The 2023-24 Blum Center Student Leader Team is tackling an array of critical issues this year, including UCSB’s student housing crisis, advancing regional equity on the Central Coast of California, and promoting the collective solutions and ideas of cooperative economics. We will also be hosting workshops, forums, and research symposia and welcome all to participate. Come join us in the work!

This past Spring Quarter, the Blum Center hosted its first combined research symposium featuring original UCSB faculty and student projects centered on The Dr. U.S. Awathi Initiative in Cooperative Economics, and the Central Coast Regional Equity Initiative. This is our inaugural year featuring Central Coast Regional Equity research at UCSB and our second year supporting Cooperative Economics projects, and we invite you to learn more about these respective presentations in the newsletter.

We are also pleased to announce the 2023/24 Central Coast Regional Equity awardees, and Cooperative Economics awardees, for the up-coming year. UCSB faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students are tackling an array of issues including California essential workers’ access to legal knowledge, undocumented high school students’ funding for secondary education, gendered labor markets in post-socialist states, the role of economic democracy within social networks, home care cooperatives, democratic decision-making in the classroom, the power of queer bookstores and transnational networks, LGBT+ publishing opportunities in Brazil, and network support within BIPOC farmer communities.

Please use this link to access the full newsletter.

UC Berkeley Labor Center's recent analysis of U.S. Census data reflects major shifts in the demographics of organized labor over the past twenty years with the uptake that "it’s not your grandfather’s union anymore." 

Today, "at least half of all of California’s 2.5 million union members are women and that the majority of all union workers are people of color. By contrast, 20 years ago the typical union member in California was a white man. This shift in the portrait of union membership comes as a 'hot union summer' across the state rolls into what promises to be an equally militant fall, with public support for unions higher than it has been since the 1960s." 

Learn more about this labor union phenomenon by accessing the California Union Membership and Coverage: 2023 Chartbook.