What does it look like when you report to your co-workers, instead of someone up top?
We hear from cooperative owner and artist Daniel Park, as he talks through the peaks and valleys of cooperative art-making and business ownership – and how your business can be as radical as the art you create.
––––
Links and resources mentioned in this episode:
U.S. Federation of Worker Coops (USFWC)
Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC)
Creatives Rebuild New York Guaranteed Income / Artist Employment Programs
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Guaranteed Income Pilot Program
Don’t Start a Non-Profit Part 1 with Adrienne Mackey of Swim Pony
“The Talk”
––––
Episode Transcript
––––
What does it look like when you report to your co-workers, instead of someone up top?
We hear from cooperative owner and artist Daniel Park, as he talks through the peaks and valleys of cooperative art-making and business ownership – and how your business can be as radical as the art you create.
––––
Links and resources mentioned in this episode:
U.S. Federation of Worker Coops (USFWC)
Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC)
Creatives Rebuild New York Guaranteed Income / Artist Employment Programs
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Guaranteed Income Pilot Program
Don’t Start a Non-Profit Part 1 with Adrienne Mackey of Swim Pony
“The Talk”
––––
Episode Transcript
––––
01: No Starving Artists. No Sellouts.
Daniel Park:
How you run the business of making your art should absolutely mirror the art that you are making or could if you would like it to.
Marina Lopez:
Hello and welcome to Remember the Future, a podcast from Art.Coop where we invite you to remember the future by listening to the stories of artists and culture bears who are returning to practices as old as time to build community and care centered workplaces, where they are their own bosses. There are no landlords and they decide how money flows. My name is Marina Lopez and I'm your host.
Marina Lopez:
Did you ever wonder why do we as creatives get taught how to paint or sing or dance but not taught how to make a living without sacrificing our values? And when we are taught about business, why is it so focused on increasing individual profits? How do we make our businesses and nonprofits as radical as the ideas in our artwork? With this podcast, we invite your open curiosity as you learn about another way of doing things, where the people who do the work make the decisions and share the surplus together. In today's episode, we'll hear from Daniel Park, a theater artist and co-founder of obvious agency, a theater and digital arts cooperative that creates interactive live performances blurring the lines between audience and performer theater and game. Daniel shares his stories about how he found his way into the solidarity economy movement, the birth of obvious agency and what that has meant to his life. We also hear about some of the teachers he's learned from along the way and how you two can own your creative labor without a boss by starting or joining a worker cooperative. Thank you so much for being here today, Daniel. So I would love for you to introduce yourself.
Daniel Park:
My name is Daniel Park. I use he/him pronouns. I live and work in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Lenape Hoke, and I am one of the founding worker owners with Obvious Agency. I am the training and consulting manager at the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, which is part of where I got my solidarity economy education. And most of my learning about worker cooperatives has been through the USFQC, and then most recently I am also the Philadelphia recruiter with Guilded, which is a freelancer's cooperative. That's, um, been an incubation for uh, about a year and a half, two years now. Ultimately the way that I like to talk about my work these days is that my medium is people in rooms together and systems. I really love thinking about how do people come together to create change. How do people come together to change themselves, to change one another, to change our world? What tools support and facilitate those kinds of conversation and that imaginative work? How do we make sure that imagination and hope and optimism and laughter and fun and joy and love are part of all of those things? So we're building the road while we walk it at the same time. Not to say that those things are never uncomfortable or hard or challenging, but how can we shape them in a way that feels good to us?
Marina Lopez:
What was a moment or experience that you had that made you question our current economic system?
Daniel Park:
Yeah, so I've got two stories that I wanna share with you today. The first one is the moment where I realized things weren't working and then the second is a moment when I was like, Oh, this is working. This is the economic system that I wanna live under. Cuz I am very, a very hopeful, optimistic person. So I didn't wanna just think about what doesn't work. Um, a few years ago in Philadelphia, there was a relatively small regional theater in the city where the artistic director had been caught with their pants down saying something racist. And at that same time there was a production that was going on, um, that had at least I know a majority black performance team, a white director, I'm not sure about the rest of the production staff. You know, the community had a pretty strong response against it. It was pretty upsetting to a lot of folks and I think I do have a reputation in the community of being somebody who's been organizing pretty strongly, particularly for racial justice at that point.
Daniel Park:
And as I was talking to the director of that production about what was going on was I asked, Well, you know, are you all doing anything about it? And I sort of proposed like, well, you know, you all could go on strike. You could say we're not gonna rehearse this or, or what have you until there's some kind of apology or recognition for harm that's been done. And ultimately that's sort of not a path they choose to take. The folks that we're involved in the production we're not interested in striking. But I think in the arts generally, whether we are administrators, whether we are artists, right, whomever we are in those processes, we have power. If we choose to not do our work, that work will not get done. And I think part of both what that moment as well as some conversations later on down the line for myself helped reveal for me are how much we as workers in the arts have both been taught to relinquish our power because we're working in a scarcity mindset and we sort of are working on this thought that like we are easily replaceable at any given moment.
Daniel Park:
There's another contractor, there's another actor, there's another administrator who would love to have this opportunity. We throw away whatever it was that people saw in us that made them want to work with us. We don't even think about that. We just think about ourselves as like a stock commodity that, you know, anybody else can provide or whatever mm-hmm. <affirmative> and don't think about what makes us unique actually, which is, you know, that's what art making is all about. And being an artist is all about ultimately is that unique creativity. And then on top of that, institutionally so many workers are so quickly ready to both throw away their power and pass that buck of power onto somebody else. A designer's really likely to say, Well I can't do anything about it. It's the production manager who really has the power here. And the production manager's gonna say, Look, I can't really do anything about it.
Daniel Park:
It's the managing director that has the power here and the managing director's gonna pass it off to the artistic director and the artistic director's gonna pass it off to the board and the board's never gonna hear it cuz nobody's ever really gonna bring a real challenging topic to a board of directors <laugh>. Right? Um, and seeing how quickly artists and arts workers are willing to say, There's nothing special about me. I don't have any power here. It's actually this other person that holds all of the power and so I shouldn't make waves. So I was like, this can't be it. Like this can't be the thing. We as workers need to be able to organize our power and say no to institutions that are treating us unfairly. And, and of course the other part of it is that I don't want to throw away the reasons why a gig worker particularly would say, No, I can't do this.
Marina Lopez:
Wow. There's so many parts to that story. I wanna jump into <laugh>, but I loved how you were talking about this need to organize our power and create opportunities where artists can have workspaces that are dignified where our human dignity is present. So I'm wondering what did you create from that experience?
Daniel Park:
So that's a great segue into my other story about a moment where things really came together and worked. Um, a big part of it was obvious agency. My co-op. Part of what we recognized early on was that as a company we were going to be working for less money than what we deserved And so what we decided on was that we were going to, every time we got a gig that brought money into the company, we were gonna check in as a group and talk about where we each were financially, what was going on in our lives. Like what did we need at that given moment, and let those conversations inform what pay did we wanna take from whatever pool we were pulling from, What pay did we wanna put back into the company in, in as an investment?
Daniel Park:
What pay did we need in order to make the gig possible for us? And so myself, Joseph Ahmed and Ariana Gas, two of our four other worker owners sat down together and at that point in time, Joe and Ariana both had stable solid jobs full time or close to, they had salaries, they had income, they were doing fine financially where they were at. I on the other hand was in a year of my first time trying to fully freelance and financially it was not working out in the ways that I hoped it would and I needed cash. I was in one of those moments where I didn't know where my rent for next month was gonna come from. Um, I didn't know if I was gonna have it in time or not. And so as we were having this conversation, Joe and Ariana both said, You know what?
Daniel Park:
We're fine. We're good. We really don't need extra cash right now. Um, I'm sure we could have used it, but our, you know, perspective on how much money we needed to live and get by and be comfortable and take care of ourselves was very different at the time. Um, but they said, You know what? I'm good. I'm fine Daniel, how about you take however much you need to pay your rent next month and we'll put the rest of that into the company. And I don't know if I have all of the words to describe what I felt in that moment.
Daniel Park:
I was just so grateful and I felt so taken care of in a way that I never had before. And I'm sure other folks who are listing have experienced this, but that constant pressure and anxiety when you don't have enough money to like get your basic needs met, that is just constantly there no matter what. That informs every single decision I made when I was struggling financially. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I felt that drop away for just a moment. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> Seeing, experiencing feeling them say, we can't do this work without all of us and if you can't take care of yourself, you can't do this work Daniel Park:
Knowing that we couldn't have had that conversation if we were just three separate contractors working for somebody else who had been brought in, that what that required was the three of us committing to each other saying, we do this work together when we talk about the solidarity economy. I was like, this is it. This is that thing. Um, and it, it was so human and relational. It wasn't about just a financial transaction. It was what do you need in order to take care of yourself? What do you need in order to be an artist? What do you need in order to show up in this collaboration because we want you here Marina Lopez:
Mm. What an incredible story. when you describe that feeling of being an artist, being on your own, struggling to make ends meet that like immense weight and fear on every decision that you're trying to make juxtaposed to this experience of being so deeply held and seen as a person and as an artist by your collaborators.that is such a beautiful description of what's possible in this movement towards a solidarity economy even if you don't understand all the technical terms of what is a worker co-op, what is a land trust, this or that, like at the core of what the solidarity economy is, it's like you said, it's relational, it's cooperative, it's trust based, it's what do you need to be able to show up and do this work that you wanna be doing as an artist, as a person? I mean that's foundational <laugh>. Yeah.
Daniel Park:
Yeah. And I think as, even as I hear you say that it reminds me how important our feelings and our bodies are and that sematic experience towards measuring internally for ourselves. Like am I going in the right direction? Is this the thing that I want? And like that feeling of love and care, I need to remember that for all time because like that is a feeling that will tell me if I am moving in the right direction. That is the feeling that will tell me if I am in solidarity economy practices if I can feel held and supported by my colleagues, my collaborators, my coworkers and they can feel the same of me, that tells me that we're establishing and building the relationship that we want to build with one another.
Marina Lopez:
Yes. As the somatic body person over here, you know, I love that <laugh> all about that <laugh>. I'm like, what's your body telling you? Is it you go in the right way. I think it's interesting how obvious agency, and I think that this is like a common theme in what I've heard from other folks who have been a part of founding and starting cooperatives is they're like, actually it wasn't until like X numbers of years in that we were like, Hey, I think we're cooperative. Like a lot of people don't actually start that way. So I'm curious if you could maybe give us a little bit of the origin story of how did obvious agency come together? How did you decide to start this structure with your co-founders and collaborators?
Daniel Park:
Yeah and and I'll focus more on that second part in part because I don't think obvious agency's origin story is unique. We came together in the same way that artists come together all the time. This is something that anybody can do. Obvious Agency started with a commission from an external group that sort of came to one of our collaborators, Ariana initially through her job and she reached out to Joe and myself to see if we wanted to work on this project with them at the same time. So I think that is a unique aspect, but frankly obvious agency started because we did that one project together and we said, we like working together, we wanna make more art and we wanna do that as a group and we wanna do it collaboratively. Joe and myself particularly, were both coming from devised theater backgrounds, so very ensemble based, very collaborative in terms of process making new work and not just producing something that already existed or focusing on the work of a single person, but really like collaborative.
Daniel Park:
We're making this together. But I think one of our shared dissatisfactions as a group was that's not just our responsibility. Artists having sustainable lives is not just like an interpersonal issue that a single person changing their actions can fix. That's actually a cultural and systemic issue, right? Thinking about, well who's paying us? What wages are they providing? What does help my healthcare and my rent cost? I don't have any control over any of that, right? So I think that was again sort of another informing factor for us. Adrienne Mackey of Swim Pony Performing Arts here in Philadelphia also had released an essay around the time that we were starting called um, Don't Start Another Nonprofit or something like that. But essentially saying like, look, if you were an artist, the work of starting a nonprofit is not worth it. It is too much work.
Daniel Park:
The bureaucracy and all of the red tape, the fees, like et cetera, et cetera. It just does not make sense. We don't wanna be reliant on grant funding. We already know that being a nonprofit doesn't make a ton of sense, but let's get even deeper than that. Part of the issue is that's such fickle unreliable money. It is so restricted, it's so rarely able to be put towards artists and making sure that they have dignified jobs and wages and are taking care of can we figure out an alternative model for ourselves? And so that is how we came up with our current business model, which is that we have sort of this for-profit reach, which is our consulting work, which is our commission work, which is our educational work where the goal is we are bringing in money to provide a sustainable and dignified place of work for our worker owners and the other artists we're working with.
Daniel Park:
And to make our artistic branch that is not focused on making a profit that is focused on what is meaningful to us to funnel money in that direction. And that way that artistic work is less reliant on funders, is less reliant on the ultra well feed. And that if we can make this business model work and it is even still now a big experiment, that means we don't need to be reliable on that. Right? I mean it does mean that we are participating in like quote unquote the market and all of that stuff, right? It means participating in capitalist systems. It means thinking about business, it means talking about money. But this was, I think the other big part of it was we wanted to talk about those things because all of us have to, no matter what a lot of artists try to avoid talking about money either because it's scary or because they think that just talking about money and business is capitalistic inherently.
Daniel Park:
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, but they don't really have an understanding of what being capitalist means or anything like. Right. There's not a super strong analysis to back that up. And when I think of a cooperative, I think of a grocery store in a gentrifying neighborhood that is a force of gentrification that has way too expensive things mostly for white folks. But then pretty quickly as I got oriented to what a worker co-op is, I was like, Wait, wait, <laugh>, I, I think I'm doing this already. <laugh>, like I think that, I think I have a worker co-op <laugh> and so I brought back what I was learning to obvious agency and we were like, Yeah, this does sound like us. Actually I think there was this aspect of ownership is the other big thing. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that Ariana in particular, especially early on, was really smart about wanting to talk about and encouraging us to talk about that.
Daniel Park:
Like what happens if things don't work out? What happens if we get in a big fight? What happens if somebody wants to leave? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And a lot of those conversations, Ariana was flagging them before we as a group were ready to have them in part because we didn't know why it would be important. There was just a lot of trust, right. But once you start calling yourself a worker co-op that implies ownership and shared ownership. And I think that was the framework that helped us really start getting into even deeper and more complicated and nuanced conversations about all of these things and at a point where we were ready to start having those conversations. And it also made us think about how do other people join this if we can succeed, we don't want our success to just be like bo guarded or kept within the three of us.
Daniel Park:
Like we want this to be something that can benefit other people and our community. How does all of this also play out with the artists that we're hiring, even if it's on a contract basis and the employees that we hire, most companies are set up in a model that is focused on profit generation, right? Which means keeping costs down and pulling out as much money from their workers, as much labor from their workers as they possibly can. Worker cooperatives are different because they are run by those workers. So yes, there is an an investment in making sure that you can make enough money to take care of yourself and take care of others, right? But the workers are the ones ultimately deciding how their labor is used and what it's worth. Mm.
Marina Lopez:
Very cool. I think I had these preconceived notions, um, coming into spaces with more folks who'd started co-ops of like, oh, they had this like very structured idea of these are all the boxes you need to check to be a cooperative. Like this is the process that happens. And hearing these stories, I'm like, that's actually like the opposite of what tends to happen. They're like, we're doing this thing in a group in a collaborative way. We have these shared values based on cooperation and care and oh, there's like a toolkit over here that I can use that like has names for these things <laugh>.
Daniel Park:
And I think that part of why that happens, right, is also because there are such limited options for formalizing a group and creating the infrastructure needed to support a group within our tax systems and economic systems and what have you. If I had known earlier that a worker co-op was an option, like if somebody in college was like, there's fiscal sponsorship, you could start a business right as like an option in LLC for particular artists, that makes sense. Also, there's this other way where you're democratically managing all of those things and collaboratively making decisions. I would've been like, oh well yeah, that one, that one makes a lot of sense to me and feels a lot better. But nobody told me that that was an option, right? Towards thinking about remembering the future. We know that solidarity economy practices go back far beyond when we called them those things.
Daniel Park:
They were traditional ways of working and caring for one another in community that we have rediscovered as we've needed them. And as people who have never practiced them before, like myself are like, Oh, oh, this is a thing that's codified actually there's ways to do this work that is in alignment with everything that is important to you about why you make art. This doesn't need to be a separate project. How you run the business of making your art should absolutely mirror the art that you are making or could if you would like it to. And that's all for you to decide. And I think that like, that lack of helping reveal the creativity and making that's possible in making those kinds of decisions is a real like bummer to me. And something that I'd like to see more of and something that particularly as a facilitator and teacher I try to provide to artists is like, yes, there are best practices out there, but maybe that's why making your art isn't feeling good right now is because you're following these best practices that don't actually make any sense for you.
Marina Lopez:
Mm. Yeah. I wanna see more of that too. And I think that that's what we're hoping we can share with folks in this podcast is, um, like you, I love how you beautifully kind of mapped out like there are these different options and <laugh>, there's this one here. I know that you mentioned a few folks who influenced the early shaping of obvious agency and I'm wondering if there are other legacies or ancestors or ancestors of knowledge that really informed you in this cooperative world, in this solidarity economy world And as an artist navigating those.
Daniel Park:
I mean, I would be absolutely remiss if I didn't shout out Esteban Kelly, the executive director of the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives one just as like a mentor to me and somebody who's provided me with so much of my education around not just worker cooperatives, but movement building, the solidarity economy. Um, Ron Reagan, who's a good friend in collaborator and also a mentor of mine, I think Ron and also just a lot of southern artists generally because of the context that they're coming from have both been unrecognized in a lot of the solidarity economy work that they have been doing for a really long time because the south and the us, um, for all of those reasons, but who've practiced a lot and who have taught and shared a lot with me in some of the most generous ways that I've ever experienced, like the practices of popular education and like participatory democracy that come from the South, I think have just been a huge part of opening me up to group process to collaboration, to showing up with integrity and boundaries and generative conflict like all at the same time and living in the imperfectness of those things.
Daniel Park:
And I also think about a lot of the game designers because games are just systems ultimately where every unique input from every person leads to a unique output. Whether that's, you know, tapping the a button to like swipe at a monster and how you do that and where you do that and when you do that is up to the player games when combined with theater become this really amazing way to test the limits of our agency. I think a lot of that learning and that theory and also practice that's informed my work has come from people like Jane McGonigal was really hugely influential, but then there's also this really, and a lot of her work is about gamifying life. But then a few years after I was introduced to her work, I read this really amazing, um, book of essays from queer game designers and academics. And one of those essays was like, why are we gamifying everything? Like why do we need to make work fun and why do we need to make fun productive? Like, can't fun, just be for the sake of fun. And I'm like, Yes, also that too, right? Like both using games as tools for testing things right and learning about ourselves, which is a productive thing, but then also using them for silliness and pointlessness and just pure enjoyment.
Marina Lopez:
Thank you so much. There's a few things I wanna touch on. One of them is this idea that you brought up of generative conflict and your collaborator, Ariana really kind of raising these questions of like, what if if this doesn't work out, what do we do if we have conflict? And I'm really curious about the role that conflict and generative conflict and learning how to have these hard and uncomfortable conversation. How does that play out in this space?
Daniel Park:
Oof. Ooh, I love this question. It's so juicy with all of my various hats on this question of conflict. I mean, I think first it's important to name I am a cis man. I am somebody who has been socialized towards conflict. I'm also a very external processor. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Like I need my ideas to like get into a big fight with somebody else's ideas and then like fall in love and make children and like come up with awesome idea babies that like from that like that is, that's so much about how my creative practice works. Um, it's part of why I, I'm never working on my own. I hate that. And part of why I think ensemble devised work is interesting and powerful is because of that, how do we make a world that works for everybody? And tied to that though is like the need to draw boundaries and the willingness to say, this doesn't work for me. That's how we get to something that will work for everyone. In order to really be collaborative, we need for our nos to be able to run up against one another so that we can articulate this is what's not working to me about this, this is where I'm coming from that's informing that answer.
Daniel Park:
Mm-hmm <affirmative> so we can find something that works for everybody here that will lead us to something really beautiful. I can't do this for $15 an hour. I need to make more than that. Okay, well I thought that was enough. Okay, well you've got this other job that's really supporting you where you've got inherited wealth and you don't need this money as much as I do right now in my current position. Okay. it's about understanding like we're all different people, we all have different needs and recognizing that like this is what helps us define like do we wanna be in relationship with one another? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>
Marina Lopez:
And I think that another thing that capitalism divorces us from is this somatic embodied experience, right? Cause it's really hard to have an embodied experience when it's so, so just uncomfortable because capitalism asks us to grind at this very fast pace. In the beginning you talked about so beautifully, like this sensation of care and love and being supported and held that embodied experience allows me to know that I'm moving in the right direction. And so what are the embodied cues for you and what are the tools that allow you to embody this, this conflict in a healthy way?
Daniel Park:
It's a little tricky for me to answer that in part because again, I am somebody who is very socialized to conflict and very much like craves not craves. That makes me sound so dramatic. Um, but you know, like to me conflict and healthy conflict is a sign of a process working in the way that it should. So I think one is actually simply like if there doesn't seem to be any conflict at all or questions that tells me something, whether that is like we're feeling too rushed to ask questions and to be in conflict or whether that means like maybe somebody just isn't saying something that ideally would be said. I think what I can really talk about is more so what are the tools and practices obvious agency has adopted? Because you recently we had a company retreat and I asked us to do a little fist to five activity where we would hold up a number of fingers to, to sort of respond to the question right?
Daniel Park:
On a scale. And the sort of prompt was, I feel comfortable saying no to my collaborators, five being like I'm totally comfortable, I'll say no to the end of time. And one being like, I would never say no absolutely not <laugh>. And most of the group was around like a two or a three and I was like, oh no, nope, nope, nope, nope. Because if we don't feel comfortable saying no, then that means our yeses are not always going to be sincere fullthroated yeses. That is not actually consent, that is not actually consensus, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative>. So like what are the conditions? What are the relationships? What is the context that is informing people feeling uncomfortable saying no to one another. So part of that just points to talk about decision making as a tool. Mm-hmm <affirmative> check in about decision making and how that feels like it's going for folks generally.
Daniel Park:
And especially in a moment where you're not in the middle of making big decisions. Ask people what they need in order to support their ability to feel like they can fully stand behind their decisions and give a no when they need to. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I think part of what we figured out was just that we were even just in sort of the minute to minute conversations moving too fast, people needed more time to think and process and needed new ways to being able to do that. Such an easy fix, such an easy thing for us to adjust to, to be like, all right, cool. Like let's make sure that we are checking in about if people need a minute, two minute, five minutes, 10 minutes of like silent processing time after any moment, right? Or anything or between discussion topics or before a big decision.
Daniel Park:
And also recognizing the different roles and responsibilities to be able to use any kind of tool or to for people to check in with their body. For folks who feel less comfortable saying no, there needs to be some internal work there to articulate what's happening for me, what would support me? Like there's some work that needs to happen there. And then on the other side, for other folks who maybe feel more comfortable saying no or hold like myself more social power in terms of norms or what have you asking, what can we do differently? Is there anything in my behavior that it would be useful to change?
Marina Lopez:
Thank you. So I just would love for you to speak to a way or a few ways, um, that folks listening can make this work tangible. Like what's a place they can start if maybe they've never heard of worker co-ops, what's a place they can tap into if maybe they've heard of them but they wanna know if there's some in their area they wanna learn more of the technical or how other folks have done this?
Daniel Park:
Yeah, so a few thoughts. Um, first there's that worksheet, “The Talk.” If you all like she wanted to share it with this podcast, that would be totally fine. Um, but that tool I have found really, really useful and have used it in many different places and spaces, but as a way of like having really open and honest conversations about like who am I as a human right now and how do I relate to the other people that I'm working with? I think that's useful in any kind of working relationship. So there's that. I think one thing that's worthwhile for folks to know, especially folks who are new to these concepts, are that even if you don't fit into a technical definition of what a cooperative is or you're not interested in falling into that technical definition, the solidarity economy and acts of cooperation, taking care of one another and being invested in who we are as people more than the profit that we are generating or recognizing that the profit we are generating is in service of the people. Anybody can do that. You don't need a cooperative in order to take care of one another and make decisions together in a cooperative way for folks who are working at nonprofits. Also learning about workplace democracy and worker self-directed nonprofits is another option. So let me like then now talk through some of the resources for all of those things since I introduce them into this space
Marina Lopez:
And we can link to them too.
Daniel Park:
Great. So for folks who are just generally interested in learning more about worker cooperatives, my first big suggestion would be to check out the website for the US Federation of Worker co-ops, that's usworker.coop. So for people who are interested in starting a co-op, um, the Democracy at Work Institute also has a lot of information on worker cooperatives and have a lot of research and data and then the Sustainable Economies Law Center, SELC, they've got actually a few different programs and resources now, particularly for folks who are interested in worker self-directed non-profits and how to make that possible, what that looks like, the different models that there can be. And also me, I am always happy to take some time to talk to folks who are interested in learning more about worker co-ops in the arts and culture. My email at the federation is park.daniel@usworker.coop.
Daniel Park:
I just want to like shout and lift up all of the new programs and projects that are coming out right now that I'm thinking about Creatives Rebuild New York. I'm thinking about the Yerba Buena Center's guaranteed income program. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and the all the other basic and universal and guaranteed income programs that are happening around the country right now. Uh, something that I was thinking to a collaborator recently is I think I'm starting as I'm like getting older or whatever, Like I'm starting to understand the value in just experimenting and even if those experiments are failures. I think especially when obvious agency was starting for myself, I felt this real obligation to success. Mm. And now I still wanna be successful of course, but I'm also like, you know what, if we actually find out this model for whatever reason didn't work this time, that's okay too. Because what matters is that we spent our time trying something different and proving that something different is possible even if it's not leading to the outcomes that we want yet. And I just want to encourage anyone who's listening who's like, you know what, like what exists right now isn't working for me to like just try something new, even if it's small. See and at least you'll know you gave it a try and maybe it will feel better having tried and failed than sticking with what already wasn't feeling good.
Marina Lopez:
Absolutely. I love that advice, that acknowledgement. And I think Mike Strode said something like, People created these systems. There's nothing to say that we can't create new systems, new ways of being. So I think that as an artist, especially being reminded to experiment, to let go of the need to perform perfection and success as we define it, that in experimenting you will undoubtedly learn. And that is incredibly valuable cuz it informs the next things you do.
Thank you so much for joining us for Remember the Future. Special thanks to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for their generous support of this podcast, and thanks to Creative Study for their ongoing partnership. Remember the Future is co-produced by Meerkat Media Cooperative, Alletta Cooper and Art.coop. It's edited by Justin Maxon and Alletta Cooper with Visual Design by Emma and theme music by Andile Blessing Magwaza and Sizwe Lancelot Mbelu. The show's executive producers are Eric Phillips-Horst and me Marina Lopez. Additional thanks to our consulting editor Caroline Woolard and to my colleagues at Art.coop, Nati Linares and Sruti Suryanarayanan. You can hear more episodes of Remember the Future anywhere you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed what you heard, we invite you to rate, subscribe and review! Find us on Instagram and twitter @_artcoop You can also help sustain this podcast by visiting our website art.coop and clicking on SUPPORT to make a donation. I’m your host, Marina Lopez and this has been Remember the Future.