Music keeps us thriving and excited—and performance spaces can become magnets for community organizing.

Tamah Yisrael, an energizing and experienced new member of the Columinate team, connects and organizes the community. Thanks to her work as a co-op board member, start-up co-op leader, comptroller, chief financial officer, loan officer, musician, and education/outreach coordinator, Yisrael is invested in figuring out new solutions to old problems from within her community.

“The ultimate work is power shifting. What is the path towards shifting power—does it look like cooperatives, does it look like strategies that include cooperative values and principles? I’m happy to offer part of the solution,” says Yisrael.

She was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, in a community developed out of the coal mining industry. Yisrael says her exposure to economic disparity and her own experiences with employment disparity underlie her passion for organizing in black and brown communities. However, it was organizing a music school with her family that squarely placed her on the path to being an organizer.

After Yisrael landed in New Orleans, Louisiana, with her musician husband and family, they saw a need for performance places for children. “Music keeps us thriving and excited. Being able to express and create is a critical part of being in existence. But shows were isolated to where adults could perform.” With her business management lens, Yisrael organized the Neo Jazz School of Music—a space in which children could perform too.

These performance spaces became magnets for community organizing. While the work is wrapped around arts and culture, for Yisrael it is also fueled by her own exposure to work-related issues and economic issues that hurt black and brown communities. “In creating shows, you are connecting with people, promoting, asking other talent to be part of the show. In the co-creation of the performance, you are already in the space of building a community and building economic strategies,” she asserts.

Yisrael found that she and her music collaborators were already talking about things that are important, discussing commonalities and ways to solve problems. As a result, music shows grew into outreach and connections with parents who have a slew of problems to solve. It is community organizing based around simply, ‘Let’s sit down and talk about this, let’s have dinner together, let’s talk about what we can do to meet a need in our community.’ Holding the space for performances is the organizing seed. From there, it’s more connections; next, programs; and from there, more actions to address inequity and re-balance power.

Discovering cooperatives

During the Neo Jazz School of Music’s early years, Yisrael also discovered the New Orleans Food Co-op (opened in 2011), her first exposure to a commercial cooperative enterprise. She quickly found that cooperative practices resonate with her, and after shopping in the store and participating in the co-op’s hands-on member program, was asked to join the board of directors. Her community organizing and social justice advocacy broadened to include access to healthy foods. And Yisrael started seeing a need to connect the black community to cooperative-based enterprises.

She co-founded Cooperation New Orleans to build a path for people who are in the working class to have ownership. Yisrael and her colleagues aim to strengthen the cooperative infrastructure in New Orleans by developing political education and practicing language justice, sharing skills and resources, and developing a community loan fund. Yisrael regards herself as a connector who sees cooperative practices showing up in communities. She sees a need to build out ecosystems from co-op grocery stores, and to support organizing around consumer co-ops in black communities.

In the recent Columinate internal Ends survey of impact highlights, Yisrael reflected on her contribution to Common Good services provided to resident-owned communities:

“Common Good was faced with some challenges in meeting our financial report deadlines. Having this issue right out the gate caused concern for some of these communities. I was able to provide direct engagement with the resident owners, giving them more context and allowing us to deepen the relationship and eventually work toward problem-solving to meet their needs.”

“My strong point,” said Yisrael, “is connecting with people in community and doing the organizing. I work to create a point of empowerment for folks that are looking to organize cooperatives, and I’m well-equipped from my previous co-op experience to understand how decision-making looks.” As a trained facilitator in cooperative governance, she is familiar with how Policy Governance can help communities. Additionally, though it is still under development through Columinate, Yisrael is ready to offer contract finance manager services for start-up co-ops.

This mixer and mingler in the co-op sector seeks to build trust in the social spaces where Columinate works. Yisrael recognizes how co-op practices show up in communities, and her expertise in organizing will yield access to resources that are meaningful for strengthening community.