Sustainable Economies Law Center: A Conversation with Ricardo Nuñez

Sustainable Economies is a non-profit law center based in California, USA focused on combating systemic oppression and creating policies that give back to the community. It was a pleasure to interview the director of economic democracy, Ricardo Nuñez, and learn more about their important work.

Ricardo Samir Nuñez : Director of Economic Democracy , SELC

Ricardo Samir Nuñez is a worker cooperative ecosystem development specialist supporting cultural practices, policies, organizations, and systemic changes that allow communities to build beyond the interlocking systems of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. He is currently the Director of Economic Democracy at the Sustainable Economies Law Center where he co-coordinates educational programs, legal services, policy advocacy, and regional and national ecosystem development to restore human labor to right relationship with people and the planet. He is board president of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives and at-large board member at the California Center for Cooperative Development and the Southern California Focus on Cooperation. He is also becoming a lawyer without going to law school through California’s Law Office Study Program. Check out Ricardo's Favorite Cooperative Resources here!

Serafina: Hi! It's so great to talk to you and learn more about what you do in your role. First off, could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do?

Ricardo Nuñez: For sure, so I'm Ricardo Nuñez, I'm the director of economic democracy at the Sustainable Economies Law Centre. We're a non-profit law centre that creates the conditions to transition from extractive, oppressive systems to cooperative alternatives. And so, a lot of the work that we do is developing lots of different types of models. Whether it's cooperative-owned businesses that are democratically run by the workers or taking land and housing and farmland off the speculative market and putting it into a cooperative arrangement with the communities that depend on those assets for their daily lives. Or… doing policy work that helps facilitate that transition. And then another part of our work is based around organizational design, and looking at the non-profit sector in particular, and trying to train and educate other non-profit workers on why it's important to democratize their workplace because we believe that democratizing the workplace, especially in the non-profit sector, as well as in conventional for-profit sector, is a necessary step towards confronting different systems of oppression; whether it's patriarchy, white supremacy, secular colonialism, like all of these different structures and histories that we're born into and that we need to heal and make amends for. And so, creating a democratic space within our organisations, where we're spending most of our waking lives, can help us start to confront those realities and at least start to have those conversations on a more equitable field with each other. So, I think that's in a nutshell what we do.

Serafina: Wow! That's incredibly important work. So how did you get into that field?

Ricardo Nuñez: So the way that I got into this was I have always been really interested in politics, and confronting these ‘systems of oppression’ and I went to peace core. That's basically a US government agency created in the late 60s for international development which places American volunteers in communities around the world to do international development and cultural exchange basically. And so, most of the people who do peace core in the United States are recent graduates of college. It’s sort of like a two-year volunteer program, and so I did peace core and lived in a village in Zambia.

While I was there, I attended a village meeting, I introduced myself and said “I’m supposed to be here doing the work that peace core wants me to do, but I want to be here in service of the community. So tell me if I can support you in any way” and a group of women stood up and said “we want to start a women’s cooperative” and I said “ok great! I’ll help you out!” And I didn’t even know what a co-op was at that time. And so, in the next two years, basically these two women’s groups, who were starting these sort of micro-enterprise businesses that were cooperatively owned and democratically managed by the women, taught me what cooperatives were. So, that was my introduction into this alternative economic field in a real living experience form.

And when I came back to the States, I was at an anarchist book fair, and I stumbled upon someone who was starting a studying group for developing working cooperatives in the US and so I joined that group and through that group, I went up to the San Francisco Bay Area in California, where there’s a hub of these types of cooperatives, and met an attorney who founded the law center.

And, as I was interviewing her about the legal needs of these types of cooperative enterprises, she started asking me questions about what I was planning on doing, and eventually asked me if I wanted to come up and do worker cooperative employment, and become an attorney without going to law school, which you can still do in a few states. So, that’s how I got here, a lot of luck, and a lot of just being opened up to what’s possible. And overcoming fears of not knowing what’s coming next.

Serafina: That sounds incredible! I was wondering, is there an issue through your work that has stood out to you in particular?

Ricardo Nuñez: There’s lots of issues. I think if there’s one that’s helped me to understand the power of the alternative models we’re making, as well as the communities we’re working with, is that all of these problems are going to take generations to resolve, to make amends for and to heal from. We need to create systems that acknowledge that conflict is inevitable and natural, and so instead of creating systems that shame and guilt people when they do something wrong or make a mistake, we need to create systems that can allow for space to even acknowledge this, so that we can have a conversation about it.

And so, the issue for me, the thing that came to mind when you asked that question, was that it’s been really important to create organisations that start to surface the underlying dynamics, the patriarchy, white supremacy, and all these things so that we can have honest conversations about them, and how they show up in our daily lives. Like the way that we interact with each other. By acknowledging that, I’ve felt empowered and I’ve seen coworkers and other folks in these spaces that I’ve participated in, and supported, that it allows people to sort of step out of the idea that because you participated in a system, that you’re inherently a bad person, or not worthy, or if someone else does something wrong that immediately we can just write them off.

Creating organisations and structures that allow us to see, and start contrast the reality that we live in, has been an issue that has been really powerful for me. It’s creating those spaces and containers with honest conversations, with compassion to happen.

Serafina: So, if in time, we broke down these systems, what changes can you imagine?

Ricardo Nuñez: That’s a good question. Something really irritating about sci-fi films is that they’re set so far in the future yet gender dynamics are portrayed exactly the same as they are now. I think if all this work was successful, life would look a lot differently, in the sense that we would no longer be worshipping at the idol of a death cult of white supremacy and capitalism. Where, when communities are in need we act out of solidarity and not self-interest. And, where we acknowledge our relationship to the earth and are more sustainable,I think there’s a lot of things that would look very different. Some of the ways that we are human are going to stay relatively the same, and we need to acknowledge those things about us, like the idea that conflict is always going to happen. And that there’s always going to be some difference so we need to acknowledge and honour the difference, and honour what the conflict is trying to tell us, that there’s something wrong, that there’s a violation of somebody’s boundaries that’s happening, and to dig underneath that and see what it is for that person, the impact of somebody else’s actions and where that boundary was crossed. So, I would hope that if all of our work is successful that we would have spaces that were supported by the community to restore us, as opposed to punishing us.

Serafina: So along the lines of reforms to the police and social justice system?

Ricardo Nuñez: Yeah! It would be all from top to bottom. Like: the abolishment of prisons; instead of what our current police looks like having some type of restored injustice councils that are set up; doing the hard work to care for each other and acknowledging that that takes time, and just because it doesn’t produce money doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. It’s probably more valuable than what most people are doing to generate money and capital.

Serafina: Right, what’s a typical day of work like for you?

Ricardo Nuñez: Honestly because I work at a legal center there’s a lot of research that we do, while we acknowledge most that the legal systems we live in and policies by our governments, even though these systems were created to produce healthy sustainable cooperative environments for ourselves and our communities, we still need to know what the laws are, so we need to make those steps towards creating those alternatives. So, a typical day can look like answering a lot of emails. Because a lot of people are trying to set up these alternatives and set up these cooperatives that are community-based and rooted injustice, and they’re just trying to figure out how to do it in a way that is sustainable from a legal perspective.

Some of these laws were created to protect workers, to protect investors, or whatever, but the way they’re being applied is acting as if a worker cooperative where the workers have equal power and say in how the business is run and profits are shared equitably based on how much value they’ve contributed, and that major decisions are divided equally. The courts will look at that place, and apply the same sets of laws and standards as a place like Amazon that is making their workers work twelve-hour shifts through the night, and they get paid poverty wages.

And so, the laws are being applied to those different situations, in the same way, the difference is that Amazon has hundreds of attorneys who are able to fight any of those employment cases in court, and these small worker cooperatives don’t, so this could destroy their enterprise with one mistake. And so, a part of my work is like responding to people’s requests for resources. If somebody asks us a question, we do the research and create some resources, that not only answer the question but also answer the questions in a way that is truly relevant to the person who is taking that resource so that they can give it to the rest of the members of their community so that they can actually understand what the law says, and how to navigate it.

There’s part of that, and part of our work is doing education. Yesterday, my workday was starting off with a meeting with an organisation ‘the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives’ which is the national business association of cooperatives and democratic workplaces in the United States. And us talking about things we need to do to make our organisation more effective so that we can meet our members’ needs around the country. That started my day, I had a few various meetings about other projects and then ended my day doing training on how these alternative business models and alternative business projects can actually get the capital the money they need to buy the resources like trucks, refrigeration, etc, all these things that you need. If you’re building a restaurant or a company that’s going to be building the community that it serves, so that’s a typical day.

Serafina: So do you believe there needs to be reform inaccessibility to the law from the origin of the system and legislation itself?

Ricardo Nuñez: Yeah! So that’s also part of our work to not only recognize where the system is failing our communities but to listen to our communities and to create policies that are actually community-generated, and so if somebody’s coming to us and saying they want to start a food truck, for example, to start a micro food enterprise from their food kitchen. So, we actually heard this from our communities and we created a policy that allows people in California to create home-based food businesses. So, that’s just an example that we are trying to listen to our communities and write laws that respond to their needs, but then again, also through the policy-making process that it’s not us to do our work alone but we also need to involve the community in this. So we’ll bring the folks we’re working with to the state capitals to talk about their experience and for them to advocate for the policies that will most impact them. We’re just there to facilitate that, do the research, and the work the community needs. So yes we need fundamental changes in our policy and these environments.

Serafina: Thank you! Final question, do you have any advice for people who are looking to help their community in a similar way, smaller scale of course?

Ricardo Nuñez: Yeah, get involved! I think one thing I would recommend is just get involved, there are people doing stuff all over the place and I would recommend that when particularly young people are possibly getting to a place of frustration, just take a breath. There’s always something else to be done or a different way of doing things. The more and more we go through systems, and get older, the more we’re told that it is what it is and this is how it is but just stop and slow down and reject that. That is a legacy of multiple systems of oppression. Whether it’s patriarchy, telling women they can’t do certain things, white supremacy telling people of color that we can’t do things. You know, all of these systems have told us that there’s a certain way to do things and we can’t go past them. Whenever you hit against that, stop. It’s an illusion and there’s always another way of doing things. It is human to be creative and we need to tap into that human creative potential in whatever situations or issues that we’re confronted with. So, that’s a really broad answer but this should help everyone anywhere. There are ways to plug in all over the place, and if not, start it up on your own.

Serafina: Thank you! It was so interesting to learn more about your organisation and what it does, and a very insightful experience

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You can learn more about Sustainable Economies Law Center and Ricardo Nuñez at: https://www.theselc.org/