Throughout US history, street food vending has rarely been considered an improvement to modern society or its capitalist economy. However, beginning in 2008, a new generation of mobile vendors serving high-quality, inventive foods became popular among affluent populations.

Ginette Wessel’s new book, Mobilizing Food Vending: Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City (Routledge 2024), investigates the gourmet food truck movement in the US and provides a clearer understanding of the social and economic factors that shape vendor autonomy and industry growth.

Using a human-centered approach, the book features case studies in a variety of American cities and uses top-down and bottom-up urban theory to frame a discussion of food trucks’ rights, displacement, and resiliency. Wessel shows that food truck vendors are critical actors that support local economies and contribute to the public realm while shaping regulatory policy from the bottom up.

This lecture appeals to urban scholars studying the contemporary neoliberal city, the public realm, and communication technology and mobility, as well as to urban planners seeking to understand how vendors shape city plans and policies.

About the speaker

Ginette Wessel, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Roger Williams University, where she teaches courses in urban design, urban planning, and environmental design research.

As an urbanist, designer, and scholar, Ginette has published articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association, New Media & Society, and the Journal of Urban Design, as well as chapters in Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice (MIT Press 2017) and Participatory Urbanisms (UC Berkeley 2015).

She holds degrees from the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina (UNC), Charlotte, and she is an experienced urban designer who has worked with communities throughout her teaching at RWU, San Jose State University, UC Berkeley, and UNC Charlotte.

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Watch the video of Mobilizing Food Vending

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Transcript for Mobilizing Food Vending

0:00:08.8 Tom Llewellyn: Welcome to another episode of Cities@Tufts lectures, where we explore the impact of urban planning on our communities and the opportunities designed for greater equity and justice. This season is brought to you by Shareable and the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, with support from the Barr Foundation. In addition to this podcast, the video transcript and graphic recordings are available on our website, shareable.net, just click the link in the show notes. And now, here’s the host of Cities@Tufts Professor Julian Agyeman.

0:00:40.2 Julian Agyeman: Welcome to our Cities@Tuft’s Virtual Colloquium. I’m Professor Julian Agyeman, and together with my research assistants, Amelia Morton and Grant Perry and our partners Shareable and the Barr Foundation, we organize Cities@Tufts as a cross-disciplinary academic initiative, which recognizes Tufts University as a leader in urban studies, urban planning and sustainability issues. We’d like to acknowledge that Tufts University’s Medford campus is located on Colonized, Wampanoag and Massachusetts traditional territory. Today we are delighted to host Dr. Ginette Wessel, who is associate Professor of Architecture at Roger Williams University.

0:01:19.0 Julian Agyeman: She teaches courses in urban design, urban planning, and environmental design research. As an urbanist designer and scholar, Ginette has published articles in the Journal of the American Planning Association, as well as chapters in my book, Food Trucks, Cultural Identity and Social Justice, and a chapter in participatory urbanisms. Her forthcoming book, which I’m sure she’s gonna tell us all about, is called Mobilizing Food Vending, Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City. And that’s coming out apparently next month through Routledge. It investigates food trucks rights and resiliency in the urban food scape using ethnography, policy analysis and spatial interpretation. Ginette’s research interests include current social and cultural transformations that are underway in city making with an emphasis on public space, social equity, and communication technology. Ginette’s talk today is mobilizing food vending, planning and policy for gourmet food trucks in the American city. Ginette, a fantastic welcome to Cities@Tufts. Over to you.

0:02:31.0 Ginette Wessel: Thank you, Julian. I’m very excited and delighted to be here, and thank you for everyone to come and listen to the talk today. My title of my talk, as Julian mentioned, is Mobilizing Food Vending, Planning and Policy for Gourmet Food Trucks in the American City. And I first really became interested in food trucks back in 2008 when I was doing my doctorate work and I found myself really intrigued by their growing presence around the San Francisco Bay Area. And their ability to mobilize, using social media and activate urban space was really something quite novel to me and unfamiliar. And little did I know I would spend about 16 years following the industry, but here we are and I have a new book to share with you, that talks about that. So let me get my slide moving here.

0:03:27.1 Ginette Wessel: So in my book, I use a spatial lens to question how food trucks navigate social structures of power in cities and contribute to the evolution of urban space. I look at Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Charlotte, and I examine how agency among usually disproportionately powerful actors unfold spatially in the act of claiming rights to urban space. I also examine how social life is generated in urban spaces with the help of communication technology and mobility. And further, I incorporate a firsthand study of space to understand how food truck locations play a role in the public realm of the capitalist city. I confront as well problems facing food trucks, due to rising property values and shifts in the real estate market. So in this book, I question if food truck’s spontaneous ability to overcome time and space is an indicator of a wider bottom-up transformation of how urban space and social life are generated. How will cities adapt and react to food trucks and how should they plan and accommodate them? Who is the gourmet food truck phenomenon, including who’s it excluding? And what about food trucks helps to diversify the city and support a more equitable city?

0:04:49.9 Ginette Wessel: So in this book, I argue that mobile food vending offers a window into a wider urban transformation, in which urban space has become part of a social and economic system reliant on mobility and technology for success. And that’s a new urban process that has become really fundamental to society’s social landscape and neoliberal economy. So the talk today is gonna follow this sequence. I first wanna talk a little bit about the origins, then I wanna shift into some theory that supports the framework for my work. I wanna look at a series of vignettes, about displacement, bottom-up policymaking, pandemic resiliency, and then we’ll look at some of the benefits and drawbacks and then a planner’s toolkit.

0:05:39.2 Ginette Wessel: So Roy Choi, Korean-American, professionally trained chef had just left his job at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and had a sleepless night. He began experimenting with Mexican and Korean flavors and created a short rib taco made with warm corn tortillas, the Korean barbecue beef or bulgogi, salsa Roja, cilantro, onion, lime, relish, slaw, and chili soy vinaigrette. Without enough money to open a storefront, Choi decided to sell his $2 tacos out of a food truck. His friend Mark Manguera quickly brokered a deal with a local commissary owner for a used catering truck. And he called his sister Alice Shin, who was a writer in New York City to manage the customer relations. Manguera, his wife Caroline, her brother Eric and Choi, bought $250 worth of food and trained for one week and began serving Korean barbecue tacos on Sunset Boulevard. Together the team of friends and family established the Kogi barbecue food truck, which made stops in South Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Koreatown and their initial vending locations had really predictable foot traffic, but were surprisingly unsuccessful.

0:06:55.3 Ginette Wessel: And then in December of that year, the team tweeted and parked outside a co-op housing unit at UCLA during final exams week, and 1000 students lined up for tacos. Choi’s recalls that was the turning point for their business. And the truck grew steadily with crowds up to 500 people within the first three months grossing nearly $2 million in that first year. And the food trucks customer base grew rapidly, both through word of mouth, but also Twitter really launching Choi into a leader of culinary experimentation. The team soon added Roja, Verde and Aranka, which served different areas of Los Angeles County, and Rosita was used for special events. And following the success of Kogi food truck imitators emerged almost immediately, each one trying to recapture Choi’s mix of fusion street food and street smarts. In 2008, a variety of unique converging factors led to the perfect moment to start a food truck business.

0:08:00.4 Ginette Wessel: For one, the economic downturn in 2008 and the subsequent decrease in consumer spending, diminished sit-down restaurant sales and made the purchase or the maintenance of a brick-and-mortar restaurant impossible for many. Chefs found food trucks to be more financially feasible option for supporting existing restaurants or starting a new business. And food truck ownership and leases grew among the under and unemployed populations across US cities. While clever food entrepreneurs sustained their livelihoods with food trucks, they also introduced a new competitive dining model to the American public. At the same time in 2008, the social media website, Twitter, which is now called X, was just 2-years-old, and it was growing in popularity among young adults. And by alerting customers to the day’s plans with a simple tweet, chefs could visit different locations with the assurance that their customers could find them. This new mode of finding food was also a fun engaging activity for food truck fans who really enjoyed seeking out new foods at impromptu locations.

0:09:12.1 Ginette Wessel: And so also another critical factor in 2008 is also thinking about food trucks and mobility, which was certainly helpful for the industry’s success. The mobility that a food truck has, really affords vendors the flexibility to change locations if business is slow or if demand is picking up in a specific location. Mobility is characteristically an American phenomenon, one that has been deeply embedded in the country’s economy and American everyday life for over a century. And more recently, mobility has been leveraged to create new economic sectors, such as on demand shopping and food delivery businesses that really cater to where people live and work. Food trucks mobility challenges also established planning ideologies, which generally address economic growth and consumer dining through very fixed and predictable business locations.

0:10:15.4 Ginette Wessel: So this calculable process of development usually allows governments to easily regulate and monitor business activity within the formal market system. In order for food trucks to align with those existing regulatory processes, governments actually require food truck owners to submit a very detailed vending schedule or operate a GPS device for surveillance. Fundamentally, mobility afforded by the food trucks temporarily activates urban space with social life, providing more opportunities for the public to socialize or take a break from work. Aside from organized special events, food trucks frequently appear in underused marginal spaces of cities of which many are privately owned. As opposed to the celebrated downtown centers, these spaces are typically a distance from restaurants or have fewer regulations. And these unfamiliar spaces also reveal the unbalanced priorities of cities, which typically focus on economically productive space, new development, or automobile circulation. Food trucks informally provide opportunities to strengthen the public realm by converting the once auto dominated spaces into more active pedestrian hubs. And food trucks also blur clear social and political boundaries of urban space, by carving out spaces for the public on private land.

0:11:49.4 Ginette Wessel: Food trucks are also attractive to customers because each visit includes a culturally charged experience. The marriage of Korean and Mexican flavors created a specific consumer connection for the Kogi food truck. Whereas over the 20th century when we were talking about cooking French or Mexican or Chinese or Italian food, that really meant providing Americans with a very well-known and easily recognizable dish reminiscent of a particular culture.

0:12:19.5 Ginette Wessel: Kogi’s Korean barbecue tacos are inventive, they’re original, and they’re cooked with ingredients that showcase Choi’s ethnic background in culinary expertise. Chefs also bring with them global influences to urban spaces through vibrant food truck branding as well as the music, all of which play and have a powerful effect on how we recognize other cultures, whether they’re real or constructed identities. And many food trucks chefs have trained in culinary kitchens across the globe, experienced transnational mobility throughout their lives, and created popular dishes that incorporate those indigenous ingredients sometimes combining them to create new fusion foods. And as food truck customers seek out or outdoor food experiences, they’re also immersing themselves in the flavors and the ambiance of distant cultures.

0:13:15.5 Ginette Wessel: Kogi food trucks are unique, in that they intentionally seek out diverse social classes in both affluent business centers and low income communities in LA. Their menu is priced affordably at $3 a taco, making the food attainable for many Angelenos. And these lower price points help attract loyal customers whose regular presence allows that truck to keep the prices low. However, very few food trucks can maintain lower prices, given the complexity of the menu or the operational costs in their region. It’s not uncommon for food trucks to exclude low income groups with prices ranging from 15 to $30 a person. The great recession of 2008, the convenience and rising popularity of social media, and the renewed desire to engage in the public realm of cities led to the birth of the US gourmet food truck movement. Over time, the food truck industry has steadily grown with the exception of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and expanded to mid-size cities and small towns.

0:14:20.0 Ginette Wessel: And as of 2023, there are more than 47,000 food truck businesses nationwide, and that industry is now worth approximately about $2.2 billion. Mobile food trucks are an important topic to study because their presence can be an indication of a changing urban landscape that reconfigures the social, the cultural, the economic, and the physical contours of cities. Moreover, as communication technology is part of our everyday life, and proximity is less of a factor in customers’ decision making shifts in how urban space is consumed and produced really should be carefully considered.

0:15:03.6 Ginette Wessel: So, let’s keep moving here. All right. So historically government officials have resisted street food vending on the grounds that it supports unsanitary food practices, it congests streets, it weakens business for brick-and-mortar establishments, contributes to crime, and is part of a low income sector. Unfavorable views of vendors have reinforced the mid 20th century modernist planning and design ideals that were about creating clear order, automobile-centered city streets and doing away with activities perceived as inefficient or unproductive.

0:15:44.9 Ginette Wessel: In the 1970s, concerns over the oversaturation of vendors in New York City prompted a 3000 vendor permit cap, which in turn tripled the cost of the permits and produced a black market. The treatment of vendors historically is rooted in a belief that their presence is an informal practice with little contribution to the formal economy. In 2009, municipalities were taken by surprise, really with the rapid growth of food trucks, which forced them to revisit the outdated and often irrelevant vending regulations.

0:16:21.6 Ginette Wessel: The lack of effective regulations allowed food trucks a bit more freedom in finding locations, enabling a faster expansion of the industry. But however, food trucks soon learned that regardless of whether they’re conducting business in a public right of way or on private land, they’re gonna draw a debate from a variety of social groups that are economically or socially motivated. And food trucks relationships with cities and municipal government, and other food sectors has fluctuated over time in terms of its acceptance or resistance, but I would say overall increasingly favorable as the customer demand continues to this day.

0:17:04.7 Ginette Wessel: So let’s talk a little bit of theory. I’m gonna look at Philosopher Michel de Certeau’s concept of strategic and tactical spatial practices, which are particularly relevant to understanding the spectrum of power or lack thereof in the mobile food vending industry. Regarding the tactical spatial practices, Certeau states, “Tactics are a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents, and also to the play it introduces in the foundations of power.” He emphasizes that participants in the city who live in transverse adapt, alter in appropriate space, make it their own. And food trucks perform tactical spatial practices, finding opportunities within the urban landscape and adapting to new changes. Similarly, Philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the oeuvre perfectly frames food, trucks, social production of urban space. And oeuvre is an urban milieu in that is participatory in nature within which urban citizens have a right to appropriate and modify their environment.

0:18:21.7 Ginette Wessel: And oeuvre is a realm of everyday life, an opportunity for play and social exchange in the city, rather than a space with the functional purpose of making profit. To the benefit of residents, food trucks offer opportunities to remake the city as an accessible and livable social space. They are nimble, flexible, and self-organizing. And however, they’re often subject to regulatory controls or strategic spatial practices which observe, measure, and control vendors determining their inclusion or exclusions from government’s total vision of urban space.

0:19:03.7 Ginette Wessel: So I would like to review a few of them. Notably proximity bans, which are advocated by restaurant owners, proximity bans are among the most common examples of strategic spatial practices limiting their opportunity. Supporters of the bands argue the presence of vendors creates direct competition, and therefore vendors should be distanced from restaurants to protect their profits. The protectionist views often align with the interest of local politicians and council members, who leverage their decision making power to promote or to protect or improve economic development in the area, which is often defined by property taxpayers.

0:19:47.0 Ginette Wessel: Some municipalities, such as Chicago, Boston, and even Cranston, Rhode Island, have begun monitoring food locations by requiring them to place GPS locator in their vehicles. Restrictions that contain vendors to districts or ban them from public property or limit the amount of time they can stop and wait in one location also serve as examples of powerful interests really seeking to gain from regulating food trucks. The complexity, the type, and the degree of regulation enforcement in the US depends on the local municipality and its residents.

0:20:30.3 Ginette Wessel: Strategies that are used to regulate food vendors can be categorized, as I’ve done here, as acts of spatial exclusions, things like proximity bans or bans on public and private property, acts of regulating and monitoring behavior, such as putting GPS devices in the trucks, or spatial distancing between vendors, or regulating alcohol consumption and recycling, or acts of enforcing public health standards, such as requiring a commissary or letter grades for the trucks. So, however, food trucks become more powerful and gain more rights when they work collectively as an association or they seek out representation from a supporting advocacy organization, and these groups argue for more equitable regulatory frameworks and fight for vendors’ rights and share best practices. The Southern California Mobile Food Vendors Association is the most legally active group in the US, having sued 13 municipalities for not abiding by the California Vehicle Code, which states that vending regulations for the public right-of-way must address a specific public safety issue.

0:21:48.7 Ginette Wessel: So, for example, in Monterova, California, the city’s ban on food trucks in the Old Town District for reasons of business competition was quickly reversed by a lawsuit. In 2013, as these food truck associations began to grow across the nation, the President Matt Geller, co-founded the National Food Truck Association, along with six other association leaders to support existing food truck associations and build new ones. And the organization represents now about 18 regional associations across the US, and I’d also mention, likewise, the Institute for Justice in Washington DC, which was founded in 1991, and that’s a non-profit public interest law firm. They litigate for food truck vendors, and they’ve organized and filed over a dozen food truck cases across the country, winning most of them and publishing many research reports on how to promote food trucks as small businesses in growing.

0:22:55.4 Ginette Wessel: So, tensions between how we think of tactical and strategic spatial practices are inevitable when public space is at stake and when new food industries emerge in landscapes with established restaurants. The strength of the food truck industry in each city is really determined by that interplay between the bottom-up efforts of food truck vendors, the associations and the advocacy firms, and the top-down regulations that are typically installed by local, county, and state government. So, now I’d like to share a series of vignettes that I think best capture the central debates at play surrounding the gourmet food truck industry.

0:23:37.1 Ginette Wessel: In 2010, the rise of gourmet food trucks on Los Angeles’s Miracle Mile led to a dispute with local restaurant owners at the Museum Square and LA County Art Museum, who argued vendors were encroaching on their business at a time when sales were in decline following the 2008 recession. One restaurant owner stated, the economy’s been so bad I had to cut employees and these trucks show up and I have to cut more. We all average $16,000 in rent and I have to pay employee taxes and alcohol licenses.

0:24:11.4 Ginette Wessel: Supporting the restaurants, District 4 Councilman Tom LaBonge claimed the trucks monopolized parking spaces and he said these trucks parked for multiple hours in a commercially zoned area, contrary to the intent of those metered spaces. Parking meters were designed to encourage turnover of vehicles in high-demand areas. Soon, junk cars began appearing to occupy the available spaces for trucks and LaBonge proposed two alternatives to City Council, either restrict trucks from commercial zones or create designated zones for them.

0:24:50.4 Ginette Wessel: The food truck vendors saw LaBonge’s proposal as short-sighted and in violation of the same code that upheld the earlier People versus Garcia-Lonchera court case, which found that local regulations can only be enacted for matters of public safety. Accordingly, LaBonge expanded his argument and claimed that the trucks blocked visibility of drivers on Wilshire Boulevard. A local food truck advocate turned to Twitter, spread the news about the debate on a Friday in 2010, asking the community to contact LaBonge with concerns. A Facebook page titled Los Angelinos Against LaBonge described him as a friend of the celebrity and a foe of a small businessman. And by the next Monday, LaBonge’s phone and inbox were flooded and the backlash postponed the measure for two years, allowing the trucks to continue business if they located an empty parking space.

0:25:44.3 Ginette Wessel: In December 2012, Los Angeles City Council approved two restrictions for the area. Food trucks larger than 22 feet long and 7 feet high were prohibited from parking with oversized vehicle restrictions along 15 blocks of Wilshire Boulevard. And second, oversized vehicle parking was prohibited from bisecting streets entirely. These restrictions, still in place as of today, reduced the number of potential parking spaces by half, from 40 to 20. And food truck advocates claim that the lack of visibility has not been proven and argue that the new regulations were a way of balancing competing interests and not having to take sides. The vendors feel the real losers are the customers who have more limited lunchtime options. So the restaurants argue that by selling food in the vicinity of their locations, food trucks are unfairly luring customers away from their establishments.

0:26:52.7 Ginette Wessel: However, the several court cases really have no evidence to support that. And much of the case law has been established by longer running Loncheras. 1978, another case where there was the banning of sale of viticules on public streets with within 100 feet of a brick and mortar establishment. And after Loncheras fought this ordinance, it was ruled that the regulation discriminated economically against catering truck operations. So that’s important to realize that the Loncheras had such an incredible role in laying a foundation. Some restaurant owners have been more inclined to embrace, actually, the food truck activity and found ways to reinvent or boost their business.

0:27:37.1 Ginette Wessel: So for instance, the owners of the Lennon ru restaurant in the HBO Hulu campus in Santa Monica realized that they could not stop food trucks from parking near the campus and instead lowered their prices and changed their menu with a different offering each day. Their new business model responded to the consumer demand and have more to go options. So from the perspective of mobile food vendors, restaurants constitute an entirely different market that offers dining space and restrooms in a climate controlled environment.

0:28:11.9 Ginette Wessel: The person who’s going to the food truck isn’t going to it over a restaurant, they’re making an active choice to go. Even so, many vendors are aware of restaurant complaints and make an effort to really avoid areas with the established restaurant scene. And in the end, consumers are driving the market and today they want more options and more access to foods that are inexpensive, inventive, and healthy.

0:28:36.9 Ginette Wessel: So my second vignette illustrates the vulnerability of food trucks at bottom-up food truck rallies in Charlotte, North Carolina. Two years after Kogi had been serving the streets of West Hollywood and they were really popular in major cities across the US, they just started emerging in Charlotte at office parks and breweries on the outskirts of the city. When Kelly Kierson arrived in Charlotte in 2010, she was eager for her own business and found that the startup cost of a truck were too high and the city’s regulations were not friendly.

0:29:13.6 Ginette Wessel: In May of 2011, Kierson started her roaming for food business in a refurbished equipment trailer and began contacting property owners at major office parks in Ballantyne and South Park. Two months into her search, she began building a relationship with Gaines Brown, a local property owner with a passion for growing the arts culture in the South End. Brown owned a vacant lot sparsely covered in grass at the intersection of Camden Road and Park Avenue. He purchased the lot in the 1980s as part of a larger initiative to create Live Work Hub art studios in this dilapidated area. In the 2000s, the lot hosted a popular weekend tailgate and Brown agreed to let Kierson operate on his lot on Wednesdays for lunch and on the first Friday art gallery crawl.

0:30:08.7 Ginette Wessel: In February 2012, Gaines Brown, Brian Seely, owner of the rising food truck Urban Legend, and Ted Boyd of the Charlotte City Center City Partners began collaborating to host food truck rallies on Brown’s lot every Friday night. City Center Partners helped them build a relationship with the city officials since the event violated current ordinances. Next door, a local grocery provided restrooms and sold beverages that could be brought to the rally. The trucks were scheduled and managed by the Tronner family, who operated the Sticks and Cones ice cream truck, and the rally started with just three trucks and rapidly grew from there, reaching 14 by 2015. These family and dog-friendly rallies also supported the neighboring Fat Burrito restaurant, whose manager reported that the weekly gathering had doubled their sales. After three years of popularity, in October 2015, Brown announced on Facebook that the last food truck rally at the lot would be that November. The lot, along with parcels of land on the 2.3 acre block, was being sold to make way for the Dimensional Fund Advisors investment firm headquarters.

0:31:27.2 Ginette Wessel: Brown saw this nine-story, 292 square-foot commercial office space development as crucial to supporting the amount of housing in the city and he was nearing retirement and wanted to pursue other things. And while the closing of the Food Truck Friday rallies at the lot was upsetting for many, it was not unexpected given the area’s rising property values and the walkable access to light rail and the strong housing growth in the surrounding area. Luckily, Brown, whose impact on the arts community was lasting, took steps to accommodate the rally at a local brewery.

0:32:04.2 Ginette Wessel: Sycamore Brewing, one of Charlotte’s rising brewery establishments, had a 1.6-acre property with an unused gravel area that could accommodate 12 trucks just a few blocks south of the original site. At the brewery, the trucks were successful but eventually seen as an amenity, not a focal point, for customers who primarily visited the location for the quality craft beer. Eventually, in 2021, as the South End neighborhood continued to appeal to real estate investors, the owners of Sycamore Brewing sold their property for $9 million to developer Hortman Holdings.

0:32:41.1 Ginette Wessel: The two-phase, 16-story development called The Line includes 285,000 residential square feet, 28,000 retail square feet, and the retail component of the development is anchored by a new 7,000-square-foot Sycamore Brewery and Taproom. And while the brewery moved into the new development, no plans were made to relocate the food trucks. And as South End became more vulnerable to development pressure in the neighborhood, food truck rallies were phased out. The food truck rallies had played a vital role in introducing the area to outsiders and to facilitating the community’s revitalization for 10 years and were a true public space, fostered from the bottom up by the public and local food entrepreneurs.

0:33:26.0 Ginette Wessel: So for my third vignette, I wanna step back a little bit to 2008 to explain the challenges that hindered the growth of them in Charlotte. In 2008, just before gourmet food trucks had arrived on the scene, the city revamped its food vending ordinances by enacting strict controls after residents complained about crime and noise from them along South Boulevard.

0:33:50.1 Ginette Wessel: And among the many regulations implemented, the most impactful limited them to vending only 90 days a year, limited the hours of their operation, required 400 feet of separations from residential communities or another vendor, and prohibited them entirely on the streets within the Central Business District. At the time, Loncheras, the Latino vendors that were the dominant population, saw the new regulations as a direct attack on their 50 vendor community. In an attempt to change what felt like a discriminatory act, the Loncheras launched the Carne Asada Is Not a Crime campaign and petitioned for the ordinance to be amended. Residents and city council members, on the other hand, argued the regulations were not about ethnicity and were meant to eliminate noise, garbage, and loitering. Unfortunately, the Loncheras’ advocacy efforts were too late to prevent the passage of the regulations, which had a detrimental impact on their businesses, decreasing from 50 to 7 by 2019.

0:34:52.3 Ginette Wessel: In 2014, Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Planning Department proposed the first major set of revisions since 2008. This was in response to the gourmet food truck scene, which had found the mobile food vending regulations way overly constraining. And these amendments established more zones which food trucks could operate in and were overall viewed as a step in the right direction. But vendors still felt they didn’t go far enough and were concerned that they were limited to operating one day a week, they had to remain 100 feet away from restaurants or residential districts, and they could not provide tables and chairs outside of their truck. So in response to this, vendors formed the Charlotte Food Truck Association in 2014, launched charlottefoodtrucks.org, and collected 3,000 signatures in three days. These advocacy efforts materialized in the Charlotte Mobile Food Truck Citizen Advisory Group, which were meetings held by the Planning Department.

0:35:54.5 Ginette Wessel: In March 2017, after three years of meetings, a set of amendments were approved by Charlotte City Council. Of them, some of the significant ones were allowing vendors to operate in residential districts at schools and churches, but still maintaining 100 feet from a property line, residential property line, down from that previous 400 feet, allowing them to operate near a restaurant if they had permission from the owner, written permission, otherwise they needed to stay 50 feet away. Vendors were no longer constrained to certain hours of operation, and although the regulations still required expensive special event permits, this was largely seen as a collaboration between city officials and vendors and resulted in much less severe restrictions. And vendors felt the new regulations were really an improvement and were pleased that their voices were heard.

0:36:52.1 Ginette Wessel: So though Loncheras were unable to change policy in 2008, and food truck vendors were able to achieve this middle-of-the-road agreement in the subsequent decade, it highlights the kind of ensuing challenges ethnic vendors face in the US. And for my final vignette, which I’m gonna kind of shorten ’cause I see time’s getting a little tight here, I do wanna mention that Charlotte’s residential communities were really unanticipated lifelines for sustaining profitable food truck businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic, something that many vendors hadn’t predicted. Charlotte’s residents, like residents of many cities and towns in the US, were ordered to stay at home. And at that moment, food trucks across the city really started to appear in housing complexes.

0:37:47.2 Ginette Wessel: And in addition to the thrill and the novelty of ordering a meal from a truck, vendors were providing an enjoyable break from the monotony of daily life and the opportunity to connect with other people, things that were really taken for granted before the pandemic. One food truck expert had noted that neighborhood associations and apartment management companies quickly started scheduling food truck visits as a perk for their residents, and real estate businesses benefited from happy residents and residents enjoyed food options close to home. So this was a big shift for vendors who were very familiar with very predictable commercial and office areas. Now shifting into this new set of residential communities.

0:38:34.4 Ginette Wessel: And this eventually, now with the new unified development ordinance in Charlotte, is now a long-term opportunity for vendors to be vending in these large multi-unit residential complexes. There’s even data to show that the county had noted in 2021 about 250 food trucks and 70 of those had opened within the year of the pandemic. So very resilient despite that.

0:39:03.3 Ginette Wessel: I do want to pause here for another little snippet on thinking about rights. So the right to the city, as Henry Losev reminds us, always requires mobilization and struggle. Food trucks’ rights are never fixed. In this past January, I spoke with a reporter about a food truck dispute in which two Haitian Food Truck owners filed a lawsuit against their Virginia town of Park Slee after a vulgar city council member cut the truck’s water line because the owners did not have an active conditional use permit and were allegedly disposing of grease in the city’s sewer system. The lawsuit states that if the owners had not been of Haitian descent, the town government would not have engaged in abusive contact, effectively putting them out of business.

0:39:50.9 Ginette Wessel: I wanna mention that food truck vendors claiming rights to urban space is a very high risk activity that can collapse their business entirely and add to the many, many challenges of being successful. And so for this reason, actually, catering companies and brick and mortar locations become preferred by chefs and food truck owners after just a few years of operating. And while it’s unclear what the outcome will be for the Haitian food truck owners, this case is certainly a reminder that food trucks’ rights to urban space are deeply entwined with issues of cultural prejudice and protectionism of property.

0:40:29.4 Ginette Wessel: Food truck locations are also vulnerable due to the rising property values, as I’ve mentioned, and that was amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. And as vacant land in the growing capitalist city becomes sparser and more valuable, food trucks are at risk of displacement. Additionally, and paradoxically, while food trucks are displaced, they are also part of the gentrifying process in a neighborhood. They can participate in changing a neighborhood economically by fostering food business competition or catering to populations with middle or upper incomes. And food trucks could also be promoted as amenities for new housing developments, even as they simultaneously displace homeless who occupy marginal and unseen spaces of the city. Therefore, food trucks can be gentrifiers, but not unilaterally. They are part of a wider set of relationships that force neighborhood change, and they sometimes experience the brunt of that change themselves.

0:41:32.5 Ginette Wessel: So I know we’re getting tight. So I’m gonna skip a few parts here as we get down to thinking about… I’m gonna jump down to the toolkit as I start to think about how we might approach planning for them in the future. So let me get to my slide on that one. Okay.

0:41:57.5 Ginette Wessel: So I’d like to conclude with a planner’s toolkit. Food trucks, they can support planners’ strategies to diversify and grow small businesses. And they can introduce food options to areas with very few food businesses, and they can diversify food options for customers and others. In areas with an older restaurant scene, food trucks can elevate food quality, they can provide friendly competition at lower price points. And in general, food trucks strengthen the local economy rather than weaken existing revenue streams. Food trucks can also serve as a catalyst for diversifying that economic landscape by increasing the growth of other small businesses in mobile enterprises like beauty salons, pet shops, and health services. And planning for the growth of small businesses and recognizing them as critical economic contributors within cities helps grow entrepreneurship among that middle and low income population.

0:43:00.8 Ginette Wessel: Food trucks should be considered as part of short-term and long-term urban planning strategies to activate urban space with pedestrians. They can attract patrons by social media or by proximity. They are versatile in their environment and should be considered when we think about how to distribute them with high and low income neighborhoods.

0:43:22.0 Ginette Wessel: Food truck markets create large social gatherings and more economic revenue and facilitate streamlining permits and simplifying seating and trash and other amenities. So food truck businesses also can do well independently, but both models of having independent or collective vending can be used in combination with urban activation plans. And whenever possible, they should also be supported with mobile and permanent seating shade and weather protection.

0:43:56.4 Ginette Wessel: Zoning ordinances that deregulate rather than creates constraints leave room for interpretation and flexibility when it comes to the particularities of locations. Each site’s unique and so therefore thinking about each challenge should also be unique. And so the ability to kind of think about ordinances that incorporate access to easy transportation, thinking about how public safety and fire prevention codes apply to land use zoning is also an important element that needs to be simplified. Managing these issues on a case-by-case basis appears to be the best policy that will mitigate issues and conflict. But there’s many, many other things that they can do by simplifying their permit application. They can build better communication between enforcement and the decision makers that reduces unneeded ticketing and unneeded fines. They should also think about delegating the parking enforcement to be kind of the guardians of the industry opposed to police force who are too busy to kind of manage them.

0:45:14.5 Ginette Wessel: I’d also add that data, in some of my past work, helps to support kind of an efficient form of urban planning. When you can start to see where the food trucks move over the city over time, you can pair that with land uses and food deserts and public infrastructure and property values. So thinking about how the data of social media posts can be incorporated as a planning tool is also very powerful.

0:45:42.0 Ginette Wessel: Almost done. So almost last slide here. In the end, as I recall my visits to food trucks since 2008, I realized that the industry is a microcosm of a larger set of dynamics that define everyday urban life in the 21st century. The public realm may forever be digitally mediated and amplified by our social connections. And at the time of writing, mobile enterprises are growing in value in American society. And as real estate prices continue to skyrocket. And as formal urban centers in the public realm grow fewer, the demand for informal public spaces becomes ever more obvious. So food trucks are pop-up reminders of the tremendous value in public social life in cities. Thank you, and I look forward to chatting if we have time.

0:46:34.8 Julian Agyeman: Thank you so much, Ginette. That was fascinating. And as I mentioned in my introduction, Ginette contributes to the great chapter to my book on food trucks, which is now seven years old. Go back to some of the research that we did, and we found, for instance, you know, Portland Go figure is the gastro-polis, the great food truck center, and they only have three permit requirements, whereas Boston in 2015-16 had 17 or something requirements. So of those forms of regulating trucks, I think spatial exclusion, there was behavior. And then public health. And public health. We found in Boston, the public health restrictions were huge. I mean, is this still the case? Is… Well, which of those forms of exclusion do you think is most prominent?

0:47:41.6 Ginette Wessel: It’s a good question. You know, gosh, Portland is such the anomaly in the food cart democracy because they do not require this commissary use. And I think that commissary use is a very powerful regulation coming from the county’s public health regulatory body. And so I think that is the biggest shaper of what the food trucks can or can’t do, meaning that they would have to park their trucks overnight. And in all states except Portland require that. It’s quite amazing to see this. But you see what it looks like at the end of the day if we didn’t have that particular regulation on there.

0:48:24.3 Ginette Wessel: So I think that’s one of the most powerful shapers. But I would also say the immediate reaction to them was proximity bans, as that is now over time, I think, lessened. And we’ve gotten to really look at, again, site-specific requirements opposed to blanketing the whole city with a ban to restaurants or schools, which was a very holistic approach to thinking about it. So I think we’ve backed off from that immediate reaction. And like I said, over time, the headlines to me just keep improving in terms of their acceptance. Yes, it may mean more layers of regulations in some places, but there is generally a partnership and relationship forming between cities and food trucks to what I call in San Francisco, a top up form of urbanism really where there is a strong, strong, tight-knit relationship. And that can lead to drawbacks and benefits too, certainly thinking about vendors’ autonomy is at jeopardy there. So I think I’m always fascinated. Every place has a different story that emerges from it. And it’s really a wonderful topic to explore and study.

0:49:45.9 Julian Agyeman: So we’ve got a question from our own page, Kelly, from Shareable. She says, “Any thoughts on the growth of mobile food trucks in rust belt cities and the economic benefits they could bring?” She says, “I’m in Syracuse, New York, and it feels like we’ve had a food truck boom. Local businesses like beer gardens and even our art museum have really embraced them with permanent or regular food truck days.”

0:50:11.1 Ginette Wessel: Yeah, no, I think that is absolutely the case. It is… And again, I think this is reinforcing what I just mentioned as the kind of top-up urbanism where you find city officials and event organizers really tapping into and actually looking to I would say the industry for help in understanding it better. Some of the more famous food truck advocates have become really stars for helping cities understand what to do. And that might be the case there, that they’re starting to kind of really latch into and seeing the value and the benefit that these trucks are providing in terms of economic development. There’s wonderful spillover effects that can be heard. But it comes back to kind of Julian and your work and always thinking local, right? This is another amazing illustration of how the local sustains and is resilient and continues. The COVID didn’t kill the food trucks, you know, they found a way. And so there’s just a beautiful, local approach to thinking about how we can continue to fight for rights and agency over urban space, as long as we kind of stay true to the fight.

0:51:29.5 Julian Agyeman: Right. Okay. We have another question here from Tom, Tom Llewellyn. “Are there examples of food trucks increasing access to food in neighborhoods without grocery stores and brick and mortar restaurants.” That’s a great question, Tom. I’ve never actually thought about it. So are there food trucks that are really helping out in food desert, so-called food desert areas?

0:51:56.2 Ginette Wessel: There are. And that was one of the slides I had to quickly go through. But World Central Kitchen has actually more recently been famous because they are starting to work with food trucks during disaster relief efforts, predominantly in Florida, where there’s been a lot of destruction happening. So that is becoming, more recently, the newest kind of resilience, where they’re really helping support communities in times of need after devastating natural disasters. Roy Choi, believe it or not, started a restaurant called Local, which was meant to serve low-income communities in Watts neighborhood in LA. And so he, believe it or not, the first person has really put that message forward of trying to think about how do we serve vulnerable communities in food scarcity.

0:52:50.3 Ginette Wessel: There are also education programs with schools that will take a truck for free of lunch programs in the summer for children in neighborhoods. So there is an incredible amount of efforts and it… I’m thinking too, actually. Yeah. The wildfires in California, food trucks were able to kind of go and mobilize to help collectively get a lot of food that they could distribute quickly. I know Off the Grid was very well part of that effort there in San Francisco. So there’s so many great ways I think that they are helping in filling in the void in so many dire situations of dire need or everyday stresses of communities too.

0:53:29.6 Julian Agyeman: Thanks, Ginette. So final question. You know, you’re talking here to a lot of urban planning students. If there’s one thing you can say about food trucks going into the future, that they need to be aware of as budding urban planners, what would that be?

0:53:49.0 Ginette Wessel: That’s a great question. It’s a hard one. I would say, don’t ever assume, always talk to the chefs, talk to the owner. Ethnography is an incredible tool and powerful tool for urban planning, and I think we don’t put enough attention to it. And so that would be my last piece of wisdom to leave you is, look closely and get to know your subjects that you’re looking at.

0:54:14.8 Julian Agyeman: Great. Well, Ginette, thanks so much. And you’re in Providence, I’m in Boston. Next time, let’s get a coffee in the tent.

0:54:24.3 Ginette Wessel: That’s right.

0:54:29.2 Tom Llewellyn: I hope you enjoyed this week’s presentation. Click the link in the show notes to access the video, transcript, and graphic recording, or to register for an upcoming lecture. Cities@Tufts is produced by the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University and Shareable, with support from the Barr Foundation, Shareable donors, and listeners like you. Lectures are moderated by Professor Julian Agyeman and organized in partnership with research assistants Amelia Morton and Grant Perry. Light Without Dark by Cultivate Beats is our theme song and the graphic recording was created by Ronna Alexander. Paige Kelly is our co-producer, audio editor and communications manager. Additional operations, funding, marketing and outreach support are provided by Allison Huff, Bobby Jones and Candice Spivey. And the series is co-produced and presented by me, Tom Llewellyn. Please hit subscribe, leave a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and share it with others. So this knowledge will reach people outside of our collective bubbles. That’s it for this week’s show.

The post Mobilizing Food Vending with Ginette Wessel appeared first on Shareable.

Now imagine that you prepare for another day of work, only to find your account deactivated. No explanation, no timeline for reactivation. You’re unable to earn, yet the bills keep piling up. What would you do?

For rideshare drivers, these scenarios aren’t imaginary—it’s the everyday reality where drivers face low wages, long hours, and little control. A 2022 study found drivers in the Boulder-Denver Metro area earned an average of $5.49 per hour, far below the minimum wage. Often, less than 50% of the fare goes to drivers.

But what if drivers could take control of the companies they work for? What if drivers could own the platform? That’s exactly what the Drivers Cooperative-Colorado (DCC) attempted to do by developing a platform that provides drivers with a better earning and working environment—a revolutionary worker-owned cooperative with over 620 members and 12,000 riders, plus 3,000 drivers on the ownership track.

DCC offers drivers a seat at the table, a share of the profits, and a voice in their company.

What is DCC?

DCC is one of the largest worker cooperatives in the nation. Its mission is to support drivers with fair wages and provide marginalized communities with affordable transportation. As Colorado’s largest platform worker cooperative, DCC offers pre-scheduled and on-demand rides through its apps: Co-op Colorado for riders and Co-op Driver for drivers.

Under this democratic model, every driver is not just a worker, but an owner, with an equal vote in shaping the coop’s future and the opportunity to serve on the board of directors. This structure flips the rideshare system on its head: drivers retain 80% of the fare, breaking free from exploitation and paving the way to wealth-building. Without millionaire CEOs siphoning profits, every dollar is reinvested in the community, benefiting both drivers and riders.

“This is the future starting now in terms of rideshare and broader community satisfaction,” says Taiyelolu, a driver-member of the coop that has already completed over 200 rides with the coop within a month.

How it all began

In 2022, the idea of DCC took root in the parking lot of Denver International Airport. Spearheaded by Minsun Ji, labor activist and the Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center (the non-profit that is incubating the project), organizing began to challenge exploitation with cooperative values. What began as a small group of dreamers evolved into Colorado’s first driver-owned ridesharing business.

Through countless hours of street-organizing of drivers, training, formation of a steering committee, and the establishment of a Board of Directors, DCC incorporated in May 2023. However, the road to launch was challenging. DCC had to create new legislation in 2023 that would allow a locally owned Transportation Network Company (TNC) to enter the market with a reduced licensing fee. It took DCC more than 5 months to secure insurance, and two years of fundraising to launch the Co-op-Colorado app to cover the steep costs of technology.

But perseverance paid off.

In September 2024, DCC officially launched, earning a proclamation from the City and County of Denver for its positive impact on the local economy and community.

Seventy percent of DCC drivers are immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, Asia, or Latin America, seeking better opportunities through this cooperative model. Members like Ahmed (a Moroccan rideshare expert), Isaac (the General Manager from Africa), Abdullahi (a Somalian dispatcher) and Mohammed and Mohamed (Sudanese Board members), have brought diverse perspectives and leadership.

One of the largest obstacles is funding. As a grassroot organization, DCC seeks to find more funding through grants, special events, individual donations and investment opportunities. DCC has recently launched a donation-based crowdfunding campaign to raise $30,000 to cover the cost of technology as one of the first efforts to raise funding from the public.

What’s next?

DCC’s vision extends far beyond Colorado. Across the U.S., drivers face similar struggles that can’t be ignored. DCC aims to create a Federation of Driver Cooperatives nationwide in partnership with community organizations that work with drivers. This federation will jointly own technology, share financial burdens, and provide resources for collective growth. However, funding and organizing at the local level will be essential to make this vision a reality. The revolutionary story of cooperative rideshare drivers starts right here in Colorado by practicing a commitment to “one driver, one ride, one community at a time”

How you can help

Donate to DCC’s crowdfunding campaign to empower drivers and expand the cooperative. Share the link with three people you know to spread the word!

The post Driving change: The story of the Drivers Cooperative – Colorado appeared first on Shareable.

In addition, 97% of food waste ends up in landfills, and the methane gas released from rotting food – the same thing that’s released in your refrigerator drawers, causing perishables to expire faster – is 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. So, reducing food waste has an environmental impact as well, playing an important role in curbing climate change.

Addressing food waste through prevention, redistribution, and composting is an emerging focus for city leaders. Inspired, in part, by the report Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill, by Dana Gunders, staff scientist at the NRDC, food waste is a hot topic.

Despite the magnitude of the problem, solutions exist to prevent food waste—many of them are fairly easy and inexpensive to implement. In fact, a great deal of food waste prevention can be accomplished simply by changing people’s habits.

Everyone can help reduce food waste, and some steps elected officials, city managers, and other leaders can take to make food waste prevention a widespread practice. Countless resources, tools, and initiatives to prevent waste and draw attention to the issue have already been created:

• France became the first country to ban supermarkets from disposing of unsold food. Supermarkets in France now donate unsold food to charities and food banks.
• The Food Too Good to Waste toolkit provides families and communities both strategies and tools resulting in a nearly 50% reduction in preventable food waste.
• Just Eat It, a documentary film about food waste, is screened around the world.
• National Geographic features the ugly foods movement in its cover story, How ‘Ugly’ Fruits and Vegetables Can Help Solve World Hunger.
• ReFED – a collaboration of more than thirty business, nonprofit, foundation and government leaders committed to reducing United States food waste – creates numerous resources, including a Solutions to Food Waste interactive chart and the Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20 Percent.
• WRAP, a UK organization that works in “the space between governments, businesses, communities, thinkers and individuals,” creates the Love Food Hate Waste program to educate and instruct people about food waste prevention strategies.
• SHARECITY is crowdsourcing information about food sharing activities enabled by Information and Communications Technologies (ICT). They’re creating a searchable database of 100 cities around the world.
• Save Food, a joint initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Messe Düsseldorf, and interpack, forms to fight world food waste and loss through a global alliance of all stakeholders.
• Italy offers tax breaks to supermarkets that donate their waste food to charity.
• FoodCloud announces a ground-breaking partnership with Tesco Ireland to redistribute surplus food from 147 grocery stores to charities and community groups.
• The Real Junk Food Project creates cafés in the UK that serve restaurant-quality food from produce headed to the landfill.
• The Think.Eat.Save campaign of the Save Food Initiative is created to “galvanize widespread global, regional and national actions, and catalyze more sectors of society to be aware and to act.”
• LA Kitchen recovers healthy, local food from the waste stream to feed the hungry and provide culinary training to unemployed adults, particularly adults exiting prison as well as foster kids aging out of the system.
• A growing number of apps are created to reduce food waste, including Waste No Food, Copia, Zero Percent, Pare Up, Spoiler Alert, FoodKeeper, Food Cowboy and many more.
• Imperfect Produce launches to deliver ugly fruits and vegetables in the Bay Area.
• End Food Waste’s Ugly Foods movement grows into a global community connected by social media platforms.

For city officials, reducing food waste remains a matter of educating residents, providing the necessary infrastructure and creating a consistent messaging strategy that addresses both sides of the issue: preventing food waste and recycling organic matter once there is waste.

Shareable connected with three food waste reduction experts to get their recommendations for city leaders in the effort to help reduce food waste on a municipal level. We spoke with Cassie Bartholomew and Jeff Becerra from Stop Waste in Alameda County, California, which has one of the largest food scrap recycling programs in the country, and Veronica Fincher, Waste Prevention Program Manager at Seattle Public Utilities in Seattle, Washington, where it’s now illegal to throw food and food waste into the trash.

Their responses include great tips to prevent food waste, strategic partnerships for food redistribution and recycling options for food waste once it is generated. Here are their top 27 recommendations.

1. Look to Prevention First

Just as the materials recycling hierarchy places reduction as the best option, ahead of reusing and recycling, food waste has a similar hierarchy. Preventing food waste is a far more desirable option than dealing with it once it’s been created.

Composting is certainly better than letting food waste rot in the landfill. But it’s also important to remember that when food is wasted, all of the resources used to produce the food, including water, are also wasted.

As Fincher explains, at the municipal level they’re trying to reduce the tonnage of materials going to the landfill through both composting and prevention.

“It saves everybody money if we don’t have stuff going into the waste stream period,” she says. “It’s a matter of trying to use resources wisely, conserve, keep rates as low as possible, and help our customers reduce the amount of food waste they throw out.”

The food recovery hierarchy places reduction as the most preferred means of reducing food waste. 

2. Raise Awareness of Food Waste Reduction Strategies

One of the biggest challenges of reducing food waste is breaking people’s habits and automatic behaviors. If someone has thrown away food scraps and uneaten food for decades, composting requires a complete behavioral shift.

The best way to accomplish this shift in thinking is to create awareness regarding the massive amounts of organic waste. The Food Too Good to Waste toolkit is designed to help families both track and reduce their individual food waste. It includes instructions and messaging and marketing materials as well as research conducted on reducing household waste. Numerous cities are already utilizing this toolkit for broader campaigns and food waste challenges, and it can be customized to work with any community or family.

Communities can also include food waste prevention with their municipal messaging, supplying tips and resources to help citizens implement food waste prevention strategies in their own daily lives.

Download our free ebook: “Beyond Waste: Community Solutions to Managing Our Resources”

3. Bring the Problem Home

Food waste prevention requires everyone to do their part. Programs that people can easily implement at home and that involve the entire family bring food waste awareness to people of all ages. Therefore, it’s essential to find and create ways to work with families to minimize food waste.

An estimated one-third of food produced in the world for human consumption is being lost or wasted. 

4. Reduce the Ick Factor

Some people already understand the benefits of composting, while others push back with concerns about cleanliness and rodents. As Becerra points out, compost consists of the same waste that people are already generating, they’re just sending it to a different location.

“When you have a new waste stream like this, people don’t necessarily get it,” he says. “There’s sort of this ick factor that people need to get over.”

Becerra suggests creating simple behavioral changes, such as designating a small pail in the kitchen to collect vegetable trimmings and disposing of food-soiled paper in an outdoor organic bin.

5. Support the Growing Community Composting Movement

Community composting programs use previously wasted resources as local assets and reinvest them back into the same community. Many of these food waste prevention programs are powered by bicycles. City officials can support community composting programs and partner with them to further engage the community.

6. Educate Composters about Prevention

One of the challenges that Stop Waste faces is getting people who are already composting to make a deeper commitment to food waste prevention. Composting is the fifth tier of the EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy, so it’s important to educate seasoned composters about the importance of reducing food waste in the first place.

“People may feel like they’re already doing their green duty,” says Bartholomew. “They feel good about [food] recycling. It’s easy to do. It doesn’t take as much thinking and analysis as prevention.”

Through composting, organic waste becomes fresh soil. Photo: USDA (CC-BY)

7. Look at the Big Picture

Because food waste is a complex issue, it’s important to look at the big picture as well as the steps toward ideal solutions. Stop Waste did some strategic planning to assess the whole waste management cycle—how materials are produced, consumed, and ultimately discarded in their area—to create a closed-loop cycle.

“That’s where the prevention and reduction piece came in,” says Bartholomew, “from looking at the EPA’s food recovery hierarchy and trying to develop resources and best practices around reducing waste through prevention, reduction, and donation, then composting the rest.”

8. Work on a Community Level

Raising awareness of food waste prevention and recycling should be part of a top-down messaging effort, including mailers, posters and websites. But the message should also be community based, reaching community members in familiar places. Where are people in the community gathering? What messaging will they respond to? What kind of hands-on education can you provide? These are key questions to ask.

9. Develop Culturally Appropriate Materials

Developing culturally appropriate materials for community members works hand in hand with community outreach efforts.

Determine your target market, then work with community organizations to find the best ways to spread food waste messaging and disseminate resources. Be culturally sensitive. Work closely with neighborhood organizations to determine the most effective strategies for their specific community, then support them in doing the work. A marketing message has far greater impact when it comes from someone within a community.

“We work with community organizations and nonprofits so they can help educate their communities,” says Becerra. “They work in conjunction with us, but in a way that resonates with them. We’ve been visiting nonprofit groups over the last couple of years and have worked closely with them to find the best ways to reach their constituents.”

The resulting projects include a community mural about composting and a door-to-door canvassing campaign.

“It’s a little more of a grassroots community effort,” says Becerra.

Reducing food waste can be a grassroots community effort. Photo: Family O’Abé (CC-BY)

10. Create Food Waste Reduction Requirements for the Garbage Franchise

Cities typically control the garbage franchise, so they can require garbage haulers to pick up the organic stream. That organic stream can be set up to allow for food waste, including food scraps from preparation, uneaten food, and food-soiled paper, such as paper coffee cups and takeout containers.

“If the city is able to site a commercial composting facility, that helps a tremendous amount as well,” Becerra says, “because you’re generating this new waste stream, so you need to have a place fairly close by to process it. The city can assist by making sure the permitting process is not too cumbersome for setting up a commercial composting facility relatively close to the city.”

Becerra stresses that waste haulers need to be on board and invested in the fact that recycling organic matter is worthwhile and not simply meeting the requirements of their agreement.

11. Find the Right Location for Industrial Composting

Neighbors will likely push back against proposed locations for commercial composting facilities because they don’t want it in their neighborhood. Finding an agreeable location will be different for every city, but Becerra advises finding an area that is close to the city, but not necessarily in an urban setting. Many of the Alameda County composting facilities are in fairly remote areas.

The Food Too Good to Waste toolkit is full of resources and strategies to reduce household food waste.

12. Create Diverse Strategies and Messaging

In your communications about reducing food waste, offer a variety of options. Not every food waste prevention technique will work for every family or individual. In a small pilot study in Seattle, residents received a list of possibilities to reduce waste and tested three options over the course of a month.

“We were hoping it would settle on a few key, top strategies,” says Fincher.

However, they discovered a mix of 15 different strategies that worked for different people.

“It’s so individual,” Fincher explains. “We recognized that we need to allow for a lot of flexibility in our messaging so people can pick what’s going to work for them.”

13. Leverage Waste Management Funding to Raise Prevention Awareness

Cities may have robust budgets and resources available for food scrap recycling, but fewer resources available for food waste prevention. Bartholomew advises leveraging the recycling budget to raise awareness about food waste prevention.

“When rolling out a new recycling program, for example,” she says, “see if you can pair the messaging to use this as an opportunity to teach people how to reduce the amount of food waste they’re generating in the first place, then compost the rest.” She adds, “It’s a complex message, and you’re teaching multiple behaviors. Clearly there’s an opportunity to leverage that funding that already exists for outreach by adding in the prevention messaging.”

14. Create Food Waste Challenges

Building on the resources from the Food Too Good to Waste toolkit, you can create food waste challenges in households, neighborhoods, and cities to bring awareness to the issue of food waste. Rally community members around the cause and introduce a competition where people can challenge themselves and each other.

15. Utilize the UK’s Love Food Hate Waste Resources

Love Food Hate Waste is a project of the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP). Their website offers a number of resources to reduce food waste, including an app to help people waste less and save money, a perfect portion tool, a two-week meal planner, and hints and tips about date labels, freezing food, storing food, and more.

To help reduce food waste, set goals for yourself and your household. Photo: Madhan Karthikeyan (CC-BY)

16. Create Partnerships

Partnerships play an important role in solving food waste at a grassroots level.

“If communities are going to be successful,” says Becerra, “multiple parties need to be on board. Working together is critical to making it happen, whether it’s food waste prevention or food scrap recycling.”

Potential partners include industrial kitchens, restaurants, school cafeterias, supermarkets, local community organizations and nonprofits. To facilitate these partnerships, there’s a growing need for companies to create software and increase efficiency.

Food recovery—taking surplus food from one business and delivering it to organizations working to curb hunger—also requires key partnerships.

In Orange County, California, they found that restaurants didn’t understand the Good Samaritan Act, which protects businesses from criminal and civil liability when they donate food to nonprofit organizations. Concerns about liability had been preventing restaurants from donating food.

To educate restaurant owners, local health inspectors, who regularly visit the restaurants, were trained to discuss how to safely donate excess food.

The county then partnered with Yellow Cab and local 7-11 stores: Yellow Cab picks up the food during off-hours and takes it to the convenience stores to refrigerate overnight until pick up.

“These are innovations that are specific to that community,” says Bartholomew, “and they took a handful of partners to really think through and come up with.”

Food rotting in landfills produces methane, a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO². Photo by Taz (CC-BY)

17. Sell or Donate the Compost

Compost can be sold, donated to local schools and organizations, or used for public projects like parks and gardens.

“One thing you can do,” says Becerra, “is have free compost giveaways. It’s a way to show residents, who are essentially the customers, that their work is creating a useful product, and not just disappearing.”

One school district in Alameda County has language built into the city’s franchise agreement to donate a percentage of the finished compost to the school district for school gardens. One of the haulers also has a donation program where they donate directly to community groups and school groups that can promote the use of local compost.

18. Do a Local Study

Gathering sample data can help determine next steps toward sustainable consumption in cities. Officials in Seattle conducted a small food waste study of 119 households. They asked each household to weigh their organic waste to help determine how much of their total waste stream was organic matter.

“That gave us some data that we didn’t have from any other source,” says Fincher. “It showed that a third of our food waste is edible food waste and that reducing it is actually something that is worthwhile.”

Food waste occurs at every stage of the food cycle, from producers down to consumers. Photo: s pants (CC-BY)

19. Create and Support Food Recovery Programs

Food waste recovery is an important, socially responsible aspect of reducing food waste. Businesses may be inclined to adopt food waste recovery practices, since production is unaffected.  Encourage local stores and restaurants to join existing food recovery programs or to create a new program.

20. Create and Support Food Redistribution Tech Tools

Preventing food waste requires smart systems. Develop and use local tech platforms, such as online portals or mapping platforms, to connect those with surplus food to those who need food. In Seattle, for example, 200 different agencies pick up and redistribute food, but, as Fincher explains, “There are a lot of other generators and people who need the food.”

21. Celebrate Wins and Showcase Businesses Taking a Leadership Role

One of the best ways to get businesses and organizations on board with food waste reduction is to spotlight the ones that are already doing it well. This inspires and encourages other enterprises to find ways to participate.

“We’re always trying to share success stories and best practices,” says Bartholomew, “by highlighting businesses that are doing the right thing or highlighting how they overcame some barriers.”

22. Set Food Waste Reduction Goals

In keeping with the nationwide goal to reduce 50 percent of food waste by 2030, city officials can create local goals to keep leaders and residents on track.

“By setting some sort of goal, tracking how much pre-consumer food waste is being generated, then categorizing why it’s being generated and whether that food gets composted or goes to the landfill,” says Bartholomew, “we can see where that food waste is generated and where it goes.”

Stop Waste will be gathering data for the next few years to yield better insight into the county’s larger waste generators. Once they’ve pinpointed the largest problems, they can work to reduce food waste in those areas.

23. Include Food Scrap Pickup in Mandatory Recycling Programs

Alameda County has a mandatory recycling program for businesses that includes organics collection. Recycling Rules Alameda County states the rules and gives information on both the expectations and best practices.

97 percent of food waste ends up in landfills. Photo: Alan Levine (CC-BY)

24. Support Food Waste Reduction Legislation

There’s an increasing amount of legislation addressing food waste reduction—particularly regarding date labeling. Advocates aim to create a standard labeling system to help reduce food waste. The NRDC report The Dating Game: How Confusing Food Date Labels Lead to Food Waste in America is a “first-of-its-kind legal analysis of federal and state laws related to date labels across all 50 states.” The report presents recommendations for a new labeling system.

Congresswoman Chellie Pingree from Maine recently introduced the Food Recovery Act. The bill is aimed at reducing the amount of food wasted each year in the United States and includes nearly two dozen provisions to reduce food waste.

Supporting legislation around food waste issues is critical for city leaders working to prevent food waste.

25. Provide Food Waste Awareness Outreach in Schools

As Bartholomew explains, it’s easier to instill positive waste reduction behaviors in children than to change existing behaviors in adults. To facilitate this behavior change, city leaders can create and support programs designed specifically for local schools and youth organizations.

Organizers should work with an existing recycling coordinator or find the resources to integrate food waste education into existing programs. To create consistency, Bartholomew recommends setting up a consistent infrastructure, so kids have the same recycling bins at school that they have at home.

Stop Waste’s Student Action Project visits 5th grade and middle school classrooms to train teachers about recycling and food waste. Their team also helps families with the Food Too Good to Waste program, which works with them for four to six weeks. Bartholomew finds the citizen-science aspect to be particularly effective because students are bringing the same message home to their families.

26. Get Other Officials On Board

The best way to get other officials on board with a food waste reduction program is to show them projects that are successful in other cities.

“City officials have to deal with many of the same issues,” says Becerra. “It’s helpful for elected officials to know that it is possible to do these things.” He adds, “Sometimes it takes a while for people to understand that this can be done fairly easily and that it is important.”

27. Connect with Successful Food Waste Reduction Programs

Are you ready to get started on a food waste reduction strategy? The Stop Waste team is available to advise and share its best practices. Services and programs are well established in Alameda County, and the Stop Waste team stresses that they can help connect the dots for other leaders, too.

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This article was originally published on April 11, 2016

Follow @CatJohnson on Twitter

The post How to prevent food waste: 27 tips for community leaders appeared first on Shareable.

What is a worker co-op? 

It’s an enterprise owned, democratically controlled by, and operated for the benefit of, its workers. There are endless variations on co-ops, which means there are many questions to consider before forming your own unique venture. Remember, you are starting a real business and if  you’ve never started a business before, you will need support. 

Read up on how to start a co-op below, get advice from co-op development organizations, and talk to co-op friendly lawyers and accountants. You will need a business plan, cooperative-specific legal incorporation documents, and capital to finance the co-op in the beginning. Additionally, you will want an organization plan detailing how you will run your co-op cooperatively.

Are worker co-ops a new thing?

Big and small worker co-ops have a long and rich history in the US and internationally. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers established the Rochdale principles in 1844 and are considered the founders of the cooperative movement. Enslaved African Americans started practicing cooperative economics from the moment they were forcibly brought to the US. The first Rochdale-type Black cooperative was established in 1901 in Ruthville, Virginia.

Today, Mondragon Corporation in Spain is made up of over 90 cooperatives and employs over 70,000 people. In the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy, a majority of its 4.5 million residents belong to a worker co-op and co-ops support about 30 percent of the region’s GDP. As of 2021, there were 612 verified worker co-ops in the US, but the Democracy at Work Institute estimates that number is closer to 1,000 co-ops that employ about 10,000 people. 

Why start a worker co-op?

Worker co-ops can be more satisfying than working for “The Man”. Worker-owners aren’t forced into a hierarchy, and they have more say over what the business does than traditional employees. You still have to be responsible for managing a co-op, but your coworker-owners will likely be nicer and more understanding of your personal needs and quirks than middle-management at any corporation. 

You will probably make more money by cutting out the investors and managers. In typical low-paying industries, worker-owners can make several times what they were pulling in as employees. For example, in Petaluma, California, Alvarado Street Bakery worker-owners take home around $60k a year — a lot better than working for minimum wage. As a worker-owner, you are less likely to get laid off, both because co-ops prioritize steady employment over short-term profits, and because they are more sustainable than their conventional counterparts.

How to start a worker-co-op

This list is based on a paper from the U.S. Federation of Worker Co-ops.) 

1. Assemble the initial organizing group and information, then clarify needs.

• Forming the group

One of the first steps to starting a worker cooperative is finding others willing to be part of the initiating group. If you are converting a business into a co-op, you may already have your members.

• Identify and convene around 5-15 people with mutual needs and interest in creating a worker-cooperative.
• Individuals should be available for weekly or bi-weekly meetings and able to devote substantial time to completing necessary research.
• Inventory the skill sets and experiences of the group in order to assess roles and tasks.
• Choose roles and assign tasks.

• Collect necessary information, materials, and data. 

• Carry out market research to determine viability of the business proposition.
• Investigate legalities of converting or creating a co-op.
• Identify your legal structure: LLC or cooperative corporation?
• Decide where initial funding will come from:
  • Worker-owners and/or a loan from the former owner;
  • A loan from a bank (try one that has loaned to co-ops successfully); 
  • Or a grant for worker co-op start-ups.

2. Convene initiating group to assess moving forward.

• Members meet to discuss, plan, and organize next steps. 

• Review all collected materials, allowing time for discussion, then vote on moving forward (or not).
• Choose key decision-making processes and governance structures.
• Set up committees to work on preparing the business plan and raising funding.

3. Incorporate your business, create by-laws, and initiate funding.

• Outline the purpose (mission) of your business, overview of goods and services, organizational structure, and define the process by which new worker-owners will be allowed to join.
• Finalize all legal documents.
• Secure membership and funding.

4. Launch your new worker-cooperative!

• Begin operations by opening your doors and putting your business plan into action.

While this sounds like a lot of work (and it is), worker-owners I’ve talked to say that, in the long run, it’s totally worth it. There are resources listed below to help you get started, including worker co-op development organizations. 

Starting a new co-op can create jobs — not just for you, but also for people who may have never had the opportunity to own a business or earn a living wage. Worker co-ops are part of a larger movement to create an economy that is democratic, just, and takes care of everyone. And it can start with you and your co-workers.

Resources

Worker-Coop Development Organizations:

• The U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives
• The National Cooperative Business Association
• Sustainable Economies Law Center 
• Canadian Worker Co-operative Federation
• International Cooperative Alliance

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Originally written as an essay by Mira Luna in July, 2011. This guide was updated and reformatted by Jennifer Foley on July 31, 2024.

The original essay appears in Shareable’s paperback Share or Die, published by New Society and available from Amazon. Share or Die is also available for Kindle, iPad, and other e-readers. For the next article in Share or Die, Astri and Liz’s “Get on The Lattice,” click here.

The post How to start a worker co-op appeared first on Shareable.

While working at dozens of coworking spaces in multiple time zones, Johnson founded The Lab, a marketing club for indie coworking spaces, and Coworking Convos, a virtual event series to help coworking space operators learn, share, and connect. She also launched the Coworking Out Loud podcast, which explores coworking, community-building, and connectedness. 

Johnson has also devoted the last decade of her life to helping coworking space managers move beyond wifi and coffee to build community-centered spaces. “It truly, truly lights me up. Commercial real estate does not light me up—what lights me up is the humans within the building.” 

In her latest book, The Daily Co: 366 Days of Coworking and Community, Johnson shares one affirmation for building a coworking space for each day of the year. I spoke with Johnson about her work and the potential of coworking to help rebuild community in the post-pandemic world. 

Ruby Pratka: What first brought you into coworking? 

Cat Johnson: I worked in record stores for 20 years and started writing about music, which grew into arts and culture, which grew into writing about community projects, which led to coworking. Back in the early days, it was very much a movement. I realized, I don’t want to write about coworking—I want to be part of it. I started content marketing for coworking space operators. 

RP: What are some of the ways coworking has evolved over the past few years?

CJ: When I first found my way into coworking, there were probably a couple hundred spaces in the world. There are thousands now. It’s evolved from a pop-up thing into a major industry. But even with all of the razzle-dazzle of amazing, fabulous spaces, it’s still about what happens in a coworking space. That’s what separates coworking from office rentals.

RP: What inspired you to write a day-by-day book of community-building advice?

CJ: I wanted a place to put all the things I care about, in short snippets where somebody can just flip open a page, read a sentence or two—hopefully, it inspires some ideas—and then go about their busy day building community. This book is primarily for coworking space operators, but a lot of the content speaks to community builders at large.

RP: In the book, especially in the March section, you talk a lot about the pandemic. How did the pandemic transform coworking?

All of a sudden, cities were in lockdown and people couldn’t come in. Not all spaces made it. The ones that did, I think it made them more resilient. If we pull back to the big picture, the pandemic accelerated the remote work movement by 10 years. Now there’s this massive opportunity for coworking. A lot of people live in small towns where coworking couldn’t have been sustained before, but now with remote work, it can be. It was already a growing industry, and the pandemic really accelerated that. 

RP: How do you see the importance of building and rebuilding community?

My grandparents, in any given week had a church social, a bowling league, a poker night with friends, a golf league, the Elks Club. They had this really rich social tapestry, and that’s not where we are right now. There’s been a massive spike in loneliness and isolation since the pandemic. We have this digital-first culture where we’re everywhere all the time, and yet genuine connection is harder and harder to come by. I think coworking is part of the solution to that.

RP: What have you learned about how spaces can add that extra element of community?

The special sauce! I wish I could bottle it up and sell it—I’d make a billion dollars—but it can’t be bottled. An important part of it is understanding what your members are working on, struggling with, and working toward because that lets you create programming to support them. You can’t take what works in one space and put it in another space. It’s so specific to each space, town, community, and member experience.

RP: What do you want people to take away from this book?

CJ: I want people to read a blurb in the morning and be inspired. Being a community builder is hard, highly emotional work [that requires] a lot of multitasking. I want to give them a little support and remind them what they’re doing is really important, that it goes beyond filling offices. Even though they’re stressed because they have to fill those three vacant offices, there’s something deeper happening here.

The post Sharing the spirit of coworking day by day: Q&A with Cat Johnson appeared first on Shareable.

The bill, developed over years of advocacy by the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC), Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI), and their members, proposes a comprehensive federal strategy to support these co-ops. It calls on major federal agencies like the Small Business Administration (SBA), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and the Departments of Treasury, Commerce, Agriculture, and Labor to implement programs that will remove regulatory barriers, ease access to capital, provide educational resources, and offer technical assistance to worker co-ops.

Notably, the act envisions the establishment of a United States Council on Worker Cooperatives within the Department of Labor, tasked with coordinating federal efforts to bolster the worker co-op sector. This includes developing a federal strategy to integrate worker co-ops into economic development plans, identifying and solving regulatory barriers, and ensuring the availability of research and educational materials on co-ops.

In addition to policy support, the bill proposes a tangible boost to worker co-ops through a 10-year, $60 million small business lending pilot program administered by the SBA, aimed specifically at worker-owned cooperatives. This financial lifeline is complemented by funding through the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund to help establish and manage worker co-ops.

The initiative has been met with enthusiasm from lawmakers and advocates alike. Rep. Khanna, inspired by the success stories within his own district, sees worker co-ops as a vital response to rising inequality and the displacement of jobs due to automation. “Worker-owned businesses empower employees, promote equitable wealth distribution, and anchor jobs locally,” Khanna remarked, highlighting the alignment of worker co-ops with American values of liberty, democracy, and fair opportunity.

Rep. Bowman echoed this sentiment, emphasizing the potential of worker cooperatives to build wealth in local communities and strengthen democracy. As a champion of worker co-ops, Bowman has incorporated support for these businesses into federal initiatives like the CHIPS and Science Act and seeks to continue this support through the new bill.

As the U.S. braces for the “Silver Tsunami” of retiring business owners, this act represents a proactive step to keep businesses open, save jobs, and bolster the economy by transitioning these businesses to worker co-ops. By addressing the challenges faced by the worker co-op sector, including a lack of awareness and understanding, the National Worker Cooperative Development and Support Act aims to pave the way for a more inclusive and sustainable economic future, where workers not only have a say in their workplace but also share in its success. This legislation stands as a beacon of hope for a more equitable, cooperative America, drawing on the power of shared ownership to transform lives and communities.

Sign on as a supporter of the National Worker Cooperative Development and Support Act (individuals and organizations) HERE.

The post New legislation could accelerate the development of Worker Cooperatives across the US appeared first on Shareable.

Here’s a fun fact: Abraham Lincoln didn’t go to law school. He independently studied the law, registered with the Sangamon County Court in Illinois, and passed an oral examination by a panel of attorneys. He was then given his license to practice law. More recently, Kim Kardashian was able to take and pass the bar exam without attending one day of law school as well.

In four states, you can still take this non-law-school route to becoming a lawyer. Vermont, Washington, California, and Virginia all allow people to become lawyers by “reading the law,” which, simply put, means studying and apprenticing in the office of a practicing attorney or judge. Currently, New York requires at least one year of law school experience, plus an apprenticeship program, and five more states (Oregon, Georgia, North Dakota,  Maine, and Indiana) are considering adding apprenticeship paths as well.

The Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) has been a leader in educating people about legal apprenticeships. Their Movement Lawyering page offers a big-picture glimpse into the legal apprenticeship movement with information, resources, advice, and first-hand accounts from both supervising attorneys and apprentices.

Using information found on SELC’s website, as well as interviews with legal apprentices and SELC’s co-founder Janelle Orsi, Shareable created the following how-to for becoming a lawyer without going to law school. Rules and requirements vary from state to state, so check your local law, but here are some practical tips, best practices, and virtual cheers of encouragement.

Why Do It

There are numerous benefits to taking the legal apprenticeship route to becoming a lawyer. They include: making becoming a lawyer more accessible to a wider demographic of people; gaining years of legal practice prior to becoming a lawyer; avoiding law school debt, which can run hundreds of thousands of dollars; learning at a pace and style that works for you; studying in the area where you want to practice law; and building a network of future clients, mentors, colleagues, and legal professionals.

Receiving a license to practice law without crushing debt also allows one to take on legal work that is centered on building and strengthening community rather than making lots of money to pay off loans. This is a truly radical aspect of the legal apprenticeship program.

As Chris Tittle, the former director of organizational resilience at SELC, writes, “Laws protect those who write and defend them. So, in a country where over 88 percent of lawyers are white, 70 percent are men, and 75 percent are over the age of 40, is it surprising that our legal system repeatedly fails to serve the interests of youth, women, communities of color, and other underrepresented groups?”

SELC’s Chris Tittle and legal apprentices Yassi Eskandari-Qajar and Christina Oatfield

The Nuts and Bolts

The requirements for legal apprenticeships vary by state. In California, for example, apprentices are required to work and study with a practicing attorney 18 hours per week for four years. Supervising attorneys must also give monthly exams and bi-annual progress reports. Apprentices also take a law students exam (dubbed “The Baby Bar”) after the first year. At the end of their apprenticeship, they’re eligible to take the full Bar Exam.

The fees associated with the apprenticeship route are a tiny fraction of law school tuition. Christina Oatfield, who apprenticed with SELC co-founder Jenny Kassan (and went on to work with the SELC for almost 8 years and currently provides legal services to Shareable), broke down the costs in California (updated to reflect 2024 costs):

• Initial registration fee: $158
• Fee paid to the California Bar every six months: $30*
• First-Year Law Students Exam: $600–$800 each time. (The pass rate is around 20% so many students take the exam more than once.)
• Bar exam at the end of the four years: $1,000 each time.
• Books and other study materials: $1,000+.

The total cost can be as low as a few thousand dollars. As Oatfield said in 2013, “Not bad compared to law school tuition.”

*Current fees could not be confirmed by the time we reprinted this story.

Find a Supervising Attorney

The first thing you need to do is to find an attorney or judge with whom you can apprentice. This may prove to be a challenge.

“This has been a stumbling block for some people who hope to participate in the Law Office Study Program,” said Oatfield, “as some attorneys are wary of taking on the responsibility of supervising an apprentice.” However, many attorneys who have worked through the program (like Oatfield herself) are more likely to take on apprentices once they hit their five-year mark. 

In California, the supervising attorney needs to have been practicing law in the state for at least five years, and they need to spend at least five hours per week directly supervising you. Oatfield advised finding a supervising attorney who is practicing in areas of law that you want to learn about, and eventually practice in yourself.

Supervising an apprentice requires a long-term commitment of time and energy, as the attorney needs to administer and review exams, provide guidance, and offer feedback on essays. But there are benefits to doing so, including improved skill at explaining complex legal topics; the opportunity to revisit legal questions and topics; bringing new skills, as well as linguistic or cultural competencies, into practice via an apprentice; the potential to learn and grow in response to feedback from apprentices; and the joy and satisfaction that comes with collaborating on a meaningful project.

Orsi notes that people who already work in legal organizations and law offices are probably the best positioned to find supervising attorneys and start apprenticing. Oatfield, as well as Yassi Eskandari-Qajar, another former SELC legal apprentice, both volunteered for SELC before they decided to pursue legal apprenticeships.

“[W]e had already built relationships with the attorneys who are supervising us now, and developed some very basic familiarity with their areas of specialty,” Oatfield said. “I think a potential supervising attorney wants reassurance that the prospective apprentice is really committed to the study of law — and their particular area of expertise — because it can take many months, or even years, of apprenticeship before the apprentice has the potential to contribute back to the attorney’s practice.”

Once you’ve found an attorney, there are some simple forms that both of you must fill out. Check with your state to see what paperwork you’ll need.

Work While Apprenticing

Yes, it is possible to work another job while apprenticing. Or, better yet, find a paid position within the legal system. That way, you’re furthering your hands-on experience while learning the law. The additional exposure, said Eskandari-Qajar, also helps to contextualize one’s studies.

She experienced a “serious learning curve” as she was getting up-to-speed with legal terminology. This meant that she had to slow her pace and devote more outside time as she was building a foundational understanding of the law and legal terms.

“[N]ew apprentices should play it by ear and be prepared to give more time and energy toward the beginning…if they are like me and new to the field.” She continued, “I imagine that, when I am preparing for the first-year law students exam, I will have to really ramp up the time I give to the apprenticeship, and do so again prior to taking the bar exam. If you can strike an arrangement with your employer that is flexible around those times, that would be ideal.”

Orsi points out that apprenticing only requires 18 hours per week of work and/or study, and the idea is that the apprentice should not be required to study beyond that. But if the apprentice spends 18 hours doing legal work that doesn’t prepare them well for the bar exam, they should make extra time to study the bar exam topics.

The inspiration for LikeLincoln. Photo by Ron Cogswell (CC)

Practical Tips

For Eskandari-Qajar, one of the most important tips she offered is to make time. “Even if you have a job in the field of law, there will be things that aren’t covered by either the apprenticeship or work,” she said. “For those, you have to hit the books.”

Orsi advised that apprentices — especially those with weak writing skills — do a lot of writing, as two-thirds of the bar exam is essay writing. In law school, most exams involve essays, so students get a lot of practice.

“[A] key skill for passing the bar exam, and for practicing law,” Orsi said, “is the ability to write well and organize information clearly. Apprentices with strong writing skills will have a significant edge, and will be able to spend more time doing practical work, and less time writing practice exams.”

Studying and Test-Taking

The two solid days of intense test-taking make the bar exam extremely stressful; Orsi offered advice to those preparing for it:

“My theory is that it’s good to develop positive associations with test taking, if possible,” she said. “So each time I give a monthly exam to the apprentices, I try to do something fun or silly, before, during, or after. Last month, I brought a massage chair to the office on exam day.”

She said that she’s unsure if these things will “ultimately reduce the torture of the bar exam,” but figures there’s no harm in doing fun or silly things, so it’s worth a try.

When Orsi was studying for the bar exam, she had audio courses that she listened to while hiking and biking. She also wrote dozens of songs that outlined the 12 bar exam topics to the tune of 12 different karaoke tracks, including “I Will Survive” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” In the final weeks before the exam, she got up and sang the songs every day.

“I did everything possible to make it enjoyable,” she said. “I did not do what most people do, which is pay $3,000–$5,000 for an intensive bar exam prep course. However,” she continued, “I might actually recommend that apprentices do take such a course, because they may benefit from re-learning the material in a classroom context, and from receiving significant input on their practice exams.”

Challenges

For as many benefits as it offers, LikeLincoln advises that the apprenticeship route isn’t for everyone. Since the apprenticeship option is not offered nor recognized by all states, there are geographic concerns. Law school libraries also offer a host of resources that apprentices can’t access, and some big law firms may be more inclined to hire lawyers who have gone to law school.

One of the benefits of law school is being surrounded by other law students. Developing a peer circle is a good way to gauge your progress and find support during challenging and stressful times. 

You’ll also need to determine if you’re the kind of person who would do better in law school than as a legal apprentice. LikeLincoln advises law school if you: need a structured curriculum and learn well by listening to lectures; enjoy the social aspects of school and the academic side of law school, with its highly intellectual arguments; want the prestige of a law degree; or want to work in a big law firm or teach in a law school.

The Big Picture

For self-starters who want to jump right into legal work, becoming a legal apprentice is an attractive alternative to law school. But as Eskandari-Qajar reminded us, this is a big commitment, not to be taken lightly.

“Even though you are not dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars on this educational path, you are investing four years of your time to become a lawyer,” she said. “Remember to keep your eye on the prize, and don’t forget why you chose to take this path instead of taking other paths.”

The post How to become a lawyer without going to law school appeared first on Shareable.

While each guest is working on several unique projects, they are connected by their dedication to their communities and their participation in our SolidarityWorks program. Together, we discuss the current threats to their communities, both political and environmental, the ways they are collaborating with others to develop community-led solutions, and how they find joy in their life and work despite the many challenges they face.

Check out the resources below to learn more about all of their projects.

Resources:

• SolidarityWorks
• Emergency Battery Network Toolkit
• Mutual Aid Hartford (MAH)
• FREE HART Closet
• The People’s Saturday School
• Central Florida Mutual Aid
• Beautiful Trouble
• Bvlbancha Collective
• Bvlbancha Radio
• Imagine Water Works
• How To Set Up An Open Mesh Network in Your Neighborhood
• Meet Freifunk, the German group that aims to provide free internet to all
• “The Food Conspiracy Cookbook“
• Urban Recipe (Food Distribution Co-op)

Episode credits:

• Hosted and produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Edited by Robert Raymond
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

The post SolidarityWorks with Gabbie Barnes, Rachel Kinbar and Ida Aronson appeared first on Shareable.

Resistance without a clear vision of the alternative, risks merely reforming the current system, while building the alternative without roots in movements of resistance, with leadership from those on the forefront of struggle, risks both being exclusionary to these folks and their communities, and being co-opted by reactionary/status quo forces.

While there is a growing overlap between the resist and the build movements, there is still too much distance between the two.”

That was the initial invitation shared by the US Solidarity Economy Network before the first Resist & Build Gathering in 2020.

Throughout this season of The Response podcast, we’ve been exploring various methodologies and ethos working to address the polycrisis’ of our times. From Anarchism to Decolonial Marxism, and from Agroecology to Organized Labor.

On this week’s show, we turned our focus towards the Solidarity Economy and what is meant by ‘Resist & Build’; the practice of resisting the systemic forces causing harm to people, planet, and place while simultaneously building alternatives that can eventually replace them.

Joining us for this conversation is Emily Kawano, Co-Director of the Wellspring Cooperative Corporation and Coordinator of the US Solidarity Economy Network, Matthew Slaats, co-director of the Solidarity Research Center and the founder of the Virginia Solidarity Economy Network, and Edget Betru, an attorney who is on the boards of Community Movement Builders and the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy in Atlanta, GA.

Together, we unpack what ‘Resist & Build’ looks like in practice, discuss the necessity of cross-movement dialogue and collaboration, and explore pathways for scaling up (and arguably, more importantly, scaling out) the solidarity economy.

Resources:

• Resist & Build
• People’s Network for Land and Liberation
• Stop Cop City Solidarity
• The Response: Stop Cop City with Jesse Pratt López & Nolan Huber-Rhoades

Episode credits:

• Hosted and produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Edited by Robert Raymond
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

Follow The Response on Twitter and Instagram for updates, memes, and more. Our entire catalog of documentaries and interviews can be found at theresponsepodcast.org — or wherever you get your podcasts.

Want to help spread the word? Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify — it makes a huge difference in reaching new people who may otherwise not hear about this show.

Available anywhere you get your podcasts, including:

The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

Download our free ebook- The Response: Building Collective Resilience in the Wake of Disasters (2019)

The post Resist & Build with Emily Kawano, Matthew Slaats and Edget Betru appeared first on Shareable.

On the positive side of things, prosocial activities like sharing food in public, which had been criminalized in many places, suddenly became normalized. Organizing neighborhoods and blocks became routine. And inequalities which had long been hard to see just under the surface became visible.

But it was not all roses. Mutual aid has a deep political history of challenging the status quo that was often neglected or purposely stripped away. And as the Pandemic transitioned to being endemic, many of the pre-covid policies that criminalized Mutual Aid, returned, with some being much worse.

In our recent feature story, the noted mutual aid practitioner and educator, Dean Spade, wrote about how the Georgia state Attorney General, Chris Carr, is currently arguing that participation in mutual aid projects and practicing solidarity as part of the organizing happening to Stop Cop City constitutes a criminal act to further a criminal conspiracy.

Dean illustrates how this represents a brazen assault on social justice organizers reminiscent of the FBI’s surveillance and attacks on the Civil Rights and Black Power movements in the 1960s and 70s.

And it’s not just in Georgia, all over the US, reactionary policies are criminalizing reproductive justice, climate protests, and more.

Today on the show, we’ve brought on Stephanie Rearick, a founder, and Director of the Madison Mutual Aid Network Cooperative and Humans United in Mutual Aid Networks, or HUMANS for short, which is a new type of networked cooperative ‘creating means for everyone to discover and succeed in work they want to do, with the support of their community.’

In this conversation, Stephanie talks about how mutual aid has changed since the pandemic began, how to create networks of Care that can actually support members of our communities long term, the new tech stack that they’re creating to support mutual aid work to scale, and what it means to live a POSHtarity Lifestyle.

Resources:

• Mutual Aid Network
• Humans at Home
• Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza
• Jewish Voice for Peace Call for Ceasefire in Gaza
• Mutual Aid and the Movement to Stop Cop City

Episode credits:

• Hosted, presented, and co-produced by Tom Llewellyn
• Edited by Robert Raymond
• Theme Music by Cultivate Beats

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The Response is an award-winning podcast series produced by Shareable and Robert Raymond exploring how communities respond to disaster — from hurricanes to wildfires to reactionary politics and more.

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