Supporting Cooperative Conversions in the DC Region

In addition to more traditional cooperative incubation programs, where worker owners begin at the idea stage and move through cooperative development to a launch, BCI works with already operating small businesses that want to convert to a worker-owned cooperative model. This kind of conversion is a key way to build the solidarity economy in our region.

In 2024, BCI has been working with two Black and Brown led businesses, Bold Yoga and Rise Up Fitness, to convert from a more traditional business structure to worker-owned cooperatives.

Do you know of or run a business that might be interested in converting or want to learn more about conversion as a retirement plan? Contact us here!

BCI License Fund Supports Street Vendors in Path to Licensing

The BCI Vendor Team is excited to share these midyear updates on the BCI License Fund, which supports leaders in the Decrim Vending campaign with the costs of accessing licenses — from equipment purchases and repairs to class and certificate fees.

Kahssay Ghebrebrhan, a leader in the campaign to decriminalize street vending, returned to vending on July 1st for the first time since the pandemic began in 2020! With the support of the BCI License Fund, which provides financial support for vendors who are in the process of applying for licenses, Khassay was able to get necessary repairs made to his cart, enabling him to set up his hot dog stand for thefirst time in four years on the corner of 5th St NW and Indiana Avenue NW.

The BCI License Fund has now supported more than 27 vendors with the cost and classes required to receive their food manager certifications, an important step in ensuring that vendors can sell legally in DC. Interested in getting emails about BCI’s work with street vendors in DC? Sign up for vendor specific emails here!

DC SELF Surpasses $2 Million in Loans to Local Cooperatives

The DC Solidarity Economy Loan Fund provides non-extractive financing to DC-area cooperatives. We’ve already reached our goal of providing $2 million in loans to local coops, and wanted to share a couple of highlights from 2024.

We’re excited to announce that Swamp Rose Co-op will be receiving a loan from DC SELF to buy a truck, trailer, and new equipment, allowing them to expand their operations. Swamp Rose is a local landscaping cooperative that works with native plants to transform yards into dynamic, ecologically thriving spaces. You can celebrate this exciting time with them by signing up for a consultation or by shopping their summer plant sales!

Earlier this year, DC SELF made its biggest investment to date with Community Purchasing Alliance, a DC cooperative that leverages the buying power of community institutions like small businesses, schools, retirement communities, housing co-ops, nonprofits, and congregations to accelerate progress towards sustainability, equity, and justice. The $750,000 loan will help CPA increase their amount of local racial equity purchasing. This summer, we’ve already begun to see the effects of this partnership beyond the loan, including a regional small business referral program and a pilot program with Swamp Rose Co-op offering climate smart landscaping. 

BCI's work with Street Vendors Honored by Washington Lawyers' Committee

On Wednesday, May 29th, Beloved Community Incubator was honored by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs for our work supporting DC Street Vendors as they fight for fair implementation of DC’s new vending laws.

Many street vendors are charged a quarterly minimum sales tax regardless of how much they actually sell. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when vendors weren’t selling due to unsafe conditions, many of them accumulated large amounts of debt due to these unfair taxes. Under the Clean Hands Law, vendors cannot apply for a license if they owe more than $100, which creates a major barrier for vendors working towards receiving Street Vending licenses. In 2023, Legal and Technical Assistance Director Geoff Gilbert, along with BCI’s Vending Team and Street Vendors, worked with The Washington Lawyers’ Committee, and pro-bono lawyers from Tzedek DC and Weil, Gotshal & Manges to file a constitutional challenge to the Clean Hands Law.

BCI received the 2024 Alfred McKenzie Award, awarded annually to clients of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee whose dedication and courage have produced civil rights victories of particular significance. We’re grateful to our partners for this recognition and look forward to continuing to support street vendors as they fight for access and fair implementation!

You can watch a short video highlighting BCI below and on YouTube.

BCI Celebrates DC Street Vendors

On Thursday, May 30th, BCI and supporters gathered at Sankofa to celebrate the victories and hard work of DC Street Vendors, who have been navigating the steps to access licenses over the past thirteen months. From getting their ServSafe Certifications to repairing and upgrading carts and other equipment with the BCI License Fund, vendors shared their recent wins and accomplishments with community members.

Vendors also called on their community to support them in their fight for a fair implementation, including pushing DC Health to make their microenterprise home kitchen permit available and accessible for DC’s smallest businesses. You can learn more about the campaign and send a letter in support of vendors here.

DC SELF reaches nearly $2,000,000 in loans!

The DC Solidarity Economy Loan Fund launched in December of 2022 with an ambitious goal of lending 1 million dollars to cooperatives in our community by 2024. We are so excited to share that DC SELF has hit 1.9 million dollars in approved loans! The loans have varied across sector and the impact to local cooperatives is already being felt. We gave Dulce Hogar a small loan to buy new equipment and bring on new members. Throneless tech needed a line of credit to be able to say yes to their biggest contract ever – and got to raise their wages in the process! 

Dulce Hogar signing their loan agreement with DC SELF

Community Purchasing Alliance received a loan to hire three new staff and extend their reach across the region. They are poised to grow their local purchasing with local and BIPOC owned businesses to 40 million dollars annually over the next 10 years. We’re excited to collaborate so that our local institutions (houses of worship, schools, apartment buildings) can serve as an alternative anchor institution, providing quality jobs and more opportunities for worker ownership. A first example of this is a pilot program with Swamp Rose Coop to provide landscaping and stormwater mitigation to faith communities. 

We are also excited to announce a 1 million dollar bridge construction loan to Dreaming Out Loud, a food hub and ecosystem partner, who are building a grocery store, food hub, and commercial kitchen in Ward 8. BCI & Dreaming Out Loud have been partnering together for years. Together we helped coordinate the distribution of thousands of pounds of food to be distributed early in the pandemic, with DOL coordinating with the Black Farmers Network and BCI with local mutual aid groups. Together, we are supporting the commercial kitchen and DREAM Program to help create new regional cooperatives in food and catering.

BCI + Cooperation New Orleans Launch the Solidarity Economy Research Exchange Program

This June, two organizers from Cooperation New Orleans (CNO) will be joining BCI’s community researchers for our summer regional listening campaign. 

CNO will bring PAR practices and experience back to New Orleans. Our projects share a commitment to transforming our world through the solidarity economy —toward power for poor and working-class Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people, freedom for queer and trans people, international worker solidarity and ecological sustainability. You can support this project here.

If you want to learn more about solidarity economy organizing as a power building strategy, we encourage you to check out these short audio and text excerpts of the recent Nonprofit Quarterly series on Solidarity Economies, featuring Maya Pen from CNO and Felix Macaraeg from BCI.

BCI Launches Solidarity Economy Apprenticeship Program

BCI launched the first cohort of the Solidarity Economy Apprentice Program in February, which provides business development skills and member leadership development for our regional ecosystem. While there are many organizations who recognize the wealth building and racial equity promise of cooperatives, our region lacks culturally competent coop developers who have trained to work with potential worker-owners who have been historically excluded from the traditional workforce.

The Solidarity Economy Apprentice Program began with three months of coop developer training and continues into a summer of regional listening using Participatory Action Research (PAR). PAR is rooted in the belief that that people closest to problems are best able to envision solutions to those problems, and that the people best positioned to study and produce knowledge with communities are members of those communities.

In partnership with African Communities Together, Muslims for Just Futures, National Domestic Workers and others, our ambitious goal is to speak with 500 workers across the DMV about the challenges they face and the organizing opportunities we can imagine to meet those challenges. This summer of community research will guide BCI's work for years to come.

BCI's Work Highlighted by Greater Washington Community Foundation

BCI was recently given the opportunity to share about our work with Greater Washington Community Foundation, as part of their Sharing Community initiative. We’re excited to include a few highlights from our conversation — you can read the full post at the link above.

GWCF: What excites you the most about receiving support through the Sharing Community initiative?

BCI: What is most exciting… is knowing that the Sharing DC Committee really understands and believes in our vision. We realize that our organizing model as a solidarity economy organization is unique. Our power building strategy is through institution building (through cooperatives) and membership, but also includes a programmatic and technical assistance component. Our work with “high touch” cooperatives is essentially base building with poor and working class BIPOC workers in order to build a coop from the ground up. There is more and more research that traditional workforce development and job training programs don't guarantee jobs or increased income. By developing and supporting worker-owned cooperatives, creating market access for local BIPOC-owned cooperatives, and using DC SELF to invest an additional 1 million dollars in local cooperatives over the next 2 years, we are working to close the racial wealth gap. The funding from Sharing DC committee means they believe in our vision too.

GWCF: As a nonprofit leader in our community, what are your dreams or aspirations for the future?

BCI: Last summer, the local coop ecosystem came together to vision what's possible and shape our work for the future. Their collective vision included affordable care cooperatives (childcare, home health care, elder care), bookkeeping and legal cooperatives, coop grocery stores, and collectively owned spaces for artists and food businesses. BCI is always dreaming about more community control over resources in our community -- think grocery stores, workplaces, land, banks, housing, and more!

M. Felix Macaraeg on Ecosystem Building

BCI’s Organizing Director M. Felix Macaraeg was recently highlighted in Nonprofit Quarterly for their description of the differences between campaigning and ecosystem building.

“It’s just radically different, and I don’t think we can explain that enough…We need time to get to work, to do the sufficient accompaniment work, that it will take to employ these scaling strategies…I’m not saying we are the silver bullet, but unless we start to actually build in the shadow of empire and are resourced to do it and build our own protected enclaves, and interweave those strategies to scale…we don’t even get a start.”

The Regional Solidarity Economy Ecosystem Organizing Model

Building on BCI’s webinar with Nonprofit Quarterly and New Economy Coalition that looked at the national movement for solidarity economies in February 2024, BCI’s Program Director Bianca Vazquez facilitated an online conversation on March 27th about what it takes to build a regional solidarity economy in the DC area, and what’s possible when we focus locally on the well-being of people rather than profit.

Many of us live and work in places where gentrification, displacement of local businesses and families, and low-wage extractive work are par for the course. Over the past several years Beloved Community Incubator has dreamed and organized to build a different kind of city and region — one that prioritizes community accountability, collective and democratic planning, and equitable production and distribution of everything that people need to live, rather than maximum extraction, endless growth, and unchecked profit.

It can often be difficult for people interested in anticapitalism, cooperatives, or collective models to figure out how to plug into the work happening at the regional level. Our conversation brought together people from different cooperatives, both operational and in incubation, union members, funders, other regional cooperative incubators, and people generally interested in building solidarity economies in their regions.

During the call we shared practical models that we can use to evaluate and map the needs of our solidarity economy ecosystem, and collaboratively mapped our resources and needs in the DC area.We envision this regional conversation and skill-share as the first of many, as we weave together our collective vision for the DC area. We invite you to watch this call and reach out to us with questions, resources, and other needs you’d like to add to our regional solidarity economy ecosystem map!

DC Grocery Co-ops Build Connection + Solidarity

"The Takoma Park/Silver Spring Co-op & Glut are wonderful places to shop/work. Now, we can add the City Garden Co-op to that list. It was great hearing that our meeting yesterday fulfilled their long-standing desire to connect with Community Grocery Cooperative. Their 30 years of experience will provide valuable insights." - Loryne JOYce, Community Grocery Coop Member

Members of the Community Grocery Cooperative, which is organizing to build a community-owned grocery store serving neighborhoods East of the River, were excited to visit the City Garden Coop in Mount Pleasant over this weekend, which has been serving its 130 members since the 1970s.

"City Garden Coop seems to be a great benefit to its members and a model that our CGC can learn from. I enjoyed hearing details about how they have kept the business  operation running for over 40 years. I’m looking forward to continued dialogue with them. And it was especially wonderful to catch up with so many of our CGC members in person." - Nancy, Community Grocery Coop Member

City Garden Coop members were generous in sharing a wealth of insights and resources related to their coop's operations, including information on sourcing goods, managing financials, scheduling volunteer shifts, and making collective decisions. This information will be instrumental to the Community Grocery Coop as we grow our buying club and build toward our vision of operating a brick and mortar store. We look forward to continuing the conversation with City Garden Coop and we appreciate Beloved Community Incubator for facilitating this exchange. 

"It was really encouraging to share with and learn from City Garden folks. Even better to share and feel the energy of the CGC fam." - Anthony

Remaking the Economy: Regional Solidarity Economies

The national movement towards a solidarity economy has grown exponentially over the past few years, seeded by regional ecosystems that are building grassroots power across the country. Over the past six years, BCI has been working to build a regional solidarity economy in the DC area — and our strategy of organizing with cooperatives and workers is being recognized nationally.

Building on the series in Nonprofit Quarterly this winter that highlighted case studies of solidarity economy ecosystems, including BCI’s organizing work with cooperatives and workers, Nonprofit Quarterly and the New Economy Coalition are co-hosting a webinar to dig deeper into how we build regional economies rooted in community ownership.

BCI Organizing Director Felix Macraeg shared about BCI’s work of organizing a regional solidarity economy in the DC Metro region, and the national impacts of our work with the New Economy Coalition. We invite you to watch the recording of this free webinar below.

The BCI License Fund: $125,000 for DC Street Vendors

Today BCI is excited to announce the launch of the BCI License Fund, which covers 90% of the costs associated with applying for a Street Vendor License under DC’s new vending laws! This $125,000 fund, made possible by generous individual donors, will help ensure vendors are able to afford the many costs of applying for licenses.

“With this $125,000 fund, we are giving DC’s smallest business owners a fighting chance to fulfill their dreams,” Geoff, BCI’s Legal & Technical Assistance Director, says of the fund. “We are doing our part to support street vendors. Now it is time for the Mayor’s executive agencies to do their part.”

Although the new law was passed in April 2023 and went fully into effect in October, vendors are just now beginning to see city agencies move to create a real pathway to compliance. The Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection (DLCP) is responsible for creating a license application process that works, but vendors often find themselves tangled in red tape, unable to finish the license application process.

Many of DC’s agencies have a long and shameful history of providing services that are inaccessible to poor and working class street vendors due to language, literacy, and technology access issues, along with ineffective communication between agencies. You can read more about this in our new report, A Brief History of DC Street Vending which chronicles the history of street vendors fighting for recognition and legalization in DC, and the equally long history of DC Government’s regulatory repression and lack of support for one of the District’s oldest forms of entrepreneurship.

Since last summer, BCI has been pushing DLCP to cut through the red tape and create a series of pop-up clinics for DC Street Vendors. Today vendors are showing up to a clinic where financial need and barriers to tech, literacy and language access do not stand in their way. We hope this clinic is the first of many! 

Community Grocery Co-op Attends Inaugural Black Farmer Conference

BCI supported Community Grocery Co-op Member Loryne JOYce Bowen with attendance at The Inaugural 2024 Mid-Atlantic Black Farmers Conference this past January, put on by the Mid-Atlantic Black Farmers Caucus, a cooperative network of producers and associations of producers of agricultural products located in the Mid-Atlantic region. “As a Seasoned Community Networker/Co-operator, I learned a lot from the folks who attended and from the varied activities offered…Many thanks to BCI!”

A deep relationship between Black Farmers and food justice leaders East of the River is a key factor for success in developing a just food system and locally grounded supply chains -- an integral part of local and regional solidarity economies.

One of the Black Farm Tours offered at the conference - at The Farm at Kelly Miller.

Felix Macaraeg, BCI’s Organizing Director, shared: “It has been so exciting to accompany Community Grocery Coop (CGC) on their journey to resist and build: resist food apartheid in DC, and build a home-grown community grocery store! While successful grocery coops can be an uphill struggle, CGC has done the truly hard work first--staying together for over 10 years learning to make decisions together and navigating conflict. As one of our mentors, Ed Whitfield recently reminded us, we need more people who know how to keep people united together. Upwards and onwards, CGC!”

DC Street Vendor Sunni T. Shares Stories from #DecrimVending Campaign

Sunni T, the co-owner and head chef of Sunni T's Kitchen. and a future member of the Vendors United Catering Co-op, shared highlights and stories from the successful campaign to decriminalize vending in DC at the Community Storytelling event sponsored by Baldwin House and Ward 1 Mutual Aid on Wednesday, January 31.

“Being apart of DC street vending has been more than just a job for me – it’s been a life-changing ride,” Sunni shared.

“I’m not just making ends meet; I’m making history. It’s incredible to know that I am seen as a role model and a leader in my community. Fighting for the legalization of street vending wasn’t just about the law; it was about standing up for what’s right and making a difference.

I’m glad to be a part of DC’s legacy, doing something chefs aren’t known for – changing laws and getting involved in the community. It feels good to know that I’ve inspired others to join the street vending world with a catering-style setup similar to mines. Seeing people set up their tents next to me brings joy, and I always offer words of encouragement, while supporting them in any way that I can.

Sunni T and BCI Advisory Board Member Celeste Smith

Yet, it’s frustrating to see the mayor trying to reverse our hard-fought victory of making street vending legal. My food alone was bringing the community together, bridging gaps between ages and cultures. It’s more than a business for me; it’s a source of comfort and the means to provide for my children. I strongly disagree with the notion that our neighborhood is worsening; in fact, my presence has been a positive force.

I am paving a way so that my boys won’t have to face the same struggles. I’m teaching them, and other youth, to believe in what they stand for, to be unwavering, and never give up. I am going to keep moving forward, inspiring others, and building a future where everyone has a shot at success. Thank you, and here’s to my journey!”