Constructing the Solidarity City, Stone by Stone

Worcester and the Emergence of Stone Soup

To situate how Stone Soup came together as an urban commons, we want to set the neighborhood context surrounding our primary focus. Main South is located along Main Street between Worcester’s gentrified downtown to the east and Clark University on the western edge (see Maps 6 and 9).2 Main South is one of the city’s lowest-income and most racially diverse neighborhoods. Two-thirds of Main South’s population is nonwhite. Around 20 percent of the population is not proficient in English, less than a quarter have any college education, and median household income hovers near the poverty line at just over $26,000.3 In comparison, the median household income is nearly $52,000 for the city as a whole.4 All of these factors put Main South below the averages for the city in many respects, concentrating the effects of poverty in one place. It is in this neighborhood that Stone Soup first came together (see Map 11).

Stone Soup is a unique composite institution involving multiple cooperatives and social justice organizations clustered together within the same physical space, a four-floor Victorian house with the same name. Originally built as a funeral home, the building was converted into Stone Soup in 2006. It began in 2001 as a kind of “solidarity dream” by three Clark University students who formed the Worcester Roots collective. Worcester Roots’ mission centers on youth empowerment and social, economic, and environmental justice. Much of its work was and is devoted to building cooperative and explicitly solidarity economies in and around Worcester. The founders conceived of Stone Soup as a neighborhood-based, volunteer-run organization, with the building providing a safe shared space for diverse social justice organizations to set up their operations and to support one another.5

In 2006, two individuals from Worcester Roots transferred ownership of the building to Stone Soup. The organization became a collective of collectives, rather than a collective where one member held disproportionate power. As Matt Feinstein from Worcester Roots explains:

The main purpose of Stone Soup is to run this physical space, you know, a lasting institution and space that will provide resources, connections, and some organizing work in Main South and in Worcester. But it’s made up of many grassroots organizations . . . who are member groups of Stone Soup, so Stone Soup itself is kind of a co-op model, where each of the member groups that either have an office or regularly use the building or follow the mission and want to be part of Stone Soup have a seat on the board and have members that go to the membership meetings and make major decisions.6

Even the organization that founded Stone Soup played an equal role with other organizations in governing the space. We have written about this structure as the Stone Soup community’s attempt at establishing a “commons space” for the solidarity economy.7 More than just a shared space, commons are spaces maintained through practices of managing the space to ensure widespread access and use for community benefit. Correspondingly, the continuity of any commons depends upon the commoners who are engaged in its care.8 Commoning, therefore, is another name for the practice of solidarity that links commons and commoner in a dynamic and ongoing relationship.

From its start in 2006, activist enthusiasm for Stone Soup as a common space for collaboration grew. The fallout from the global financial crisis of 2008 amplified interest in the solidarity economy in Worcester, as elsewhere. The solidarity economy that emerged in this space included formal and informal practices of cooperation. Some of these efforts primarily spoke to people’s immediate needs for food, transportation, and companionship, while others worked more broadly to engage with the city and the broader solidarity economy movement, though of course basic needs of people and the needs of the movement frequently overlap. An example of need-based initiatives is Worcester Earn-a-Bike, a nonhierarchical all-volunteer bike shop that empowers community members of all social and economic means to earn a free bicycle by volunteering five to ten hours at the organization. Matt W. from Worcester Earn-a-Bike described Stone Soup as an ideal location for connecting bicycles donated or reclaimed from city streets with young people in need of bikes and interested in learning basic bicycle maintenance skills.9 He identified youth from Worcester’s Ghanaian community as particularly enthusiastic participants in Earn-a-Bike’s efforts, but really this initiative has become a beehive of youth and adults drawn to the model.10 Beyond this signature program, Earn-a-Bike continues to be quite active in city and state initiatives to promote cycling as a means of everyday transit. When the group repairs more bikes than it gives away to volunteers, they donate surplus bikes to others through a bike-share program run at nearby Worcester State University. Through its economic model, Earn-a-Bike deals with differing needs and abilities of participants while also working to expand their capacities to repair, cooperate, and move through the city.

Stone Soup’s interest in worker cooperatives and the solidarity economy emerged from another key project during this period. Toxic Soil Busters was a Stone Soup–based environmental justice organization that grew out of the Regional Environmental Council (see chapter 4 for further discussion) and worked to test and remediate lead-contaminated soils throughout the city. Stone Soup took over facilitation of the youth-led organization, working with clients and UMass Chan Medical School to test and remediate contaminated soils—the legacy of a long century of industrialization and lead contamination throughout the soil and housing stock. Matt Feinstein explained that some of the early graduates from this program became interested in what to do with the surplus profit generated from their remediation activities and how they should make distributions according to their and the community’s priorities. These early conversations sparked a strategy around cooperative development with other Stone Soup member organizations about the worker cooperative as an alternative means for securing livelihoods.11

As a physical common space, Stone Soup played a crucial role in facilitating these conversations. Stone Soup brought together people who might not normally mix: neighborhood youth, formerly incarcerated individuals, older adult volunteers, members of the Catholic Worker Movement, and university students. The cooperative was expressly designed to generate what Gill Valentine terms “geographies of encounter” where progressive organizations would come to interact and grow together in ways that would not be possible in isolation.12 Stone Soup acted as a nurturing ecosystem of meeting and interaction, becoming a magnetic hub in the neighborhood, and all of the participants came to feel the commons as greater than the sum of its parts. In pragmatic ways, the organization developed affiliations with other organizations across the city spanning racial, ethnic, income, and generational divides.

Disaster struck in 2009 when a building fire destroyed nearly everything. From the ashes came an incredible display of solidarity across lines of race, class, gender, and generations. With legal support from the community-based organization Common Ground and technical support from allied local unions, the building was rehabbed after five long years. The process entailed thousands of hours of volunteer labor, which ranged from donated time from a local architecture firm, to the hundreds of hours that Stone Soup volunteers spent washing soot from the walls, to apprentice programs organized by local construction unions that gave opportunities to neighborhood youth from the Black and Latinx communities to volunteer and learn new skills simultaneously.13 Among other improvements, the building was retrofitted to be more energy efficient and more accessible to people living with disabilities. The process of rebuilding was an exercise of solidarity in motion, taking years of cooperative effort, and the end result was a building where everyone who took part felt like they owned the space. Coauthor of this book Stephen Healy attended the rededication of the building in April 2014, along with member organizations, unions, volunteers, members of the immigrant support organization Neighbor to Neighbor, and the community at large.

During that opening, there was a giddiness traveling through all those present as they realized what had been accomplished via their tenacity to achieve their dreams for something better for their neighborhood. Solidarity, seemingly reborn in this moment, itself birthed a new commons space, different from what came before it, a Commons 2.0 (see Plate 4).

2014–2020: Stone Soup as Commons 2.0

After the rebuild in 2014, many of the original tenant organizations returned. Earn-a-Bike occupied much of the ground floor. Ex-prisoners and Prisoners Organizing for Community Advancement (EPOCA) also returned and was an anchoring tenant that occupied much of the second floor, while the local ACLU chapter and a worker cooperative named Future Focus Media Co-op entered anew, along with StandUp for Kids Worcester, Worcester Immigrant Coalition, and a Food Not Bombs chapter. While some things remained the same about Stone Soup, other things changed. The entrance of new tenants changed the dynamics, and from late summer 2014 onward a bigger change was afoot in the United States as events in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked a national Black Lives Matter movement.14

During this time, the norms of cooperation and solidarity that framed monthly Stone Soup meetings enhanced mutual listening and learning within the shared space, thereby helping to amplify the groups’ respective advocacy initiatives rooted in racial justice. Stone Soup members also played a role in local Black Lives Matter activism in 2015 and beyond, including an instance circulated in national media where Julius Jones, Stone Soup member and Worcester Roots codirector, confronted presidential candidate Hillary Clinton about her support for the 1994 Crime Bill and its consequences for Black communities. The hard-won, accumulated experience of cooperation among Stone Soup member organizations was beginning to translate into a shared vision for the city and the nation. If you have lunch frequently enough with people who share solidarity dreams, the world can open up a lot, with the kinds of interventions each can make growing bolder.

During this period of time, a larger cooperative ecology was beginning to emerge in the city. Stone Soup inspired the creation of two more cooperative spaces—the Shop (now the WorcShop) and Technocopia, cooperative makerspaces (the latter still exists). As we will discuss in the following chapter, Stone Soup also played a big role in Worcester’s food solidarity economy, working with other organizations and acting as a fiscal sponsor for a community-supported agriculture organization in the city. In the projects they chose to nurture, Stone Soup performed a consistent economic development strategy that promoted solidarity and cooperative economies rooted in addressing basic needs in communities. Crucially, the strategies extended spatially across the city, not just contained to Main South.

Stone Soup’s citywide agenda took many forms. Organizations like Future Focus Media Co-op engaged closely with youth via training programs. Cooperative member Cedric explained that the intention was to offer young people experience in media production while preserving their capacity to be autonomous. By expanding these programs to young people throughout the city, Future Focus Media moved beyond the neighborhood and toward a more open-ended sense of community and future possibilities.15

Stone Soup the organization also prioritized developing leadership by youth of color through its own ranks. Many young men and women who had worked in Stone Soup and in affiliated youth-led cooperatives went from being shy young people to being “spokespeople like keynote speakers at youth Federation of Worker Co-ops conferences.”16 The involvement of youth in cooperative enterprises and their development as civic leaders in the context of the common space provided by Stone Soup contrasts sharply with the exclusion that many youth of color experience in homogeneously white organizations and spaces. An intergenerational and multiracial approach dominated the creation of the biannual Co-op Academy, a cooperative entrepreneurship training and mentorship program held at Stone Soup, where youth of color came to be both stakeholders and leaders. From there emerged a discourse of multiplication, as the Co-op Academy spawned many new community-rooted cooperatives. In many ways, the space centered encounter, reciprocity, and listening. In general, Stone Soup started to become well known throughout the city as being a different container for social relations. Through Stone Soup, communities outside Main South have more routinely come into contact with the idea of worker cooperatives and other forms of collectives, inspiring them to spread a culture of solidarity as a result.

Stone Soup was part of an effort to remake the city and to ensure that as many people as possible, particularly those whose voices have historically been excluded, had a say in shaping what the city would become. One instance unfolded in 2015, when the organization played a pivotal role in hosting the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy at Clark University and the surrounding community. At this conference, Worcester’s community activists first began to hear of a plan to build a new stadium for a Boston Red Sox farm-league team that was moving from Rhode Island to Worcester. Developments of this sort come with the danger of displacement, particularly for communities living with low incomes (a fear that proved to be well founded). For the cooperatives at Stone Soup, however, as well as for other social justice organizations and organized labor, the stadium was also an opportunity to make political demands upon the city. Matt F. described how a coalition emerged across Worcester to develop a community benefits agreement (CBA) to ensure that economic opportunities associated with stadium construction would be distributed across the Worcester community and that special consideration would be given to communities of color. Ultimately, the CBA was a successful campaign with really poor timing. The agreement was about to be finalized when Covid-19 hit. The pandemic delayed construction, and then, when construction recommenced, the CBA dissolved before it could materialize.

Even if the campaign did not materialize in the envisioned community-based agreement, it is worth pausing for one moment to draw out at least one implication. The experience gives a sense of what is possible in a smaller city like Worcester: an organization like Stone Soup can potentially emerge as a powerful local force to multiply solidarity initiatives. Through their efforts, what begins to emerge is the Solidarity City. Stone Soup is a testament to the possibility present whenever a small group of committed people get together. In important ways, a one-building commons helped produce ruptures and disruptions in how to think about city planning in Worcester, insisting that stakeholders deserve seats at the table.

In its first iteration, we could see Stone Soup as a democratic collective or commons running a building and bridging connections inside a space. In its postfire 2.0 version, Stone Soup sought to extend that same principle toward city-level strategies and social movements. Stone Soup came into its own as a political force in the city, making space for diverse communities, younger and older alike, to be important players. As for so many other aspects of life, the pandemic marked a profound turning point in the history of Stone Soup. A series of conflicts that came to the fore during this period led to both the end of Stone Soup and its transformation into something new.

Teetering over the Edge, Coming Apart at the Seams, and the Rebirth of Commons 3.0

With the arrival of Covid-19, much of the activity in the solidarity economy movement focused on the provision of direct mutual aid to people most affected by the pandemic. For movement activist Jeuji Diamondstone, this intention centered on the emergence of a relationship between Stone Soup and Worcester’s Southeast Asian Coalition, a group that worked with Worcester’s Vietnamese community concentrated on the southern edge of Main South.17 There, the focus was on bringing Asian and Black youth together as part of a concerted effort to combat anti-Asian racism that swelled in the early months of the pandemic. Focusing on the needs generated by the pandemic, a pedicab cooperative coming out of the Co-op Academy pivoted to using an electric van to transport food and other supplies to housebound and vulnerable households during the pandemic.18 These practices of citywide mutuality might be seen as Stone Soup’s efforts to extend their commons, a goodwill expansion of solidarity to the scale of the city.

During this same period, the Main South neighborhood increasingly became the destination for those facing dislocation from gentrifying pressures elsewhere. Citywide decisions and dynamics turned the neighborhood into a containment zone where unhoused populations and drug users from other neighborhoods were pushed. In the words of one activist, “This is where the cops chase people to, then leave them alone.”19 Some of this pressure had negative incidental consequences for the cooperatives. For example, a break-in at Stone Soup resulted in the theft of Future Focus Media’s equipment, which led the cooperators to disband. Neighborhood and city changes exacerbated internal political dynamics within Stone Soup, which became increasingly fractious. The broad outline below of what transpired between 2017 and 2020 speaks volumes about the challenges that come with close encounters and about how contestation over the very meaning of solidarity can destabilize relationships.

One central element of the story was a change in the organizational form and mission of EPOCA. At the height of its powers in the latter half of the first decade of the 2000s, EPOCA was a registered nonprofit that enjoyed considerable success with grant funders. EPOCA had a lot of initial success in reforming a practice by which criminal offense record information (CORI) was frequently used by landlords and employers to discriminate against formerly incarcerated people. In 2008, EPOCA successfully petitioned the City of Worcester to stop the preemptive use of CORI for vendors supplying the city with services. Thanks in large part to EPOCA, the CORI system underwent reform at the state level and the state began to make it easier for formerly incarcerated individuals to have their records sealed.20

In the years since 2014, EPOCA underwent a number of changes: EPOCA’s president, who had a long history with the group, was ousted, and the organization lost its status as a charitable nonprofit. The new leadership refocused on the direct provision of services to formerly incarcerated folks experiencing houselessness. EPOCA subsequently fell significantly behind in its rent to Stone Soup, while its current president took up residence in Stone Soup’s second floor, eventually transforming the place into a wet shelter for people who actively use drugs and alcohol.21 The repeated break-ins at Stone Soup, sanitation problems, and other complaints from neighbors eventually led the city to initiate a receivership auction with the intention of placing the building into the hands of a third party.22

The response to this situation split the Stone Soup community largely along the lines of age. Many older activists tended to see these developments as something that undermined the safety and accessibility of Stone Soup as a shared space. Many of the younger activists, particularly those involved with harm reduction and other approaches that depathologize substance use, viewed these safety concerns as “middle class” (or even as “gentrifying”) and regarded efforts to provide shelter for those currently unhoused as a practice of direct solidarity.23 At the same time, these political struggles became interpersonal, and conversations became charged with accusations of racism. Stone Soup made efforts to reconcile these differences by offering two facilitated workshops: one run by the Anti-oppression Resource and Training Alliance (AORTA), a cooperative with a base in Philadelphia, and another led by Worcester Roots president Patricia Feraud-King, an African American woman who had been a part of Stone Soup throughout her adolescence. Eventually, EPOCA was evicted from the building, but by that time Stone Soup had become a rudderless ship. It was at this point that a youth activist, Sha-Asia Medina, stepped forward and began conversations with remaining tenants that led to further transformations.

After over fifteen years of providing space for grassroots organizers and organizations, Stone Soup became something else: the Village. The Village emerged as an Afrocentric cultural, learning, and healing center that seeks to “connect BIPOC groups, healers, and individuals whose work is rooted in racial justice, learning, creativity, community, & healing.”24 They explain their origins in the wake of the George Floyd protests in 2020, when Worcester’s need for a community center devoted to the uplifting and safety of Black folks became especially evident. For seven months, a team of people shared their time, expertise, and other talents to ensure that the Stone Soup Collective could transition into the Village, a space led by the BIPOC community and open to all.25

All of this transformation emerged from a serious crisis of ownership: the city was quite close to taking control over the building and selling it in auction. As we observed at the outset of this chapter, it is commonplace to conflate crisis with failure, and in this instance to treat failure as supposed proof that solidarity doesn’t work in tough times. Critics of the solidarity economy movement might see the end of Stone Soup as proof that solidarity doesn’t work, as evidence that selfish human nature will always undo solidarity bonds. What organizations like Stone Soup can teach us, however, is the need to accept change, including dissolutions, endings, and new beginnings. The care that was required to “lovingly transition” Stone Soup is proof that solidarity can work, even in the toughest of times.

Early and publicly visible efforts used the Village as a space to create seasonal market spaces and develop an environment supportive of a wide variety of community-based initiatives. These developments are so recent that it is unclear what will come from the space’s second resurrection from the proverbial ashes. But Village Worcester indisputably enjoys support from the Worcester community, including community members involved with Worcester Roots and Earn-a-Bike, both of which remained tenants in the building. Effectively, the building (4 King Street) went from being the site of Commons 2.0 to Commons 3.0 by becoming a new organization with transformed principles in the wake of the Floyd protests. The emphasis on healing shines a light on caregiving elements that make solidarity economies possible, especially in peripheralized communities facing intersecting traumas.

One thing we can trace through the evolution of Stone Soup/the Village as a commons space is a shift in the meaning of solidarity economy. In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the solidarity economy represented a means for a different kind of economic security. Its significance was in providing a means for securing alternative forms of employment. In contrast, the language that the Village uses—spaces of healing—seems to express some of what Penn Loh and Boone W. Shear describe as an evolution in solidarity thinking away from a focus on alternative employment opportunities and toward a modality where the formal economy is no longer at the center of life.26 This evolution does not so much replace cooperation, cooperatives, or other alternative forms of livelihood as part of a solidarity economy, but it does suggest that the solidarity city is more capacious. If the solidarity city is going to be about more than economic transformation, then what are the boundaries of “more than”? Excitingly, this is where there is a need for solidarity dreams and the freedom to dream new things.

Realizing those dreams is hard, as this chapter shows us, because it involves running up against external dynamics like state violence as well as internal dynamics that threaten to tear things apart. But solidarity dreams, like all dream interpretation, involve opening to the idea of metamorphosis, of becoming something else altogether. Both the fire and Stone Soup’s transformation into the Village showed us that moments of crisis can also be moments of regeneration.

What Comes Next? Another City Is (Always) Still Possible

In its first stage, Stone Soup was heavily shaped by the 2008 financial crisis. It crafted its mission around solidarity economies as a real alternative. After burning down and coming back from the ashes, Stone Soup found a second life, adapting its practices to make more extensive connections with other social movements, including those connected to immigrant rights, racial and environmental justice, and solidarity economies across the state. While perhaps not a famous institution outside of Worcester, Stone Soup was a big player in the city activist scene, playing behind-the-scenes roles in many different kinds of projects. In its third phase, Stone Soup grappled with the fallout of the worldwide Covid-19 crisis, eventually transforming into the Village. Stewarded through crises by persevering members, the building has, with remarkable continuity, served as a space of cooperation, mutuality, care, and healing across time.

There are strong links and continuity between what the Village is and what Stone Soup was. For instance, Future Focus Media’s early 2013 projects (like restaging and recording Frederick Douglass speeches) focused on uplifting Black history prior to the Village’s turn in that direction. Anchor tenants are continuing their activities. Worcester Roots plans to continue working with other Stone Soup–era cooperatives to run the Co-op Academy to inspire the next generation of cooperators. Earn-a-Bike is still working hard at refashioning the citywide transit system through policy by working with coalitional partners like WalkBike Worcester and has recovered and helped fix thousands of bicycles. And new entrants are pushing on in different forms with a focus on BIPOC communities, including holding conversations coupled with drum circles and community programming on Malcolm X’s birthday. Clearly, the Village is dialing into Stone Soup’s long history of racial justice activism across groups and projects and cultivating a resurgence in younger membership.

While some effects are seen most clearly at the neighborhood level, they are all a part of what helps to produce the Solidarity City. One initiative to get more free bicycles under anyone who wants one has created a commons version of familiar rent-a-bike programs.27 Some of Stone Soup’s earliest initiatives, such as Toxic Soil Busters, continued larger conversations about Worcester’s local environment, the role of community gardens in food security and belonging, and a broader sense of what it means for a city to flourish economically, socially, and ecologically (a thread we pick up in the next chapter). This shift in culture has led to both a knowledge of existing cooperatives and a desire for new ones throughout the city. Stone Soup’s efforts at developing both worker cooperatives and co-op incubator spaces inspired other efforts throughout the city, and Worcester cooperators became players in statewide solidarity economy organizing, precipitating the formation of the Massachusetts Solidarity Economy Network.

Even projects that did not ultimately materialize still have significance. They are not simply “failures.” For example, while the efforts to create a community benefits agreement related to the new baseball stadium ultimately didn’t materialize, that will not be the last time that a proposal advancing gentrification comes along. Community members will have the new social networks and prior experience of community mobilization available to them the next time similar pressures come along, and we are guaranteed a next time given gentrification pressures in Worcester. One place, one organization, can start to have effects on the space of the city as a whole. Another city is possible, and this is the lesson for every city.

There is another lesson to be learned from the experience of Stone Soup/the Village. People gathering in one place continuously sought to extend practices of cooperation across many social divides (intergenerational, racial, political, educational, and carceral). It is not easy to confront profound questions of who gets to decide on the direction of the commons and how the commoners should address serious external forces like fire, capitalist real estate dynamics, and pandemic, or pervasive social problems like homelessness and drug and alcohol use. Even in the most difficult of crises, Stone Soup members did not relinquish their commitment to commons space, the city, and one another. The story we have told exemplifies a process of adaptation and transformation made more remarkable by how people responded to the tensions that arise where people with multiple and different identities encounter one another and work together on common projects.

In the next chapter, we shift our focus to a major sector in the solidarity economy: food. Organizing the production, exchange, and consumption of food is centrally important. Chapter 4 looks at this sector in relation to all three cities, with a particular focus on two contrasting and revealing patterns in Philadelphia and Worcester. We sharpen our analysis of how city-level racial and economic divides shape entire solidarity economy sectors.