Beloved Community Incubator (BCI) and Muslims for Just Futures (MJF) are partnering to invest $4 million in Black, Brown, and Muslim poor and working class communities in the DC region. Through our program, Co-Operative Futures, we’ll build power with communities that have been extracted from by developers, their workplaces, as well as 25 years of criminalization under the War on Terror.
Our innovative program combines monthly guaranteed income payments with cooperative business incubation, so that groups of workers can invest the time it takes to build a successful business together. Over the next 18 months, we’re working with local community institutions to support nine teams of workers, who will transform shared ideas into nine businesses that reinvest in our local economy without extracting from their communities.
Our cohort’s teams are developing businesses in industries that are historically profitable for bosses but extractive for workers, including home health care, catering, commercial and residential painting, and wellness services. The businesses created in Co-Operative Futures will generate wealth for workers, create family-sustaining jobs, and anchor communities who are living through ongoing and intensifying attacks.
Once worker-owners launch their businesses, they’ll join an ecosystem of support through membership in the BCI Network, which provides sliding scale legal, technical, and administrative support and access to capital to more than 30 cooperatives in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. This ongoing support will help sustain these new cooperative businesses beyond their first 18 months — ensuring that they can help build long term wealth for their worker-owners, their families, and their communities.
Co-Operative Futures is a regional pilot that serves as a national model — one that doesn’t just help communities survive in the short term, but resources our region to build economic power and sovereignty for the long-term. We’re working with the Center for Urban Economic Development at University of Illinois Chicago, who will provide research support for our pilot over the next 18 months. At the end of the program, as the teams of workers launch their new businesses, BCI and MJF will also release our report on the combined guaranteed income and cooperative incubation model. This report will create a resource and pathway for others to build and invest in combined guaranteed income and cooperative incubation programs across the country.
BCI and MJF are investing in worker-ownership in the DC region, but also in community economic defense — making sure our communities and our neighbors build wealth, sustain their families, skill up in cooperative leadership, and sustain themselves even in the face of rising fascism, wealth inequality, and Islamophobia.
Co-Operative Futures represents what is possible when communities facing sustained economic divestment and state repression come together to build shared assets, collective ownership, and economic power. Our program’s historic reinvestment in local communities that have endured decades of economic extraction and divestment at the hands of developers, corporations, and the federal government, including through 25 years of the War on Terror apparatus, marks a critical step toward building a future in which our communities can economically thrive.
Join us December 1st as we officially launch Co-Operative Futures and celebrate a historic investment in Black, Brown, and Muslim working class power.