Join SVC and ASBC Wednesday, Wednesday 2/10 at 1pm ET for 40-Acres & a Mall: Black Co-operativism in Los Angeles.

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John,

SVC, ASBC, and 1worker1vote ([link removed]) invite you to join us Wednesday, February 10 at 1pm ET for 40-Acres & a Mall: Black Co-operativism in Los Angeles ([link removed]) . Speakers include Clark R. Arrington (Seed Commons ([link removed]) ), Damien Goodmon (Crenshaw Subway Coalition ([link removed]) ), Ed Whitfield (Seed Commons ([link removed]) , New Economy Coalition ([link removed]) ), Niki Okuk (Rco² Material Reuse ([link removed]) ).

Building on decades of community organizing and advocacy on land use, housing justice, collective ownership and community-centered development, Downtown Crenshaw Rising (DCR) started as a broad-based coalition campaign to prevent the sale of a 40-acre mall in the historically Black Crenshaw neighborhood of Los Angeles to a Trump-backed real estate group, CIM Group. The Crenshaw community has the unfortunate distinction of being the hottest real estate market in America’s most unaffordable city. The area is being swarmed by real estate speculators that are: flipping homes, purchasing naturally occurring affordable apartment complexes to push out long-term low-income residents; and building new market-rate housing units affordable only to families that make above $125,000 per year. The neighborhood’s median household income for a family of four is about $40,000 per year. To defeat CIM, DCR rapidly built a coalition and earned the support of over 300 local organizations, business leaders,
neighborhood associations and civil rights groups, including Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, and 12,000 individuals. Subsequently, in an inspiring act of self-determination, the community asserted that it wanted to own the mall collectively, stabilize it and reimagine/redevelop the iconic Black commercial space as a 21st century community wealth building urban village with a sustainable net positive energy system.

There aren’t many models for how investors could invest in a development project without taking power away from the community. DCR is grateful to be partnering with creative technical experts and attorneys to design investment structures where investors are in a regenerative, instead of extractive, relationship with the project and community. This is an opportunity for donors and investors with commitments to racial justice and wealth redistribution to be in a strategic partnership with the Crenshaw community. With proper investment in this endeavor, a viable alternative community development model that is rooted in community ownership, community stabilization and community wealth building can be developed which will make projects like Downtown Crenshaw possible all over this country.
Register Now: 40-Acres & a Mall: Black Co-operativism in Los Angeles ([link removed])
Co-Hosted by
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Niki Okuk attended Audubon Middle school in South LA and went on to complete her degree in Economics at Columbia University, a Masters from the Nanyang University in Singapore, and a certificate in Sustainability at MIT Sloan School of Business before returning home to start a green-collar business in Compton. Rco Tires existed for nearly a decade as an example of black woman owned small business, employing dozens of formerly incarcerated community members, recycling millions of pounds of tire rubber into new products and creating decent, dignified, and democratic workplaces in South LA, which she talked about in her 2017 TED talk, "Fire the Boss". Niki continues to work at the intersection of sustainability, industry and environmental justice and is currently serving on the leadership team for Downtown Crenshaw Rising, the ambitious community led effort to purchase and redevelop the historic Crenshaw Mall 40 acre site into a thriving urban village under collective and cooperative models
which will house, employ, stabilize, and nurture the Crenshaw community for generations to come. Tribal member Awakane Kamanuku, Papua New Guinea.
Ed Whitfield is originally from Little Rock Arkansas and was a long time social justice activist before becoming involved in community development, cooperative development and philanthropy. He now spends most of his time trying to help communities build self-reliant economies to meet their needs and elevate the quality of life. Ed was Co-Founder and Co-Managing Director of the Fund for Democratic Communities (F4DC) and continues to serve on the boards of the Seed Commons: A Community Wealth Cooperative and the New Economy Coalition (NEC) Ed spent 9 years as Board Chairman of the Greensboro NC Redevelopment Commission and was the board chair of Greensboro’s Triad Minority Development Corporation before becoming involved with the cooperatives and the world of democratic non-extractive finance. He currently serves as a consultant to community groups on matters of community cooperative economic development and community wealth building, as well as working in the arena of organizational
diversity, equity and inclusion improvement. Ed writes, teaches and lectures on these matters of importance while balancing this work with playing blues and eating barbecue.
27-year Leimert Park resident Damien Goodmon has been labeled a “visionary” by the LA Times, recognized as one of the L.A.’s “100 Most Influential African-Americans” by the LA Wave Newspapers, chosen beside former LA Mayor Richard Riordan and actress Drew Barrymore for the 2009 “LA People” issue of LA Weekly, and is a lead subject of the award-winning documentary “Beyond the Echo of the Drum,” which premiered at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. As a nonprofit executive director he has led some of the Crenshaw and Black Los Angeles' most impactful community advocacy campaigns. As a political operative he has managed, led departments and advised electoral campaigns from the school board level up to the presidential. As an executive management consultant and systems thinker, he has built, reconstructed and managed multiple large companies and departments, including some with over 400 employees, and successfully guided complex projects and partnerships, featuring actors with divergent
interests.A graduate of L.A. Loyola High School, he has studied at the University of Washington and Harvard University programs.
Clark R. Arrington is an experienced attorney and educator with degrees from Pennsylvania State University (BA Sociology) and the University of Notre Dame Law School. He currently serves as General Counsel for Seed Commons, a finance organization specializing in the non-extractive financing of cooperatively organized and worker owned enterprises. He lives in Philadelphia PA and is also a partner in the law firm, Arrington Owens & Associates of Jackson MS.

Prior to joining Seed Commons, he was a consultant to New Communities, Inc. of Albany GA and taught and practiced law in Africa. He organized a Master’s Degree Program in Community Economic Development at the Open University of Tanzania on behalf of the Southern New Hampshire University, taught business law at the Kampala International University-Dar es Salaam, served as Special Counsel to Mkono & Co Advocates and served for two years as a Legal Consultant to the African Development Bank in Tunisia.

Before venturing to Africa, he worked for the US Securities Exchange Commission, Catholic University Law School, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the Colom Law Firm of Columbus MS and served as Chair, General Counsel and Capital Coordinator of Equal Exchange, Inc. He also served as General Counsel of the ICA Group and served on the boards of the ICA Group, the Social Venture Network, the Cooperative Fund of New England (CFNE) and the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement (Selma AL). He currently serves on the boards of Nature’s Garden for Victory and Peace (Tuskegee AL) and CFNE.

He is a member of the Pennsylvania, Mississippi and Massachusetts Bar Associations.

He is a 2021 inductee into the Cooperative Hall of Fame.
Upcoming Events
February 17: Restorative Investing: A Framework for Racial Equity ([link removed])
Erika Seth Davies (The Racial Equity Asset Lab)
Sean Campbell (Capital for Communities)
Laina Greene (Angels of Impact)

February 24: The Human Amazon: Funding The Future of the Quilombola People ([link removed])
Selma Dealdina (CONAQ
Sandra Maria (CONAQ)
MaryAnne Howland (Ibis Communications & Global Diversity Leadership Exchange)
Josh Knauer (JumpScale)
Vasco van Roosmalen (UTU Social Impact Investment Fund)

April 20-22 - ASBC-SVC 2021 Spring Conference ([link removed]) (register now for Early Bird Pricing)
A virtual convening for business leaders, impact investors, policy makers, and more.
In partnership with

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