Since only a few of us were fortunate enough to join the sold-out New York Cooperative Summit last weekend, we're especially delighted to share the two opening speeches that kicked off the inspiring weekend of connect, learning, and movement building.  ECCG Board President Eric Johnson (MO#434) did a great job of welcoming visitors to Schenectady, and reminding those of us who live here about how special this place is and how important and powerful our cooperative efforts are to open a community-owned grocery store in the heart of the Electric City.  Eric's welcoming words were followed by an exceptionally inspiring keynote address by Sandra Lobo of Our Bronx, "Building a Bigger We:
Cooperation, Community Power, and the Economy We Deserve."   You can hear them in their own words here from the livestreamed event, or read on to enjoy copies of the speeches they generously shared with us. 
 

Welcome to Schenectady: 
Past, Present, and Emerging Future

Good afternoon, and welcome to Schenectady! I'm Eric Johnson, and I'm with the Electric City Community Grocery. For those who drove in from Buffalo, Ithaca, the Hudson Valley, the Southern Tier, the Big Apple, or the North Country: thank you for coming. I've been asked to tell you a little about where you are, so let me start near the beginning.
 

Land acknowledgment

We're gathered on the homeland of the Mohawk people, People of the Flint, Keepers of the Eastern Door of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The Haudenosaunee lived here long before this was a settlement or city, and they're still here today. The name Schenectady itself comes from a Mohawk word, usually translated as "beyond the open pines," and the river that runs past here still carries their name. A conference about cooperation should remember that the Haudenosaunee built one of the longest enduring working democracies in the world on these lands, based on consensus building and shared responsibility. We honor them, and we're grateful to be here.
 

Where you are: the past

Schenectady is one of the oldest cities in America. Dutch settlers founded it in 1661 just a few blocks from here, in what we now call the Stockade. You can still walk those streets, and hopefully on Sunday you will.

Most people know us by another name: the Electric City. In 1886 Thomas Edison moved his machine works here. Six years later it became General Electric. George Westinghouse grew up here too, tinkering in his father's machine shop. Down the road, the American Locomotive Company built the engines that pulled trains across the continent. For most of a century, if something plugged in or ran on rails, there was a decent chance it was built in this town.

Tens of thousands of people worked at GE. My father was one of them, a scientist in the research lab. My mother, Karen Johnson, joined the community with a focus on civics, went on to serve as mayor, the first and only woman to hold the job, so far. She spent over 40 years working to improve the city for the residents. So I grew up hearing about this city from two sides: the company and the community.

And here's what I learned. When your town depends on one or two giant corporations, the most important decisions about your future aren't made here. They're made in boardrooms in other cities, by people who will never shop on our main streets. In 1969 the locomotive works closed. Over the decades that followed, GE cut its workforce here from tens of thousands to a few thousand. Nobody in Schenectady got a vote in that. The city lost about a third of its people. Storefronts emptied, and so did the neighborhoods behind them.

I left too. I spent 29 years away, because it honestly looked like there was no future for me here.
 

Where you are: the present

But a city is its people, not its factories. And when the big employers stopped building Schenectady, the people kept at it.

Schenectady was built by waves of people. Some of the first didn't come by choice: enslaved Africans worked the farms around the Stockade until New York ended slavery in 1827. Others came here seeking freedom, like Moses Viney, who escaped slavery in Maryland and built his life in this city. In the twentieth century, Black families came north in the Great Migration for jobs at GE and the locomotive works, and integrated into the various neighborhoods of the city. Polish, Jewish, Italian and Irish families also helped build our neighborhoods. They came for the jobs that corporate industry made possible. And in the early 2000s, hundreds of Guyanese families came up from Queens and bought and restored homes that had sat empty for years. Today there are over 5000 Guyanese living here. Today, we have rich culture, delicious food and an inclusive community that supports a thriving arts community.

But I want to be honest with you about where you are. Walk a few blocks off State Street and you'll see a different Schenectady. Nearly one in five people in this city lives below the poverty line, close to double the rate for New York State. Many neighborhoods, the same ones those waves of families built, are living with vacant houses, too few jobs, and too few places to buy fresh food. The comeback you'll see downtown hasn't reached them yet.

That's the Schenectady I came home to. It's a city that has learned it can't wait for someone else to save it.
 

Where you are: the emerging future

Which brings me to why you're here. Downtown is coming back. There's new housing and new businesses on lower State Street and along the river. But revitalization raises the same old question: who decides, and who is it for?

Cooperatives are our answer to that question. A co-op is what it looks like when a community stops waiting for a corporation to come back, and takes matters into its own hands.

A few blocks from here, in the historic Wedgeway Building, we're building the Electric City Community Grocery. For 26 years, downtown hasn't had a full-service grocery store. The big chains looked at the numbers and decided we weren't worth it. So the residents of the city decided to build our own. We incorporated in 2013, and today we have nearly 1,600 member-owners. With their support and $8.25 million in public funding, we're aiming to open our doors in April. And this time, the decisions about this store will be made right here, by the people it serves.

We're not alone. The Capital Region has a long co-op tradition, from Honest Weight in Albany and the Niskayuna Co-op, which has been around since the 1940s, to many cooperative banks, to the worker co-ops and housing co-ops coming up today. What's different now is that cooperative development is becoming part of how cities like ours rebuild. Schenectady knows better than most what happens when wealth and decisions get made somewhere else. Co-ops keep both at home.

I'll give you one small example of what that looks like. One Saturday morning every month, a group of co-op members and neighbors go out and clean up a different part of Schenectady. This morning we worked on Albany Street. It's a street that has struggled, and drug use has hit it hard. You don't fix that with a trash bag. But you don't fix it by staying away, either. So we show up, we pick up, and we work with and talk with the people who live and work there. Nobody's paying us, and nobody asked us to. It isn't glamorous. But it's how you build the trust that a co-op runs on: neighbors deciding that a street is still worth caring about.
 

Come see it

So here's my invitation. If today whets your appetite, come see it for yourself on Sunday morning. We'll meet at 9 a.m. in the Wedgeway Building parking lot, with coffee. We'll tour the future home of the grocery, walk the new downtown along lower State Street, wander the Stockade, and follow the Mohawk River. Then we'll finish with lunch at Arthur's Market, a historic Stockade landmark. It's about a mile and a half, flat, and kids are welcome. There are still about 30 open spots.

The Electric City used to power and haul the world from boardrooms somewhere else. Now we're learning to power it ourselves. On behalf of my hometown, welcome to Schenectady. Now I'm going to hand it over to Anh-Thu Nguyen to introduce our keynote speaker, Sandra Lobo.
 

Building a Bigger We:
Cooperation, Community Power, and the Economy We Deserve

Sandra Lobo, Our Bronx
Keynote Address | New York Cooperative Summit
October 17, 2026 | Armory Studios NY, Schenectady

Thank you, Sandra Lobo, for sharing the text of her powerful keynote address with our coop community! 


Good afternoon, everyone!

It’s good to be here with you today. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be part of this gathering.

I want to start by recognizing first and foremost the incredible diversity of folks gathered here.

I know that we have worker-owners who know firsthand what it takes to build a democratically owned business. Housing cooperators and community land trusts working to keep homes and land in community hands. People working with food cooperatives, credit unions, and local businesses, along with organizers, educators, funders, researchers, and so many others who are helping to build a different economy. I trust that we also have some folks here who are curious about cooperative ownership and what it could mean for your communities.

Whatever brought you here, you are in the right place, and I’m grateful for your interest, your curiosity, and your solidarity.

Many of us come from different sectors, organizations, regions and experiences. We use varying strategies and may approach our work differently. But we are here because we share a belief that our economy can and should work for all of us.

That the people who create wealth should share in it.

That workers and residents should have a say in decisions that affect their lives.

And that our communities should have greater ownership and control over the assets and institutions that shape their futures.

We are here because we understand that none of us can build that economy alone. We need a stronger cooperative movement that makes it possible for cooperation to thrive at scale. 

I want to share some of what we have learned through our work in the Bronx, and what I believe it means for building a movement together.
 

Our Bronx Context

I serve as the Executive Director of Our Bronx, formerly the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition.

I first became involved with this organization as a young, first-generation immigrant college student. I’ve spent much of my adult life connected to its work, as a member, a board member and in the last decade, as Executive Director.

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to learn from incredible community leaders, tenants, young people, faith institutions, and labor partners who have organized to improve the conditions in their neighborhoods. Much of my own understanding of how change happens has been shaped by those relationships, the victories we’ve celebrated and the challenges we’ve faced together, including our losses.

Our organization was founded 52 years ago, in 1974, in response to redlining, disinvestment, and abandonment.

For decades, we have developed grassroots leaders who organize around the issues affecting their lives.

We organized tenants to address housing issues. We demanded investment in our neighborhoods, a say in community plans, and accountability from institutions and government. And we won lots of really important victories over those years.

Over time, however, we saw a pattern. We could organize to save a building, win improvements, or secure an investment, but a few years later, we’d find ourselves fighting the same battle all over again.

We were constantly responding to decisions being made by people and institutions that had a lot of power over our communities but very little accountability.

So we began asking ourselves some more critical questions.

What would it take to change the conditions that kept producing these problems?

And how could residents and workers build lasting power over the assets and institutions that shape their communities? 

Those questions became especially urgent after the 2008 financial and housing crisis, as Bronx families struggled to stay in their homes and workers lost their jobs.

By 2012, we understood that while fighting back against these forces was important, it wasn't enough. That year, we shifted our mission to racial justice and economic democracy.

For us, economic democracy means building shared wealth, shared ownership, and collective governance over the assets and institutions in our communities.

This shift invited us to change the questions we asked in our campaigns.

When a major development was proposed in our community, we wanted to know who would benefit from the investment, who would own the businesses, and who would have a say in the decisions.

In our housing work, we continued to organize for repairs and tenant rights but began helping residents become owners and govern their buildings.

We shifted from fighting back against the status quo economy we inherited to what we called fighting forward, building an alternative economy that our communities deserved.

Today, the pressures on our communities are even more intense. In the Bronx, about eight out of ten households rent their homes, and more than one in four residents lives in poverty.

Our borough is full of hardworking people, talented entrepreneurs, strong institutions, and people who have kept their neighborhoods going through incredibly difficult times. Yet we see investment coming in while families struggle to stay.

We keep coming back to the same core questions…

Who owns? Who benefits? And who governs?

Those questions also pushed us to think about the scale of our organizing. We were organizing on a neighborhood level, but many of the decisions shaping our neighborhoods were being made on regional levels.

Beginning in 2019, community, faith, and labor organizations came together in the Bronx around a long-term vision for our borough. We wanted to connect the work happening across neighborhoods and issues and began developing a shared economic agenda.

We were asking some of the same questions that had guided our organizing for years, but now at a larger scale. …..specifically, what kind of economy we wanted for the Bronx?

We looked at our assets, what our community could own and govern, and how we could build the collective power to shape our borough’s future.

In 2024, that work grew into a partnership with the Bronx Economic Development Corporation to develop the Bronx’s first federally certified Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy, or CEDS.

This partnership brought together a broader range of economic actors, including financial institutions, educational and healthcare anchors, businesses, labor, housing organizations and many others. At the core, we wanted residents, workers, and small businesses to help define priorities for our borough.

During 2025, we organized several large-scale public assemblies, surveys, sector-based focus groups, and conversations across the Bronx. We trained community leaders to help facilitate these conversations, and nearly 1000 Bronx stakeholders contributed to shaping the strategy.

This year, we hosted a borough-wide economic development summit. And now we’re establishing a governance body and working groups to move those priorities forward.

Core to every stage of this work was organizing. We brought together people who don’t ordinarily work together, developed leaders, and worked through differences in priorities and power because those relationships have to last for the long-term.

While challenging, we are learning how to do that together. And we’ve learned that no single strategy will get us to economic democracy.

The challenges facing our communities are incredibly interconnected and complex. And our responses have to be creative, open to experimentation and open to new kinds of partnerships.

I want to share three areas of our work that have shaped our thinking that I hope is useful for our conversations today.
 

Housing and Community Ownership

The first is housing.

Our Bronx has a long history of organizing residents, preserving affordable housing, fighting for stronger tenant protections, and more recently, supporting residents in becoming cooperative owners of their buildings.

Housing cooperatives give residents the opportunity to collectively own their homes, make decisions about their buildings, and create long-term stability.

But becoming a housing cooperative is only the beginning of a really long and often challenging journey.

Housing cooperators still have to pay for insurance, manage rising operating costs, navigate financing and government requirements, and develop the skills and relationships to govern a building together.

The cooperative structure itself doesn’t make those challenges disappear. We’ve seen community-owned housing become vulnerable to real estate pressures without strong protections for long-term affordability.

That’s why we established the Bronx Community Land Trust in 2020, to help keep housing affordable and accountable to the community across generations.

One example is Hillcrest HDFC, an 18-unit building where we are working to rehabilitate the property and support its conversion into a limited-equity cooperative, with the Bronx Community Land Trust providing long-term stewardship.

We’re also organizing tenants, preserving existing HDFCs, and developing a pipeline of buildings in partnership with the CLT to move more housing and land out of the speculative market and into community hands.

Because of the increasing displacement pressures facing our communities, we’re working with partners across the city and state to scale this work - organizing to pass the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act and the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act to give tenants and community organizations a first opportunity to purchase buildings when they go up for sale.

We’re also organizing for acquisition financing, technical assistance, supportive public programs and other resources to match the organizing and the legislation. 

The lesson here is that building and sustaining cooperative ownership requires organizing and a supportive ecosystem if it is going to be democratic, affordable, and sustainable for the long haul.
 

Worker Cooperatives and Business Development

We've learned something similar through our work in cooperative business development.

We recently merged with our sister organization, the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, as we expanded borough-wide.

For nearly fifteen years, BCDI has helped build the infrastructure for a more democratic and locally rooted economy in the Bronx, supporting worker cooperatives, developing employee ownership business models, strengthening locally owned businesses, and bringing together partners who can help those enterprises succeed.

Worker cooperatives, many of you know, face incredible challenges. Workers manage a business, make financial decisions, share power, and build democratic governance, all while trying to remain financially viable, and often without the same access to capital, networks, and markets as established traditional businesses.

To grow these businesses, we must build the supportive infrastructure that makes that possible. Today, we are working to expand our local ecosystem through efforts like our Worker Ownership Ambassador Program, which aims to grow a network of partners supporting worker cooperatives and other employee ownership models.

We want cooperatives to partner, access financing and technical support, find affordable spaces, and secure contracts with local institutions. We also want local businesses to have opportunities to consider employee ownership because we know we need a spectrum of strategies.
 

Kingsbridge Armory

The third example is the Kingsbridge Armory.

For those who may not know it, the Kingsbridge Armory is the world’s largest armory located right in the heart of the Northwest Bronx and has sat largely vacant for decades. Our organization and our community partners have organized around its redevelopment for over 30 years. 

The Armory raised fundamental questions for our organization also - about who would benefit from public investment, what kinds of jobs would be created, and whether the surrounding community would have any meaningful role in shaping its future.

We organized for family-sustaining wages, community benefits, local hire and procurement, and affordability. And for the first time in this 3 decade organizing effort, our community asked: What would it look like if the community had an actual ownership stake in its redevelopment?

After years of organizing and negotiating, Our Bronx secured a 20 percent ownership stake in the development partnership, along with a legally binding community benefits agreement for community spaces, co-governance, and mechanisms for ongoing accountability - all for 99 years.

There is still an enormous amount of work ahead with this project.

But this win represents an important shift that we hope can become a model for New York City and the state. We need to expand the possibilities for democratic ownership and governance wherever economic decisions are being made. And we need the community organizing and institutional capacity to make those possibilities real.

I know that the Bronx is not Buffalo or Schenectady, and no one place has a model or formula to hand to another. But I have a suspicion that many of you are wrestling with similar questions.

How can residents collectively own housing stock to maintain affordability and responsive to the needs of our community?

What opportunities are there for cooperative or community ownership when a factory or commercial building sits empty, or when a longtime business owner wants to retire?

How can communities help shape major development projects before the decisions are made?

Each place has its own history and assets: our skilled workers, our local businesses, our community organizations, land, and buildings.

And we have a lot to learn from how people in different places are approaching cooperative conversions, industrial property, community land ownership, and other strategies to transform our economy to work for all of us. 

So, today, I want to offer an invitation to all of us.

Sometimes, in movements working toward economic and social change, we can become singularly invested in our own approaches that we lose sight of how much we have to learn from one another.

We debate which ownership model is most democratic, which strategy is most transformative, whether one approach goes far enough, or whether another compromises too much.

These are worthwhile debates, and we should be asking hard questions about governance, power, accountability, and whether our work is truly benefiting our people, and we should also be giving one another support to experiment and learn.

There is room in our movement for different ownership structures and paths into this work. We can stay clear about our values while making space to learn, co-create, and experiment.

Not every small business will become a worker cooperative. Not every community ownership project will have the same legal structure. Not every institution will come to this work from the same starting point.

To transform our economy, we must grow our broad and diverse movement and build collective power.

We have to bring people into this work, develop new leaders, create spaces for political education, build trust across communities and institutions, and find the issues we are willing to act on together.

We have to build enough collective power to shape policies and investments, and enough accountability to one another to stay in this work when things get difficult.

The experience and relationships in this room can help us organize statewide while remaining grounded in the communities we serve.

There is an enormous opportunity right now to move more of our economy toward shared ownership, cooperation, and community wealth.

If we want an economy built on cooperation, we have to practice cooperation in how we build it. 

I am in awe of the hard work, creativity, and sheer determination of so many of you in this room. Building democratic and cooperative institutions takes patience, commitment, resources, and trust.

So my invitation to all of us today is to be curious. Ask questions. Meet someone whose work is different from yours. Learn about the challenges they are confronting. Share what you have learned from your own successes and struggles. And look for the places where your strategies connect.

If we want an economy that belongs to all of us, we need to build a bigger we.

Thank you.