually came to the conclusion that a partnership with an existing foundation would have been the most elegant solution, but we were unsuccessful at convincing any of our local community and social justice foundations to take on the project.
By Year 3 we decided to completely forego the nonprofit industrial complex whenever possible, and we entered into a deeper level of trust with the folks who redistributed their wealth through SEGP. People made pledges at the start of the year with the amount they wanted to move, and they were clear about which vehicle they needed to use (foundation, personal checking account, etc.) so that we could match grantees with donations based on amounts and systemic conditions. For example, once the grantmaking committee recommended a grant and the group receiving the funds accepted the grant, we would contact the donor to move the money to the group by check or transfer. This eliminated any charitable deductions donors received from the IRS, but it also meant the movement got more of the money (none was lost to the administrative fees we paid on transactions) and we could avoid the time spent wrangling and drafting legal memos or lengthy legally-binding grant agreements that nonprofits require. A win for everybody! This system worked great for us, and built off of a tradition in prior years to keep some funds from the SEGP pool aside in personal accounts outside the nonprofit industrial complex so that we could move money if needed to undocumented people for emergency situations as ICE was terrorizing our communities in 2016–2018. (They still are, it was just particularly targeted during that time as a centerpiece of Trump’s administration.) When we did not use any of those funds for person-to-person transfers, the donor would then just issue a check at the end of the year to the donor-advised fund or our fiscal sponsor. What we learned here is that deeper relationships and trust means you can move together, rather than silo wealthy people and everybody else into their own distinct donor and receiver classes that are so neatly maintained by the IRS.
MANAGING DATA
As organizers, we consider ourselves skilled when it comes to tracking
information and managing databases, but as the bureaucratic constraints grew, the data load became a problem. Now we had grant agreements, legal memos, reports, grant requests, demographics, internal timetables and decision-making, and both a fiscal sponsor and donor advised fund to manage. Foundations have sophisticated databases designed for grantmaking that track legal documents and requirements. We had Google Sheets and CiviCRM and a mostly volunteer team along with a couple of part-time staff members who had several other areas of responsibility. We recommend having a solid and navigable data system in place before you start any grantmaking.
This is another reason why we believe that foundations should take on the burden of grantmaking to the solidarity economy, rather than forcing us to do it ourselves! Foundations are uniquely designed for the task of grantmaking, and they have staff specifically for that purpose. Adding grantmaking to program and administrative staff’s workload meant they had less time to devote to programs, our own fundraising, organizing, membership, communications, training, etc. Role division within our movements can be a good thing, provided that philanthropy is driven from the bottom up and is formed by communities in partnership with foundations. That’s the world we want to see.
MANAGING RELATIONSHIPS
While the program provided support to grantees and covered its own costs, fundraising was a challenge. We relied heavily on existing networks and relationships, and we did not quite achieve the deep level of community building and relationality we hoped for and intended. Part of this was because the grantmaking took so much time and attention that the fundraising and donor community was always getting about half of what it needed, and that resulted in a feeling of disconnection. Prior to recent surges in giving circle platforms, most giving projects were held within foundations and coordinated by a full-time staff with benefits and security. We operated in a much more precarious way, without that level of support, and while our program was strong in its content and presentation, that difference in foundational support was felt. Once again, having philanthropy resource this work adequately would go a long way to allowing solidarity economy folks to focus on building relationships with owning-class people who want to learn about our ways of meeting needs and being in the world.
The easiest part of the work was determining who received grants and how the grants made an impact. Our relationships with the solidarity economy community are deep, and we had no problem getting the word out about the SEGP and vetting applications. We knew who was immediately credible and who needed more relationship-building, what the money would be used for and why, and how to make the “grant application” as easy as possible. We know each other, so we were familiar with both the need for and impact of these grants in our given communities, and we prioritized accordingly as conditions changed for specific sectors (such as worker co-ops, which had their own Covid relief fund, where other groups did not), or did not change (people of color were always prioritized). The application was designed to take 15 minutes or less, and the official reporting only needed to be a few lines of responses. Most of us have experience with cumbersome applications, interviews, site visits, and reporting for small grants that amounted to unreasonable amounts of time, money, and energy that could have been spent elsewhere, so we wanted to avoid that above all else. Here we were wildly successful, and it proves that if folks on the ground are doing the grantmaking, then you don’t need bureaucracy to stand in for trusted relationships and movement networks.
This is not to claim that the work was easy. Anybody who has convened a volunteer group to allocate resources will know that plenty of issues arise. Originally, for example, we had the idea that “grantees” would want to join the grantmaking committee and participate in decision-making. But in three years of grantmaking, we had only 2 people express interest in learning more about that. Instead, we understood from community members that they wanted and relied on those resources, but they had no interest in taking on the extra work of grantmaking. For this reason we maintained a volunteer committee comprised of members of the elected CEANYC Board of Directors, which then sent recommendations to the full Board each month for approval. This worked relatively well, and when the committee got stuck because they did not have enough of a relationship to a group or a sector, they were able to receive support from the Board or staff in order to come to agreement.
MANAGING TIME
We seriously underestimated the amount of time it would take to fundraise, deal with bureaucracy, and move money. The program was also intended to be resourcing, but over time we found that while we were resourcing our communities, we were sacrificing on other programs and necessary operations. With only part-time staff and volunteers, we found we just could not do it all, and ultimately this was a significant part of our decision to wind down the SEGP Giving Circle (fundraising) and grantmaking. We realized we needed to resource CEANYC with the same fervor we were resourcing our communities, so we are shifting our donor circle to focus on gifts to CEANYC for essential programs and services. When possible, we do expect to continue to make grants and move money, because there is such a dire need, but that fundraising must not come at the expense of the organization.
CEANYC HAS HEARD REPEATEDLY, LOUD AND CLEAR, that the resources this effort offered to our communities are vital. This is why it has been so difficult for us to determine that in 2021 we are sunsetting our grantmaking and SEGP Giving Circle for all the long-term reasons we listed above, but more urgently because we’re cycling out of a grantmaker’s program in 2021 that makes up almost 50% of CEANYC’s operations budget. Without replacing that support, we’ll close.
If you’re down to support us in that work in 2021, we can use your help! You can make a one-time or recurring donation (by visiting gocoopnyc.com/donate) or join the May Day Circle to lend your skills and hands to our May crowdfunding campaign. Send an email to organize@gocoopnyc.com to express your interest!
With that said, we know that the pandemic and recession are deeply hurting our communities, and we should provide any relief that we can. We’re hoping to secure a grant for a Covid-19 Relief Fund that will provide immediate assistance to solidarity economy groups hit hardest. While in the long-term, we believe philanthropy needs to take over solidarity economy grantmaking, we can’t wait for that! In this moment our communities are in such urgent need we must do all that we can. If we get the Covid-19 money, friends, you’ll see us opening up applications for those grants as soon as the funds hit our account. Our intention is to move the money as quickly as possible into the community, and we expect the Fund would only be open for a few months unless we located additional funding for it.
It’s worth mentioning that in addition to the Solidarity Economy Giving Project, CEANYC has been in front of funders asking them to direct resources to this entire field of work for many years. Whether that has been in the form of investments to community development financial institutions, moving money out of banks into community development credit unions, providing grants to nonprofits engaged in solidarity economy development, providing reparations directly to communities, or topping off those GoFundMes we’re all running, we’ve been out here. We’ll keep doing that work until we’ve been heard.
If you’ve been a part of making the last three years of the Solidarity Economy Giving Project a success, thank you. Whether you got a grant, wrote a check, fundraised friends, spoke at an event, directed us to donor advised funds, wrote a legal memo, served on a grantmaking committee, helped spread the word in your community, or did the loving and caring work of being in community with us while we ran into hurdles with any of these moving parts, thank you. Without the work of so many people we would never have been able to attempt this ambitious experiment, and we hope that our report here honors you and the contributions we’ve made together to a more just world.
2020 Grantees
WORKER CO-OPS
Samamkaya Yoga Back Care and Scoliosis Collective (Manhattan) $1000 to support for Samamkaya worker-owners and students working with the collective
Hopewell Care (Brooklyn) $2500 to cover housing, food, and medical costs for 11 worker owners now unable to work
Beyond Care Childcare Cooperative (Brooklyn) $2500 to pay bills, food, rent for members of the cooperative who are out of an income presently
Radix Media (Brooklyn) $3000 to help cover rent for
the business’ space and to pay worker owners
Brightly Carroll Gardens (Brooklyn) $2500 to support members and
their families meet urgent needs around paying for food, housing,
and medicine
Khao’na Kitchen (Brooklyn) $3000 to help cover rent and wages lost due to COVID
Cards By De (The Bronx) $3000 put towards rent, food, utilities, and medical expenses for worker owners
Caracol Language Cooperative (City-wide) $1500 to hire an experienced CPA
to help us amend or re-file our federal taxes for 2018, and 2019 to include the Unincorporated Business Income Tax for the city of New York
LOW-INCOME HOUSING CO-OPS
274 E 7th St HDFC (Manhattan) $3000 to support tenants who have lost their income in paying rent
719 E 6th St. HDFC (Manhattan) $1500 to pay for part of a long
overdue wall repair in their common area
29–33 Convent HDFC (Manhattan) $1000 to install rooftop security doors
155 Ave C HDFC (Manhattan) $1000 to help cover maintenance
and mortgage costs for the 10 out of 16 apt. shareholders who are now out of work
304 E. 8th St. HDFC (Manhattan ) $2000 towards repairing a damaged window and sewer pipe
721 Van Siclen HDFC (Brooklyn) $2650 towards tenant rent for
the months of March, April, May, June, July, August and September
129 MacDonough HDFC (Brooklyn) $2000 for repairs, utilities, roofing
work, and solar upgrade upfront costs
327 Putnam Ave. HDFC (Brooklyn) $2000 towards vital repairs to their building’s roof
2116 Honeywell Ave HDFC (The Bronx) $1500 to help cover mortgage
240 Echo Place HDFC (The Bronx) $3000 for building repairs and supporting out of work tenants
COMMUNITY GARDENS
The People’s Garden (Brooklyn) $600 to pay for care packages to help community members get started growing food
Brooklyn Queens Land Trust (Brooklyn + Queens) $1500 to develop an anti-racism training for their 36+ community garden members
2019 Grantees
WORKER CO-OPS
Action OSH (Queens) $4000 to translate a construction worker safety training manual into Bangla
Cards by Dé (Bronx) $1500 to cover training and consulting to support start-up greeting card enterprise led by Black women
Co-op Cafe (NYC) $2500 for espresso machine and start-up costs for cooperative coffeeshop organized by low-wage workers
Maharlika Cleaning Cooperative (NYC) $4000 towards mediation for
Filipina cooperative cleaning enterprise members
Samamkaya Yoga Back Care and Scoliosis Collective (Manhattan) $3000 to subsidize classes for people with disabilities
Sunset Scholars LLC (Brooklyn) $3000 to provide tutoring scholarships for low-income children by Sunset Park immigrant tutoring cooperative
Tribe CoCreate (The Bronx) $2500 to cover start-up costs
for a Black women’s co-working space
Worker’s Transport (Brooklyn) $3000 to support start-up costs for opening a bike shop in Bed-Stuy
LOW-INCOME HOUSING CO-OPS
517 West 184th Street (Manhattan) $2500 to build a conference room for shareholder meetings in Washington Heights/Ft George
568 W. 171st St. HDFC (Manhattan) $900 to cover cost of a bike rack
for residents in Washington Heights
Desperation HDFC (Manhattan) $1400 to purchase fire extinguishers for 70 shareholders, many of whom are seniors
Oliver Gardens HDFC (The Bronx) $2500 to purchase and install
LED lightning to meet insurance requirements
COMMUNITY GARDENS
Kelly Street Garden (The Bronx) $1000 for participation in
Cooperative Leadership Intensive training
COMMUNITY-BASED COLLECTIVES
BK Rot (Brooklyn) $2000 to purchase technology and provide training to young people of color who operate the collective’s business in Bushwick
COMMUNITY-SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE
White Pine Community Farm (Hudson Valley) $3500 to expand CSA program to low-income families
2018 Grantees
WORKER CO-OPS
A Bookkeeping Cooperative (Brooklyn) $2000 for conflict resolution training
Black Conference (Brooklyn) $1200 for the Falconworks Theatre Company’s production centered around Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s book “Collective Courage”
Brooklyn Packers (Brooklyn) $3000 to hire staff to subsidize low income CSA work in Central Brooklyn
Khao’na Kitchen (Brooklyn) $3300 to expand operations and source emergency kitchen space
Third Root Community Health Center (Brooklyn) $4000 for staff support
and facilitation as part of a crowdfunding campaign
Woke Foods (Bronx) $2500 to cover costs of project management and growth of staff
LOW-INCOME HOUSING CO-OPS
224 Lefferts Avenue HDFC (Brooklyn) $4000 to cover the costs of essential repairs to get an affordable housing rental on the market.
29–33 Convent HDFC (Manhattan) $1000 to install rooftop security doors
155 Ave C HDFC (Manhattan) $1000 to help cover maintenance and mortgage costs for the 10 out of 16 apt. shareholders who are now out of work
304 E. 8th St. HDFC (Manhattan) $2000 towards repairing a damaged window and sewer pipe
721 Van Siclen HDFC (Brooklyn) $2650 towards tenant rent for the months of March, April, May, June, July, August and September
129 MacDonough HDFC (Brooklyn) $2000 for repairs, utilities, roofing work, and solar upgrade costs
327 Putnam Ave. HDFC (Brooklyn) $2000 towards vital repairs to their building’s roof
2116 Honeywell Ave HDFC (The Bronx) $1500 to help cover mortgage payments
240 Echo Place HDFC (The Bronx) $3000 towards building repairs, and supporting out of work tenants
COMMUNITY-BASED ORGS
BK Rot (Brooklyn) $2500 toward an e-cargo trike to haul food waste in a larger zone
FOOD CO-OPS
Bushwick Food Co-op (Brooklyn) $3000 for accounting services with A Bookkeeping Cooperative
Central Brooklyn Food Coop (Brooklyn) $4600 for inaugural meeting, party, and crowdfunding campaign matches
Lefferts Community Food Co-op (Brooklyn) $2500 to expand inventory and store hours, and to cover insurance
COMMUNITY GARDENS
The People’s Garden (Brooklyn) $2500 to support immigration housing justice organizing in Bushwick
Loisaida United Neighborhood Gardens (LUNGS) (Manhattan) $2500 towards youth programing for Lower East Side garden organizers
TRAININGS
Northwest Bronx Community Clergy Coalition (The Bronx) $1500 to provide economic democracy training for Bronx residents
Cooperative Leadership Intensive
$7,900 towards participation in CEANYC’s CLI for 9 women in NYC’s solidarity economy:
• Ashleigh Eubanks, CBO
• Jennifer Alise Flanders, worker co-op
• Sarah Lopez, worker co-op
• Catherine Murcek, worker co-op
• Magali Regis, gardens
• Natalia Sucre, gardens
• Maggy Ureña, worker co-op
• Alison Conforti, CSA
• Qiana Mickie, CSA
