Soul Descendants

Solidarity Starts with You 🌻

A Long Island community project in its early days. We’re early, and we’re honest about that.

Who we are

Our mission is to advance community resilience and environmental justice on Long Island through cooperative housing, healing-centered education, and trauma-informed mutual aid.

Soul Descendants is a community project in its early, pre-launch days, rooted in Hempstead, Wyandanch, Brentwood/Central Islip and Glen Cove: priority communities that include New York State–designated disadvantaged census tracts. We believe the problems our neighbors face every day (housing insecurity, isolation, environmental harm) share a root: people cut off from their own power and from each other. We’re building toward spaces that reconnect both.

Why we do this

A lot of us feel it: rent and groceries keep climbing, neighbors feel like strangers, and our feeds pull us apart faster than we can find each other. On Long Island, 51% of renters and more than a third of homeowners are cost-burdened (NYS Comptroller, 2024).

When people seem checked out, it’s rarely because they don’t care. It’s what happens when you’ve been told your voice doesn’t count, and you’ve been cut off from the people who’d prove otherwise. Our neighborhoods already know a lot about getting through hard times together: sou-sous, church kitchens, the elder everyone calls. We’re not here to teach that. We’re here to make room for it.

We believe two things belong together. The first is thinking for ourselves: noticing what pulls at our attention and trusting what we know from our own lives. (We call it cognitive sovereignty.) The second is showing up for each other, across the street and across generations, so what we learn and build gets passed on. Together, we call it divine solidarity: your freedom and mine are tied together.

What’s at stake is simple. Either our communities keep getting priced out and talked over, or we start owning more of our future, together.

The community we envision

We picture blocks where neighbors know each other by name. Where elders’ stories and young people’s ideas sit at the same table. Where someone going through a hard season has places to turn that feel safe, and where people pool what they have so no one goes without. And, in the long run, housing that residents own and govern together: permanently affordable, community-controlled, and built to be passed on.

Who we hope to meet

• Renters, homeowners and families feeling the squeeze of Long Island’s costs
• Elders and young people, and the households where several generations live together
• Neighbors who are tired of programs that don’t listen, and are a little skeptical of us too (fair!)
• Local groups, congregations, libraries and small businesses already doing the work

What we hope to grow, together

These are aspirations, not programs running today. Over time we hope our communities build:

• Listening and sharing back: regular ways to hear what neighbors need and report it back plainly
• Places to heal and gather: trauma-informed spaces, shaped with the people who use them
• Mutual aid: neighbors meeting neighbors’ needs, organized and accountable
• Shared know-how: learning cooperative economics, from savings circles to co-ops
• Community-held housing: resident-owned, permanently affordable homes (our long-term horizon, years away)

Where we stand today

We’re early, and we’re honest about that. Here’s what’s real right now:

• Structure: a fiscally sponsored project of State Democracy Project, a 501(c)(3), with our founding policies written
• The need: we’ve gathered public data on housing costs, health access and environmental burden in our four focus communities
• Relationships: we take part in Long Island coalition spaces and have mapped dozens of local organizations we hope to learn from (no formal partnerships yet)
• Learning: ongoing study in nonprofit development, cooperative economics and environmental justice, including a nonprofit incubator program
• Our first table: Sweet Connections, a free community listening table. The survey is written, venues are scouted, and our first event is planned for Glen Cove. We’ll post the date once it’s confirmed.

What we don’t know yet

Plenty, and that’s the point of listening first. We don’t yet know how neighbors will feel about a table that asks questions, what they’ll name first, or who will want to keep in touch.

Here’s what we hope to find: a word wall that fills up faster than we expected, a few people who stay to talk longer than they planned, and the first handful of neighbors who say, “Let me know what happens next.” Whatever we hear, we’ll share it back.

Here’s how we’ll know a gathering worked: people leave owning a little more of their own thinking, and a little more connected to each other.

Say hello

Questions, ideas, or want to hear when our first table is set? Email us.

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