This article was originally published by NPQ online on February 26, 2025 at https://nonprofitquarterly.org/resist-and-build-a-movement-building-process-centering-the-solidarity-economy/. Used with permission.
State of the Movements is a recurring NPQ column dedicated to tracking the pulse of social movements and the solidarity economy in 2025.
The solidarity economy movement finds itself at a critical juncture. The opportunity for a breakthrough amid crisis is real, even as social change movements today face increasing repression, fragmentation, and resource scarcity. Our challenge is survival while growing permanently organized communities to resist structural oppression and build the systems necessary for a just future.
Addressing these challenges will be a central theme of an upcoming gathering likely to attract hundreds of solidarity economy practitioners from across the country. Taking place in Atlanta at the beginning of May with the theme “Solidarity at Scale: Converging our Movements for System Change,” this Resist & Build Convening aims to both refine the movement’s vision and plan concrete actions in the coming years.
What Does “Solidarity Economy” Mean to Us?
As detailed before in NPQ, the solidarity economy is a global movement to build a world that centers people and the planet rather than private profit and blind growth. It’s not a blueprint that has been theorized by academics in ivory towers. Rather, it is grounded in concrete, real-world community practices that exist around us—some are old, while others are emergent innovations.
The following definition draws on both the work of the US Solidarity Economy Network (USSEN) as well as RIPESS (Red Intercontinental de Promoción para la Economía Social y Solidaria, or the international network for the promotion of the social and solidarity economy), which led a two-year international consultation process to build a shared understanding of the solidarity economy.
While there is tremendous latitude within the solidarity economy to encompass a wide range of approaches—grounded in the local realities of culture, language, history, political-social-economic contexts, and the environment—here are some core elements of the definition that apply across these specificities:
The solidarity economy is a framework.
This framework connects solidarity economy practices (see below for examples).
Solidarity economy practices are aligned with solidarity economy values, which are:
Solidarity
Participatory democracy
Equity in all dimensions—race, class, gender, ability, and so on
Sustainability
Pluralism, meaning that this is not a one-size-fits-all approach, or as members of the Zapatista movement would say, “A world in which many worlds fit.”
All of these elements articulate a post-capitalist vision, which holds that we cannot achieve the just, sustainable, democratic, and cooperative world that we seek by reforming capitalism. We do not reject reforms, but we do insist on the importance of seeing them as part of a longer-term process of fundamental system change. In the absence of a deeper post-capitalist strategy, reforms end up strengthening capitalism.
We are now in a period where people’s