Kali Akuno on imagination and “the ways we can and must resist”

Rob Hopkins

As one of the co-founders of Cooperation Jackson and Executive Director of the non-profit division of Cooperation Jackson, Kali Akuno has spent the past four and a half years, through Cooperation Jackson, working to transform Jackson into ‘a beacon of radical politics’. For the uninitiated, Jackson is the capital city of Mississippi, with a population of around 200,000 people, with its 80% black population making it one of the blackest cities in the US, with 60% of people living below the poverty line. Cooperation Jackson is working, in a context of colonialism, white supremacy and patriarchy, to upend these dynamics through the building of a solidarity economy, to, as he puts it, “transform the material circumstances of the people living in Jackson”.