[23] Play Cousins Collective: Black Family Care Network

11/17/21 • 55 min

Play Cousins Collective is a Black centered family care network based in Louisville, Kentucky. They are building multi-generational and inter-sectional Black spaces and community resources rooted in ancestral methods of healing and resistance. Through offering programs at every stage of development, from in utero to adult they are able to foster a supported and resilient community.

In this episode I speak with executive director Kristen Williams about the significance of building a village amongst the African-American community. She shares how they started with mapping out all of the Black businesses and practitioners in their community, voids children of color experience in educational institutions and communities, tools they are utilizing to affirm Black power and beauty from a young age, decolonization of mentality and practices, the multitude of programs they offer to all ages, membership structure, how they navigate generational trauma and healing, and more!

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Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Dr. Joy DeGruy

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Website

Instagram

Facebook

Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome by Dr. Joy DeGruy

Want to support Cooperative Journal?

Share your gifts with us on Open Collective Foundation

Previous Episode

[22] East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative: Community Owned Real Estate

East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative is based in the East Bay of California. They facilitate BIPOC and allied communities to cooperatively organize, finance, purchase, occupy, and steward properties, taking them permanently off the market. Residents, investors, community members, and EB PREC staff then co-own and co-steward the property. It creates a shift toward community controlled assets, and empowering their communities to be ecologically, emotionally, spiritually, culturally, and economically restorative and regenerative.

In this episode, I speak with executive director Noni Session about how EB PREC is garnering support to shift real estate ownership from extractive developers into the hands of the BIPOC community in Oakland and the East Bay. She shares the difference between a permanent real estate co-op and land trust, ancestral remembrance of cooperative ownership, how they got the first group of people to invest, their governance structure and multi-stakeholder model, prioritizing inclusivity and accessibility to individual investors, transparency of investment risks and how they mitigate it, and their exciting new venture - a historic Black arts svenue they’ve acquired for Black artists and small businesses at 50% of market rate.

Document detailing their direct public offering: https://ebprec.org/offering

Esthers Orbit Room - mixed-use Black cultural venue: https://ebprec.org/esthers

Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperatives

Next Episode

[24] Understory: Worker-led Restaurant

Understory is a worker-led restaurant, bar, and incubation kitchen in Oakland, CA. In collaboration with Oakland Bloom, they center immigrant, working class, and people of color chefs through pathways to worker-leadership, project support and training, and economic opportunities. It is more than just a restaurant, they offer a platter of ways to physically and socially nourish the community in a co-creative way. You can experience the roots of the workers through their rotating menu of Filipino, Moroccan, and Mexican cuisine, check out local art, attend a dance party, or support an immigrant or refugee chef at their weekly pop-up.

In this episode I speak with one of the chefs Florencio Esquivel about how Understory is shifting the narrative of who receives support and amplification in the restaurant industry. They share how the pandemic influenced the restaurant’s formation, process of assuming responsibilities and navigating decision making, impact and intention of their worker emergency fund, importance of preserving indegenous recipes, and their vision for a changed restaurant world that is horizontally structured while honoring the diversity of workers and their lineage.