Free the Land – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

What would it take for black lives to matter in America?

In this month’s issue of Vice magazine, I take a long look at one answer to that question in Jackson, Mississippi. There, in 2013, voters elected black-nationalist lawyer Chokwe Lumumba as mayor based on promises of direct democracy and cooperative enterprise. Lumumba died unexpectedly less than a year later, but the story of what he tried to carry out in Jackson remains a possible future for Black Lives Matter—especially now that BLM spokesman DeRay Mckesson is running for the mayor’s office in Baltimore.

Please share this story far and wide! You can simply retweet this or share this. You can also download the print spread.

In addition to the excellent editorial work by the team at Vice, I’m grateful for the photographs by William Widmer, who also took pictures for my Al Jazeera America (RIP) feature on transgender Catholics.

More cooperation where that came from

I’ve been continuing to explore the prospects for a more cooperative economy wherever I can. I profiled a co-op Internet service provider in the mountains west of me; I argued in The Guardian that cooperative economics might be the best way to make good on Bernie Sanders’s call for political revolution.

Together with a small, distributed team (join us!), I’m developing The Internet of Ownership, a directory of cooperative online platforms and the ecosystem that supports them. This week, also, Trebor Scholz and I are completing the manuscript for our collaborative book (with around 60 co-authors) on platform cooperativism.

In my column for America magazine this month, I reflected on Pope Francis’s emphasis on process in his governing philosophy, which can help us think through the U.S. presidential election as well as the pope’s own recent statement on family.

Speaking schedule, more or less

2016.04.16: Boulder, CO – TEDxCU, CU’s Folsom Field
2016.04.30: Boulder, CO – Panelist at “Starting Worker Co-op Businesses,” CU’s Environmental Design Building #1060, 12-4 p.m.
2016.05.18-20: Paris, France – OuiShareFest
2016.05.21: London, UK – “Platform Co-ops: Rewiring the Sharing Economy,” Newspeak House, 7-9 p.m.
2016.06.06: Melbourne, Australia – “Creating a Culture of Mercy in Public Life,” The Oratory, Newman College
2016.06.07: Melbourne, Australia – Catholic Social Service event on cooperativism
2016.06.10: Melbourne, Australia – Platform cooperativism workshop, 2-5 p.m.
2016.10.06: Omaha, NE – IGNITE at Creighton University

Check here for updates.