Ujima Wednesdays in April: Black Money Lineages

6 hours ago
4 min read

From unpacking our personal relationships to finance in February, to mythbusting financial literacy in March, we now invite you to truth seek and dig deep into Black Money Lineages.

This April, we will surface historical Black economic practices that build agency and self-determination. Our direct focus on lineages of economic action will address racial capitalism, reconsider wealth-building, and characterize economic development that has served, and may continue to serve, our aims and our means.

4.1: Talk Back | RSVP

We begin this month with a collective reflection on the dominant narratives about finance that we discussed last month, grounding ourselves in a shared understanding of the stories we want to challenge and make powerless. Building from that reflection, we'll turn toward the money lineages of our ancestors. This workshop hosts space to explore our values, practices, and relationships to wealth, care, and survival that have shaped our communities across generations.

4.8: Building Self Determination Part I | RSVP

Getting organized and building wealth under the dominant economic system can feel like an endless battle. Our ancestors and forebears organized against a backdrop of racial capitalism; our peers continue the fight.

Join us in learning with Dr. Charisse Burden Stelly how racial capitalism structured (and continues to structure) domination, while foregrounding how members of the African Diaspora challenge, resist, and build against exploitation within the US. We’ll learn from Black-led movements and organizations, picking up strategies, failures, and wins to carry forward and pull into our own (protracted) struggles.

4.15: Building Self Determination Part II | RSVP

4.22: Brick by Brick: Black Financial Institution Building | RSVP

Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard will explore Black cooperative histories, past and extant examples of vital money lineages. She will discuss how mutual aid associations and community development credit unions work, and other alternative financing strategies Blacks Americans have used throughout history to pool resources and access financial services, even during enslavement and segregation.

Examples include the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union, The National Federation of Colored Farmers, The Independent Order of St. Luke and the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank; Citizen's Cooperative Trading Company, Bethex Credit Union.

Facilitator Bios:

Tomme Faust (they/she) is a learner, storyteller, and advocate. They are passionate about Black liberation and use an intersectional framework to understand the interlocking systems that impact de-centered communities. Runway embodies the same liberatory principles which drew Tomme to the organization. They come to this work after years of supporting, coordinating, and organizing strategies for start-ups and non-profit organizations that work to break down systemic and structural barriers that impact marginalized communities within the U.S.

James Vamboi is a social worker, visual artist and fundraising strategist originally from Philadelphia. He moved to Boston to serve on the City Year Boston 2012-2013 corps and never left because he found community in Jamaica Plain and doing feminist mens work. James cares deeply about people and the planet and is inspired by the work of the Justice Funders, Bayard Rustin and his Sierra Leonean aunties who taught him all about love. Prior to Ujima, James worked at Health Leads for 3 years primarily focused on managing a portfolio of institutional & individual donor relationships against cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship activities. James is honored to support the economic world-building that the Boston Ujima Project is envisioning and continue to build towards a world where all humans are in the right relationship with change and each other.

Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University. She is the author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, the co-author of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and the co-editor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writings and of Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State. She is currently working on her second single-authored book, Against Imperialism: Mutual Comradeship and Black Liberation in the McCarthy Era. M. Dr. Burden-Stelly’s writings appear in peer-reviewed journals including Small Axe, Souls, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, CLR James Journal, and American Communist History. Her public scholarship can be found in publications such as Essence magazine, The Nation, Monthly Review, Teen Vogue, Boston Review, Hammer & Hope, Jewish Currents, and Black Agenda Report. She is a member of Black Alliance for Peace and the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective.

Author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic

Thought and Practice (2014), and 2016 inductee into the U.S. Cooperative Hall of Fame,

Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D., is Professor of Community Justice and Social

Economic Development, in the Department of Africana Studies, John Jay College, City

University of NY. Dr. Gordon-Nembhard is an internationally recognized and widely

published political economist specializing in cooperative economics, community

economic development, racial wealth inequality, solidarity economics, Black Political

Economy, popular economic literacy, and community-based approaches to justice.

Recipient of numerous awards in social economics and cooperative studies, she is a

member of the Cooperative Economics Council of NCBA/CLUSA; the International Co-

operative Alliance Committee on Co-operative Research; a Faculty Fellow and Mentor

with the Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing at Rutgers

University School of Management and Labor Relations; an affiliate scholar with the

Centre for the Study of Co-operatives (University of Saskatchewan, Canada); adjunct

with the International Centre for Co-operative Management, Sobey School of Business,

St. Mary’s University (Halifax, NS, Canada); board member of several community-based

and/or cooperative development organizations, and advisor to the Collective Courage

Fund. Gordon-Nembhard is also a past board member of the Association of Cooperative

Educators; a past fellow with the Center on Race and Wealth at Howard University; and

a member and past president of the National Economic Association. She is the proud

mother of Stephen and Susan, and the grandmother of Stephon, Hugo, Ismaél and

Gisèle Nembhard.