JACKSON, MS (Mississippi News Now) -
Imagine a self-sustaining village in West Jackson run by its residents.
A grass-roots environmental group hopes to eventually see that happen.
The "Our Power Plan" group says the Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan doesn't go far enough to reduce carbon pollution or take action on climate change. Group members hope to encourage Mississippians to take charge and demand more.
Read More"Climate Justice Alliance organizes actions in 10 cities to call attention to community-based solutions to clean energy future."
Cooperation Jackson took the lead for the Southeast Region at the EPA region 4 headquarters.
This article features member Sacajawea 'saki' Hall.
Read MoreThe Jackson Free Press' Scott Prather interviewed members of the Cooperation Jackson delegation going to the global climate justice convergence in Paris, France. Members of the delegation discuss the goals of the trip and Cooperation Jackson's climate and economic justice work in Jackson, MS.
"The goal is half protest and half affirmation," said Kali Akuno. The political leaders and corporations involved in the official discussions about climate change are "playing games with the planet and with our lives."
Cooperation Jackson's climate-justice vision outlines policy goals grounded in a political vision that looks to connect the dots between the environmental, economic and racial crises that have long plagued the south.
Read More“There’s no Hispanic air, no African American air, or white air, there’s just air. And if you breathe air, and most people I know do breath air, then that makes you part of the environment and if you are concerned about the quality of that air, I would consider you an environmentalist. And if you drink water, and most people I know drink water, and you are concerned about what’s in the water, then I would consider you an environmentalist. And you eat food, and again most people I know eat food, and you are concerned about what’s in the food, then I would consider you an environmentalist. If you answer two of the three, then I would say you are an environmentalist, you just might not know it.”Read More- Dr. Robert Bullard
150 years since an end to chattel slavery, anti-Black racism is still a virulent force in the U.S. The cause? The path to liberation?
Please donate generously to make this project a success. We cannot complete this provocative and revelatory film without you.
Read MoreA call to support An American Nightmare: Black Labor and Liberation
Greetings,
This is an appeal to people’s artists of liberation and revolution to join with Deep Dish TV and Cooperation Jackson to create a new multi-media video project, An American Nightmare: Black Labor and Liberation , a seven part documentary series which is now at a crucial stage of development.
Read MoreSince the rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, Black people throughout the United States have been grappling with a number of critical questions such as why are Black people being hunted and killed every 28 hours or more by various operatives of the law? Why don’t Black people seem to matter to this society? And what can and must we do to end these attacks and liberate ourselves? There are concrete answers to these questions. Answers that are firmly grounded in the capitalist dynamics that structure the brutal European settler-colonial project we live in and how Afrikan people have historically been positioned within it...
Read MoreBy Zachary Oren Smith Monday, July 27, 2015 1:32 p.m. CDT
In the summer of 2012, Andrew Campbell took a bus up to South Dakota. He was going to spend the summer interning with an organic farm that raised crops for cooperatives and farmers markets. Before that summer, Campbell knew only one kind of tomato: red and roughly the size of your fist.
Read MoreFeaturing Kali Akuno
As part of the Climate Convergence, REC helped host "The U.S. Left and the Problem of the State," a panel with Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin, journalist and author Christian Parenti, historian Frances Fox Piven, organizer Kali Akuno, and REC Executive Director Marcie Smith. The panel, which was held at 16 Beaver Street, discussed the role of the state in addressing the climate crisis.
We appreciate The Clarion-Ledger and Mayor Tony Yarber including Cooperation Jackson in this latest promotion of the great city of Jackson, Mississippi.
By Adofo Minka
El-Hajj Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X) once said that travel helps to broaden one’s scope. I never exactly understood what he meant by that and this is likely attributable to the fact that until now, I had never traveled outside of the United States. Being a part of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance’s (GGJ) delegation to the World Social Forum has changed that reality and has helped me to understand, more than I did before, the importance of international travel and engaging with other people throughout the globe to grasp a better understanding of where the work you do fit into the world picture. Being a part of this delegation has shown me the difference in reading about various struggles globally and having the opportunity to actually meet, talk to, and strategize with various people who are engaged in these struggles. The difference is that you actually get to learn about the nuances, complexities, and challenges that people face in their struggles against various forms of oppression in a way that in many instances reading will not reveal to you.
Read MorePosted on March 18, 2015
By Dara Cooper, Contributing Editor, Environment, Food, and Sustainability
Just over a year ago last February 2014, the world lost an incredible activist, organizer, father, and mentor—Jackson, Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba who came to be known as “America’s revolutionary mayor”—due to a very sudden death. Although we gained Baba Chokwe as an ancestor, after only seven months in office, the loss of Mayor Lumumba came as a sudden blow to activists, dreamers and loved ones all over the country. The significance of his revolutionary work, and most notably his term in office, was and will be forever remembered. With scant resources, a radical agenda and revolutionary heart, his candidacy appeared to be a tremendous long shot to most. A strong grassroots strategy that mobilized the masses proved that the power of the people is more than an ideology. The election of Mayor Lumumba was a real life example of the true power of democratic processes and the viability of a radical agenda.
Read MoreKali Akuno - February 2015
By Kali Akuno. “As the South Goes…So Goes the Nation.”
W.E.B Du Bois wrote these famous words in Black Reconstruction, linking America’s promise of democracy to the horrendous conditions for Black people in the South. Sadly, the State of Mississippi has long been a bellwether in this regard, from slavery and lynchings to Jim Crow, segregation, and ongoing voter disenfranchisement. Today, Mississippi has both the country’s largest Black population by percentage and its highest poverty rate. This is a not a coincidence but an illustration of how economic inequality goes hand in hand with racial discrimination.
Read MoreIn this article, Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson ask critical questions like what is the root cause of racism and national oppression in the U.S.? What are the underlying reasons for the fact that Black people remain at the bottom of the U.S. economy? What are African-American organizations and communities doing to resist the persistence of institutional racism and structural inequality? What are we doing to combat advancing structural exclusion from the formal economy, which is intensifying our dehumanization making large sectors of our people disposable? And what is the direction forward?
Read MoreIn Jackson, Mississippi, Kali Akuno expected to help develop worker cooperatives alongside that city’s new mayor, Chokwe Lumumba, who won office in 2013. But Lumumba died of a heart attack Feb. 25, a few months into his term.
Now supporters are wondering what will happen to their plan to construct a network of co-ops that would create jobs and overcome the city’s entrenched poverty, particularly among its black majority. Akuno, Lumumba’s former coordinator of special projects and external funding, was tasked in 2013 with creating a cooperative-development fund that would rely on city grants and private sources, with the goal of creating several new organizations and hundreds of jobs.
Read More2014 was a critical year for the Climate Justice Movement, which is arguably the most important social justice movement of our time. In the minds of many 2014 will be duly noted as the year when the movement transformed from being a resistance movement focused on altering the policies and practices of the national states and trans-national corporations, to one that is beginning to focus on system change and a just transition from the extractive economy.
Read Moreby Jessica Desvarieux - The Real News Network December 7th 2014
Activist Kali Akuno and historian Paul Le Blanc link judicial injustice to economic inequality
by Jessica Desvarieux - The Real News Network December 8th 2014
Activist Kali Akuno and historian Paul Le Blanc discuss the abandoned Freedom Budget of the Civil Civil Rights Movement and how it could be revived to address race and class disparities.
Jackson, Miss.: Not exactly the eco-capital of the world. The city’s wastewater disposal has the attention of the EPA, Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant is a big fracking supporter, there’s no glass recycling within city limits … and so on. But longtime organizer Kali Akuno has a vision: He and 100-plus volunteers want to turn the hardscrabble city of roughly 170,000 into a marvel of sustainability and social justice.
Read MoreBuilding a solidarity economy in Jackson, Mississippi anchored by a network of cooperatives and other worker-owned and democratically self-managed enterprises.
