In It for the Long Haul: Building Relationships for Economic Transformation

 

The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar on “Remaking the Economy: Advocacy and Community: The Delicate Balance.” View the full webinar here.

Nia Evans: 23:16-24:21

I really like to point out the role of relationships in our work— it’s very strong— and also the role of long-term work. It being really important, I think, not to be transactional in our relationships, or to be short-sighted. I think the fact that we had a group of people coming together who had already kind of worked together with each other in different ways, coming together around this venture was key.

The other thing is, we’re a multi-stakeholder initiative. And so, we have people from all walks of life participating in the formation of Ujima. We have people with finance expertise, community organizing, healthcare, you name it. It really was a place where different types of people could see entry points. And I guess the last thing I just wanted to touch upon: Julia [Ho] talked about this notion of moving beyond crisis, and then also just talked about this sense of long crisis. When I mentioned gentrification and displacement, these are realities that we were all living, and we all understood. There wasn’t a hard sell to say we needed to do our economies differently.