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How am I only now finding out about this? Looks cool af.
@GuerillaOntologist Must be related to Cooperation Jackson?
@Matt_Noyes @GuerillaOntologist I couldn't find a single mention of Cooperation Jackson on New West Jackson's page. I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect it's because at this point Cooperation Jackson is just a shell company that Kali Akuno is using to fund his speaking gigs and writing. I mean, take a look at the blog; for this year; it's just speaking engagements and webinars, and no on-the-ground-in-Jackson progress updates or success stories:
https://cooperationjackson.org/blog
This fundraising page for a community fab lab has no updates since 2017:
https://cooperationjackson.org/the-community-production-initiative
This list of coops they're working on is mostly just ideas, with zero images of their work, and it's remained that way for years:
https://cooperationjackson.org/prospective-coops
Their Twitter is just forwarding national calls to action and virtue signaling:
https://twitter.com/cooperationjxn
It seems to me that New West Jackson is the only one of these two orgs actually doing the work! I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but you'd think if Cooperation Jackson was helping people on the ground, they'd be WAY more up-front about it.
@amikigu @GuerillaOntologist Good to have questions and be critical, even of friends and allies. I have many of the same questions about CJ. And I wonder about the relation between political organizing and building grassroots economic organizations. But I think we need to be careful when it comes to raising suspicions and using terms like shell company and virtue signaling. It's especially important not to foment or echo real or potential divisions btw organizations in BIPOC communities.
@Matt_Noyes @GuerillaOntologist Yeah, I definitely wouldn't publish what I wrote anywhere official; it's all just what I've been deducing from afar, without any first-hand evidence. I also admittedly got burnt out in NYC within many organizations where a core group of well-spoken, well-connected, and educated people were able to essentially hijack cooperative organizations into being a vehicle for their careers or to virtue-signal to others that they were good people, while doing absolutely nothing to create functioning economic alternatives for those who needed it most. Even though from where I stand it looks like CJ has become just that, I hope the on-the-ground reality is different, and that they're just not putting everything online.