More on assessing Fannie Lou Hamer’s 1970s Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC) in Sunflower, County Mississippi. Its successes included temporarily feeding the hungry and providing poor people with housing, banking services, healthcare, and employment. The FFC tried to do too much and what it did it could not sustain the work. The question isn’t why did it fail but had to stay afloat for as long as it did? The FFC faced a number of challenges the greatest of them insufficient startup capital and a lack of reserves for emergencies, and natural disasters. From the start it had too many financial vulnerabilities. Economist Jessica Gordon Nembhard argues that the FFC also failed largely due to a lack of resource coordination and an insufficient job of FFC leaders of training potential members about how cooperatives work.
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