We’re excited to announce that we’re one of the grant recipients of Rochdale Capital’s Greater Washington Center for Employee Ownership 2024 Annual D.C. Co-op Impact Grant!
Our main goal for $10,000 grant is to organize a one-day conference in DC for participants to discuss the intersection of music, labor, and the solidarity economy. We will bring musicians and community together from across genres for a day of conversations around the problems facing the music industry with a lens of solutions based in mutual aid and the solidarity economy. Speakers and panelists will talk about their experiences in the music industry and explore how cooperative solutions can build resilience in our communities.
We aim for the event to be impactful and well attended, take a full day, and be organized at a space that’s part of the solidarity economy in DC. We know that folks involved in these spaces already rely heavily on mutual aid and solidarity to succeed and create their art, and want to create a space where we can formally learn from each other, skill-share, and build stronger relationships.
While there are existing DC music conferences that already focus on the music business, we will orient this event specifically towards the solidarity economy and co-op space. We aim to reach out to a diverse audience of musicians in DC, including those in the gogo scene, the punk scene, and electronic music scene, therefore bringing together artists and organizers with long rooted histories in music and DC’s various justice struggles as well as those with experience running and building spaces that support musicians.
We believe that building community, trust, and deep long-term relationships among people is one of the best ways to grow the solidarity economy and cooperative ecosystem in DC. By creating more spaces for people to be together, discuss, and reflect, we hope to help plant those seeds. In the next few months we will start reaching out to our connections in DC to start building a team who can bring together this conference.
We're honored to receive this grant along the other recipients.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/post/72