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.

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.

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!

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!