“Oscar Wilde soon became Information Central. As the first gay bookshop in the country, we amassed something that proved to be invaluable for organizing a march,” wrote Fred Sargeant in his 2010 first-person account for the Village Voice.

Meanwhile, Washington, DC’s Drum and Spear Bookstore, “was a creative hub for black power, black consciousness and internationalist activism” from 1968 to 1974, according to the Library of Congress. The bookshop eventually shut down due to debt. 

Despite being bastions of societal advancement, community and mental nourishment, bookshops have dwindled due to factors like competition from Amazon and the popularity of e-books. In 2021, the United States Census Bureau pointed out that “the number of U.S. Book stores (as listed in the North American Industry Classification System) dropped from 12,151 in 1998 to 6,045 in 2019.”

The pandemic furthered this downward trend. In October 2020, Focus Finance reported that “sales turnover from brick and mortar bookstores declined by 31% from January to July 2020. Some bookstores are even seeing year-over-year sales declines as high as 80%.”

Discover Orca, Olympia’s largest independent bookstore

In April 2020, when Covid-19 was in full swing, the Orca bookstore in Olympia, Washington stayed afloat by adopting the co-op model. As the shop’s site explains, owner Linda Berentsen “was ready to retire, but wanted to ensure that the store lived on.”

“Diversifying was the only option,” says Kait Leamy, an Orca worker-owner since December 2021. “People didn’t want Orca to go away, so turning into a member-owned co-op was a great way to fundraise at the time.”

Leamy explains that the shop, which existed in various forms for nearly three decades before becoming the Orca Books Cooperative, is now owned by its employees and supportive Olympia community members.

“I think people in this area love that community-run aspect of things,” they state, adding that Orca owes its survival to this communal spirit. “The community has saved our lives several times. People in town are supportive on a day-to-day basis by shopping here and also when big, crazy things happen.” For example, one crowdsourcing campaign replenished funds lost to an embezzling bookkeeper. Another helped cover veterinary expenses for the shop’s resident cat, Orlando.

The bookshop has two kinds of memberships: “Basic Consumer [and] Low-Income Consumer.” Each member pays a fee that provides some benefits, discounts and voting rights.

Olympia is a hot spot for co-ops. In 2019, the Northwest Cooperative Development Center told the social justice publication Works in Progress that the city had “more cooperatively owned businesses per capita than any other US city (one co-op business for every 5,255 residents).”

Leamy, who was a member of several co-ops while in college, notes, “Now I can’t have a job with the hierarchy that regular corporate jobs have, because I am so used to this co-op model where everybody has autonomy, [all] voices are equal, and no one is telling you what to do.”

As Olympia’s largest independent bookstore, Orca is a space where customers and staff “from all walks of life” form “a vibrant, supportive, and generous book-loving community,” the store’s site states. “We rejoice in offering a wonderfully eccentric haven for our wonderfully diverse patrons.”

The shop’s amenities include a free coffee cart and a mutual aid table with medical supplies. Orca also carries cards, calendars, stickers, prints, magnets, t-shirts and other items crafted by local creatives like noted papercut artist Nikki McClure.

It also serves as a “community hub for book trade, resource sharing, and community re-cycling.”

“You don’t have to spend money to be here,” Leamy notes. “These days, there are so few places in the world that you’re allowed to just be in, so we try hard to make Orca a welcoming place. I think that helps us because people care and are invested.”

Selling mostly used books, Orca strives to keep its prices as low as possible, “so people can have access to the information,” according to Leamy. “We’re told all the time that we’re the cheapest bookstore in town. That feels important to us because new books are getting more and more expensive. A new hardcover these days can be $45.”

Rather than participating in a wholesale process, local authors can sell their books in small numbers at Orca. The shop takes only a small cut, leaving the author with the majority of the sale price.

Orca hosts events such as author talks, poetry readings, mending circles and book club meetings “where [people] come together, read the same thing, talk about it, and talk about life and the world,” Leamy says. “You can’t do that on Amazon. Having a physical space and a physical book instead of digital feels important.”

Combined with right-wing efforts to ban and burn books, the decrease in face-to-face interaction in the digital age makes the survival of shops like Orca more important than ever.

“Bookstores, particularly, are hard [to maintain] these days,” Leamy observes. “There are some days where we say, ‘Are we going to make it?’ and some days where we’re flying high. I think there are enough people out there who want bookstores to exist [bettering the odds] that we can make it.”

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

[Local Peace Economy produced this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Community Support Helps the Orca Book Cooperative Stay Afloat appeared first on Fair Observer.

Budget gaps can often result in reduced funding for crucial resources like social services and education.

Fortunately, there are numerous solidarity enterprises and mutual aid groups in Chicago that can help ease the brunt of these conditions. For instance, the community and neighborhood development organization Reason to Give offers education, school supplies, clothing and toys to children and families in need. The nonprofit HighSight provides low-income high school students with scholarships and academic support. The Sol House Cooperative’s mission is to “provide affordable homeownership opportunities on Chicagoʼs Northwest Side to socially conscious individuals who want to share in decision-making and property management responsibilities, within a cooperative enterprise.”

While speaking about the effective change that “hyperlocal organizations” bring, Daniel Ash of the Chicago Community Trust told the Chicago-based publication Reader, “These formal and informal networks that are centered around mutual aid are almost, by definition, more nimble because of their size and scale… And when you’re close to an issue, when you see people in need, there is a sort of innate response to act now.”

The ChiCommons Cooperative, a worker-owned collective that aims to “foster and grow a people-owned solidarity economy,” has created an online map of more than 800 solidarity entities, cooperatives and associated resources in the Chicago area. Similar to New York’s Seeding Solidarity and the nationwide Solidarity Economy Map and Directory, ChiCommons’s map points viewers to local housing collectives, food co-ops, worker collaboratives, credit unions and other mutual aid-based groups. Its users can search by co-op category, zip code, city or neighborhood.

Besides helping Chicago residents find community and resources, this map is valuable to groups and individuals working to develop co-ops. Steve Ediger, founding co-owner and acting president of ChiCommons, explains that consulting and incubation services can use it to learn “who is in the universe of cooperatives in Chicago and what they’re doing.”

The map also serves as a regional resource for Find.coop, an international solidarity map curated by the Data Commons Cooperative.

Anyone interested in using ChiCommons’s directory as a model for a similar project can access its source software on the developer platform GitHub. “We’re very willing to talk to folks about what we’ve done and what our experience has been with the map,” Ediger notes.

Between 2010 and 2012, the Institute of Cultural Affairs laid the groundwork for the solidarity map by creating Accelerate77, a list of organizations promoting sustainability throughout Chicago’s 77 community areas. In 2012, a sharing economy hub called the Chicago Time Exchange worked with the solidarity economy news source Shareable to create a map of shareable resources in the region. In 2016, two ChiCommons worker-owners used data from Accelerate77, Shareable and other lists of local solidarity groups to create an early version of what would eventually become ChiCommons’s solidarity map.

Explaining the importance of the solidarity economy, Shareable states that it “is a global movement to build a world that centers people and the planet rather than maximizing private profit and endless growth.”

According to Ediger, the first version of ChiCommons’s map contained between 400 and 600 entries. “Some were cooperatives, some were associated resources, some solidarity entities: things like community gardens, farmers markets, urban forums, worker co-ops, bicycle co-ops, housing co-ops, credit unions, mutual aid folks—all of the folks that are associated with the co-op and solidarity ecosystems.”

Service providers

Besides the solidarity map, ChiCommons has created the communications platform BlockShare. “It’s trying to provide the last-mile internet service to underserved communities,” Ediger explains. Recipients of this service join the ChiCommons Cooperative as consumer-owners. Blockshare provides people with individual servers, enabling them to organize their communities and “share their garden produce, time, talents, tools, and rides with each other,” Ediger states.

ChiCommons’s website notes that while the Chicago area is “a dynamic crossroads of cultures, commerce, and innovation,” it “also has legacy problems of inequality, disinvestment, and exclusion. Too often, existing institutions have ignored whole geographic, demographic, and generational segments of our communities, including access to technology and life’s necessities.”

An analysis by the University of Chicago’s Data Science Institute, based on responses received between 2014 and 2019, found that while approximately 80% of Chicago’s households are Internet-enabled, up to 40% of households in the city’s least connected communities lack Internet access. “Most disconnected households in Chicago are on the city’s South and West Sides,” the study states.

Co-operators

ChiCommons sustains itself by providing paid business and technology services to small businesses, nonprofits, cooperatives and solidarity entities. For instance, the collective designed and implemented all the required technology for the Wild Onion Market grocery co-op, including its computers, network, Internet connections, point-of-sale infrastructure, security cameras and printers. ChiCommons also offers strategic planning and facilitation for prospective co-op founders.

Worker-owner Paul Bowman, who is developing a booking and management system for the Interpreters’ Cooperative of Madison, describes his position at ChiCommons as “an opportunity to be directly involved in cooperative work.” Worker-owner Alvyn Walker says he enjoys “the opportunity to collaborate with other people in a non-hierarchical environment” and the autonomy that self-employment brings.

Ediger, one of roughly 35 residents of a sustainability-oriented commune called the GreenRise Intentional Community, feels the most rewarding aspect of his involvement with ChiCommons is the sense of community it provides. “What I like, what gives me energy, is working toward common goals with like-minded people,” he notes. “I practice my cooperativism on a daily basis. I shop, bank, and work at co-ops.”

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

[Local Peace Economy produced this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Chicago’s Solidarity Economy Map Makes Poor Families’ Lives Better appeared first on Fair Observer.