Abstract

Compositionists are committed to social justice in classrooms, in academia, and in our communities, but we must also respond creatively and strategically to the structural consequences of precarity capitalism, even more urgently so in the wake of Covid-19. Precarity has shaped both composition studies’ and community literacy’s histories, and compositionists have often had little choice but to develop entrepreneurial responses to austere conditions. In this article, we advocate owning up to this history so that we can more intentionally direct entrepreneurial practices toward social justice, noting that people across numerous communities have worked along these lines for some time. Justice-oriented entrepreneurship is especially relevant for community literacy practitioners. To contextualize this argument, we examine how scholars in community literacy and technical and professional communication have conceptualized entrepreneurship as an analytically useful frame and/or employed entrepreneurial practices themselves. We then unpack the work and values of justice entrepreneurship, highlighting traditions of communalist Black entrepreneurs who have fought for economic and political self-determination. Next, we offer a model of justice entrepreneurship practiced by Youth Enrichment Services, a Pittsburgh-based non-profit that has demonstrated community-responsive, entrepreneurial flexibility in confronting Covid. We conclude by considering the future of justice entrepreneurship in a society simultaneously trending toward further crises of precarity and, contradictorily, new opportunities for progressive experimentation.

Introduction

Compositionists find themselves at the epicenter of fundamental contradictions in contemporary higher education. Many of us align ourselves with promoting justice in classrooms and community partnerships even as austerity capitalism has exacerbated precarity for most of the field’s members, students, and community partners; indeed, the salience of these contradictions has been further illuminated by Covid-19. And yet, relative to other academic disciplines, rhetoric and composition has always confronted austerity, and in negotiating these conditions, the people who first established and later sustained the field have long pursued practices that, for all intents and purposes, can be understood as entrepreneurial. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, the discipline coalesced as an entrepreneurial response to the exigencies of open access, and whether we are talking about the rise of graduate and undergraduate degree programs within English departments, the push for stand-alone writing departments, or the establishment of university- and community-based writing centers and publishing houses, we could think of rhetoric and composition as the ultimate disciplinary startup. 

As a host of compositionists have argued over the years, these innovations have often moved forward in ways that sacrificed the concerns of labor in favor of management and, in turn, further instantiated the field’s complicity with the neoliberal university (Bousquet et al 2003; Downing et al 2002; Schell 2016; Scott 2016). These institutional realities constitute an indisputably weighty component of the field’s entrepreneurial tradition, the impacts of which have fallen most cruelly and painfully on graduate students and adjunct faculty, especially women and people of color, and which have been further exacerbated by the pandemic. As a result, many compositionists have disavowed academic entrepreneurship as irredeemably affiliated with the neoliberal drive to, among other agendas, disinvest in public education, exploit and casualize faculty labor, and abandon the civic purpose of education (Bousquet et al 2003; Downing et al 2002; Scott and Welch 2016; Spellmeyer 2012).

Our position, however, is that by recognizing the history of composition as entrepreneurial, we put ourselves on more honest ethical footing. This means acknowledging the material and ideological baggage of entrepreneurial practices that have reinforced structures of White patriarchal capitalism within and beyond the academy; but it also means raising awareness about and, as importantly, participating in more coalitional, inclusive, and progressive practices of entrepreneurship that seek to subvert these same structures. Our argument is especially relevant for community literacy practitioners whose intercultural, interdisciplinary, and inter-institutional partnerships are the most direct way that compositionists can participate in social justice work beyond classrooms; at the same time, these partnerships are especially vulnerable to the belt-tightening ethos of neoliberal austerity. In this article, then, we seek to position justice and entrepreneurship not as binary opposites but as imperfect companions, and we explore how community literacy practitioners can pursue this imperfect companionship. 

Before unpacking what we mean by justice entrepreneurship, we want to situate our approach in this manuscript. Each of us has worked for years in entrepreneurial contexts and capacities. In community-oriented courses, for instance, Paul routinely asks students to examine social problems of their choosing and then establish prototypes for what are essentially non-profit startups dedicated to addressing these issues. Teams develop materials including a mission and vision statement, a report on the rhetorical ecology of their issue, a logo and brand campaign, and a pitch to potential funders. Ben entered academia from the music industry, where entrepreneurial thinking and maneuvering are essential skills for career success (i.e., working with lawyers, record labels and representatives, creative collaborators, managers, and members of the listening audience). Dànielle is core faculty in Michigan State University’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Initiative, and she teaches one of two required courses in the university’s Minor in Entrepreneurship. Prior to this, she ran a creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship lab with a community-engagement focus for humanities students. 

We began this work together after an energizing conversation at the 2017 Conference on Community Writing in Boulder, Colorado. In the interim years, we have continued conversing, reflecting, presenting, drafting, and redrafting while also observing events in the nation and the world evolve with breathtaking speed and often tragic consequences, none more profoundly than the Covid pandemic that emerged in early 2020. But we have also observed creative entrepreneurial responses to these events grounded in values of inclusivity, community empowerment, sustainability, and wealth redistribution. This proliferation of communalist, progressive practices has convinced us that justice entrepreneurship is even more relevant to a post-Covid society. In fact, while it is impossible to predict with confidence what economic, cultural, political, and public health transformations might occur in the years ahead, we take heart from the optimism evinced by progressive authors Rutger Bregman (2020) and Naomi Klein (2021). Writing respectively about the Covid pandemic and the Texas winter storm of February 2021, Bregman and Klein (each ironically borrowing from Milton Friedman) argue that in times of crisis, the transformative responses that emerge are “the ideas that are lying around.” And increasingly, the ideas lying around are progressive policies like the Green New Deal and, more directly to our purposes here, visions of a radically transformed economic system often called the solidarity economy. As we examine below, justice entrepreneurship is ideologically consistent with this solidarity economy, and we want to ensure that justice entrepreneurship is one of the ideas lying around as communities, civic institutions, governments, and global society make the decisions and actions that shape humanity’s fate in the 21st century.^[1]By contrast, as journalist Nathan J. Robinson writes, “One of the most peculiar features of contemporary politics is how unwilling conservatives are to actually defend many of their core ideas and … Continue reading

In proposing the term justice entrepreneurship,^[2]In using this term, we are decidedly not advancing “woke capitalism,” such as Nike’s 2018 ad campaign featuring former San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who in 2016 began … Continue reading we confess to a degree of utopian thinking, but like other community-oriented scholars (Branch 2007; Freire 1994; hooks 2003; Jacobs 2005; Mathieu 2005), we find it useful to envision the world we wish to see so that we can work toward that outcome even if we will never arrive there. For us, a genuinely justice-based entrepreneurial ecosystem could only be possible amid a broad and deep social safety net woven together by, among other strands, universal health care, universal basic wealth, and debt-free college education. As we explore below, a progressive safety net along these lines would more equitably circulate both the risks and rewards that emerge from entrepreneurial endeavors, thus empowering more people to take these creative leaps, especially people from low-income communities (Bee 2018). As importantly, such an ecosystem would have to eliminate the massive racial wealth gap, as well as cultural biases about authority and leadership, that prevent many women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and differently-abled people from pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors in the first place.

We also recognize how extensively present reality deviates from this vision.^[3]In affirming the extent of our utopianism, we cite Ta-nehisi Coates’s response to Ezra Klein regarding what it would take to achieve racial justice and equality in the United States. Emphasizing … Continue reading That is, entrepreneurial initiatives occur within socially and culturally embedded ecosystems defined by intersectional power imbalances, differential access to resources, and legacies of settler colonialism and imperialism. In fact, as Scott Galloway (2020) argues in his book Post Corona, the pandemic has intensified everything dysfunctional, exploitive, and oppressive about global precarity capitalism. The dichotomous economic trajectories of the relative few who derive wealth from capital investments and of the vast majority who rely on compensation from labor starkly demonstrates this intensification in that the “world’s billionaires increased their wealth by about a fifth” during the first year of the pandemic, whereas during the same period “a quarter of U.S. adults said someone in their household was laid off or lost a job” (Vara 2021, 93). And of course, thousands of adjunct faculty, having been subjected already to marginalization and exploitation, saw their course loads reduced or eliminated entirely (Krantz 2020; Pettit 2020). We understand that efforts to enact justice-oriented values within unjust systems will invariably be compromised by those systems and, in turn, fraught with contradictions. But we argue that the same is true of any efforts via which academics promote social justice insofar as these efforts are tied to institutions that reinforce social inequity (Armstrong and Hamilton 2013; Jack 2019; Soares 2007; Tough 2019). We thus agree with Lynn Harter et al. (2004) that “realities are socially constructed by people who confront complex decisions as they struggle to enact their ideals within material and cultural situations” (422). Where we differ from the staunchest skeptics of entrepreneurship is in our guarded optimism that alternative, more just practices can, and in fact must, be cultivated, and we note that people across numerous disciplines and communities in and beyond academia have long worked along these lines. 

Business ethicist Marjorie Kelly (2012) explains that despite the still-dominant notion that entrepreneurship merely serves the bottom-line interests of capitalists seeking financial maximization, for quite some time there have existed more cooperative, distributed, and inclusive forms of entrepreneurship. Practitioners of these alternatives renounce what Kelly calls the extractive business model—epitomized by the publicly traded corporation beholden to shareholders—of postindustrial capitalism, seeking instead to establish an ecologically, biologically, and communally generative range of business practices and models that serve the interests of many stakeholders, that prioritize community ownership and coalition building, and that support a just transition to a more sustainable economic system. Penn Loh and Boone Shear (2015) define this emergent solidarity economy as “a set of practices and theories promoting democratic, just, and sustainable development” that is “consistent with democratic and transformative approaches to community development” (245). Comprised of entities and practices such as credit unions, worker-owned businesses, community land trusts, community gardens, financial seed libraries, and people’s assemblies, the solidarity economy prioritizes racial and climate justice and community self-determination (Akuno 2017, “Build”; Beery 2020; Kelley 2017). For Loh and Shear, models associated with the solidarity economy demonstrate that “another economic system is possible and already here in various forms, waiting to be realized, organized around, struggled over, and expanded,” and that this process can expand both “individual and collective agency” (245). 

Insofar as the field is concerned, we posit justice entrepreneurship as a way for community literacy practitioners to participate in this transition via partnerships that circulate communalist agency and capacity and, in turn, help create equitable, sustainable communities and societies. In doing so, we can better resist, challenge, and subvert the most unjust consequences of precarity capitalism while also contributing to knowledge about how rhetors and writers critically and ethically pursue such work; this includes centralizing the sociocultural complexities of engagement across lines of power, identity, and politics; subverting attempts to silence and marginalize; and promoting counter-efforts to speak truth to power, all of which are in play in workplaces, community partnerships, and social movements. And because in many instances, faculty and students will be the ones learning from community-based entrepreneurs, justice entrepreneurship provides another mechanism for leveling the hierarchies of knowledge-making that so many practitioners have contended with over the past few decades (Cushman 1998; Mathieu 2005; Parks and Pollard 2009). Experiencing firsthand how justice-oriented entrepreneurs strive to build economic solidarity in community spaces beyond the academy might in the long run help us envision and work toward a truly solidarity-based university. To put it another way, justice entrepreneurship in community literacy means helping to ensure that, decades from now, these emerging practices will be perceived by a radically transformed society as the ideas lying around when the Covid crisis emerged.

To contextualize our argument, we provide a brief overview of how various compositionists, particularly those affiliated with technical and professional communication and community literacy, have conceptualized entrepreneurship as an analytically useful frame and/or employed entrepreneurial practices themselves. We then more directly unpack the economic and critical work of justice entrepreneurship, which seeks to subvert the power dynamics of mainstream entrepreneurial narratives and to experiment with inclusive solidarity-based structures that recognize and respond to histories of injustice and intolerance; that catalyze wide benefits for the many rather than financial maximization for the few; and that expand public understandings of revenue and capital beyond the economic and financial to the cultural, social, and political. In unpacking these values and practices, we briefly explore traditions of justice entrepreneurship in marginalized communities, emphasizing a long history of African American activists employing entrepreneurship toward the establishment of economic and political self-determination. We then examine in more detail a model of justice entrepreneurship practiced by Youth Enrichment Services, a Pittsburgh-based non-profit that has demonstrated community-responsive, entrepreneurial flexibility in confronting Covid. We conclude by arguing that the pursuit of justice entrepreneurship is even more urgent—if yet more complicated—amid an economic and political landscape characterized by expanded precarity on the one hand and a revitalized progressivism on the other.

A Brief Overview of Entrepreneurship in the Field

In subfields associated with rhetoric and composition, technical and professional communication (TPC) scholars have done the most to study entrepreneurship as a discursive practice (e.g., Fraiberg 2017; Lauren and Pigg 2016; Spinuzzi 2017), with some scholars emphasizing both the opportunities and challenges of connecting entrepreneurship to social justice in the field (Jones 2017) or in coursework (Bay and Ruiz 2020). Although, as Ryan Weber and John Spartz (2015) note, even TPC scholars “largely ignored entrepreneurship and its population of writers” until fairly recently (53). Entrepreneurship was also a key theme of Joyce Locke Carter’s Chair’s address at the 2016 CCCC in Houston, and various writing consultants have considered their work in entrepreneurial terms (Shaver et al. 2009; Tauber 2016). Some community literacy practitioners have also participated directly in entrepreneurial endeavors. David Jolliffe et al. (2016), for example, established the Students Involved in Sustaining Their Arkansas (SISTA), via which high school students in the Arkansas Delta received funding and mentorship to develop business plans for community revitalization projects. Other practitioners have analyzed their programs through the lens of entrepreneurial studies, such as Frank Ridzi et al. (2011), who trace the establishment of a literacy coalition in Central New York as a combination of social entrepreneurship ^[4]Although there is inevitably some overlap, we think it vital to distinguish justice entrepreneurship from the widely used phrase social entrepreneurship, which is frequently understood as extending … Continue reading and institutional entrepreneurship, a process whereby community members “lead efforts to identify political opportunities, frame issues and problems, and mobilize constituencies” (103). Broadly speaking, we believe that community literacy is an evocative site for considering how entrepreneurship operates in the field, because practitioners invariably confront concrete challenges related to procuring and sustaining project funds. This can include scrambling to find alternative revenue streams when previous sources—especially precarious public funding—dry up. 

Indeed, a noteworthy example of this latter phenomenon can be seen with the National Writing Project (NWP), one of the field’s earliest and most enduring entrepreneurial networks comprised of compositionists, K-12 teachers, and a wide range of community partners in sites throughout the nation. Tom Fox and Elyse Eidman-Aadahl’s (2016) essay “The National Writing Project in the Age of Austerity” recounts how, in the aftermath of deep cuts to federal funding in 2011, the NWP faced an existential challenge: how to survive financially as an organization while “keeping its principles of equity and social justice at the center, and honoring teachers’ knowledge about the teaching of writing” (89). To negotiate their austere conditions, local NWP sites leveraged networks that had emerged over decades in order to “rely less on the national office and more on each other” (83). Among these changes were that the 

Network of urban sites now is handled by individual sites managing a conference through fees, university support, and, occasionally, commercial sponsors, instead of money from the national office. Other writing projects have transformed or developed yearly conferences, inviting the network to exchange smart and thoughtful ways to implement the Common Core State Standards. (83-4)

The NWP example illustrates that within our deeply precarious institutional contexts—and, in this case, within the larger national landscape—the projects at most risk may be those we engage in with communities beyond academia, especially those associated with promoting literacy for justice. Inevitably, community-oriented compositionists will face tough budgetary choices: downsize projects significantly, shut down all together, or find ways to generate support—including monetary support—to keep doing work the partners believe in. This capacity for adaptation is particularly vital in the post-Covid political economy of community literacy, one in which public austerity measures might become still more punishing even as wealthy people, having made out so well in the pandemic, increase philanthropic donations. 

Exploring Values, Practices, and Traditions of Justice Entrepreneurship

Perhaps the most compelling reason to embrace our entrepreneurial tradition is that we have much to learn from community-based entrepreneurs who have negotiated austere circumstances while promoting justice-oriented values. Participating in, experimenting with, and helping to circulate narratives that centralize the work, values, and experiences of these innovators represents a concrete way for community literacy practitioners to challenge predominant, exclusionary conceptions about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. Toward this end, we turn now to exploring how entrepreneurship can be more purposefully directed toward social justice. Of course, social justice is itself a complicated term that bears on every aspect of human experience; the term is also necessarily ambiguous. As Frey et al. (1996) explain:

Social justice is not the sort of thing that can ever be measured or shorn of ambiguity. Rather, it is always open to debate, always particular rather than abstract or general; it is an end we seek in particular instances of contingent action, rather than a telos at which we arrive once and for all. (110)

To be sure, all particular instances involve fighting inequality and empowering people who have been systematically marginalized and oppressed. We thus follow technical communication scholars Natasha Jones and Rebecca Walton (2018), whose research in social justice “investigates how communication, broadly defined, can amplify the agency of oppressed people—those who are materially, socially, politically, and/or economically under-resourced” (242). 

To accentuate the entrepreneurial components of this work, we want to consider Jones and Walton’s goal of enhancing agency among oppressed people as a form of collectivist capacity-building. Our framing here is guided by community development theorist Jnanabrata Bhattacharyya (2004), who describes human agency as “the capacity of people to order their world, the capacity to create, reproduce, change, and live according to their own meaning systems, to have the powers to define themselves as opposed to being defined by others” (12). Building on the arguments of Jones and Walton (2018) and Bhattacharyya (2004), we propose justice entrepreneurship as the generation and circulation of practices, values, ideas, knowledges, narratives, and material resources toward collectivist economic and cultural capacity. Justice entrepreneurship thus supports the autonomy and resilience of communities against the degrading and extractive forces of precarity capitalism. And perhaps most relevant to community literacy practitioners—as we examine further below—justice entrepreneurship makes visible and helps to change the systemic forces and biases that shape the contemporary entrepreneurial ecosystem.

To further elucidate what we mean by collectivist capacity-building, we want to pick up an earlier thread of utopian thinking about entrepreneurial risk and reward. Risk-taking is, after all, inevitable to processes of innovation because ideas, technologies, organizations, and other resources that people seek to bring into the world may not have significant impact or prove sustainable—that is, produce desired rewards—at least not the first time around. For us, the problem is not that new ideas and ventures come with risk. On the contrary, the learning that can emerge from entrepreneurial failure can be as useful in the long run, maybe even more so, than when a project “succeeds” right away (Byrne and Shepherd 2015; Singh et al. 2015). The problem, rather, is that within the existing entrepreneurial ecosystem, the consequences of risk-taking are so unequally distributed. Mainstream entrepreneurship in our neoliberal era has, for example, come to be associated with self-employment, which has significant legal and material implications that jeopardize access to healthcare and a stable income. These conditions discourage people who have creative ideas, but who lack capacity derived from generational wealth or access to networks of financial capital, from prototyping and implementing these ideas. The underlying message of the prevailing system is that all but the most privileged should be punished for trying something new and failing. As mentioned earlier, establishing a strong social safety net would allow a much more inclusive population of aspiring entrepreneurs to engage in risk-taking. Such an ecosystem would reflect broad societal recognition that innovation requires a willingness to tolerate failure,^[5]The societal circulation of risk does have precedent in American society, of course, but not in ways designed to redress inequality. This was most infamously seen in the federal government’s … Continue reading and it would support a virtuous cycle of collectivist capacity-building in which historically marginalized communities are empowered to circulate knowledge, wealth, and culturally sustaining practices that nurture both individual and communal welfare. 

Crucially, there already exists a significant history of marginalized entrepreneurs confronting White supremacy in order to establish a base of financially successful businesses and, in turn, to cultivate self-determination. Among African American communities, for example, traditions of de-coupling entrepreneurship from capitalist exploitation and marginalization extend back to chattel slavery. Historian Jessica Gordon Nembhard (2017) traces currents of cooperative economic and entrepreneurial thought and practice in the scholarship and activism of W.E.B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Ella Baker, A. Philip Randolph, and many others, arguing that for centuries the pursuit of “economic alternatives and solidarity economic relationships” have been central to the resistance to slavery and oppression “even in the face of sabotage and violence” (171). This history of violence includes, of course, the massacre and destruction of the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma—a thriving early 20th-century business center often referred to as “Black Wall Street”—by White mobs in 1921 (Luckerson 2018). The story of the Tulsa Massacre was forgotten by White Americans, by design (Blow 2021), for decades until finally receiving significant attention from journalists and politicians leading up to the Massacre’s centennial in 2021. This assault was far from an isolated incident, with similar attacks against Black businesses occurring in communities including Springfield, Illinois in 1908, St. Louis in 1917, and Chicago in 1919 (Gold 2016, 1707).

Featured prominently in Gordon Nembhard’s (2017) timeline is Fannie Lou Hamer, who established the Freedom Farm Corporation in Mississippi in the late 1960s, arguing that “Cooperative ownership of land opens the door to many opportunities for group development of economic enterprises which develop the total community rather than create monopolies that monopolize the resources of a community” (qtd. in Gordon Nembhard 2017, 177). Inspired in part by Hamer’s legacy, activists in Jackson, Mississippi have spent years working to establish Black economic and political self-determination, a project highlighted by the election of radical civil rights lawyer Chokwe Lumumba as Mayor in 2013. Central to this work was the establishment in 2014 of Cooperation Jackson, a network of interconnected organizations and institutions whose collective mission is “Building a solidarity economy … anchored by a network of cooperatives and worker-owned, democratically self-managed enterprises” (“Welcome”). Components of this network include local cooperatives, a “Cooperative Incubator,” a “Cooperative School and Training Center,” and cooperative credit unions and banks (Akuno 2017, “Build,” 15-16). Cooperation Jackson co-founder and co-director Kali Akuno argues that “We have to be clear, crystal clear, that self-determination is unattainable without an economic base. And not just your standard economic base, meaning a capitalist oriented one, but a democratic one” (“Build,” 7). For Akuno, “economic democracy and the transition to eco-socialism have to come from below, not from above” (“Build,” 8). In practice, this bottom-up energy in Jackson is generated by People’s Assemblies, which Akuno describes as a “mass gathering” that engages at least one-fifth of a community’s population and that “allows people to direct their agency, exert their power, and practice democracy … in its broadest terms, which entails making direct decisions about the economic, social and cultural operations of a community or society (“People’s,” 87). While actualizing these goals will require partnerships that extend far beyond the municipality of Jackson itself, Akuno nevertheless advocates utopian imagination about future possibilities. That is, “We firmly believe that we must demand the impossible, both of the world and of ourselves, in order to change both subjects” (14).

The fact that many people whom community literacy practitioners might partner with beyond the academy perceive their work in entrepreneurial terms reinforces for us the necessity of embracing justice entrepreneurship in the field so that we may both further support these efforts and, as importantly, learn over time to confront precarity capitalism within the academy itself. We thus imagine various ways that community literacy practitioners can both participate in and help circulate these counterhegemonic practices, narratives, and values. Such work might include partnering with businesses and organizations run by locally based entrepreneurs who are committed to community empowerment; helping students leverage their own resources and human capital in justice-oriented ways; and conducting ethnographic case studies, participatory action research partnerships, and other forms of collaborative research. 

As one example of such scholarship, we want to highlight Natasha Jones’s (2017) narrative inquiry into how Black entrepreneurs build both cultural and economic agency from their lived experiences. Jones argues that these narratives “should be examined as important representations of accomplished business ownership and examples of the innovative and creative deployment of rhetorical and economic strategies” (320). For Jones, such narratives demonstrate that Black business owners “are actively pushing back against discriminatory economic systems and finding ways to work within oppressive institutions. Black entrepreneurship, in this way, can be understood as cultural as well as economic” (325). These narratives also demonstrate how marginalized entrepreneurs critically engage in the development and circulation of entrepreneurial discourses to survive within austere circumstances and, in doing so, sustain their livelihoods and cultural practices. The connection of critical action to economic force is highlighted by this participant from Jones’s study, who explains, “Our money needs to go to our communities, our homes, and businesses. It’s the only way black lives are going to matter, that’s if our money matters first” (339). 

This insight, applied to a national landscape of communalist entrepreneurs persisting and rebuilding in the wake of Covid’s devastating economic and public health consequences, becomes even more striking. That is, having experienced disproportionate impacts from Covid, many entrepreneurs of color have taken leading roles in sustaining their communities through the pandemic crisis. These initiatives, which have both emerged from and reinforced a “symbiotic relationship between BIPOC entrepreneurs and their communities” (Lang 2020), have included providing food relief in food-insecure neighborhoods, setting up community libraries and book drives, and expanding access to affordable health care (Lang 2020). Similarly, some local communities have rallied around small businesses owned by people of color, especially Black owners. At Michigan State University, in the department in which Ben and Dànielle work, the communications team (led by a master’s student and two undergraduate interns) launched, in May 2020, a Black-owned businesses social media campaign focused on the local community along with a Black artist spotlight. These examples demonstrate that solidarity, cultural empowerment, and community resilience are core values for justice entrepreneurs; at the same time, justice entrepreneurs recognize that the tactics and strategies they employ to enact their core values must be flexibly responsive to community needs and goals—reflecting what one might call a sense of entrepreneurial kairos—because the material, political, and cultural circumstances evolve continually.

Situated Flexibility in the Community: Youth Enrichment Services, Pittsburgh

To further unpack this notion of community-situated entrepreneurial flexibility, particularly in the wake of Covid, we offer now a case study of Youth Enrichment Services (YES), a non-profit in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty neighborhood with whom Paul has partnered since 2018. Central to the mission of YES, which incorporated as a 501(c)(3) in 1994, is to “give young people from inner-city and urban communities a portrait of themselves as successful, empowered, and confident leaders” (“Home”). Having worked with more than 3,500 mostly African American middle and high school students, YES cultivates students’ individual agency to succeed academically and professionally, as well as their collective agency to effect change in the community, employing a model that centralizes peer mentorship. As YES Founder and Executive Director Dr. Dennis Floyd Jones—known among YES staff and students as Dr. Jones—puts it, “We put them in various positions where we have high expectations … The key to it is to make them accountable to each other. As the students become certified through our mentorship certification program … they give back in a significant way by helping the younger kids, being a role model, volunteering, being active in all of our programs” (Feigenbaum et al. 2019, 118). 

Key components of YES’s model include championing students’ accomplishments to families and the broader community through its summer YES Student Research Symposium and its annual awards banquet. Students also receive compensation for their work, which can take the form of clerical jobs in the YES office, positions in designated workplaces around Pittsburgh, as well as community-based research and advocacy projects (Jones et al. 2021, “Motivation”). In 2017-18, for example, YES students worked with local university and government partners on a citizen-science research campaign to better understand and raise public awareness about lead-contaminated drinking water in various Pittsburgh communities of color (Jones et al. 2020, “Preliminary”). Students were uniquely equipped to carry out key tasks such as collecting data, facilitating conversations between families and health officials, mapping community assets, and organizing neighborhood meetings. As locals, YES students enjoyed built-in community trust, enabling them to engage community members in ways that government officials simply could not have done (D. Jones 2019, “Restoring”). 

As a non-profit for the past 27 years, YES exemplifies the situated flexibility and responsiveness of justice entrepreneurship, sustaining its core values of youth advocacy and empowerment even as it negotiates the constantly evolving landscape of local, regional, and national priorities that shape access to governmental and philanthropic funding and resources. That is, YES is both firmly rooted in, and able to adapt in reciprocal relationship with, the community. Significantly, Dr. Jones began the non-profit while also employed as a tenure-track faculty member in the College of Physical Activity and Sport Sciences at West Virginia University (WVU), but as a longtime Pittsburgh resident, he spent his professorial career commuting to WVU in Morgantown rather than the other way around.^[6]Dr. Jones retired from WVU in 2021, though he remains Executive Director at YES. As importantly, YES is an embedded presence in East Liberty and surrounding neighborhoods, with students who come to YES at age 12 or 13 often staying involved into their early adulthood while also expanding YES’s network to their siblings and friends. 

Insofar as the politics of community-university partnerships are concerned, YES’s nonprofit status has shielded it from strategic university incursions of the sort that have been extensively documented in the engagement literature (Cushman 1998; Feigenbaum 2015; Goldblatt 2007; Mathieu 2005; Parks 2010). For example, as a scholar straddling the complicated intersection of higher education and non-profit work, Dr. Jones experienced what he considers to be a combination of indifference and antagonism from institutional supervisors at WVU about his affiliation with YES, which did not “count” for his research, teaching, and service assignments at the university (D.F. Jones, 25 July, 2018); this despite WVU’s status as a land-grant institution whose mission includes “creating a diverse and inclusive culture that advances education, healthcare and prosperity for all by providing access and opportunity” (“Mission”). Crucially, however, even if WVU did not support Dr. Jones’s community work, the university had no leverage to shut the non-profit down. Furthermore, YES’s non-profit status has helped the organization pursue and leverage entrepreneurial partnerships with faculty and programs from various institutions of higher education in the greater Pittsburgh area, including the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, The Community College of Allegheny College, and Chatham University.^[7]Located in Miami, Florida, Paul’s home institution of Florida International University (FIU) is rather geographically distant from Pittsburgh. Paul and Dr. Jones met serendipitously as Red Cross … Continue reading Through these partnerships, YES has developed a wide-ranging literacy extracurriculum in areas including health and wellness, sports science, finance, computer science, engineering, and community advocacy (Jones and Jones 2020, “Transcend”; Jones and Jones 2021, Growth). Along the lines of a model described by Steve Parks (2010) in his book Gravyland, YES’s non-profit status helps it “lobby” universities as community stakeholders rather than as institutional goliaths with disproportional power to shape the terms of engagement (204). 

However, like so many resource-limited non-profits trying to survive and meet payroll in the deeply competitive landscape of the contemporary philanthropic-industrial complex (Feigenbaum 2015), YES faces an unrelenting parade of exigencies that can physically and emotionally tax staff members and divert energy from engaging students. These challenges include satisfying the various legal requirements of maintaining a non-profit, executing multiple grants at any given time and regularly seeking further funding to sustain or expand existing projects or to develop new ones as student and community needs and goals evolve. Sometimes this means scrambling to write a grant that staff members have learned about with just a few days advanced notice (D.F. Jones, 25 July, 2018). And because the system is designed not to meet the needs of YES’s target population, empowering students requires a holistic approach. As Dr. Jones puts it:

Invariably, we wind up not only trying to work with the students in academic and enrichment programs, but also providing them with food, travel, transportation, helping them to access fees for getting to and from their work, applying for various schools and colleges. Helping to monitor a lot of their absences in school. Many of these youth face two choices: Stay home and watch young siblings, or watch the only provider in the house lose their job. Those are not two choices that you would like to see. (Feigenbaum et al. 2019, 117)

Within its local context, that is, YES finds itself plugging gaping holes in the social safety net.

But amid the imperfect companionship of justice entrepreneurship, the organization’s community embeddedness, and its networks of both formal and informal sponsors, promote solidarity and sustainability. For instance, families and local community members regularly help with tasks such as organizing and facilitating YES events, raising funds, leading literacy workshops, and serving as observers and jurists at the annual Research Symposium (Feigenbaum et al. 2019, 118). These networks were especially key when Covid-19 upended operations and jeopardized programming in 2020. In-person meetings at YES’s office shut down in February—earlier than many places in the U.S.—because the organization had no means to protect both students and staff during afterschool programming at the office, where up to 50 people could be present at a given time. Amid this upheaval, YES effected a rapid shift to virtual programming, leveraging existing partnerships with organizations that support community tech capacity in order to equip staff and to help ensure internet access for students (D. Jones, 21 Dec. 2020).

The Covid shutdown occurred amid the piloting of the YES Incubator, an initiative that seeks to enhance students’ entrepreneurial literacy, to support community-based businesses, and to generate (and keep) wealth in the community. Phase One of the Incubator, which paired students with local businesses and non-profits, had previously launched in Summer 2019. Partnering organizations were selected because of their expressed commitment to supporting local community and business development. These included Cocoapreneur, whose mission is “to foster an environment of economic prosperity … to ensure more sustainable neighborhoods for the historically African American communities and neighborhoods around Pittsburgh, PA” (“About Us”), and Auberle, a non-profit that provides a variety of educational, professional, and health-related programming to local families (“Who We Are”). The students learned from the expertise of local entrepreneurs, but they also built capacity for these resource-constrained organizations, which included developing marketing strategies via human-centered design and conducting strength-weakness-opportunities-threats (SWOT) analyses to help owners better utilize their existing resources. Phase One culminated with cohort members creating and presenting posters at YES’s 2019 Student Research Symposium (D. Jones and McLaughlin 2019).

Phase Two was originally scheduled to launch in Spring 2020, focusing more directly on students’ own ideas for developing local businesses. Instead, staff and students adapted to constraints associated with virtual programming and the overwhelming urgency of the pandemic, turning their entrepreneurial thinking toward problem-solving in the community. To preserve some level of autonomy, staff encouraged students to form their own teams around common interests and then to undertake a process of communicating with community stakeholders, ideating and prototyping potential responses to designated issues, conducting market research, and finally pitching their product ideas to staff, community members, and peers (D. Jones, 3 Aug. 2021). Prototypes that emerged included a “robotic food delivery service to reduce Covid-19 contact” and “laptop services for low-income families seeking technology access for distance learning” (D. Jones, 21 Dec. 2020). Then in Summer 2020, YES partnered with two organizations that employ more structured entrepreneurial programming for underserved youth. One group of students worked with Junior Achievement of Western Pennsylvania, developing ideas such as a business that would sell diabetes-healthy snacks and another that would sell ethnic hair products. A second group of ten students, working with the non-profit WeThrive, developed an idea for a tutoring company (D. Jones, 21 Dec. 2020). 

As YES Assistant Executive Director Denise Jones explains, these established programs did not offer as much autonomy for students to develop their own ideas as did the original plan for the YES Incubator, but “that’s what [our] capacity enabled at the time,” and students were “still immersed in the process” of thinking through innovative responses to community challenges made much more exigent by the pandemic (4 Dec. 2020). Jones adds that the disproportionate pressures Covid-19 has placed on low-income communities of color means that, more than ever, “students have to make it work with the very limited resources they have” (D. Jones, 4 Dec. 2020). The exacerbation of inequities brought about by Covid thus makes the communal circulation of agency and solidarity that much more crucial. Insofar as future phases of the YES Incubator are concerned, Jones explains that more emphasis will be placed on building capacity for local businesses struggling to survive amid the pandemic (4 Dec. 2020). The Incubator, then, will continue to demonstrate situated flexibility in response to an extended Covid recovery process.

Conclusion: Justice Entrepreneurship amid the Contradictions of Accelerating Precarity and (Hopefully) Rejuvenated Progressivism

We believe that community-responsive, flexible practices of justice entrepreneurship, such as Youth Enrichment Services, offer concrete opportunities for community literacy practitioners, their partners, and other progressive stakeholders to begin wresting the political, cultural, and even affective implications of entrepreneurship from the hands of neoliberals and repurposing them toward a more just, as well as culturally and ecologically sustaining, society. We believe as well that the work of building a solidarity economy can and must take different forms as partners experiment with both existing and emergent models of inclusive and egalitarian decision-making and action. Because justice and entrepreneurship are imperfect companions, people need time, and multiple opportunities, to learn which organizational structures genuinely circulate communalist capacity and support coalition-building, and which do not. In practice, collaborators seeking to implement justice amid oppressive systems must negotiate the material, political, and cultural constraints that are built into these systems, which will invariably create ideological tensions. Embracing the messiness that attends the ideation and implementation of new ideas, knowledge, and structures is, after all, fundamental to the work of entrepreneurship. There is unfortunately no checklist one can codify for guiding and efficiently evaluating this work; collaborators must adapt amid dynamic and interconnected local, national, and global factors, and they may “fail” in the sense of running out of funds, losing necessary institutional support, or seeing key partners withdraw for one reason or another. But as we have stressed, a key component of building a just entrepreneurial ecosystem is enabling entrepreneurs from marginalized backgrounds to repeatedly experience and learn from failure—just as more privileged entrepreneurs routinely do (Standen 2018)—and to circulate their learning in ways that further nurture collectivist capacity.

In advocating such experimentation, we recognize with soberness the enormous and enduring power of neoliberal economic and political agendas and their implications for the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Covid, after all, accelerated the consolidation of power by corporate behemoths like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook (Galloway 2020; MacGillis 2021). Just as ominously, legislation like the 2020 passage of Proposition 22 in California represents another effort by precarity capitalists to extract wealth from low-income communities and to prevent the societal redistribution of risk and reward. Fueled by more than $200 million in advertisements by companies like Uber and Lyft, Prop 22 overturned a 2019 California law that had reclassified gig workers as employees, thus guaranteeing access to wages and benefits. Now Californian gig workers will again be classified as independent contractors who lack “full benefits, true minimum wage guarantees and stability” (Bensinger 2020). Most portentously, the corporate backers of Prop 22 plan to pursue similar ballot initiatives in other states. 

And yet, the multilayered crises brought about by Covid have created unprecedented opportunities for progressive experiments in policymaking that themselves reflect justice-oriented entrepreneurial values of communal risk, agency, and capacity. Examples in various communities nationwide have included the authorization of car-free zones to support pedestrian safety, significant increases in unemployment benefits, the elimination of bail, and increased public investment in independent living spaces for people experiencing homelessness (Cohen 2021). And some pundits argue that the passage of the nearly two trillion-dollar American Rescue Plan in March 2021 signaled the Democratic Party’s final rejection of neoliberalism in favor of a much more explicitly progressive politics (Beauchamp 2021). Will such initiatives and experiments endure after the immediate crisis of the pandemic has subsided? We don’t yet know. And we don’t know how Covid-19 has and will continue to change the shape of capitalism, as well as the means by which we can at the very least question precarity capitalism, and at the most, work to transform it. That said, we are simultaneously hopeful and skeptical.

Amid these experiments at local, national, and global scales, and amid the enduring systemic challenges and the global pandemic context, we do not argue that practices of justice entrepreneurship alone can resolve the consequences of precarity as they operate both in and beyond academic spaces, or in the context of what capitalism might look like in the coming years as our communities, institutions, cities, and countries recalibrate economically. We emphatically agree that austere circumstances harm the quality of our individual and collective professional lives and our working conditions in unacceptable ways. But we argue for engaging in the production and circulation of critical entrepreneurial practices, values, and narratives that speak back to these austere conditions, as well as subverting the political and cultural forces that engender these conditions. In advocating this position, we also appreciate that we have much to learn from individuals and collectives in various communities who are already doing such work as they navigate the dynamics of a deeply unequal political, economic, and social ecosystem, and who have been doing so for quite some time.

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