The group toured three of The Guild’s properties being developed in the Capitol View and West End neighborhoods. Once thriving predominantly Black communities, these neighborhoods have been impacted by rapid development and “buy and hold” real estate purchases. The Guild is working at a variety of intersections to keep community ownership at the center of community development. They shared about their key initiatives:

• Community Stewardship Trust (CST) – Gives local residents the opportunity to co-own community spaces like grocery stores and childcare centers, stabilizing resources in these neighborhoods and reducing displacement.
• People’s Community Land Trust (PCLT) – Removes homes from the speculative market to create permanently affordable housing for under-resourced Atlantans.
• Groundcover Fund – This is a solidarity investment fund that directs reparative capital into cooperative and community-ownership models.

Members toured a grocery store space that will be partially supported by local farms and gardens. This store will also include three fully-equipped spaces for independently-run food businesses. Finally, members visited The MURPH (Multi-Use Radical People’s Hall), a 10,000 square foot space in the West End designed as an affordable gathering and work hub for community organizing. 

Beth Levine, one of the leaders of Beyond Capitalism, said: “The most exciting part was seeing how Nikishka and her team have created innovative models that allow a solidarity economy project to survive within a capitalist framework. Every aspect of the design, economically and architecturally, is responsive to community needs because they include the community. It was beyond inspiring to see the outcomes of their efforts—affordable housing, community space, grocery store and restaurants in a food desert. I left the tour feeling hopeful and energized about the possibilities beyond capitalism.”

Faced with this reality, and the inadequacy of existing strategy, the Reflective Democracy Campaign has been challenging itself to deeply examine its work and possible paths forward. Since the Campaign launched, it has produced first-of-its-kind data and analysis; changed the conventional wisdom about race, gender, and political power; established the concept of reflective democracy as a value and commonly-used framework; and incubated some of the most innovative recent democracy-building work through grants, fellowships, and projects that can fundamentally challenge the system.  

And while the team is continuing to build on the foundation they’ve built, simply continuing to do the same things they’ve done in the past is not sufficient. The only path forward is to dive into the hardest questions, in all their messiness and uncertainty.  

That’s why the Reflective Democracy team has embarked on a wide-ranging process of exploration, research, and discovery. To facilitate this process, they are centering their work around a vehicle for experimentation and growth: the Reflective Democracy Lab. The Lab is a new arm of the Campaign that continues the Campaign’s rich history of developing bold new insights and strategies and meets the profound challenges of our moment with approaches that are more explicitly experimental, assumption-challenging, and category-busting.

The work of the Lab—and the Campaign more broadly—is based on a set of foundational beliefs, including:

• We are at a remarkable historical juncture, in which the old institutions and norms are collapsing and new ones must be imagined and built.
• There is an urgent need for spaces of feminist analysis and action, especially in light of the powerful role of gender and sexuality in authoritarian movements.
• Ways of thinking and doing imbued with patriarchy and white supremacy got us here; those same forms, processes, and expectations are not our path to a different, liberated future.
• A truly multiracial democracy has never before been built; those of us engaged in that project are attempting something profoundly new.
• Something that has never before existed will not be brought into being with already-existing imaginative frameworks, methods, and tools.

We ask what we see differently if we:

• Understand that American democracy began in 1970, when women and people of color finally won a true right to vote, not in 1776 or 1789?
• Grapple with democracy as an emotional project – one of joy, grief, rage, belonging, fear, conflict –  as much as a technical, rational project of laws, positions, rules, and policies?
• Center creativity and creative process and look to other fields for methods, approaches, and wisdom to reimagine the work of democracy-building?
• View the challenge of building democracy in the U.S. not just as a national project, but an aspect of an international project?
• Think in terms of generations, centuries, and epochs, not years, election cycles, or even decades?

To quote Georgia O’Keeffe, “…to see takes time.” Without time, we see what we expect to see, and we do what is familiar and urgent, yet ultimately inadequate.