Cooperation Jackson

The self-managed and open cooperatives that make up Cooperation Jackson aim at building co-governance and are oriented towards the construction of an economic system relying on increased participation and therefore enabling collective and socially oriented decisions. The cooperatives promote economic sustainability through a redistribution system in which the surplus is transferred to new jobs development, to community development, to social security system based on reciprocal solidarity and responsibility and to cooperation with other institutions enhancing social transformation. In that sense, the cooperatives are working towards retrieving control on labor but also getting back the control on the land.

In fact, to tackle the threat of gentrification resulting from the transformation of the place into a medical corridor, the Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust aims at providing stable and affordable housing. The project is to set up housing cooperatives to be collectively managed.

The cooperatives are also constructing urban agricultural sustainability solutions through the Freedom Farms Cooperatives. In the long term, the Sustainable Community Initiatives are aimed at forming an eco-village, namely a work-live community where solar energy is used and where people are granted urban farming plots, and where compost and recycling are adopted. 

 Eventually, the cooperatives are willing to build up a Center for Community Production comprising a Fab Lab, a coding and digital programming innovation hub as well as a maker space. This initiative, called the Community Production Initiative, will provide for industrial manufacturing based on 3rd and 4th generation industrial technology including 3D printing or quantum computing. The latter will be collectively owned and democratically used by defined communities.