Upon joining OCF in 2022, PATHS Chicago had gone through many iterations with its network of partner orgs presently composed of Black Lives Matter Chicago, Equity and Transformation, Intersections for Complex Healing PLLC, The Kola Nut Collaborative, The #LetUsBreathe Collective, Resist.Rebuild.Reimagine, and Upside Down Consulting.

After piloting both internal and public-facing political education (PATHS for BIPOC Healers: An Interdisciplinary Healing Justice Workshop), these partners began to reassess their ongoing body of work. Two projects emerged in 2022 as the ripe for further development: BASE (Black Abolitionist Solidarity Economy) Fellowship and Liberation Landing.

BASE Fellowship was an effort to co-incubate and cross-pollinate different frameworks around abolition, solidarity economy, movement building, and the Black Radical Tradition within a cohort of 20 fellows across Chicago. These fellows were working on diverse projects, including environmental justice, community storytelling, maker spaces, guaranteed income, food cooperatives, community safety and emergency response, tenant organizing, and economic research.

The fellows were able to build skills around democratic decision-making and conflict transformation, deepening their thinking about applying the different frameworks within their specific project. Each fellow received a $1000 stipend for participating in the 12-session cohort over six months. After the fellowship, we were able to award six projects an additional $6000 for projects that could articulate some key way that they would like to be supported in implementing their ideas from throughout the fellowship.

In 2023, the Steering Committee focused its efforts on evaluating the successes and learnings of the initial BASE Fellowship in anticipation that we would host a new cohort. We spent some time reflecting on what we might like to do differently and settled on anchoring the cohort in organizational partners, which might ensure greater sustainability of the ideas and frameworks shared. To facilitate building out the new cohort, we brought on two coordinators and hosted information sessions with interested partners which we hope to onboard in 2024 when the new cohort launches. 

Liberation Landing, through its co-coordinator team, focused its 2022 efforts on developing processes to recruit and build relationships for an LGBTQ + BIPOC co-living space in partnership with the #LetUsBreath Collective and Su Casa, which brought on 5 residents. Throughout 2023, the group has primarily been focused on facilitating healing and repair processes to support live-in volunteers in building programs, systems, and practices grounded in Afro-indigiqueer values and frameworks. Hilda Franco of Convivir has held this care work. This has necessitated pausing much of the programmatic work to allow space and time for reflection and the development of internal structure. The capacity made available through PATHS with project management and infrastructure aided #LetUsBreath Collective in securing an additional $300k in funding from DCASE to support the coordination of Liberation Landing, including the renovation of Su Casa in the next 2 years and the launch of a construction and handiwork co-op. Funding has also supported a junk removal and clean-out of the Su Casa space.

In addition to these two core programs, PATHS Chicago launched a Participatory Grantmaking program to make unallocated funds available to partner and aligned organizations. This resulted in launching a new internal project, Black Liberation Playday. Black Liberation Playday proposed a monthly Black Queer intergenerational playday on the southside of Chicago. The project sees joy and play as integral to creating and maintaining sustainable and thriving liberatory spaces. As of December 2023, the project had hosted five events with a rotating selection of participants with vegan cuisine at the Breathing Room space. An aspiration of the project which is not yet fully realized have been developing written materials that speak to the intersection of games and liberation.

Funding also supported the Breathing Room Summer Series, online and in-person political education by Justice Cream, and member training for Earthseed Worker Cooperative.

In April, our primary funder, Woods Fund Chicago, initiated $100k in step-down funding to further our original $500k Movement Building grant, which would facilitate our testing of new programming and building upon our ideas about what would make movement building possible in Chicago.

Finally, our Travel & Learning budget has so far supported internal committee members attending research and learning gatherings such as the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives National Conference, the Indianapolis Black Coop Convention, the Rising Majority Convening, the Rutgers Conference on Worker Ownership, the National Black Cooperative Convention, and a visit to Hawaii to learn about Ahapua’a Systems.