Transformative Justice, Economic Democracy and Collective Liberation
Esteban Kelly Creates Worker-Owned Cooperative to Support Community-Based Projects
Esteban Kelly is a visionary leader and compassionate strategist who inspires organizers by drawing on science fiction, social theory and collective liberation. Pulling together his creative energy and organizational skills for expanding food sovereignty, solidarity economy and cooperative business, gender justice and queer liberation, and movements for racial justice, Kelly was inspired to co-create AORTA — a worker-owned cooperative devoted to strengthening movements for social justice and a solidarity economy.
In addition, he is co-executive director for the U.S. Federation of Worker Co-ops (USFWC) and co-founder and current board president of the cross-sector Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance. Internationally, Kelly has advocated for workplace democracy through the International Cooperative Alliance and CICOPA (the international worker co-op federation), and for land reform and other social movements from Canada to Brazil.
After many years as a Ph.D. student of Marxist geographers at the CUNY Graduate Center, Kelly left academia with a master’s degree in anthropology. Most recently, he worked as development director and then staff director for the New Economy Coalition. From 2009 to 2011, Kelly served as vice president of the USFWC, and a board member of the Democracy At Work Institute and the U.S. Solidarity Economy Network. He is also a previous director of education and training and board president of NASCO (North American Students for Cooperation), where he was inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame in 2011. He serves on the boards of the Cooperative Development Foundation and the National Cooperative Business Association, and is an adviser to the network of artist-activist trainers, Beautiful Trouble.
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Rooted in West Philly, Kelly’s skills and analysis of transformative justice stem from his decade-plus of organizing with the Philly Stands Up collective. Similarly, Kelly worked through a major food co-op transition as a worker–owner at Mariposa Food Co-op, where he co-founded its Food Justice and Anti-Racism working group and labored to institutionalize the Mariposa Staff Collective. In light of these efforts, Kelly became a mayoral appointee to the Philadelphia Food Policy Advisory Council and works to advance education, systemic thinking and anti-oppression organizing into all of his food advocacy work.
Some highlights from Shawn Berry’s conversation with Kelly include:
- Examining his nonlinear and emergent visionary approach to movement leadership and his career trajectory.
- Unpacking terms like economic democracy, transformative justice and collective liberation.
- Exploring some of the historic cultural erasure of the cooperative economic heritage of communities of color.
- Differentiating capitalism from economics and business while increasing awareness of collective consciousness.
- Maintaining hope and inspiration by focusing on the generative work of constructing a better economy while collaborating with resistance movements.
Shawn Berry is a partner at LIFT Economy, an impact consulting firm whose mission is to create, model and share a locally self-reliant economy that works for the benefit of all life.
B the Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
