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Fannie Lou Hamer wanted to vote. 

While the civil rights movement was climbing to its height, sit-ins, rallies, and marches organized by Black folks were preaching to their communities — it was time for change. During this time, Hamer, along with some of her neighbours, registered to vote. In the end, however, Hamer was denied. And when her employer found out that she registered, he fired her. 

Growing up in poverty in Mississippi, Hamer worked as a sharecropper on a plantation, a system where landowners rented land to farmers in return for a percentage of their crops — an arrangement which benefitted white landowners and kept Black American farmers in poverty.  

But after she was fired and evicted, Hamer began to gain momentum as a civil rights activist. She advocated for Black Americans’ right to vote, co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and notably, dedicated herself to food justice by starting a co-operative. 

In 1967, with the help of donations, Hamer purchased 40 acres of land in the Mississippi Delta and founded Freedom Farm Co-operative. The vision was to build a space where Black Americans could farm collectively and support their community self-sufficiently, without depending on white land owners. 

The co-operative grew into a 700 acre farm where a membership cost $1 per month. Cash crops were grown to pay for administrative fees and taxes, while vegetables grown on the land were distributed back to the members. Hamer hoped to pull her community out of poverty and through this economic power, gain political power to push for social change. 

To deny singular ownership and instead opt for collective power and resource-sharing has always been a method of resistance and social justice work.  

And today, with the rise of the gig economy, precarious work, and economic instability due to the pandemic, co-operatives are a powerful tool for economic resilience. While more than 1.2 million small to medium businesses in Canada were impacted by the pandemic, causing worker shortages and closures, many co-operatives have remained stable through these tumultuous times. Meanwhile, researchers have found that during economic depressions, co-operatives prove to be adaptive with practices like amending wages instead of cutting jobs. Many businesses also convert to a co-operative model because it proves to be resilient. 

“Just because we don’t see it in the Canadian history books, doesn’t mean it didn’t exist.”

 
Christine Clarke came upon Hamer’s story around the time she was transitioning from a career in journalism to organic farming. She was working on a farm in Southern Ontario, and though she was passionate about agriculture, she felt out of place. 

“As a Black queer woman, I just found myself without community around me. Farming in this space, as it is in many spaces in Canada, is predominantly white,” says Clarke.

She was working on the land and producing food, but there was a deep disconnect in the way Clarke found herself approaching this work. While she chose this career based on the desire to grow food for her communities “that have historically been excluded from agriculture, dispossessed of land,” that connection wasn’t happening for Clarke. 

“Very early on as a young farmer, I realized that I didn’t want to farm alone, I didn’t want to be the sole proprietor farmer,” says Clarke, and she came to ask herself: how might she farm with a real connection to her community? 

Then she found co-operatives. She found stories of people like Hamer who saw the power in working cooperatively and what that can mean for building economic empowerment and land sovereignty. “It just really sparked something in me,” says Clarke. 

Yet, when Clarke looked for organizations in Canada that could assist with co-op startup and development, she found another disconnect — they’re predominantly white-led organizations. So once again, Clarke felt that lack of belonging and community similar to when she was farming on her own in rural Ontario.

“So here’s this history of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and people of colour] and co-ops, but we’re not seeing it here in Canada. But as we all know, just because we don’t see it in the Canadian history books, doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. These histories exist, these current realities and lived experiences exist. They just don’t get told, those stories don’t get told,” says Clarke.

Starting Freedom Dreams Cooperative Education

 
In January 2021, Freedom Dreams Cooperative Education was founded. Clarke came together with Susanna Redekop, a fellow co-op developer, with the mission not just to teach people about the history of BIPOC-led co-ops, but also to empower BIPOC communities to find alternative economic systems outside of traditional work. 

Redekop has been working in the co-operative sector for over 12 years now, including the West End Food Co-op, and the Local Food and Farm Co-op. Through all these years, she held onto a burning question: why is there so much whiteness in co-operatives? 

Though Redekop noticed that many people of colour were living in housing co-ops, they were rarely part of the board of directors. Though there are countless ways in which BIPOC communities cooperate, these stories are not in the mainstream narrative of the co-op movement. 

In Fall 2021, Freedom Dreams hosted a series of four workshops to which more than 200 participants tuned in. They covered topics like the role of co-ops in the fight for social justice, and co-ops as economic development in BIPOC communities. Guest speakers from the BIPOC community who are leading their own co-op development and education spoke at these workshops, sharing knowledge and building a network. 

Looking back at the history of BIPOC co-operatives

 
A research study by Dr. Caroline Shenaz Hossein, an associate professor of business and society at York University, delves into the many of the stories and histories of BIPOC communities’ co-operatives, which has been constantly pushed to the sidelines of Canadian co-ops.  

In the paper, Hossein writes that the Canadian co-operative story is grounded in Eurocentric perspectives, listing the Rochdale Pioneers, the Antigonish movement in Nova Scotia, and the Desjardins movement in Quebec as the perceived founders of the co-op movement, and the lack of recognition for the contributions of racialized people in building co-operatives.

Indigenous communities have deep traditions of cooperativism which range widely but are often not seen as legitimate because they were not formally established. Artist collectives, fishing groups, and band-owned businesses are all models that are undeniably cooperative in nature, without the formal title. 

If we take a look at the history of Black-Canadians and co-ops, we see a flood of mutual aid systems, community-based supports, and rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) — a type of informal bank where the members save and borrow together in a community lending system. Hossein also argues that the Underground Railroad was no doubt a co-operative as it pooled resources together to help enslaved Black people. 

“As long as people migrated by way of the Underground Railroad and as immigrants, they brought their co-operative systems, including the true bands as far back as the 1800s,” writes Hossein. 

In Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s book Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, she points out the fact that Black-led farms and communes in Ontario date back to 1831 — which predate the Desjardins and Antigonish movements often cited as the starting point for co-operatives in Canada. 

In the early nineteenth century, Japanese-Canadians formed very successful fishing co-operatives on the west coast, which operated for over 40 years and were initially formed because they were denied entry into the white-dominated fishing co-ops at the time. However, at the start of World War II, the federal government confiscated Japanese-Canadians’ boats, and supplies and relocated thousands of them to internment camps.

“Knowing the legacy of hidden co-operatives within informal spaces is important to the Canadian co-op sector. This also means that there is a real need to widen the definition of co-operative to ensure that ROSCAs and other mutual aid groups of BIPOC Canadians are included,” writes Hossein. 

These are stories of resistance and finding economic sovereignty — which are pillars of cooperativism in Canada. An important facet of Freedom Dreams through telling these stories, Redekop says, is to legitimize the different ways in which communities of colour cooperate, and highlight how different cultural traditions that a lot of these communities bring with them to places like Canada, which have deep ancestral roots. 
 

Co-ops as models of economic resilience

 
Today, co-ops prove to be resilient in times of crisis. Robin Puga, a co-op educator, says this is because a co-op is a community resource and its members, who are also part of that community, are directly motivated to keep it alive.

When the pandemic happened, marginalized communities across Canada were disproportionately impacted through job loss, housing insecurity, and food insecurity. In this time of need, the Parkdale People’s Economy, a network of more than 30 community-led organizations, started the Parkdale Pods Mutual Aid Network in Toronto. The neighbourhood is one of the few in Toronto that has remained low-income over the years, with a huge newcomer population, and is culturally diverse. 

The Parkdale Pods was an initiative that created an interactive map for residents to post their needs and connect them to their neighbours in the area who were willing and seeking to help. People on the network offered anything from grocery drops for folks who couldn’t leave their home to sharing their Netflix and Disney+ accounts. Though this project wasn’t a formally established co-op, community support, resource-sharing, and self-help is baked into its core. 

“It’s been quite amazing to be a part of something like that happening in Parkdale and seeing mutual aid, the solidarity economy, and ways to support each other that are not financial. Because again, it’s just reconceptualizing what is valuable,” says Redekop. 

“The reason I think that [co-ops] are very helpful for rebuilding or creating community is because you’re addressing the needs of the people who are participating in it, there’s direct accountability, and the money stays local,” says Robin Puga, a co-op educator. “People are going to get engaged in building this organization as a co-operative because they directly need the result of that organization, be it a buyers club or a credit union.” 

Although, this isn’t always the case. When Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC) was bought by a private US investment firm in 2020, many of their locations around Canada were forced to close and many employees were laid off or had to go on leave. The acquisition of MEC was criticized by many, who pointed out that at the end, the members were powerless. A few members of the co-op, however, said that along the way, MEC lost it’s cooperative ideals. 
 

What barriers are limiting BIPOC-led co-ops?

 
While innovative co-operative models like the Parkdale Pods have sprouted to serve their communities, the ability for these groups and initiatives to remain afloat is a challenge. 

Part of the problem in sustaining and developing BIPOC-led co-operatives is the lack of support and funding, and more than that, the lack of legitimacy given to informal co-operatives. Clarke says that many informally established co-ops find it hard to seek developmental support because there is little recognition for those models outside the formal co-op model. She also says the bureaucracy of setting up a formal co-op without the knowledge or resources to do so can be extremely daunting.

Puga, who has been involved in co-op education for over 20 years, says not much has changed in terms of co-op awareness across Canada since the start of the century. Many people still see co-ops as “hippies running a corner store” when the reality is much wider and deeper. 

“I think some of the challenges for the co-operative community is to live the values of the cooperative movement, which are really well laid out. They’re about equity, equality, democracy, and inclusion. And I don’t know if that’s really happening in an intentional way,” says Robin Puga. “I think a lot of people want it to happen but it requires effort — it requires hard conversations.” 
 

Moving forward with an inclusive co-operative mindset

 
Clarke says it shouldn’t be a question of how more BIPOC folks can join the co-op sector but to understand the ways in which BIPOC communities already engage in cooperation and finding ways to support that. “Part of that comes from opening up the definition of the formal co-op sector so that those resources that they already have can flow into the ways that our communities already cooperate.” 

For Clarke, the work of Freedom Dreams Cooperative Education isn’t about finding a door for BIPOC folks to enter the co-op sector — it’s about creating a bridge for the co-op sector to become an ally for cooperativism that has existed and continues to exist within BIPOC communities.  

Puga adds that one of the seven guiding principles of the co-operative identity from the International Co-op Alliance (ICA) is education, training and information. “I feel like co-ops could be doing a lot better on that front as well. The most successful co-ops that I’ve learned about are ones that do focus on member education.” 

Clarke and Redekop are planning to do more workshops in the coming months, but are currently working on connecting with their communities and understanding their needs, to create sessions that can truly support them. 

“I really see that there’s a great opportunity right now for us to be doing this work and to be reaching a lot of youth and reaching a lot of folks who don’t know about the co-operative model, who haven’t seen themselves represented in the official cooperative sector,” says Redekop.

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