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Solidarity Circles

BUILDING SOLIDARITY THROUGH DEEP TRANSFORMATION


Welcome to the Exchanges curriculum of the Solidarity Cirlces! Here you'll find all the content you need for the next 9 months you spend with your fellow participants. Each module correlates to the month of the process -- so module 1 kicks things off for the first monthly meeting, Module 2 correlates to the second monthly meeting, and so on.
We started Solidarity Circles because we perceived a need for a space for clergy, faith leaders, and organizers to organize together, to build relationships of solidarity together. These modules are short and sweet and are geared to help get the conversation started during your meetings together.

 
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Solidarity Circles

Solidarity, Power, and Faith Communities

 
 
 

Module 1: What’s the Problem? What are We Up Against?

The economy is not working for working people. Our current economic system is based on exploitation and extraction of people and the planet. Economic relationships fundamentally shape our personal and interpersonal lives. Work and labor are not everything, but they certainly form and shape us to our core. This training introduces some basic concepts and tools to help us understand what we're up against and introduces some key ideas to the Wendland-Cook Program.

 

Module 1: Topics Video

In this topic video, Dr. Rieger and Rev. George Schmidt, Graduate Reserach fellow with the Wendland-Cook Program, explore some of the common misconceptions about class analysis and how building solidarity requires deep intersectionality in our analysis. Enjoy!

 

Module 2: What are our Alternatives?

Now that we have introduced some of the key concepts and ideas to help us understand what we're up against, how do we go about building power and solidarity to create a real alternative to captialism? This module explores some of the basic ideas of the solidarity and cooperative economy to help us see how we can start building power. For further reading on this topic, check out two articles below by Dr. Joerg Rieger.

ARTICLES: “Deep Solidarity” and “This Changes Everything”

 

Module 2: Topics Video

In this video, Dr. Rieger interviews the Co-founders of the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development, Rosemarie Henkel-Rieger and Benny Overton.

CHECK OUT THEIR WORK: ”Learn More About Co-ops!” & ”A Forum on Churches & Co-ops!”

 

Module 3: Video - Value-Based Community Organizing

In this video, Aaron Stauffer and Joerg Rieger explore value-based community organizing and it’s impacts on faith and our political and economic lives together. By grounding community organizing in values — rather than issues — organizing can harness the power of theology and theology can harness the power of organizing.

 

Module 3 - Topics Video: The Principles of the Cooperative and Solidarity Economy

In this video, Aaron Stauffer and Joerg Rieger explore the 7 core principles and values of the cooperative and solidarity economy, teasing out the implications of these values for faith leaders and congregations.

 

Module 4: Video - What can you do? Hold a Conversation!

In this video, Aaron Stauffer and George Schmidt discuss strategies for how to hold a conversation in your community or congregation on the solidarity economy. We talk about leadership development, potential hang-ups, and where to start. The resources below link directly to the Churches and Cooperatives Toolkit developed through a Louisville Institute grant completed in cooperation between the Southeast Center for Cooperative Development and the Wendland-Cook Program.

Check out the video below that explore the Scriptural basis of the cooperative economy.

 

Module 4: Topics Video

In this video, Joerg Rieger explores how a new understanding of grace as mutual relationship with God can help us imagine different economic relationships. In the reading option below, we are feature a piece by Dr. Jessica Gordon-Nembhard who explores how economic power is crucial to achieving racial justice.

ARTICLE: “Economic Justice as a Necessary Component of Racial Justice”

 

Module 5: Video - Site Mapping

In this video, Francisco Garcia and Aaron Stauffer discuss the skill of site-mapping and its relationship to institutional power analysis. What is a “site-map”? How do you do one? And what does power or theology have anything to do with this mundane task? These are all addressed in the video.

Below, in the “Topics” video, George Schmidt talks about how power shapes up in different institutions besides the church and non-profit. Take a look!

 

Module 5: Topics Video

In this video, George Schmidt and Aaron Stauffer talk about how power exists in more hierarchical organizations, like the military, and how change is possible even in the most rigid of institutions and why that matters to your context

 

Module 6: Video - Power Analysis

In this video, Joerg Rieger discusses the important distinction between power and privilege in your context, and how with a new understanding of power, privilege can be used to build solidarity between working people and not for the dominant powers.

Interventions Forum: Privilege & Power in the Capitalocene Interventions

 

Module 7: Video - Active Listening

In this video, George Schmidt and Francisco Garcia and what active listening means and amounts to in our ecclesial and non-profit contexts. How do you listen well? What are its pastoral implications? How does this fit into organizing? These are all addressed in the video.

 
 

Module 8: Video - Storytelling

In this video, George Schmidt and Aaron Stauffer explore the role that storytelling plays in organizing and building the solidarity economy. They’ll offer some frameworks and then explore the theological resonances that come up naturally as people are asked to “testify” or tell their story in organizing contexts.

 

Module 8: Topics Video

Here, Joerg Rieger offers a response to the video above, complicating the frames of storytelling in traditional organizing. One key question that we raise here is not only how we tell our stories, but what stories do you tell? Pursuing that question will help us see the connections between solidarity and strategies of storytelling in organizing.

Module 9: Video - Deep Solidarity

In this video, Joerg Rieger wraps up our curriculum by tying the various threads together: he explores how one future of churches growth and sustainability is found in working peoples’ agency and deep solidarity.

 

Meet Our Coaches

One crucial aspect of the Solidarity Circles program is the coaching. All participants are invited to schedule a free coaching session with one of our coaches featured below! If you want to get in touch with one fill out the form and we’ll put you in touch with the coach.