North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship Grant

The North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship aims to empower Black-led cooperatives by reconnecting them with their historical roots in cooperative economics. This seven-month program encourages participants to reclaim the legacy of Black economic cooperation, offering training in governance, conflict resolution, and cooperative skills. With a focus on community building and collective care, the fellowship includes stipends and support for creating cooperative economic projects, fostering a vision of self-governance and shared prosperity among Black communities.

The North Star brings worker-owners of Black-led cooperatives together, grounded in the history of Black cooperative economics in the US, to build more powerful and engaged communities.
The North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship is a seven-month fellowship focused on Black American cooperative economics and the history of Black cooperative economic thought and practice.
The North Star is a way to start living into a future of Black wealth: self-governance, spaces for healing, and an abundance of resources, including financial capital. North Star is a place for Black-led cooperatives, collectives, housing, commercial and land trusts.
Black economic cooperation has been foundational in the Black American freedom movement. We developed the North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship to reconnect with our long-suppressed history of mutual aid and cooperative economics.
Curriculum
The North Star curriculum grounds fellows in Black cooperative economic history locally and nationally, challenges them to analyze and rethink capitalism, and supports them in building their own cooperatives, leadership skills, and networks.
As a cohort, fellows explore and receive:
Grounding in the history of Black cooperative economics in the US, and history of cooperation and Black feminismCooperative skills and tools, like governance, decision-making structures, and conflict resolutionAccess to alumni funds post-fellowshipSupport in designing and creating a strategy for a cooperative economic projectA $1,000 stipend for participating in the fellowship

Eligibility

You are interested in learning and reclaiming the history of the descendants of enslaved Africans’ cooperative economic legacies so that you can better understand and bolster Black economic cooperation today.You have been dreaming about or already belong to a cooperative with majority Black membership and majority Black leadership, with accountability to the diverse Black communities in the Twin Cities.Your co-op does not need to be fully operational to be a good fit for North Star. But, you do need to have established relationships with each other as leaders and already be working in cooperation to advance your co-op idea.There are two or more leaders or members with decision-making power who are committed to participating in the fellowship together, and the majority of that group is Black.