In most professional circles, a conversation about economics is a conversation about the stock market, bonds, interest rates, and dividends. For Jaylin Ward, it’s about something else: solidarity. The Bronx native’s fascination with building a solidarity economy is rooted in her experience as a Girl Scout. Completing journeys to address food insecurity in her neighborhood, inspired her to become an environmental activist.
Then, in 2019, while an undergraduate at Howard University, she got involved in a protest against the school and local government over a property-line dispute at the campus garden. At the core was a question over food insecurity on campus. It prompted her to start asking herself: What are the attributes of an economy that brings justice and repair to these problems?
In search of answers, she co-founded Generation Green the following year as a platform for thinking about this question with Gen Z climate activists from around the world. These conversations connected her to the New Economy Coalition, a network that represents the solidarity economy movement in the U.S. She took a job as the communications director and started working with a national membership network of cooperatives and solidarity economy practitioners.
As part of her work at NEC, she wrote newsletters and digital resources. Through that, she grew familiar with the work of practitioners she later learned were professors at SLU. Though deep in the world of the solidarity economy, urban studies appealed to her instincts as an activist, leading her to apply to the Workplace Democracy and Community Ownership Certificate when she came across it on one of her list-serves.
Returning to school was not on her to-do list at the time, so little did she imagine that she’d be sitting in classrooms listening to their lectures—let alone giving Professor Rebecca Lurie, founder of the Community Ownership and Workplace Democracy program (COWOP), a bear hug when running into her on campus, as was the case on a Wednesday in September.
Once she learned that the certificate could be applied to a Master of Art in Urban Studies, she decided to go all in.
“Quiet as it’s kept, economics is such a multi-disciplinary subject and I’m happy to look at it from an inherently interdisciplinary field,” said Jaylin. “SLU offers that up in such a beautiful package with this certificate program, but with the ability to pick from a diverse list of concentrations.”
With one class left in her certificate program, she’s already applying for the Urban Studies Master’s with a focus on economic democracy, which she’ll finish in 2028. Then, if all goes according to plan, it’s off to law school. She says, “it’s a great framework to understand the environment because we’re building it in relation to our economy. And if it’s not provisioning for human life, then we have a major problem.”
She appreciates that her professors are not just academics, but practitioners. “I find that to be really amazing as I figure out what I want to do with all this knowledge, if not as a comms worker.”
This semester, she’s taking Cooperative Finance and Law with Professor Andress Bernal. And like each lesson before, it’s further clarified her journey.
“I want to practice the law with all this knowledge in mind because the law creates the norms of how we can engage with each other. The law sets the norms about what businesses can do, and then businesses react,” she says. “But if we could go further up that chain to create different conditions, then I want to be a part of that.”