The Federation Table: Collective Practice, Cooperative Power
This event is free to attend, and lunch is on us. If you're able, a suggested donation helps us keep offering meals like this - no pressure, just appreciated. 🤎
At Understory, a worker-owned cooperative restaurant in Fruitvale.
The way people practice being together determines what they can accomplish together.
NET is piloting national cooperative infrastructure for cultural workers: pooled benefits, mutual aid protocols, portable healthcare, and shared purchasing, in partnership with labor organizations. This three-hour working lunch is part of a larger design phase that brings co-ops, labor, solidarity networks, and artmakers together at one table in cities across the US. In the Bay, we gather at a restaurant owned by the same people cooking. The federation finds its builders here.
On the menu: breaking down what’s working on the ground, what's being dreamed up, and co-creating the structures directly. El Teatro Campesino made theater on the picket line. We're bringing the picket line a benefits package.
When we stop checking the horizon and start checking in on each other we are returning to how everything worthwhile has ever been built: by the ones who need it, together, without asking for permission.