Leanna Browne
Embedded Files
Program Manager, North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship, Nexus Community Partners
Conference Participation
Reclaiming Collective Courage: Black Cooperative Histories and the Future of Ownership
Abstract: This presentation explores cooperative and shared ownership as rooted alternatives to extractive economic systems. What is often framed as “new” is grounded in long histories of collective survival and resistance in Black communities, from mutual aid societies to freedom farms to cooperative enterprises built in response to exclusion and harm. This work reclaims those traditions and carries them forward.
Drawing from the North Star Black Cooperative Fellowship, this session highlights how leaders practice economic democracy through shared governance, community ownership, and collective care. It centers political education and storytelling as tools to name systems and reconnect to ways of organizing that have always existed.
This is not just theory, but a pathway toward dignity, self determination, and community controlled futures rooted in justice and liberation.
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Biography: Leanna is passionate about facilitating spaces where Black people can connect holistically to themselves and each other. She is excited to deepen her learning about cooperatives and support community wealth building, particularly in Black communities. Her background includes experience in the arts, direct service, youth work, and data collection in research and evaluation. Leanna is also a dancer, choreographer, and teaching artist with a passion for using dance to build community and promote social change. In 2022, she became a Certified Professional Teacher in Umfundalai, a contemporary African dance technique, which means “essence” or “essential” in Kiswahili. Leanna holds a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Special Major in Dance & Black Studies from Swarthmore College.
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