Reviving the Cherokee language is a full-time job – literally

by Kristi Eaton, Next City: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/reviving-the-cherokee-language-is-a-full-time-job-literally

A Cherokee language class in pre-COVID times (Photo credit: Cherokee Nation)

Though Jacob Chavez grew up around family members who spoke Cherokee - his grandmother was fluent and his father could understand the language - the 23-year-old didn’t learn it as a child.

Now, as a young adult, the Tahlequah, Oklahoma, resident is taking part in a unique program to train Cherokee Nation citizens and those interested in Cherokee culture to become highly proficient in the language by paying them to study it. It’s one that is quickly disappearing.

“It’s in my family and I would like to kind of like, build it back and strengthen it back amongst some of our younger generation that we have and then, it’s just a passion that I’ve had — probably since senior year of high school,” Chavez says. “I just wanted to have that part of my identity and I’ve just been working on it ever since. And I took a couple classes in high school and in college and then now I’m in this program.”

The Cherokee Language Master Apprentice Program is an immersion program for adult Cherokee language learners. The program is geared for novice language enthusiasts, and it is intense: The 40-hour-per-week program runs for two years. Participants are paid $10 per hour, says Howard Paden, Cherokee Nation Language Department executive director.

“It’s not a whole lot, but what we have learned is people who have been really dedicated to learn the language—you have to have that many consecutive hours so they have to have the ability to live and continue to put some groceries on the table and that sort of thing,” he says. “So, it’s worked out really well. You know, we haven’t expected to make them be rich by any means, but we do want them to survive while they learn the language. And so that incentive has allowed people to focus just on the language instead of other things.”

The program, which started about six years ago, has grown. It went from having four students per year to 16, so at any given time, there will be 32 participants taking part in the two-year program when fully filled, Paden says.

For the Cherokee Nation — the largest tribe in the United States by population with more than 380,000 citizens worldwide — the program is taking on extra importance. There are about 2,000 fluent Cherokee speakers, according to Paden, and in the last year, more than 100 have died, some due to COVID-19-related illnesses.

“Right now, we’re losing roughly 5% of our speakers per year,” Paden says. “But we know that it takes quite a bit of time [to learn the language] and it’s not happening organically in our communities anymore.”

Losing so many fluent elders is one reason that the tribe placed them among the top of their COVID-19 vaccination list. According to the tribe, since receiving the first distribution of vaccines on Dec. 14, the Cherokee Nation administered more than 6,500 vaccines, including about 900 Cherokee speakers, as of Jan. 19.

Due to the pandemic, the coursework for the Master Apprentice Program is taught online, something that Chavez says has been difficult but he is making work.

“I’m a very in-person type of learner,” he said. “I can’t really do this technology interface kind of stuff, but I’ve had to adapt and I’m willing to do that. I want to do whatever I’ve got to do to learn and so it’s just kind of a means to an end, really. If I’ve got to use a laptop and get on Zoom, I’ll do that. But I’d much rather be in a classroom. I think we all would. But this is the world we live in and it is what it is.”

The Cherokee Nation looked to several different initiatives to help guide them when creating the Master Apprentice Program. They looked at a program within the Sac and Fox Nation, also based in Oklahoma, as well as the Euchee (Yuchi) and even the Māori from New Zealand.

The Cherokee Nation’s reservation encompasses 14 countries in northeastern Oklahoma, including parts of Tulsa County. There are ongoing discussions to possibly host a class at one Tulsa high school, though Paden is unsure where that stands now with the pandemic — both the high school and the tribe are doing most things online now.

Chavez believes that a tribe can’t have culture without language, and so that’s why he focuses on the future and learning the language.

“Those two things are just kind of joined, and if you lose our language and you still have culture, it’s kind of just a history, almost, because language is so ingrained inside of a culture,” he said. “You know, there’s names for all this stuff like games and ceremonies and things like that. You need the language to use all that. And so it’s vital for our nation and other nations that struggle with their languages … we’ve lost that connection between our elders and our youth because mainly they didn’t want to pass on language. [T]he consensus is that we’re losing it, so we’re trying to build it back now. It’s really important for us.”

Kristi Eaton is a freelance journalist based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Associated Press, The Washington Post and elsewhere. Visit her website at KristiEaton.com or follow her on Twitter @KristiEaton.

Malcolm X is still misunderstood – and misused. Fifty-five years after his assassination at the Audubon Ballroom in New York, we still get much wrong about Malcolm X

by Omar Suleiman, Al Jazeera:  https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/2/21/malcolm-x-is-still-misunderstood-and-misused

Image: Al Jazeera

Every semester in which I teach a course on Muslims in the Civil Rights Movement at Southern Methodist University, I give my students a selection of quotes from both Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X and ask them to guess who said what. So for example, I will posit the following two quotes and ask for their proper ascription:

“Ignorance of each other is what has made unity impossible in the past. Therefore, we need enlightenment. We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity. Once we have more knowledge (light) about each other, we will stop condemning each other and a United front will be brought about.”

“The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”

And every single time, they have been unable to identify the first quote as belonging to Malcolm, and the second to Martin. But it is not just a few students that have gotten it wrong. The American education system and most mainstream portrayals of Martin and Malcolm have been simplistic and sanitising.

Martin is the perfect hero who preached non-violence and love, and Malcolm the perfect villain who served as his violent counterpart, preaching hate and militancy. The result is not just a dishonest reading of history, but a dichotomy that allows for Dr King to be curated to make us more comfortable, and Malcolm X to be demonised as a demagogue from whom we must all flee. Reducing these men to such simplistic symbols allows us to filter political programmes according to how “King-like” they are. Hence, illegitimate forms of reconciliation are legitimised through King and legitimate forms of resistance are delegitimised through Malcolm X.

Malcolm was never violent, not as a member of the Nation of Islam, nor as a Sunni Muslim. But Malcolm did find it hypocritical to demand that black people in the United States commit to non-violence when they were perpetually on the receiving end of state violence. He believed that black people in the US had a right to defend themselves, and charged that the US was inconsistent in referencing its founding fathers’ defence of liberty for everyone but them.

Malcolm knew that his insistence on this principle would cause him to be demonised even further and ultimately benefit the movement of Dr King, which is exactly what he had intended. Just weeks before his assassination, he went to Selma to support Dr King and willingly embraced his role as the scary alternative. In every interview, in his meeting with Dr Coretta Scott King, and elsewhere, he vocalised that the US would do well to give the good reverend what he was asking for, or else.

But he never actually said what the “or else” was, placing a greater urgency on America to cede to King’s demands. Malcolm had no problem playing the villain, so long as it led to his people no longer being treated like animals. And while King may have been steadfast in his commitment to non-violence, the thrust of Malcolm fully served its purpose.

As Colin Morris, the author of Unyoung, Uncolored, Unpoor wrote, “I am not denying passive resistance its due place in the freedom struggle, or belittling the contribution to it of men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Both have a secure place in history. I merely want to show that however much the disciples of passive resistance detest violence, they are politically impotent without it. American Negroes needed both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X …”.

But it was not just that Malcolm and Martin had complementary strategies to achieve black freedom, they also spoke to different realities. Malcolm spoke more to the Northern reality of black Americans who were only superficially integrated, whereas Martin spoke to the Southern reality where even that was not possible.

Malcolm also spoke to the internalised racism of black people that was essential to overcome for true liberation. As the late James Cone states, “King was a political revolutionary. Malcolm was a cultural revolutionary. Malcolm changed how black people thought about themselves. Before Malcolm came along, we were all Negroes. After Malcolm, he helped us become black.”

That is why, despite the diminishing of Malcolm in textbooks and holidays, he has been consistently revived through protest movements and the arts. He has lived through the activism of the likes of Muhammad Ali and Colin Kaepernick, inspired the black power movement, and been an icon for American Muslims on how to exist with dignity and faith in a hostile environment.

And even in those claims to Malcolm as a symbol, Malcolm himself in the fullness of his identity is erased. In championing his movement’s philosophy, some seek to secularise him, intentionally erasing his Muslim identity. And in championing his religious identity, others seek to depoliticise him. This was a tension that Malcolm noted in his own life, saying: “For the Muslims, I’m too worldly. For other groups, I’m too religious. For militants, I’m too moderate, for moderates I’m too militant. I feel like I’m on a tightrope.”

Muslims too should be cautious not to sanitise Malcolm, as the US has sanitised Dr King. To restrict Malcolm solely to his Hajj experience is similar to restricting King solely to his “I have a dream” speech. Malcolm was a proud Muslim who never stopped being black. And while he no longer subscribed to a condemnation of the entire white race, he was unrelenting in his critique of global white supremacy.

Malcolm was consistently growing in a way that allowed him to not only champion his own people’s plight more effectively but to tackle a broader set of interconnected issues. And while history seems to posit Malcolm as his polar opposite, Dr King had begun to articulate many of the same positions that made Malcolm so unpopular.

In the words of the great James Baldwin, “As concerns Malcolm and Martin, I watched two men, coming from unimaginably different backgrounds, whose positions, originally, were poles apart, driven closer and closer together. By the time each died, their positions had become virtually the same position. It can be said, indeed, that Martin picked up Malcolm’s burden, articulated the vision which Malcolm had begun to see, and for which he paid with his life. And that Malcolm was one of the people Martin saw on the mountaintop.”

Perhaps it is time we ask why we only seem to celebrate one of them.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

It’s been 5 years since the Paris Agreement was adopted – here’s where we stand today

by Gulnaz Khan, Ideas.Ted.com: https://ideas.ted.com/paris-agreement-anniversary-emissions-goals/

Alamy

In December 2015, 196 countries gathered in France to discuss our warming planet, and weeks later, the Paris Climate Agreement was born — an international treaty designed to keep global temperature rise under 2°C (and ideally, 1.5°C). To achieve this, countries committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by varying degrees by 2030, and are expected to adopt increasingly ambitious targets thereafter.  

Five years later, 2020 is projected to be the third hottest year  on record, and last week, UN Secretary-General António Guterres painted a sobering picture of the state of the planet during an address at Columbia University in New York City. “Nature always strikes back — and it is already doing so with growing force and fury. Biodiversity is collapsing. One million species are at risk of extinction. Ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes … air and water pollution are killing 9 million people annually — more than six times the current toll of the pandemic.” 

And our window of opportunity to take decisive action is shrinking. We’ve already put enough carbon into the atmosphere to raise global temperatures by about 1.0°C, and the world stands at a critical juncture. With every degree of warming, we risk severe and irreversible consequences — extreme weather, crop failure, water crises and mass extinction.

Christiana Figueres, the architect of the Paris Agreement, called this decade the most decisive in the history of humankind. “Faced with today’s facts, we can be indifferent, do nothing and hope the problem goes away,” she said in a recent TED Talk. “We can despair and plunge into paralysis, or we can become stubborn optimists with a fierce conviction that no matter how difficult, we must and we can rise to the challenge.” 

Here’s where the world stands on some of the agreement’s objectives — and what countries still need to reach them. 

1. The overwhelming majority of countries are not on track to meet their 2030 emissions goals

Once greenhouse gases are released, they stay in the atmosphere for 300 to 1,000 years. That means the choices we make today will continue to shape the future of our planet long after we’re gone. 

A 2019 report by the Universal Ecological Fund evaluated 184 nations’ pledges to the Paris Agreement and concluded that 130 nations —  including China, the US and India, which are three of the world’s top emitters — are falling short of their 2030 reduction goals.  

“The science is crystal clear: To limit temperature rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, the world needs to decrease fossil fuel production by roughly 6 percent every year between now and 2030,” Gutteres said in his address. “Instead, the world is going in the opposite direction — planning an annual increase of 2 percent.” 

Unless we slash carbon emissions by about half by 2030 and eliminate them almost entirely by 2050, we’ll likely reach 1.5°C in under 30 years, according to the  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.  

2. Countries are still pouring billions of dollars into fossil fuels

The Paris Agreement called for countries to make a massive shift towards alternative energy sources like geothermal, solar and wind, but fossil fuels continue to be a major source of CO2 emissions. Progress towards a green infrastructure has also been hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Overall, we saw a 7 percent drop in carbon emissions thanks to pandemic slowdowns. At the same time, government spending has not only been diverted towards humanitarian relief efforts — but also towards bailouts of large corporations. To date, G20 nations have given a whopping $233 billion of pandemic recovery funds to fossil fuel-intensive industries, compared to $146 billion to renewable energy, according to a  report from the International Institute for Sustainable Development, Overseas Development Institute and Oil Change International. This move threatens to reverse what little progress was made over the last five years. The authors of the report urged governments to use this “critical window” to integrate green initiatives into COVID-19 recovery budgets instead of reviving dirty energy. 

But this won’t be an easy feat. In addition to completely transforming our global energy infrastructure — which would need to occur and would cost trillions of dollars —  the Paris agreement seeks a fair and equitable transition. This means creating job opportunities for communities who rely on fossil fuels for employment and adopting climate policies that protect the poor and people of color. 

3. Good news: Commitments from local governments and businesses to go carbon neutral have doubled since 2019

Tackling climate change requires unprecedented, large-scale cooperation from all sectors of society — and there’s good news on that front: Net zero commitments from businesses and local governments have doubled in less than a year (“net zero” means any greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere will be balanced by removing an equal amount through methods like forest expansion, cover crops, direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage). 

Globally, more than 900 city and regional governments announced net zero pledges as of September 2020, according to a report from the Data-Driven EnviroLab and NewClimate Institute. In total, these local governments represent around 846 million people — that’s 11 percent of the world’s population. The caveat? Thus far, only about 40 percent have released action plans, and less than 24 percent have passed formal policies to reach these targets. 

Additionally, more than 1,500 companies — ranging from hotel and fast-food chains to apparel and tech companies — have pledged to reduce their environmental impact. Together, they represent a carbon footprint that exceeds India’s annual emissions. Facebook, for example, announced plans to transition to 100 percent renewable energy sources by 2030. McDonald’s set science-based targets to reduce restaurant and office emissions 36% by 2030. Walmart pledged to go net zero by 2040 and plans to “manage or restore” 50 million acres of land and a million square miles of ocean. 

4. Some countries are pledging to take radical steps to reach net zero – but will they follow through?

Greenhouse gas emissions have been on the rise for the past decade, and consequently, our pathway to 1.5°C is rapidly narrowing. But there’s still time to avert the apocalyptic-level consequences of a 3° world. In recent weeks, the world’s top two emitters vowed to step up their efforts: China aims to go net zero by 2060 and US president-elect Joe Biden  announced that he intends to have the US reenter the Paris Agreement in 2021. There, they join more than 110 countries  — including leading emitters like the European Union, South Korea, Japan and the United Kingdom — who have pledged to go net zero by 2050. 

Meeting this deadline requires radical action. “Global renewable energy use would need to go from around 20 percent of energy today to 65 percent by 2050, and from 28 percent to 85 percent of the power sector. Electric vehicle use would have to skyrocket, from less than 10 million EVs today to more than 1.5 billion by 2050,” according to an analysis of countries’ climate policies by Morgan Bazilian and Dolf Gielen in The Conversation. 

The European Union, home to 447 million people, aims to be the first carbon neutral continent by 2050 and is leading the way. “This European Green Deal is both our vision for a climate-neutral continent and a very dedicated road map to this goal,” Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, explained in her recent TED Talk. “It is 50 actions for 2050, ranging from the first-ever European climate law to a circular economy to a biodiversity strategy, planting trees, protecting precious nature and animals, recycling and waste management.” The plan also includes an ambitious 55 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

Given these and other new commitments from countries, it’s estimated that global warming could be limited to 2.1°C by 2100 — but countries need to stick to their pledges, according to a report by the independent scientific analytics group  Climate Action Tracker. 

Watch Christina Figueres’s TED Talk now: 

Why children need to be taught more about their human rights

by Carol Robinson, The Conversation:  https://theconversation.com/why-children-need-to-be-taught-more-about-their-human-rights-139431

Many children have an innate sense of equality, fairness and justice and know how these concepts relate to their day-to-day lives. A lot of children also have the confidence to voice their opinions when they feel a lack of justice. But unfortunately, this is not always that case – especially for children whose personal rights are violated and who face mistreatment, often behind closed doors.

A recent report from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner estimates that 2.3 million children in England are living with risk because of a vulnerable family background. This includes children in the care system and children known to have experienced personal harm as well as those living in families where there is a high likelihood of harm.

Worryingly, an estimated 829,000 of these children are not known to social services or to children’s mental health services so are not receiving any support. Added to this, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, rates of domestic abuse have increased, meaning even more children may be living in homes where they are at risk of witnessing, or being on the receiving end of, violent behaviour.

Children need to know how to get help when they feel at risk. They also need to understand how rights apply to them and their lives – and while a limited amount of this is done in schools, it currently doesn’t go far enough.

Children’s rights

Children’s rights are a subset of human rights. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child sets out the rights that all children worldwide should have access to and is one of the most widely adopted international treaties of all time.

In England, specific teaching about human rights is included in Relationships Education for primary age pupils and in Relationships and Sex Education for secondary age pupils. Both primary and secondary pupils also learn about human rights in Health Education and in Citizenship education.

Schools already teach some elements of human rights, but more needs to be done. Monkey Business Images/Shutterstock

As part of these subjects, in primary schools, aspects relating to rights education includes pupils learning to recognise if relationships make them feel unhappy, unsafe or uncomfortable. Pupils also learn how to report any concerns or abuse and where they can get help.

In secondary schools, pupils are taught about issues such as how to recognise when a relationship is unsafe, what constitutes sexual harassment and sexual violence and why these are unacceptable. They are also taught about legal rights and responsibilities regarding equality, online rights, as well as how to report and get advice if needed for themselves or others. Civil liberties enjoyed by the citizens of the UK are also looked at, as are the nature of rules and laws and the justice system.

These subjects include some important teaching about rights, but the focus is on factual information about rights and the help available. What’s lacking is teaching children specifically about children’s rights and how these rights apply to their own situations. More also needs to be done to empower children with the confidence to voice concerns in cases where their rights are not respected.

Rights Respecting Schools

Unicef UK has developed a Rights Respecting Schools Award. In working towards this award, schools use the Convention on the Rights of the Child to teach pupils about their rights and how these apply in terms of their own lives.

Around 5,000 schools are working through the Unicef award, which equates to about 1.6 million children becoming more aware of their rights. Research shows that children in schools working toward this award develop the confidence to disclose instances where their rights have been disrespected. And this has led to safeguarding issues being identified.

A senior manager in one of the primary schools explained the impact it has made:

We always get some disclosures when we talk about rights at the beginning of the year … the [children] feel empowered to tell someone and that is something that probably wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for this [the award].

But not all children attend schools where the award is on offer. And even when they do, insufficient emphasis is placed on ensuring all pupils are not only made aware of rights and how these apply to them, but have the skills and confidence to act and get help in cases where rights are not respected.

‘Know your rights’

Given that under lockdown many children may be spending longer periods of time with adults who may make them feel unsafe and have fewer opportunities to voice these concerns, the need for children’s rights education to be incorporated into all levels of schooling is urgent.

The focus needs to be not only on the transmission of knowledge and facts about children’s rights but, as asserted by the United Nations World Programme for Human Rights Education, it must also ensure children acquire the skills to apply their rights in a practical way in daily life. And this means teaching children how to take action to defend and promote their rights as and when needed.

16 Ways the World Is Getting Remarkably Better: Visuals by Statistician Hans Rosling

by Josh Jones, via Simon Kuestenmacher, Open Culture: http://www.openculture.com/2020/05/16-ways-the-world-is-getting-remarkably-better.html

It certainly may not feel like things are getting better behind the anxious veils of our COVID lockdowns. But some might say that optimism and pessimism are products of the gut, hidden somewhere in the bacterial stew we call the microbiome. “All prejudices come from the intestines,” proclaimed noted sufferer of indigestion, Friedrich Nietzsche. Maybe we can change our views by changing our diet. But it’s a little harder to change our emotions with facts. We turn up our noses at them, or find them impossible to digest.

Nietzsche did not consider himself a pessimist. Despite his stomach troubles, he “adopted a philosophy that said yes to life,” notes Reason and Meaning, “fully cognizant of the fact that life is mostly miserable, evil, ugly, and absurd.” Let’s grant that this is so. A great many of us, I think, are inclined to believe it. We are ideal consumers for dystopian Nietzsche-esque fantasies about supermen and “last men.” Still, it's worth asking: is life always and equally miserable, evil, ugly, and absurd? Is the idea of human progress no more than a modern delusion?

Physician, statistician, and onetime sword swallower Hans Rosling spent several years trying to show otherwise in television documentaries for the BBC, TED Talks, and the posthumous book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, co-written with his son and daughter-in-law, a statistician and designer, respectively. Rosling, who passed away in 2017, also worked with his two co-authors on software used to animate statistics, and in his public talks and book, he attempted to bring data to life in ways that engage gut feelings.

Take the set of graphs above, aka, “16 Bad Things Decreasing,” from Factfulness. (View a larger scan of the pages here.) Yes, you may look at a set of monochromatic trend lines and yawn. But if you attend to the details, you'll can see that each arrow plummeting downward represents some profound ill, manmade or otherwise, that has killed or maimed millions. These range from legal slavery—down from 194 countries in 1800 to 3 in 2017—to smallpox: down from 148 countries with cases in 1850 to 0 in 1979. (Perhaps our current global epidemic will warrant its own triumphant graph in a revised edition some decades in the future.) Is this not progress?

What about the steadily falling rates of world hunger, child mortality, HIV infections, numbers of nuclear warheads, deaths from disaster, and ozone depletion? Hard to argue with the numbers, though as always, we should consider the source. (Nearly all these statistics come from Rosling’s own company, Gapminder.) In the video above, Dr. Rosling explains to a TED audience how he designed a course on global health in his native Sweden. In order to make sure the material measured up to his accomplished students’ abilities, he first gave them a questionnaire to test their knowledge.

Rosling found, he jokes, “that Swedish top students know statistically significantly less about the world than a chimpanzee," who would have scored higher by chance. The problem “was not ignorance, it was preconceived ideas," which are worse. Bad ideas are driven by many -isms, but also by what Rosling calls in the book an “overdramatic” worldview. Humans are nervous by nature. “Our tendency to misinterpret facts is instinctive—an evolutionary adaptation to help us make quick decisions to avoid danger,” writes Katie Law in a review of Factfulness.

“While we still need these instincts, they can also trip us up.” Magnified by global, collective anxieties, weaponized by canny mass media, the tendency to pessimism becomes reality, but it's one that is not supported by the data. This kind of argument has become kind of a cottage industry; each presentation must be evaluated on its own merits. Presumably enlightened optimism can be just as oversimplified a view as the darkest pessimism. But Rosling insisted he wasn’t an optimist. He was just being “factful.” We probably shouldn’t get into what Nietzsche might say to that.

A Boost for the Worker-Owned Economy: A New Measure Will Make it Easier for Retiring Owners to Sell Their Businesses to Employees—and Save Jobs Into the Bargain

by Fran Korten, Yes! magazine: https://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/a-boost-for-the-worker-owned-economy-20180925

Photo by Ian Spanier/Getty Images

Business owners looking to sell their companies to their employees just got a helping hand from the federal government. It’s the first such measure that’s passed Congress in more than 20 years.

Tucked into the omnibus National Defense Authorization Act signed by President Trump in August 2018 was language directing the U.S. Small Business Administration to help retiring owners sell their businesses to their employees, either as a worker cooperative or as an Employee Stock Ownership Plan.

The measure was backed by an array of nonprofit advocates of employee ownership, including the ESOP Association, the National Urban League, the American Sustainable Business Council, and the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. According to Melissa Hoover of the nonprofit Democracy at Work Institute, it is the first federal legislation ever to explicitly name worker cooperatives as an SBA priority.

The help appears to be timely, as retirement looms for a “silver tsunami” of business owners. According to the Harvard Business Review, 2.3 million companies are owned by baby boomers, half of whom are expected to retire in the next 10 years. Those companies employ 25 million people.

As that wave of retirees breaks, business owners don’t have many options. Most do not have children who want to run the business, according toJoseph Blasi and Douglas Kruse, professors at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. Studies show that many will simply close up shop, with their employees losing their jobs. Some may sell to a competitor such as another local company, a larger publicly traded corporation, or a private equity fund—options that also can trigger job losses.

“That makes selling their businesses to the workers who helped create all the value in the first place one of the best options available,” Blasi and Kruse wrote in The Conversation. “It not only helps secure the owner’s retirement but also leaves behind a legacy in the local community.”

The SBA sets the legal standards for what qualifies as a small business, and the standard varies by industry.

The new federal law directs the SBA to use its nationwide network of nearly 1,000 Small Business Development Centers to educate owners about selling to their employees. One obstacle, however, is that owners commonly want or need an immediate cash payment, which employees can rarely afford.

The law addresses that problem by authorizing the SBA to use its 7(a) loan guarantees for such buyouts. The SBA does not make the loans, but its guarantees mean that intermediaries such as banks are much more willing to make the loans. For 2018, Congress authorized the SBA to guarantee up to $28.5 billion for those loans.

Hoover cautions, however, that despite the law and loan guarantee authorization, “we can’t assume employee ownership will be a priority for the SBA. We must help make it a priority. The legislation is well-written, so now our work is to support the implementation to make sure it meets our needs.”

In 2016, the Democracy at Work Institute convened a Workers to Owners collaborative to expand the number of providers assisting with employee-to-owner transitions. Hoover noted, “now the national network is well-positioned to coordinate efforts in implementing the new law.”

Marjorie Kelly of the nonprofit Democracy Collaborative has found that retiring owners are often concerned about their employees losing their jobs. She has cited Galfab, a company that makes waste-hauling equipment in rural Indiana, as an example of a company that made a successful transition to employee ownership.

“Taking care of all the employees was foremost in our mind,” CEO Jerry Samson said when he announced the sale of the company to his employees. Kelly said that Samson decided not to take the highest bid he received for the company because he didn’t want the company sold and moved to some other place, with all those people losing their jobs.

Employee ownership is viewed by many advocates as a fundamental building block for a just economy because workers can have a say in the company’s management and share in the benefits of its success. A growing body of data supports the advantages for workers. A study from the National Center for Employee Ownership reveals that in the last recession, employee owners were four times less likely to be laid off, have two and a half times more money in their retirement accounts, and receive 5 percent to 12 percent more in wages than those in comparable non-employee-owned companies.

That information, alongside a growing concern with economic inequality, is spurring bipartisan interest in employee ownership. U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, (D-New York) who introduced the employee-ownership bill in the Senate, had three Republican and three Democratic co-sponsors.

“There’s a reason employee ownership has been favored by people as diverse as Ronald Reagan and Bernie Sanders,” Kelly said. “It works, both as a business proposition and as a pathway to a more democratic economy that works for everyone.”

The bipartisan enthusiasm is significant, Kelly said. “We have the opportunity to bend the curve of history. We can watch these 2 million baby boomer-owned businesses close or be absorbed by big companies, with the accompanying layoffs and job loss. Or we can have a major national commitment to moving these companies into employee ownership, reducing inequality, spreading asset ownership, and rebuilding the middle class.”

One form such a government commitment could take is a much larger loan-guarantee program for employee ownership, similar to federal home loan programs. This could double the number of employee owners in a decade, from 14 million today to 27 million.

“After World War II, we made a commitment to broad-based home ownership. We can now do the same for enterprise ownership,” Kelly said.