Article by the Solidarity Economy Association, UK
We need your help to raise a minimum of £18,000 to maintain our work through 2023, to strengthen and build the solidarity economy as an alternative to capitalism, and play a role in building an ecologically sustainable, resilient and socially just economic system from below.
Please donate what you can and share the link with your friends, family and co-workers.
No amount is too small, and we’re offering rewards for donations, starting from the price of a pint.
Donate in the first week of the campaign and we’ll send your reward in time for Christmas.
Who are we?
We’re the Solidarity Economy Association, a small co-operative with big ambitions, based in England, Wales and Scotland. We want to build up the ‘solidarity economy’ across these isles, and deepen relationships with and between movements developing real alternatives to the capitalist system in other parts of the world.
We produce learning, build capacity, weave relationships and initiate projects we see as missing in the UK context – local, regional and national organising with an internationalist perspective. Our work ranges from developing workshops, building and maintaining digital tools and education websites for the solidarity economy movement, to working with local and national solidarity economy groups, to practical international solidarity and fundraising.
Since 2020, we’ve raised over £150,000 to support vital water projects in North and East Syria through our Water for Rojava campaign. In 2021, we created a UK-wide organisers’ network (SEON) focused on supporting and connecting horizontally-run grassroots organisations working at the frontlines of migrant justice, working class struggles, women’s autonomy, land and food sovereignty and other arenas of transformative justice work. We have also continued to build platforms dedicated to sharing and spreading resources around mutual aid and solidarity economy. These include the construction of a (soon to be launched) Mutual Aid website and our most recent series of webinars (with live interpretation in 6 languages), Conversations with Gamechangers, aimed at learning from organisations building autonomy across almost every continent and transcending the lack of internationalist knowledge-exchange and experience-sharing, through translation.
What do we need?
In order for us to continue doing this work, and to reach more organisations and community groups, we need your help!
We currently have a shortfall for the first part of 2023 and we need your help to continue developing our current interwoven strands of work, which together form a strategy to strengthen and build the grassroots solidarity economy from below, to weave relationships between disparate groups and movements and build an ecologically sustainable, resilient and socially just economic system:
- Building a coordinated network of grassroots solidarity initiatives led by people at the forefront of systemic oppression and economic disadvantage.
- Internationalist solidarity with movements creating systems change in other parts of the world, in particular the women-led, ecological, democratic transformations in North and East Syria (Rojava), to learn from and translate these experiences to our own context.
- Research and education toward developing current movements, building alliances and capacity for sharing vision and strategy between organisations. To know our history is to know who we are, and to understand the system we are operating in, and education is a core strand of our work.
- Developing tools and resources to enable the work above.
