Akuno, Kali

The People’s Network for Land & Liberation (PNLL) is a Minimal Viable Consortium consisting of 6 Community-Based Organizations across the US that share a common program to shift from power-over, extractive and unsustainable socio-political systems to cooperative, regenerative, and balanced systems.

In this session, the following local cases in the network will be discussed: Community Movement Builders (Atlanta, GA), Cooperation Jackson (Jackson, MS) and Incite Focus (Idlewild, MI).

Our Program

We are (6) Community Based Organizations strategically located across the United States. Each of us makes adaptations to fit the unique needs of our local circumstances, but we all implement the following Dual Power program:

1) Decommodify land for community owned and affordable housing, food production using a food sovereignty framework, and the practice of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to restore the reciprocal balance that existed bfore the enclosure of The Commons.

2) Community production employing digital fabrication technologies for decentralized manufacturing to empower local communities to create goods collaboratively and sustainably.

3) Incubating an ecosystem of worker-owned cooperatives that go beyond “coops for the sake of coops” to create profitable and vibrant local supply and value chains.

4) An internal self-education program that engages folks to foster critical thinking, dialogue, and empowerment to learn and implement our transformational and liberatory program.

5) Art and Culture is infused in everything we do. This includes making things beautiful, but goes deeper. We organize according to the adage “If it isn’t soulful, it isn’t strategic.”

We propose doing two workshops on June 18, Each workshop would be a "deep dive" of three of our "nodes" and what our program means in very concrete ways.

There is a huge overlap between the Solidarity Economy and the Commons. We look forward to exploring commonalities and differences, co-developing a shared language/analysis, and strengthening real world connections between these movements. The Solidarity Economy (SE) is a global movement to build an economy and world that centers the well being of people and planet. It is a framework that connects solidarity economy practices that align with its values of solidarity, participatory democracy, equity in all dimensions, sustainability and pluralism (many paths), to express and realize a post-capitalist vision. SE Practices exist in all sectors of the economy, with practices that are old (even ancient) and new, alternative and mainstream. SE embraces the commons, as well as include worker co-ops, mutual aid, unpaid care work, peer lending, credit unions, public banking, community land trusts, co-op housing, food co-ops, social currencies, and participatory budgeting. The solidarity economy provides a framework to connect up these currently siloed practices so that we begin to perceive them as a system rather than nice, but isolated, experiments. There’s a huge foundation to build on—and the Commons is a critical, core backbone. This session will be a panel discussion following a "fishbowl" process.