GREENFIELD — A partnership between Stone Soup Cafe and the University of Massachusetts Building Solidarity Economies (BSE) program is bearing fruit in the form of monthly workshops that shine a spotlight on mutual aid organizations.
Since last summer, there have been five workshops at Stone Soup Cafe, which operates out of All Souls Church at 399 Main St. Among the organizations featured are Redistro, which facilitates waste reduction, goods exchange and decluttering through a goods exchange co-op and community space in Greenfield; the Greenfield People’s Budget, a group that campaigns for holistic public safety solutions; and the UMass Amherst Time Bank, which allows people to trade services through the currency of time, rather than dollars.
Dubbed the Solidarity Workshop Series, the programming is designed to deepen relationships and expand learning among organizers, activists and community members across western Massachusetts.
“One of the big hopes of it is that the groups can take a chunk of time to talk about who they are, and share the narrative of their history, how their projects got started, how they’re now interacting with different groups and projects, what has come of it and what their hopes are for the future,” said Juliana Green, Community Store manager for Stone Soup Cafe and former student in the Building Solidarity Economies program.
The UMass program, facilitated by professor Boone Shear, focuses on participating in “collaborative research, teaching and learning projects,” according to its website. Shear said much of the work is rooted in local community action.
The idea for the workshops sprouted from a Building Solidarity Economies collaborative research project with Stone Soup Cafe that was led by Shear and UMass alum Abby Brooks. In the research, Shear noticed that Stone Soup Cafe had an opportunity to provide popular education, a teaching and education method that involves collaborative efforts. He reached out to Green to suggest using the space to further community conversation.
“At Stone Soup, we’re really focused on one part of mutual aid, which is meeting people’s most basic needs. … This series was started to take another step forward and see ourselves as connected with the larger movements for justice, specifically in this area,” Green said. “It’s been an opportunity for us to develop and extend in that way and connect with other organizations that are doing similar but also different, connected work.”
In November 2025, the Poor People’s Army, a Philadelphia-based group focused on abolishing poverty, was the featured organization at the monthly workshop. UMass alum Jeffrey Coyne, who was part of the Building Solidarity Economies program and organizes with the Poor People’s Army, served as a “liaison” between the groups.
According to Coyne, around 100 people attended, with some people being turned away due to the venue reaching capacity. It drew support from a wide range of people, such as local organizations in western Massachusetts like Springfield No One Leaves and Touch the Sky, as well as Greenfield city councilors, students and community members.
Collaboration, Coyne said, is extremely important in a time where people can feel isolated from one another. The workshops seek to focus on ways that organizations can learn from each other and collaborate to make change.
“There’s a lot of organizations who are siloed or disconnected from each other and not in conversation with each other,” he said. “Recognizing, in this moment, in the U.S. and in the world, we really desperately need solidarity, and to be thinking together as groups engaged in different projects to keep each other alive, safe and thriving.”
The next workshop will be held Tuesday, April 21, from 6 to 8 p.m. and will feature the Easthampton Tenants Union, followed by Touch the Sky in May. Green hopes that Stone Soup Cafe can continue holding these sorts of workshops, and potentially expand into “different types of skill building and skill sharing … really building out some other skills for our community.”
“This is something that we’re doing because we want to kind of live into ways of being that are about care, as opposed to competition and individual self interest,” Shear said. “It’s just gonna become necessary, as the climate crisis unfolds and authoritarianism deepens. We’re just gonna have to come together, so this is laying some of the groundwork for that and trying to help people move into … broader networks of care.”
Coyne celebrated the efforts of local organizations to work together to create change while striving for collective resilience.
“It’s just one example of the sort of cross-pollination that’s happening, and a real desire and urgency to collectively create a strategy for how to transform the society that deprives more and more people every day of the ability to meet their basic needs and to survive,” he said. “More and more groups are trying to come up with strategies and work together so that we can be a force that moves society in a different direction.”
