Not Another Patchouli-Soaked Co-Op (with Jamila Medley)

neighborhood shop that I remember. It's through a person that I knew. It's through an interaction or an experience. And that's true for most of us about most of the ideas that we ever think about as adults. Childhoods where it started. And that is so true for me with the idea of a co op. My mother was a hippie. She was a proud mama. She had a big afro at times, she rocked her cowboy boots and loved her NPR and she wore tie dye every chance she could get.

She was a little bit different from the other moms on the block, and she was really into healthy food, I remember going to the co op with my mother for health food because I guess the grocery store at the end of the block didn't have healthy foods, and the co op was just different. There was a lot of granola, making it almost literally a crunchy place, and they had alternatives to everything I knew I loved like

I loved cheerios, and they had odeos. I loved chocolate glaze donuts, and they had carib covered doughnuts, and I didn't love that because that wasn't a chocolate glaze donut and what even is a carrob I also blame co ops for bringing grape nuts into my life because that's not even food. That's more like a gravel situation, and grape nuts with skim milk is a c The co op to me was this tied I tote bag, largely white place miles away from home where we went to

get special food. But now I'm learning there's a lot more to co ops. See as I've grown up, I've learned that co ops are more than what I remember from my childhood. And when you talk about the class of folks known as the working poor who can never get ahead because of extractive business models, cooperatives become more of an economic answer than the patruli soaked lifestyle I was used to as a kid. Today's guest shows that co ops might not be what you think they are either.

Jamila Medley is an East Brooklyn native who, at the time we spoke was the executive director of the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance. PACA is a co op of co ops building economic power in the Philly community and breaking all kinds of myths about what co ops are and who Therefore, co ops are basically a version of economic democracy. H Jamila, thank you so much for joining. How are you. I'm doing well, Thanks for having me, Thank you for agreeing to sit with me and with us. And I

want to start with you introducing yourself. My name is Jamila Medley. I'm executive director of the Philadelphia Area co Operative Alliance, otherwise known as PACA PACA. I was like, I was so glad you said it, because I'm like, as a PACA, is it? Paca? Tell me something about yourself that might not be in an online bio, something a lot of people don't know. Dang, this is a big one. I can wrap the books of the Bible.

I mean, you need to tell me a little bit more about this, so as I meagine, I'm from Brooklyn and I went to Saint Paul's Community Baptist Church growing up where the steam Johnny Ray young Blood was pastor minister of music Eli Wilson, and we did things in children's choir like learn how to wrap the books of the Bible. And it has never left my mind. It's pretty dope. I mean, I'm not gonna do it. You know what's next? Care? I mean, show, don't tell what's uh,

give me a little taste. All right, Listen, everybody, as we talked to you about the books of the Bible, the older than new. There are sixty six books if you take a long look, thirty nine and an old and a new. Pay attention. Tell you what we're gonna do. We're gonna rock to you thought the books that unfold. Then I'm gonna stop because I don't forgot that is a special, special skill. That is a spectacular answer. I did not see that coming. Thank you so much, um so, So,

tell me more about growing up in Brooklyn. Describe your neighborhood and what the community felt like to you as a kid. Sure So grew up by East New York, last stop on the Number three train. Do a lots of Avenue, East New York at that time and still is known as a struggling um neighborhood. It was, it was the hoodood. Give me some sense of timing of years that you're talking about in terms of your childhood there.

Sure So, I was born in seventies seven, so I'm talking about the eighties nineties and East York had crack, had prostitution, and had murder. It's got a documentary about the worst police district in New York City. That I mean the government literally sent anything that they considered unworthy of a good life to East New York, institutionalizing people, um, throwing throwing away humans. It was a poor and working

class neighborhood. My grandparents had moved there in the nineteen sixties um, one of the first black families to move into a new high rise apartment when the neighborhood was still white. From where from where did they move? They moved from Brownsville. So this was their Jefferson story of moving up from the projects into this newly constructed apartment high rise and uh subsequently white flight ensued, and the narrative of disinvestment, as is very typical in communities like this,

came to be. But um, I think one of the unfortunate realities is that beauty and joy aren't always um the stories that come out of this kind of neighborhood. But my family was there for three generations living. You know, my grandparents, I don't know, we're in that apartment. I grew up in that apartment. My mom grew up in that apartment. My first daughter was born. She had years in that apartment. And uh, the church that I went to had a school, and went to the school there

second to sixth grade. I was nurtured and loved by black women educators who affirmed my blackness, my womanness, my girlhood, so that by the time I was ready to go into middle school and really leave my neighborhood in that kind of like all black life for the first time, I was well prepared and uh, coming up again. I went to a Quaker school, um middle school through high school Brooklyn Friends School, but I was affirmed, so we

share a decent amount of biography. Um. I went to a very local community public school through sixth grade and then starting in seventh grade a friends School. Yeah, I grew up in Washington, d c uh in, you know, those same years, and I went to the Sidwall Friends School from seventh through twelfth grade. And I was also nurtured and loved and had a lot of joy. Um, what did your church community look and feel like during this childhood because it sounds like the church was a

big part of your experience of community. Yeah, I was probably in first second grade when we started going there. I went to church school, I did karate, I did dance classes, I took piano lessons, we had Sunday school,

Bible school, summer camp. Everything was there. It was the entire community, and it was a church that also kind of I think understood it's it's social and political relevance in the neighborhood like that, and really thinking about ways of creating community pride and self determination through the congregation

that really resonates. Like when I started working at co Ops, I was like, oh, shoot, this was like a whole thing happening when I was a kid around what has always historically been true, and I think the Black American tradition of how black folks have practiced mutual aid and cooperative economics, right, and that the church has often been a central place where people congregate to to build wealth, to share their wealth, to create community good. And it

begs the question what's a co op? And where do you see in your childhood some semblance of cooperatives? So a co op has two components. One is the association of people who come together. They identified that they have a shared need economic, social, cultural, and they determine that they want to democratically own an enterprise together, and so they create that business to fulfill the need that they have.

And that's the simple version of what a co op is in the sense that is the association of people. Democracy is in the at all in the enterprise is holding it all together. I'm not gonna say that my church was democratically organized. I don't know that that was true, but there was definitely an association of people who were organized um within their religious community, also having an understanding

of their political power. I think the biggest thing that I remember seeing is like the creation of near Mayah houses, right. So it's this entire housing development that congregations throughout Brooklyn organized to bring resources from you know, minicipal funds with their church, community and other investment strategies to create new homes. This was a struggle, This was organizing. This was the success of an association of people coming together to meet

their needs. How did what you experience as a child with this community level of organizing affect your later work and your educational path? So I think there's this continuity of values that I've always been grounded in. Everyone is worthy inherently, we all deserve good to happen. I think I understood having to work hard, you needed to serve, you had to help others, You had to find a way to to give back, to contribute to make something better.

And then in school, when I was in middle one high school, I think there was a lot of that kind of activity just in terms of like taking care of our own neighborhood. And like you know, there was really Cede Park right behind where my high school was. And I'm gonna tell you in the nineteen nineties, Brooklyn Friends was the Ratchet Independent Friends School. Um, I'm gonna leave it at that, but Ratchet Independent Friends School. I never heard those words ratchet rage. Yes, it was the

Megan d Stallion of fend schools. But we had to go to that park, right, But there were people who um use drugs there, people who um were in gauging in solicited sexual encounters in that park, and we found their refuse and we cleaned it up as a part of our Earth Day experience. Right, It's just like, this

is our community, this is our responsibility. Um So, I think those threats certainly carried, you know, into my work of really just seeing the power of collaboration and people coming together and people caring about each other, and just like ultimately just really believing fundamentally that everybody has light, right that we should be seeking that in one another, and when we do, it makes it easier to work together.

That's all. Just that's total life summation. That's perfect. I think that the Quakers would be proud we brought you to Philadelphia. Well, my first job here was in a cancer research organization based in Philly, and after that I went to grad school. And upon completing grad school, I

realized I can't keep not working. This isn't going to be a good story for too long for my husband if I don't use this degree of how and so I found a membership coordinator rule actually at Mariposa Food Co op and I got hired to be the membership coordinator there and so that was a realm in And that was my first exposure to co ops formally. So I have an image of co ops from my childhood of going up to the co op into Coma Park, Maryland Food co Op had a certain smell to it,

you know, I describe it as earthy. Made me think of that scene from Broad City. I'm sorry, but are you breastfeeding? The power of co op produce has made me fertile into my fifties. Beyond it so amazing. So, so what was it like for you working at the Mariposa Food co Op And is it anything like my experience? Yes? Very earthy, Yes, I mean it was. It was my first adult experience really being around radicalized white people. What

made them radical? They are? I've worked with a bunch of anarchists and socialists and people who you know, had very far left leaning politics, had very unconventional, you know, ways of of living their lives that were in my perspective at that time, I was like, oh my gosh, you are like the freest people I've ever encountered. How did that express itself? What does that look like? You know, it showed up. I also came from I think my church that I grew up in. I think in many

ways in that era was about respectability. Right. So it's like the best thing that you could do is find a corporate job, right, And where for me as a woman, put some stockings on, don't wear red and like, you know, do your thing, don't show as much as you can how black you are. Just make your money, get your success.

Being in this food co op world was the antithesis of everything I had learned was true to have a good life, right, that you had to button up, that you had to conform, that you had to invisibilize yourself to some degree. So when I got to the food co op, it was, you know, the first community where I personally met trans folks and had trans car workers, and I learned about pronouns, and I learned about just

like a lot of things. You know, people just wore t shirts and jeans and ripped up clothes and had piercings and tattoos and all kinds of colored hair. And for me it was just like it was great, but it was also work, and I was not familiar with seeing those expressions of one's humanity being okay in the work environment. Um So that was a real shift for me, I think, in being able to understand that, oh, there there are other ways, and people have found them. What

did that discovery feel like for you? In many ways, it was somewhat liberating from me because I had the opportunity to experiment. So there was a lot of opportunity for creativity and really just like making our way, creating new things to make this grocery store a success, and

so I really loved that aspect of it. I think one of the challenges of the space, though, that I experienced, was I wasn't as free as some of those people were because I was still a black woman and most of my co workers were white folks who I think we're just able to show up as fully as they

wanted to. But I think there were a lot of experiences that that time for black women that we could not show up as fully as ourselves without appearing threatening, without appearing too upset, if we were too loud, to ratchet, too angry, too emotional. It all just kind of like

came back to to kind of haunt you. So I also learned in that space that radicalized white people are also very racist sometimes without even knowing it, and that there's this duality and just like this work, right, I thought that maybe I had found like my anti racist home and like my place and belonging, But I also realized there was still a lot of work to do in that space, and it was also a space where my radicalization was starting to show up in terms of who I wanted to be and how I wanted to

engage in blackness as a result of that that workplace experience, what was the experience, you know, what was the behavior or the words of the radicalized white co workers that put you in a place where you felt like you had to manage how you showed up. Oh now, I'm just putting these people's business all out here in these streets. But I think we understand that this is a time

when we talk about these things. But I think one of the struggles in that community, prior to my coming there, there had been other black women that that worked there and that we're working there when I worked there, But I think when there were conflicts between those women and other white folks, sometimes there was a way in which black women were pushed out from the organization I think often rooted in conflicts, right, and that you just showed up a little bit too loud and self expressing, dear

black of lady, for the comfortability of these white folks who now see that part of you and maybe don't feel as safe as they used to. They don't want to ever see that side of you again. Right, So so there's this this tension me while like white folks was yelling and could cry and emote and do all the things that they needed to do to express themselves, but there wasn't an acceptance I think, for for black women to be able to show up in the same vein.

And I saw that happen to other people, and so I became very aware about how I needed to present in order for that not to happen to me. Mariposa Food co Op is historically, you know, one of the food co ops that is gotten it right in so many instances. Right. So the institution, I think, in many ways, is at the forefront of trying to navigate some of the harms that structural racism can perpetuate in any business.

I think the opportunity is that there's more accountability in those places to address that stuff right, and to expect better and to expect more from how our white allies in those spaces, they're going to show up. After the break, Jamila goes all in on the world of co ops. So you're the executive director of PACA. How did you first come to have a role um at this cooperative of cooperatives? So PACAB was actually being founded around the

same time when I started working at Mariposa. The first group of people have started talking about, you know, answering this question of you know, there's a lot of mature cooperatives in the Philadelphia region. There's food co ops, housing co ops, credit unions, energy co ops, work or co ops. We got a lot of co ops here, but they don't really do a lot together. What would happen if there was a way to organize the co ops sector to help grow the co operative economy? So what would

happen if cooperatives cooperated? Yes, So that became a launching pad for you know, a number of activities that invited co operators to come together to to muse and to think about what this this new organization could be. So I decided to go to one of those convenings and they were looking for volunteers, and I thought that I should volunteer because I didn't know anything about co ops and my job was to recruit people to join the co op. So SA's like, let me go over here

and see what I could learn. Um, I learned so much. I learned about an entire economy, an entire what some people would identify as a lifestyle. I learned about a network of activity and effort that I had no idea what was happening. And I stayed involved with PACK as a volunteer on their steering committee, and then as the organization formalized and became a nonprofit organization, I got elected

to serve on paca's board and then by team. When our first executive director was ready to UM step down, I was invited to be his replacement, and I said yes, And you lived happily ever after, and that was it.

What is the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance so pacas a nonprofit and a co op of co ops, and we aim to improve the cooperative economy in our region by providing education and training, providing direct technical assistance to groups of people forming co ops, and to uplift opportunities to

promote co ops through advocacy and political engagement. And when I when any of us thinks about what a business is, we are taught that businesses seek to maximize profits, that businesses are designed to maximize shareholder value, even in the in the current incarnation that we are a capitalist society. So what is a co op business? How is it operating differently from UH and off the shelf capitalist business? Okay? Can I make a caveat before I answer that question?

Co ops can be co opted by capitalism to the plot thickens. Okay, So cooperatives are an economic tool, right, people can have a lot of different motives for why they want to use it. So I think you know, from the vantage point that I have and the motivations that PACA and others in our networks have for four cooperative businesses, is that we believe that, you know, we should prioritize people and planet over profit. We believe that people have a right to self determination, including in how

wealth is accumulated and distributed within their communities. We believe that people deserve and have the right to own assets in their own communities. Right. And I think this broader sense that in incooperatively owned businesses. A distinguishing factor of it from traditional businesses is democracy, right, and there are a lot of different ways in which businesses can practice democracy, but the difference in in co ops is that if you're an owner, you have one vote. Everybody has one

vote as an owner in a co op. So when it's time to make these important decisions for how this co op business is going to move forward. Are we going to expand, are we going to up close? Are we going to hire more people? Whatever the decision points are that the owners need to come together. Each owner has one vote. There isn't a fifty one percent owner who gets to wield the power because they have that

extra ownership stake. And this is true even as co op owners might have different equity stakes, right, So people can invest different amounts of money into their coop, but the vote stays the same. One member, one vote. What do you think the benefits are two people for participating in a cooperative business model. I think you can think about it from the individual level and from the community level.

So as an individual, if you're a member owner or an owner of a co op, there's a financial benefit that you can get um you're an owner, so if the company is doing While the business is doing well, you get to eat, you get a diffidend, you get patronage rebate, you get some money back on your return. It's also true that if it's not doing so great, you absorb the risk along with your fellow co owners.

I think co ops often offer community. They offer a place where you can find people who have the same need that you do and work together to try to fulfill that. Co Ops bring potentially wealth into communities. They're locally owned, so they're not some distant you know, there's not a distant owner out there somewhere trying to figure out when to cut out and sell the business right when they can make enough money, so the dollars tend to circulate in the community for a longer period of time.

Co Ops tend to provide better working environments for UM employees UM because in many of in worker co ops, for example, people are actually controlling and owning their own labor, so they can, you know, collectively decide what hours they're gonna work, how much they're gonna pay each other or themselves.

And you know, even during a time like this where we have this financial crisis, cooperatives have a chance of surviving because of the democratic participation of their owners and their ability to say that we're going to decide to ride this out together. It occurs to me hearing you talk about the benefits of co ops, we've heard a different story from the traditional business model. The reason CEOs get paid so much because they're so smart, they're exceptional

operators and exceptional managers, and they've earned that money. And it sounds like you're saying you're putting your faith elsewhere, you know, in terms of the management of the operation or the ownership of a business and the piece of our economy, your model is trusting a larger group of people with the fate of this enterprise. Is that Is that a fair characterization that could be true? It's it's not gonna it's certainly not going to be one person.

The co ops come in all different kinds of ownership structures and sizes, right, so anywhere from the thousands of people who own the grocery store together to the small, workout owned daycare center. So the principles, though, are are such that they can work throughout a variety of structures and um different numbers of people. But it doesn't have to depend on a singular person to make or breaking after the break. What does it mean to make a

co op of other co ops? It seems like for your organization to exist, you've got to have a lot of co ops in filling. Is there something in the water in Philly that tends towards co ops? What's the nature of the city and the existence of so many co ops that your organization can exist? Yeah, well, I'll say we're also a nonprofit, so we are funded through philanthropic dollars, primarily UM. And some say that Ben Franklin was the first person to organize a cooperative in the

United States. What was that? What you talking abou? It was called the Philadelphia Contributionship and it was a mutual insurance company to protect businesses and homeowners against fire. It's lost from fire. And this was in seventeen fifty two. So in seventeen fifty two, Ben Franklin set up a co op fire insurance company. That's the story. It still exists.

It still exists. I did not learn that in history class, but I think you know, for black folks in Philadelphia, cooperative economic and mutual aid practices have been essential to survival so we can think back to periods when black folks were enslaved, and you know, there were free blacks in Philadelphia, and there were people who were running away from slavery who came to Philadelphia and created a rich and robust community of black folks here. But they survived

in many ways through operative economic practices. Right. So we think about in seventeen eighty seven, the leaders who founded the AMI Church also founded like the second black owned mutual aid society in Philadelphia. Well it's the second in the country, but they were organizing for survival because they were locked out there at the traditionally established white environments to be able to get things like education, to get

things like insurance if you were a widow. Right, the mutual Aid Society was taking care of widows and orphans. The Mutual Aid Society was paying tuition for UM students. So there's this rich tradition of these kinds of practices

in the city of Philadelphia. And I think in this environment where there are so many different ethnic groups and and also a city with a high rate of poverty, UM, we see communities turning back to these practices over and over again as a way to survive I think we we've certainly seen, for for Black Americans, a long tradition

of cooperative economic practice. You know, we look at things that Ella Baker was doing, if Annie Lou Hamer, when we look at a lot of what was happening in the civil rights movement around a lot of that effort around civil rights was also connected to economic power and leaders that during that time we're also practicing cooperative economics and trying to really think about how that connects back into the political power that also needed to be gained.

And so when we have times like we have now where things are just on edge and nobody is coming to save us, people organized to save themselves. And that's one of the reasons why we're seeing such a rise in co op creation and strengthening of ecosystems in Philadelphia, but other places around the country too. So with this long history of co ops and cooperative economics more broadly in the black community, why is the pop cultural image of a co op a white lady with an NPR

bag buying some granola? How did that happen? I think there's a mythology for sure that co ops like are things that white people do and nobody else does them, And you know, I've already started to explain that's not true. I think it got to that in some ways. Jessica Gordon Demhart, who is a researcher cooperator extraordinaire, wrote this book called A Collective Courage, which tells the history of

African American cooperative practices. And along with these stories of all of the starts right and in the ways in which black communities thrived, we also know that some of those stories were impacted by white terror, right, and that there were just so many times when black folks get too successful and white folks decided, you can't have this anymore. And there are ways in which that has happened, you know, at the neighborhood level, when we think about people's grocery.

I think it was in Tennessee or Kentucky, which was a co op owned by black folks, and the men who were the leaders in that co op community were lynched by a group of white men who didn't like that these black folks had gotten this much power and we're competing. This was in the late nineteenth century. I think we've seen how the Black Panther Party certainly was practicing cooperative economics right, and we're infiltrated by the government right too, to disrupt, you know, the things that they

were doing to see black power emerge. So there were all of these ways I think in which white supremacy has also threatened black communities and other communities of color through structural racism, through the faults even of capitalism. It's hard to try to operate collectively owned businesses in capitalism because the structures themselves aren't set up to see these kinds of enterprises succeed. So there's a lot of fits

and starts, I think. And I think we're just like all of us, whoever we are, whatever communities we come from, where contending with the society that tells us that the individual is more important than the collective, that says that going for mind is more important than making sure that we all get to benefit. And so we're all struggling to kind of really counter um that narrative in our

variety of communities that we live and work in. Resting, I'm thinking about a set of statistics which remind us that just having a job is not enough. And you know, the roughly half of people in the United States who would not be able to afford a four or five emergency,

don't have access to that cash. The number of multiple jobs people have but don't carry benefits the working poor broadly speaking, do you think that collective entrepreneurship, as you put it, do you think that cooperatives are in part and answer to the challenge and existence of a category of people known as the working poor in the United States. Absolutely.

I think when people are empowered to make choices for themselves and for one another, they'll make better choices than somebody who's really just thinking about the bottom line for themselves. And I think this is what we are seeing in the worker co ops sector. We see a lot of who you're categorizing is the working poor, turn to this business model as a way to accumulate wealth, right to to say that I'm gonna work and create a business along with these other people, and we're going to do better.

Like worker co op wages tend to be higher than traditional businesses, employees tend to have greater job satisfaction in that sector. Those businesses thrive and are able to kind of take the terms of economic difficulty better because of that democratic nature and shared decision making model. So the opportunities for wealth creation and and dignity right that comes with ownership, and there are aspects of that that can

be reinvested in community. I think are are really compelling components of why this model could could do so much more with scalability. Yeah, given what we've been talking about, this cooperative business model in a different way of interacting with the economy, but also under the auspices of a show called How to Citizen Like, we're interested in people showing up in our democracy. What to you is the connection between a cooperatively run business or entity and the

health of our democracy. This is where it gets really duty and where I think it comes back to that sense of lifestyle. For some folks, I think there's an opportunity to learn and practice democracy and co ops that we don't get in many other spaces. So for most of us in the United States, we think of democracy and we think of voting at the ballot box, and maybe that happens once a year and once every few years, etcetera.

And that's our participation in democracy, or we think about it as political democracy and how we engage with our

elected leaders. But there's also direct democracy that we could take experience in our neighborhoods and through our own civic engagement and practices, as we're thinking about how to participate as a citizen, as a neighbor, as a resident at home, and I think it gets deepened with the co op experience because people are learning how to listen right, people are learning how to collaborate, their learning how to make decisions together without power over one another, but power with

one another or conceding power to others when that's appropriate as well. I think that these are practices that help build up the democracy muscle. Right When we find opportunities to plug into decision making, when we find opportunities to plug into organizing, these are practices of democracy. Whether we're we're organizing, you know, for political power, economic power, to to get basic needs met. This is the activity of democracy.

And cooperatives provide opportunities to gain skills and doing some of at work. Whether you're an employee, you're a member owner who shows up to your membership meetings, you've got power in that place and and democracy is the pathway for practicing and utilizing that power. In co ops, that was extraordinary and the crowd goes wild woo co ops is where we can practice democracy, and we are in desperate need of more practice. Jamila, thank you so much

for spending this time with me. Thank you for listening to me and letting me go on and on. Uh, it was my pleasure. When we started making this show, I knew one of the reasons was to expand the idea of what it meant to citizen as a verb, well beyond voting, that we could express our power, flex that power in all kinds of parts of our lives.

And Jamila talking about co ops, Oh, that just brings it home, this idea of democracy in our economic relationships and the governing structure of our businesses and who they actually serve. I don't think she could have dropped the mike any harder than that. Plus there was a bonus Bible rap who knew who knew she had that in her and who knew the world of co ops didn't have to be so white. Next week, I'm speaking with someone who believes so much in investing in her local community.

She advocates for just giving people money, no strings attached. You know, we call this show how to Citizen. So here's some of the how to parts from our producer Allen, how do you co op it? Just like Jamila experience growing up, cooperatives don't always have to be formal organizations. What are some informal ways you have participated in collective stewardship, Perhaps a community garden, local part cleanup, or maybe in church. Think about the ways you cooperate with your community, local

and global. Next up, we've got some homework for you. Per Jamila's suggestions. Start with reading the book Collective Courage, a History of African American cooperative economic thought and practice, by Jessica Gordon Nemhard. Collective Courage chronicles Black cooperative business ownership and its placed in the Civil rights movement, a history that's often forgotten when discussing co ops. Purchase it from our online bookstore and support local bookshops in the process.

Visit bookshop dot Org, Backslash Shop Backslash How to Citizen, And last, but not least, check out the co ops in your neck of the woods. You'd be surprised time many cooperatives are operating right around you. Look into either buying from a local farm or grocery co op, joining a local credit union which is a financial co op, or even consider getting your power from an electric co op. The best way to find them is to just do a quick online search with the name of your city

or state and the word cooperative. You can find a directory of co ops around the country at us worker dot co op backslash directory. If you're take any of these actions, please brag about yourself online using the hashtag how to citizen and send us general feedback or ideas for the show to comments at how to citizen dot com. Speaking of that domain name, we have one and we're using it. Visit how to citizen dot com to sign up for our newsletter or learn about upcoming events or

even more stuff than that. And if you like the show, spread the word tell somebody. If you don't, definitely just keep it to yourself. Appreciate you. How does Citizen with barrettune Day is a production of I Heart Radio Podcasts and Dust Like Productions. Our executive producers are Me, barrettun Day, Thurston, Elizabeth Stewart, and Misha Usa. Our producers are Stephanie Cone and Ali Kilton. Kelly Prime is our editor, Valentino Rivera

is our engineer, and Sam Paulson is our apprentice. Original music by Andrew eapon. This episode was produced and sound designed by Ali Kilts. Special thanks to Joel Smith from I Heart Radio.