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Our translocal membership program’s expansion within recent months has brought Ujima into contact with brilliant thought leaders and partners from across the country.
We Are The Ones, a cooperatively owned economic development firm based in Houston, Texas, seeds further cooperative development and ecosystem-building across a bevy of community offerings–from capital investment, to policy advocacy and organizing, their practices center accountability and solidarity.
Dean Liscum, a founding member of We Are The Ones, spoke with us about their work and impact in Houston’s Third Ward–a predominantly and historically Black neighborhood in the city’s southeast district.
Ujima: I wanted to kick this call off just with some space for you, Dean, to introduce yourself and to talk a bit about We Are The Ones for our local membership here in Boston. What animates We Are The Ones? What kind of work do you do, and what brought you to the table?
Dean Liscum: Sure. To start: We Are The Ones is an idea that grew from Dr. Assata Richards’s work. She had been working on getting a group together to think through and implement Black economic solidarity; social research conducted on Houston’s Third Ward would often conclude that there were a lot of needs, but there are also a lot of resources. And the best way to bring those resources together to, to fulfill those needs with the community members were, um, through cooperatives.
She educated herself, then began to educate other members in the community. I happened to attend a presentation she gave, and I was really interested (especially coming from business development). From that initial movement, we created We Are The Ones, and I joined as one of the founding members.
We Are The Ones is an incubator and accelerator for Black cooperatives, building economic solidarity specifically in our community, the Third Ward, and we are ourselves a cooperative, one of very few in Texas and likely the only primarily Black owned-and-operative cooperative business in Texas. There are five members right now, and we have just officially incorporated in Texas–it's actually very difficult to incorporate as a cooperative. It’s not an official designation in the same way most other kinds of businesses are. We actually had to get some legal expertise from the University of Houston, and they donated time from their law school to help us draft our articles of incorporation.
What does incubation/acceleration look like for we are the ones?
So incubation and acceleration for us means helping groups organize and run themselves as a cooperative. There's a lot of culture building, organization and communication practice, and learning practice. Since we are ourselves a workers’ cooperative, we’re often practicing and studying alongside our co-op partners. We’re studying nonviolent communication together, working on on sociocracy as a governance practice, too, and we’re setting up workshops on these subjects, both for ourselves and for the cooperatives we work with.
Why did you choose a care worker cooperative, Community Care Cooperative, as your first business to support?
Community Care cooperative was chosen as one of the initial cooperatives to start because, just like the rest of America, we have an aging population in Houston that needs assistance; not just medical assistance, but day-to-day living. From meal prep to transportation support, housekeeping, bathing, there’s a large need for caregivers.
In our neighborhood, we already have a lot of caregivers, who face low wages from Medicare reimbursements and long travel hours for work–we help them make up the difference between their average wage from Medicare, around $9.75 an hour, and a more livable wage of $15 an hour.
Who are some other cooperatives that We Are The Ones supports, and in what kind of ways?
We also work with a construction cooperative called Third Ward Construction Community Builders; construction is very difficult because of the amount of capital needed to take on new projects. They have been really instrumental in working in the neighborhood and taking on repair work, and we’re hoping to get them the capital they’d need to take on new construction. We’re working on setting up a food cooperative, too–as a model for us, the Detroit People's Food Co-op just had an opening for a brick and mortar location after running for about 10 years. We got some funding from Sankofa Institute, so we flew a couple members up to see their grand opening in-person and to hear about their journey from a buying club to this two-story building. There’s a grocery store on the bottom, and a community room up-top–that's something we'd like to build soon.
To pivot a little bit: I was really interested to see that We Are The Ones is testing and implementing accountability assessments for community work. How did these assessments come to be, and what does the process look like?
John Jenkins is really the mastermind of this idea at We Are The Ones. One of the things that we were observing is that nonprofits would get all kinds of grants to come into this community and do some sort of work, right? They'd get this money, they'd “do the work”, and then they'd write a glowing report about how much work they did, but there was no accountability outside of the organization to the community, no community feedback that reflected their opinions on the efficacy or necessity of a given project.
And so what John has been working on from the accountability perspective is basically an accountability scorecard, where the organization doesn't get to decide its own merit but rather, the community does. We first acknowledge or ask, is this actually something that the community needs? If so, what are those needs? And were those needs met? The whole idea is to have that scorecard revisited throughout the process, not just at the beginning or end, but intermittently so that progress can be noted and there can be a course correction if things aren't actually going the right way. We think it's a very powerful model and it'll be a great tool that we look forward to sharing more broadly.
How does community voice come through in decision making for We Are The Ones? How are residents and neighbors involved in decision-making practices?
We reach out to community members in a variety of ways to evaluate and address needs; for instance, with the Community Care Cooperative, we recognized a need for care worker support and we reached out to community groups. We have relationships with a number of different groups. We have relationships with Cuney Homes [a public housing development based in Houston’s Third Ward] and its governing council; we have a relationship with the Emancipation Economic Development Council (EEDC) nearby too, which hosts a communication network.
It’s effectively a text group; they got mass participation to sign up for this group, and there's thousands of people on there. So when we have a question or a potential initiative, or if we want to dialogue about needs and solutions, we use that channel. There are also a lot of community groups here; the Third Ward is recognized by the city as a super neighborhood, and we were able to push the city for the right to have a homeowners’/neighborhood association. For a long time, the Third Ward didn't have one that was associated with the city because we were 75% rental-occupation and those organizations were technically only for homeowners; but we got the charter changed so renters could take part. Now, we have the Northern Third Ward Homeowners Association, which is mainly renters, and that’s another communication and outreach mechanism.
Hearing you speak about this policy shift you were able to effect to bring folks together in a productive capacity is fascinating. What other kinds of policy work does We Are The Ones take on?
If you've ever been a part of social organizing work or even political work, you’ll know that policy work is the least sexy, but the most powerful, right? Dr. Richards leads our policy work as well, mostly at the local level: we work with City Council and with the Mayor, sometimes to have local ordinances changed. That can look like speaking before the Council, or sending proposals up through our city councilperson (or to city government directly).
Another big part of our policy work is networking with other groups, building a coalition of aligned folks to take something on together.
As an (unsuccessful) example of this: we started a community agreements group in response to a forthcoming development in our area. Rice University owned some property and wanted to build on that property, so we tried to draft a community benefits agreement that stipulated Rice must employ our residents and neighbors and they must source from us in their construction and development. We didn’t want an MOU (memorandum of understanding), we wanted a community benefits agreement that is legally binding and is actually negotiated with the people, not through a third party. We pulled together a huge group of community members and organizations and pressed Rice for a long time; but what happened is the city took over the language–and Houston is a very developer friendly city. They said, “oh, well, we'll negotiate a community benefits agreement.” That's not how it works. The city doesn't negotiate, the community negotiates it. We tried to go through elected representatives to negotiate, and we had a set of points that we were organized on, but it unfortunately got gutted by the city.
We're also getting together with some other organizations in Texas to make employee-owned workers’ cooperatives a standard business model here–we have a lot of agricultural cooperatives and we have utility cooperatives, but we don't have many worker cooperatives.
What’s on the horizon for We Are The Ones?
We just incorporated recently, so we are finishing out our business plan, setting up our revenue streams, and so on.
Our next big action is determining, from the cooperatives we’ve started and supported, which ones are good candidates for investment–how can we get them a loan, and are they developmentally ready? Through Seed Commons, we have accessed funds and we're set up to identify groups who may need seed capital, and to work with them to figure out what projects need funding to take them to the next level. Most of these businesses have pretty low capital requirements, but a small amount of capital could help cover insurance costs, or equipment, that would empower folks to multiply their skills and services. That's what we're really focused on.
Member owners of We Are the Ones from left to right: Dean Liscum, Tanisha Holman, Rogerlyn Brown, Assata Richards, Lin Han.
Dean Liscum (he/him) is the founder of Dean Liscum Communications. He works with small businesses and non-profits using digital marketing to help them get the right message to the right customer in the right format at the right time. Distance learning led him into writing, coding, and marketing in such industries as banking and finance, software development, and marketing; he has run marketing automation systems, developed websites, managed Content Management Systems, set up and run Content Marketing initiatives. He’s also helped companies brand, and re-brand, and understand that customer experience is the essence of brand. He is a worker-owner with We Are The Ones, and has called Houston home for decades.
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