Today, we are highlighting FCCP leader Erin Dale McClellan. Erin currently serves as Executive Director at The Partnership Funds and is a Founding Owner and Board President of Fertile Ground Food Cooperative in Southeast Raleigh, NC.
Tell us a little about yourself.
I grew up in a military family; I moved every few years, living in Germany and Korea as a child. I never felt like I was from a “place”. That all changed when I came to North Carolina. My work with civic engagement started at NC Voters for Clean Elections. There, we successfully advocated for the first judicial public financing legislation in the United States. After that, I served at the Southerners for Economic Justice before moving to Blueprint NC, a collaborative of 58 progressive organizations working for a fairer, more just North Carolina, and an early member of the State Voices network.
At Blueprint, I was able to build the community I was looking for. We prioritized building relationships. Movements start and fall apart. What gives them staying power are the relationships and organizations that hold them together. I helped build Blueprint from the ground up, but after 12 years (12 election cycles), I was completely burned out. I’d given everything to build the organization’s foundation, and now it was time for me to evolve and to allow space for Blueprint to have a new leader that could build on the foundation I laid. Blueprint chose Serena Sebring and I am proud of the accomplishments Blueprint continues to make. I think many times people stay too long, and the organization and the people suffer as a result.
Most importantly, I’m a soldier for North Carolina and the South. I see my role as strengthening our movement through a framework of wholeness, resilience and self determination.
What drew you to The Partnership Funds?
I believe deeply in partnership. I believe power is collective. Partnership is a catalytic creative force, where things we can only imagine alone become possible because of a commitment to working in a vulnerable relationship; where there is comfort asking for help, listening and learning deeply across differences, seeking genuine input that results in each partner seeing themselves reflected in what is created. Successful partnership is undergirded by shared values, individual agency, clarity of process, transparency, trust, and honest representation (no faux roles or putting on airs).
At the Partnership Funds, we are guided in our every day work by three Core Values:
- Self-determination
- Nature
- Community
Our Operating Commitments are to:
- Center community and nature, while seeking liberation and joy.
- Accept it takes as long as it takes, rejecting false urgency. Follow Earth time.
- Be in praxis; embrace introspection, imperfection, playfulness, unlearning, uncertainty.
- Bring it all / Honor it all: Your vulnerability, your brilliance, your wholeness and truth in these moments. False humility has no place here.
- Keep the honest true light on, inside and out. Everything done in the dark comes to the light. Beyond curiosity: Challenge yourself to hold multiple truths.
- Roles & Power. Honest clarity on who you’re representing (yourself, your organization) living into the power dynamics of equals, with attention to what voice is missing.
- Lean into courageous and tough conversations.
Our Organizing Agenda
The work outlined below is all in service of building power. Our partners have defined power as the ability to define reality, set an agenda, win it, implement and maintain it. We believe this cannot happen without organized people, and that no one organization can do this alone. Power is strong, democratic, rooted, independent. It is interdependent people’s organizations, working together in public towards a shared vision and long-term agenda within an ecosystem. That includes us. Using the 5 directions assessment tool, we’ve collectively created this power-building agenda that guides our work and collaboration with partners. The master power-building agenda is available here.
What else are you working on?
I describe myself as a “deeply committed cooperator.” There is a long legacy of cooperatives in the Black community as a means to build power, ownership and collaboration and give people the ability to practice their own power and share governance. I’m driven by the questions: how can the community own their labor? I am a founding Owner of Fertile Ground Food Cooperative in Southeast Raleigh to attempt to fill the gap. I am incredibly passionate about the work I’ve done on voting rights and civic engagement. Cooperative organizing allows me to take that work to the next level and build organizations that practice democracy somatically, invest in training and education, build wealth for community residents and allow for our community to own the institutions in their community together,
The mission of the Fertile Ground Food Cooperative (FGFC) is to open and operate a grocery store that will be a community gathering space focused on: healthy conscious food, building a sense of community connection and belonging, and serving as a space where we can work and shop with dignity. Fertile Ground is democratically controlled by its member owners, the majority of whom are drawn from Southeast Raleigh.
It’s a community hub as well as a place for members to foster their assets and have access to fresh and healthy food options.
Today, Fertile Ground’s member base has nearly 800 Members-Owners and our site announcement is happening this spring. I’m incredibly excited for our future and the potential this coop has to reclaim our power and sustain the community for generations to come.
Erin, thank you for sharing your story with us. We can’t wait to see how all of this great work progresses.