This article was originally published by NPQ Online on May 27, 2025, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/solidarity-economy-organizers-gather-in-atlanta-to-build-toward-liberation/. Used with permission.
Remembering our history allows us to build our futures.” So said Stephanie Guilloud of movement organization Project South in the initial plenary session of the Resist & Build Summit.
The scope taken on by conference attendees was very ambitious. Held in Atlanta the first weekend of May 2025 with the theme “Solidarity at Scale: Converging our Movements for System Change,” the conference brought together over 300 solidarity economy activists from across the United States, marking the largest gathering of network organizers to date.
“When we say infrastructure, we mean systems that keep us alive.”
Learning from Atlanta
The decision to come to Atlanta was intentional. Atlanta has played an outsized role in civil rights movement history and remains an important center of organizing today. In their session, “Atlanta, Black Reconstruction, and the Black Radical Tradition,” Guilloud and Summers emphasized the importance of creating community institutions in building economies and power—in a word, infrastructure. As Guilloud put it, “When we say infrastructure, we mean systems that keep us alive.”
What kind of infrastructure? In Atlanta’s case, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), such as Spelman College, Morehouse College, and Clark Atlanta University, are critical infrastructure. Other institutions built included Citizens Trust Bank, a Black-owned bank that opened in 1921; and Atlanta Life Insurance Company, a Black-owned insurer founded in 1905 by Alonzo Herndon, who was born enslaved but as an adult became a highly successful businessman.
During the Montgomery bus boycott of 1954 and 1955 in which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. participated, Citizens Trust Bank was one of the two primary banks holding the funds of the bus boycott organizers and Atlanta Life Insurance Company, noted Guilloud, “supported the taxi drivers for a year.” If drivers did not have that backing, Guilloud elaborated, the boycott might have failed.
She described these entities as the foundation for movement infrastructure: “You build a bank, life insurance, they can start funding. This is the network that is underneath.” Among the primary elements that need to be built now, according to Guilloud and Summers, are education and training, land stewardship, and self-governance capacity.
Art…is often misperceived as a luxury, but it actually meets a vital human need of self-expression.
Reinforcing Movement Infrastructure
Much of the gathering focused on structured conversations among movement activists about how to build on and expand existing movement infrastructure.
One group centered around building the solidarity economy itself—that is, developing cooperatives, community land trusts, and other instruments of democratic ownership of land and business. A second group focused on how to build a stronger social movement network to resist