Yves here. I have mixed feelings about the developments described in this article. On the one hand, it’s encouraging to see that many initiatives in Chicago have either sprung up or expanded to help those suffering economic or social adversities. On the other, the piece states at the top that the reason for the increased scope and informal coordination of these efforts are a not-great local economy (without any relief in housing costs) and budget cuts expected to hit social safety nets. And even though the organizations profiled here are grass roots, one has to wonder if some billionaire-funded NGO will decide they can help and wind up displacing some of these (apparently efficient) groups.
The article does describe a key virtue of these organizations: they are more flexible than government bureaucracies. But putting on my devil’s advocate hat, it does not have to be this way. The US has a punitive, grasping attitude toward the poor. Many schemes have elaborate means-testing and other hurdles, presupposing that the badly-off don’t want to work and need to be monitored to make sure they don’t get more than they deserve. For instance, openDemocracy just published an article giving a UK example of this behavior, Plans to spy on Disabled people’s bank accounts show Labour isn’t for change. Even though benefits fraud by the disabled is trivially small, Labour nevertheless wants full access to bank account transaction data from scheme participants.
I don’t mean to sound critical. Mutual aid is not only beneficial, but the growth of these networks build communities and serve to counter the atomization of neoliberalism. But in a better world, they would supplement other social safety nets. The worrisome subtext here is that they are on the way to becoming the front line.
As for the “it doesn’t have to be this way” remark, there is no inherent reason for aid programs to be designed and administered on a national level. That great American socialist Richard Nixon implemented revenue sharing, based on the notion that the Federal government was better at collecting revenues than states and local governments, but states and municipalities were better at knowing their needs and devising appropriate programs. Revenue sharing administered bloc grants and (IIRC) its only controls were anti-fraud measures. Ronald Reagan cancelled revenue sharing.
By Damon Orion, a writer, journalist, musician, artist, and teacher in Santa Cruz, California. His work has appeared in Revolver, Guitar World, Spirituality + Health, Classic Rock, High Times, and other publications. Read more of his work at DamonOrion.com. Produced by Local Peace Economy
In July 2024, the Council Office of Financial Analysis (COFA) reported that Chicago, Illinois, was witnessing a struggling job market, a decrease in multifamily housing starts, and a rise in single-family home prices. The following month, the City of Chicago’s 2025 Budget Forecast projected a $982.4 million budget gap for the fiscal year.
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, and 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 “hyperlocal organizations” bring, Daniel Ash of the Chicago Community Trust told the Reader in 2021, “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 Chicago 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 percent of Chicago’s households are internet-enabled, up to 40 percent 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 grocery co-op Wild Onion Market, 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.
8 comments
Comments are closed.
As you say – ‘in a better world, they would supplement other social safety nets. The worrisome subtext here is that they are on the way to becoming the front line.” Thats exactly right. In fact, the poster children for the withdrawal of the state from any kind of welfare programs, the “withering away” of the state, often encouraged by multilateral institutions and large foreign funders, and the complete NGO-ization of civil society, socio-economic fabric and even the polity are Georgia and Bangladesh, the most intensively NGO farmed nation states. The latter now has the distinction of an NGO head of state.
I noticed a lot of these little nonprofit community groups springing up in Detroit a number of years ago. At the time I just rolled my eyes and wondered just exactly what the bigger NGO’s were pushing through the local organizations. I soon found that these groups were providing extremely valuable aid and services to the various neighborhoods. The city would be a lot worse off without these nonprofits..
I still have a few concerns. First, I hear about these nonprofits starting up all of the time, but I rarely hear about how they receive their funding. I usually hear vague talk about “donations” and “grant money”. Second, I always think of what a former city council member of my community said when she complained about how the grant money lasts long enough to get a wonderful new initiative started, only to disappear just when some actual progress starts getting made.
I had a teacher acquaintance in San Francisco who constantly complained about the latest whatever five year plan that would only last three years as each new round of consultants would have their latest plan replace the older plan or at least have funding
stolenmoved from the previous consultants’ work who would have been paid and moved on. His anger was directed against San Francisco Unified School District, but I could see similar stuff elsewhere in the Bay Area. And not just in education.You have one group of people constantly trying to control and punish the supposedly lazy moochers while another group was constantly stealing as much funding as could with no intention of seeing their work to completion.
Thanks for the info that Reagan canceled revenue sharing that Nixon started. I hadn’t known that. Yahoo! reports that when Clinton and Newt turned AFDC into TANF, it also sucked to be poor. Seventy-six percent of those who needed public assistance got AFDC. Only 26% got TANF. The attack on the poor has been pretty unrelenting. But hey! The D’s are the party of the poor!
Yes, though the problem we’re describing goes all the way back to the 80s, when Clinton killed welfare here and–abroad–the IMF began pressuring poor countries to abandon programs of support for the poor as qualifying condition in order to obtain “structural adjustement” loans. Farmer organizations I studied in the Caribbean, which once had held revolutionary and progressive reform positions (ergo for land reform) had given up these demands and pursuits and were begging for aid just to keep their members fed. CONAMUCA in the DR, whose leader had been nominated for a Nobel Prize, was uniting woman members from across the country on Sundays so that they could all get one healthy meal before setting out to work again on Monday.
So–yes–supplying those welfare functions that we should be pressuring government to make sure fill gaps in need for everyone. POSSIBLY more nimbly than some very bureaucratic agencies. But there’s really no reason why government has to be ham-handed in the provision of aid. The notion that it always is, or is endemically, is essentialism.
No kidding? Maybe, I should not have been surprised that I temporarily lost my Medi-Cal benefits because the standard federal cost of living increase for SSDI or Social Security Disability, which is the same as the increase for Social Security retirement, exceeded the maximum income limit for Medi-Cal. This leaving me with only partial Medicare for several months. I manage to get a human to override the computer program, but never did get reimburst for the extra out-of-pocket expenses.
Hyper locality sounds like a good safety valve against exploitation simply because it is so interconnected. It’s like an organization of cooperation without being a co-op. So fewer vulnerable points of failure because the money, like cooperation, is continually circulating. And how on earth do you exploit or bribe those natural instincts without destroying them? Unlike a new frontier, it’s a new interior.
The magnifying glass comes out to examine programs for the poor lest some kid get an undeserved meal, but it takes 10 years to report the Federal Reserve’s $1 trillion grift of interest on bank reserves. It makes me angry and sad at the same time. A neighbor makes soups for shut Ins in the community and the senior center collects food for distribution.