Prana App

02/04/2022

Prana is launching susus with payout amounts between $250-$5000 this year to commemorate Black History Month. Please join our info session on Feb 8th 5pm ET on Instagram live here.

02/02/2021

For Black History Month, buy from black businesses using a Prana Circle.

Join our black business Prana Circle. Sign up on our website.

You can join our circles to get beauty, fashion, home decor, and more from black businesses that you love.

Sign up today!

07/22/2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUEex1pzS8k&feature=youtu.be

In this video we discuss the Prana Circle App and how it can be used to save money using the sou sou saving method ! 💪Subscribe to Brandon Young- https://goo...

07/20/2020

Susu and Susunomics: The Theory and Practice of Pan-African Economic, Racial and Cultural Self-Preservation is one of the most powerful and effective books ever written on one of the oldest economic systems practiced. The Book is the second part of the Susu series. It discusses the practical means of developing what is required for the building of strong economic, social and cultural power in African-America as well as the rest of the Black world and the world of those striving to improve their economic, social and cultural conditions. Susu and Susunomics shows how communities such as refugees from World War II Europe and Afro-Caribbean people have used susu and economic nationalism to build up collective and individual wealth through unity, cooperation and the pooling of their resources. Susu and Susunomics discuses the form of susu economics practiced by Koreans, Black West Indians and others. It also stresses the point that in many northern cities beginning as early as the 1620s, Blacks were developing in parity with whites until slavery was officially established during the 1680s, a move that was illegal. The use of susu in the Southern U.S. and the building of strong, thriving, economically stable Black communities is also part of the evidence in this text. This book deals with a number of very important issues of significant important to the Black communities worldwide. Some of the issues include: creating a tax and job base; the attitude needed to be successful; economic racism and stopping it; susu banking and building a susu economy; workers and the susu system; pooling money to buy banks, factories, lands and other assets; stopping population control and managing a strong, growing population; Susuism and independence; the Black male and rebuilding the Black family and a number of very important issues and solutions.

Source: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0595182461/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

07/15/2020

Don’t be a Karen! Black people, and women in particular, in the diaspora have created money groups for themselves and their communities, despite living in inhospitable environments for centuries. Studies show that Black women in America’s participated in mutuals and collectives to counteract social exclusion. For centuries, black women in the Caribbean and Canada have mobilized scarce funds in a collective manner in their communities. Source: Black Women as Co-operators... by Caroline Shenaz Hossein. Image by

07/14/2020

Some sociologists have attributed the success of West Indians to high levels of informal cooperative economics that exists in the group. For example, the susu which is a cooperative loan system operating within pockets of trusted groups, essentially operates as a financial support mechanism that replaces dependence on banks and financial institutions in the early stages of immigrants life in the US. Many West Indians continue to use susu, even after getting into the mainstream economy. Repost from

01/30/2020

WHEN Jemma Legall Romain moved to New York from Trinidad in 1984, she flew on a ticket her mother had bought for her through a saving system known as a susu. Years later, when Ms. Romain had to raise money toward the down payment on her three-family house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, she too saved money in a susu. After she bought the house, she made it pay for itself by renting out two floors.

Though a staple of immigrant communities, susus are little known outside of them. The name is thought to have evolved from the West African Yoruba word ''esusu,'' which means roughly ''pooling the funds.'' In New York, such pooled funds are staples of Trinidadian immigrant communities, and, with variants, of many other immigrant groups.

Susus are generally made up of groups of family members or friends, each of whom pledges to put a certain amount of money into a central pot each week. That pot, presided over by a treasurer, whose honesty is vouched for by his or her respected standing among the participants, is then given to one member of the group.

Over the course of a susu's life, each member will receive a payout exactly equal to the total he has put in, which could range from a handful of dollar bills to several thousand dollars; members earn no interest on the money they set aside. After a complete cycle, the members either regroup and start over or go their separate ways.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/22/nyregion/new-yorkers-co-newcomers-savings-and-loan.html

Image Source: http://newyork-onmymind.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Ellis-Island-Immigrants12.jpg

01/28/2020

In parts of West Africa and the Caribbean an ancient version of cooperative economics exists, called “susu.” As one of the oldest forms of microfinance in Africa, the practice is run by one of Africa’s oldest financial groups, susu collectors. They run their businesses from kiosks in the marketplace and act as mobile bankers.

Clients make low but regular deposits on a daily or weekly basis over the course of a month into a susu account. At the end of this period the susu collector returns the accumulated savings to the client but keeps one day’s savings as commission. Susu collectors may also provide advances to their clients or rotate the accumulated deposits of a group between individual members.

Today, susu collectors provide many West Africans who would otherwise be denied credit with access to money they need to start up small venture projects that in many cases benefit the community as a whole. In the United States, Black immigrants from the Caribbean have enjoyed one of the highest economic growth rates using a form of the susu and leveraging this practice to establish successful credit unions.

Source: https://atlantablackstar.com/2013/12/16/5-historic-examples-cooperative-economics-ujamaa/

Image Source: https://atlantablackstar.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Microentrepreneur-Stella-Sabang.jpg

01/27/2020

The Freedom Quilting Bee is a quilting cooperative established in 1966 by a group of African American women in the community of Rehoboth, 46 miles from Selma, in Wilcox County. The groups arose during the civil rights movement and is heralded for having spawned a renaissance in the popularity of quilting in American interior décor in the 1960s.

The Freedom Quilting Bee was born in the civil rights movement as a way for poor black craftswomen in the Alabama Black Belt to earn money for their families.

Momentum gathered for the establishment of a cooperative, with members earning the proceeds from sales of the quilts. Thus, on March 26, 1966, the Freedom Bee was officially organized, and those present elected officers, set up a board of directors, and adopted a charter. The group counted 60 members from across the Black Belt, with its nucleus in Rehoboth (also known then as Route 1, Alberta), because that was the home of manager Estelle Witherspoon, a skilled and politically savvy community leader.

Source: Excerpts from http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1628

Image Source: https://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/10/11/freedom-quilting-bee-cooperative

01/24/2020

Banker ladies were around as far back as the 1600s, when thousandsof African slaves to the Caribbean engaged in co-operative banking groups (Hossein, 2013). Gordon Nembhard (2014) traces self-help groups of African-Americans to the 1700s, when people created co-operatives as a way to resist racism. What is certain is that collective banking is most definitely not a new concept to the Black diaspora.

Source:Source: Black women as co-operators: Rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) in the Caribbean and Canada
CS Hossein

Image:Dessert sellers, Kingston, Jamaica, Wikipedia Commons

01/21/2020

The co-operative legacy is often told through a male and European framework by the people who embody that gender and cultural origin. The story of co-operative banks usually starts in the 1880s with the German Raifeissen co-operative banks or Rochdale weavers (Guinnane, 2001; Fairbairn, 1994). In Canada, the French-Canadian Desjardins’ caisses populaires of the 1900s dominate the discourse about co-operative banking in the Americas (Mendell, 2009). Yet, if one applies a feminist and Black theorising lens it becomes apparent that “other worlds”, such as the African one, predate the European starting point (Gordon Nembhard, 2014; Du Bois, 1907). Women of colour have engaged in self-help collectives for a very long time — as far back as the 1500s — and have been carrying out P2P since long before it was named (Hossein, 2013; 2012.

Source: Black women as co-operators: Rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) in the Caribbean and Canada
CS Hossein
Journal of Co-operative Studies 48 (3), 6-17

Image: Self-Help groups meeting with Caritas in Kilimambogo, Wikimedia Commons