At Nexus, we foster our relationships with each other and with the land, and work cooperatively to cultivate and share this prosperity in our communities.
The North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship is a seven-month fellowship focused on Black American cooperative economics and the history of Black cooperative economic thought and practice. We center the wisdom and experience of those who share the ancestry of enslaved Africans in the United States and place value on the legacy of Black collective care.
The North Star is a way to start living into a future of Black wealth: self-governance, spaces for healing, and an abundance of resources, including financial capital. North Star is a place for Black-led cooperatives, collectives, housing, commercial and land trusts.
Black economic cooperation has been foundational in the Black American freedom movement. We developed the North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship to reconnect with our long-suppressed history of mutual aid and cooperative economics.
What is a co-op?
Cooperation is fundamentally about people working together and sharing ownership. Cooperatives are entities — like businesses, companies, or houses — that are owned by the people who use them and are created to meet shared needs. This can look like anything from providing affordable childcare services, or creating mutual aid networks, to establishing freedom farms.
All cooperatives are democratically and collectively owned, locally controlled, and designed to cultivate and share prosperity with their communities.
Examples of Cooperatives:
- Yo Mama‘s House
- The Fields at Rootsprings
- Mandela Marketplace
- NICE
- The Hub Bike Co-op
- Sky Without Limits housing cooperative
- Partnership in Property Commercial Land Trust
- Happy Earth Cleaning
