Everyone deserves social and economic protections

Our Intention

Welcome to the Sol Center for Liberated Work, where we collaborate across diverse communities to radically reimagine work and social protections for all. We are in the early days of building our path, which will surely be improved by your willingness to share your vision alongside us.

Still, a few things are already clear. 

• First, we are committed to making sure all means ALL, by building social protections that cover all workers, regardless of their employment status. Your job should not determine your safety net. Full stop.

• Second, we are committed to building a multi-racial, multi-sectoral effort that centers and solves for those historically harmed by and excluded from existing systems of support, beginning with BIPOC, disabled, and immigrant workers from across sectors. Our long-standing mission to support arts workers and culture bearers gives us the unique opportunity to build unconventional collaborations with movement groups who are committed to building alternative labor and economic systems.

• Third, we are committed to advancing solutions that shift power to workers and their communities, trusting that folks experiencing challenges actually know how to solve them, given the resources and authority to do so. For people of color in particular, building community power–ownership power, economic power, governance power, and political power–is a crucial precondition to preserving cultural identities, making diverse artistic and cultural expressions possible, while enabling those communities to thrive.

Our Work

We advocate for social and economic protections for all, while building infrastructure to shift power to workers, collectives, and communities. To do this, we use all the tools available to us, including research, policy, advocacy, our forthcoming 501c(4), coalition building, grantmaking, investments, and incubating entrepreneurial solutions.

We build bridges. The journey to liberated work is a collective one. That’s why we support, amplify, and help direct resources to efforts across sectors that advance our shared vision of protections for all. We also help arts workers–individually and in groups–join and support those efforts, as well as access the resources and information they need to advocate effectively for social and economic protections. 

We shift power. We seek to bring the voices of excluded workers–for example domestic workers, farm workers, creative workers, and informal workers, among others–to the center of policy debates, to shape and win new systems of protection rooted in their lived experiences and priorities. We also look for opportunities to build and support diverse coalitions across sectors of that give these workers power, ownership, and leverage to win protections for all. 

We seed new models. We incubate and build support for new models–both public and private–of social and economic protection. In particular, we look for “slippery slope” opportunities to advance protections for all, centering the most marginalized workers so as not to replicate today’s inequities. We prioritize solutions that will help our core constituency of arts workers alongside those in the broader gig economy who share their precarious working conditions.