Boston Ujima Project

<p>Before the Boston Ujima Project officially launched in 2017, its creators spent years hosting study circles and discussion groups in Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, and Mattapan — predominantly working-class communities of color — hashing out how an economy that actually worked for them might operate. The name Ujima is Swahili for collective work and responsibility. What they built is a democratic, member-run organization with a radical proposition: that investment decisions should be made by the people most affected by them.</p><p>In December 2018, Ujima launched the nation's first democratically governed investment fund, pooling $5 million in capital from more than 300 investors. The minimum investment was just $50. The fund is structured so that lower-income investors take on the least risk and receive equivalent or better returns than wealthier investors — the inverse of how finance typically works. Investment decisions flow through a participatory budgeting process. Ujima hosts neighborhood and citywide planning assemblies where hundreds of residents, local businesses, and employees set investment priorities and vote on where money goes. Local finance professionals conduct due diligence, but the final vote belongs to the members.</p><p>Their first fund vote, in December 2019, invested $100,000 in CERO Co-op, a commercial composting company in Dorchester. Since then, members have invested $2.2 million and counting in Black- and Indigenous-owned small businesses and cooperatives. Ujima is now raising a second fund focused on real estate and has launched a Translocal Membership to support peers outside Boston in building similar economic democracy ecosystems. The relational technology is the democratic process itself — the assemblies, the votes, the study circles. Ujima didn't just create a fund; it created a practice of collective economic discernment rooted in neighborhood relationships.</p>