Mutual Aid In Sussex (MAIS)

Liam Barrington-Bush will join the next Mutual Aid In Sussex meeting, on Wednesday 19 April to talk about solidarity ecosystems in Greece and beyond.

A VIOME worker puts up a poster for the 2nd Euromed Workers’ Economy meeting. By Liam Barrington-Bush, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

In 2011, the Vio.Me. factory in Thessaloniki became the first European face of the occupied factory movement which came to global prominence in Argentina in 2001 and has since spread across Latin America.

Workplace occupations present an obvious alternatives to worker exploitation, with workers developing collective and cooperative means of organising their work, without bosses. Based on the practices that have emerged at Vio.Me. in Greece and in factories across Argentina, they may also offer a more directly democratic, sustainable and grassroots vision of how social change can happen.

Connecting with other grassroots, network-led forms of organising that have taken root elsewhere in the world (e.g. Chiapas, Rojava), come and explore what the organising models found at Vio.Me. could mean for a range of radical organising efforts closer to home.

Liam travelled to Greece in October 2016 to hear stories from workers and attend the Euromediterranean Workers Economy meeting, a unique glimpse into a breadth of worker-occupations happening across Europe.

Join us at 7.30pm on Wednesday 19 April at Coachwerks, 19A Hollingdean Terrace, Brighton. Please bring £1 towards venue costs.

Read more about Liam’s experiences in Greece here on the ROAR website.

Please note the change of location for this event – it will be at Coachwerks.

Brighton and Hove house prices are nearly 5 times more expensive in 2015 than in 1995 (from £50,000 to £295,000 on average) and it has the highest share of privately renting households (32.5%) of any town and city in England and Wales, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Rip-off rents and letting fees, damp housing, overcrowding and evictions are all too common.

Housing co-operatives are one of many ways to create more genuinely affordable and secure housing in the city.

On Tuesday 29th November at 7PM at Coachwerks, Mutual Aid in Sussex have organised three people to talk about how they set up their housing co-ops and how they work:

* Andrea Jones, as project manager, is currently helping set up Bunker, a housing co-op for low-income families. She is involved with the network of Co-operative Housing in Brighton & Hove (CHIBAH).
* Allie Cannell who fairly recently helped set up Skylark, a housing co-op for young people.
* Helen Russell helped expand Two Piers, the largest and longest-running housing co-op in Brighton & Hove. Helen has clocked up 33 years of co-op living, warts and all. She is the Secretary of CHIBAH, the Chair of the Brighton & Hove Community Land Trust Steering Group, and initiated the rebirth of the Confederation of Co-operative Housing in 1991.

There will be time for both an introduction to housing co-ops as well as more in-depth advice on how to set them up. Space will be given for questions and networking.

If you’re sick of paying for the holidays of the 2% of the adult population who are landlords, or just want more affordable and secure housing, come along to this talk!

Tuesday 29th November at Coachwerks. The talk will start at 7pm. FREE.

A brief introduction video to what is a housing co-op (focused on student housing co-ops, but relevant to all housing co-ops)

The next Mutual Aid in Sussex (MAIS) meeting, on Wednesday 19th October, will include a talk with Kayla Ente (Brighton & Hove Energy Services Co-op – BHESCo) and Will Cottrell (Brighton Energy Co-op) about what they’ve been doing in Brighton & Hove, plans for the future, and how people can get involved.

Brighton & Hove Energy Services Co-op (BHESCo) is a not-for-profit social enterprise bringing together the community of Brighton and Hove to develop renewable energy projects, improve energy efficiency, reduce fuel bills and tackle fuel poverty.

BHESCo help homes and businesses reduce their energy costs by developing and installing renewable energy and energy efficiency systems at no upfront cost to the customer.

 Kayla Ente, founder and CEO of BHESCo, has a distinguished career in sustainability and renewable energy, having worked for Greenpeace International, Nuon (the Dutch utility), and Ecofys (European pioneers in renewable energy). She has helped to develop wind farms in China and Spain as well as solar power projects in California and Hawaii. She moved to Brighton in 2012 and founded BHESCo in 2013. Since then BHESCo has completed 5 renewable energy projects in the Brighton area, with a further 7 new projects in development, including a ‘food waste to energy’ plant in Hangleton. Kayla and BHESCo’s grand vision is to establish a community owned renewable energy tariff available to residents of the local area

Brighton Energy Coop (BEC) is about community-owned renewable energy. Basically, we get a load of people together, everyone puts in a little bit of cash and collectively we are then able to build large scale renewable energy systems.

Money raised from selling the electricity flows back into the coop – it’s then distributed in the form of our community fund, interest to members and paying back capital. Our host sites benefit from the cheap electricity that our panels provide.

Will Cottrell has driven BEC forward from its inception. Overseeing both new project development and fund-raising for BEC, he has experience in the technical and financial aspects of renewable energy, as well as marketing and communications. In 2014 he was awarded Community Energy Fundraiser of the Year; in 2015 he also won the People’s Environmental Award’s prize for Energy.

Come and join us: Wednesday 19th October at Coachwerks, 19A Hollingdean Terrace, Brighton. If you can, please bring vegan food to share. The meeting will start at 7pm, with the talk from 8pm.