Future Here Now: Special Neighborhood Economics Edition
Front-row reporting about bleeding-edge innovations in putting meaningful power behind community change-makers. That sounds messy....
Welcome back to Future Here Now, where we discover the unexpected ways that the world around us is changing, how that’s affecting our communities, and what we can do right now to help the places we care about thrive into the future.
And welcome to a special edition focused on the stories coming out of the Neighborhood Economics convening, held last week in Indianapolis. This is the beginning of an ongoing effort to unlock new resources to help fund and support important community improvements - entrepreneurship, affordable housing, impacts of structural racism, and more. People nationwide are doing this by creating new funding mechanisms, and new (well, new to a lot of us) ways to do businesses. And by prying open locked-up resources, like foundation principal and underused buildings.
All of that is cool — they’re the kinds of stories Future Here Now covers frequently. But dozens of individual, underfunded, under-the-radar local efforts aren’t enough to make the kinds of systemic change we all need. So a big part of the Neighborhood Economics initiative is to build new connections across the hundreds of people who are creating the solutions that could benefit all of us, starting in their local communities today. It’s the Network Economy in action, building impact not just by owning the work, but by creating far-flung webs of collaborators who learn and grow and work together.
Now you get to be part of this network as well. As you read these articles and follow the links, think about the people within your universe who need to know about this…and who is out there in your community fighting these battles all alone. If you’ve got some of those, please tell me about them. Let’s get more hands into the mix.
This edition is being sent to my entire mailing list so that we can help build that network faster. If you’re interested in getting a weekly dose of possibility-widening stories like these, you would probably enjoy a subscription. Or maybe your local change-maker would.
Coming Soon: Knocking open the doors to ownership & wealth
It is (or at least it should be) well known that Black families have access to only a tiny fraction of the financial wealth that white and other minorites do. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but a big one is the generations-long, systemic denial of avenues to building wealth, especially though two of the biggest historic wealth - generators:
Real estate appreciation, and
Ownership of businesses that generate wealth through assets, intellectual property and employment.
And that situation isn’t improving, as 96% of Black-owned businesses have no employees and even supposedly safe wealth generators like home ownership have failed to pay off for many Black owners. And access to business loans, reasonable mortgages, and other conventional wealth building blocks continue to be discriminatorily denied to Black residents more than anyone else.
Breaking that chain requires whole new ways of growing value and placing people who have been left out, directly into the benefactor seat. Here’s a few local efforts that are worth watching:
North Carolina’s Eagle Market Streets Community Development Corporation developed a Community Equity Fund, seeded by a local foundation and a county, that invests in Black-owned sole proprietors who have the potential to scale. Not only do they get funding, but they also get support specifically examining how to get out of the self-employment mode and into growth opportunities. As this article highlights, getting there takes not only financial support, but access to information that helps them realize and capitalize on the opportunities.
Local Code Kansas City is working on a combined real estate and small business strategy to build local wealth and keep more funds within the community. This organization is relatively new, but is building real estate strategies that are designed around local priorities and structured to provide multiple routes to local ownership. Their first project, a historic school building planned for a detailed mix of use, is going through design right now.
Chicago TREND is leveraging sophisticated economic development expertise by serving as a master broker for neighborhood-scale projects in some of Chicago’s more overlooked neighborhoods, occupied by businesses that meet identified community needs. They get seemingly impossible projects done that include just about every possible kind of funding tool, including locally-sourced equity crowdfunding.
Downtown Crenshaw Rising is striving to take community ownership and derive direct community benefit from a regional-scale shopping center. After raising an incredible amount of money and signing on more than 300 organizations in only a few months, Downtown Crenshaw Rising lost its bid for the sale of the mall to a questionable developer, despite offering a higher initial payment. After that, organizers pivoted to using their new war chest to improving housing in the area, while also using legal and political tools to challenge the sale.
There are many, many more.
But here’s a caveat, and an insight:
If you click those links, and you dig into the sites, you’ll find that a lot of them aren’t… social media perfection. Blogs haven’t been updated in years, project descriptions lag the current status of the project, you might even find a little wonkiness in the page design.
That’s because these people are doing the work, not talking about it. In Indianapolis, I often found that the descriptions people gave of their project differed from what the web sites show — if not in information, then certainly in energy or communication effectiveness. I’m thinking that this is one of the big challenges to creating this kind of collective impact — the doers are so busy doing that they’re not putting much effort into telling others what they’re doing.
And that’s actually a significant problem, because without telling their stories, how are these change-makers supposed to work together for meaningful, system-wide impact?
Local Learnings: Alone isn’t enough.
One of the sleeper themes of the convening was around the growing realization that working alone isn’t enough. And that awareness showed up not only in the cross-profession discussions (when’s the last time you saw a priest and a real estate developer working together on closing the racial wealth gap), but in many of the specific projects people brought into the discussions. Here’s a few:
I’ve plugged the newsletter Ownership Matters here before, and OM, as well as cooperative businesses, and organizations that help cooperatives grow, were well represented at the convening. OM profiles cooperative businesses all over the country, and they do a darn good job of it. Their articles get deep into the people and the operations of cooperatives across a wide range of industries, sizes and locations. These aren’t puff pieces, these articles lay out a clear picture of the complexity and the challenges and the power of cooperative approaches.
At the convening, a group led by OM’s publisher focused on the potential for cooperative businesses to take over for the “silver tsunami” of small business owners, who are more likely to be forced to close their business rather than find a suitable conventional buyer.
A different approach to collective impact comes from De’Amon Harges, a community organizer and self-described “social banker.” De’Amon used the detailed, door-to-door community learning that Asset Based Community Development promotes to achieve a very tangible impact:
By documenting what they learned about community interdependence and hidden financial strength, a neighborhood was able to demonstrate its community connectedness and “social capital” so clearly that local banks agreed to lessen their resistance to lending in that location. Based on the data De’Amon’s crew provided, banks recognized that the supposed riskiness of the neighborhood was far less than the usual data sources implied.
I’ve been known to criticize Asset Based Community Development before for seeming to focus on happy talk about community connection, and often failing to connect that to direct impact on peoples’ needs. De’Amon and a small number of others are showing exactly how that can be done, and the potential is huge. Here’s a link to raw video of De’Amon talking with Derek Peebles, Executive Director of the American Independent Business Alliance, about that potential. Derek is also a powerful user of ABCD methods, and the person who first taught me that ABCD could actually move the needle on social and economic priorities. Their conversation starts at about minute 22.
Do Now: Re-examinePolicy
As part of the convening’s work on various Big Issues, each Design Lab (basically a cross-discipline small group) was asked to develop a Problem Statement. Typical behavior for social impact types. And after a whole lot of group deliberation and trying on language and the like, each group posted their Problem Statement in the hallway.
Most of them were pretty much what you’d expect. Except for the Policy group, which posted one sentence:
Policy is a colonialist imposition.
Later on, they added another sentence to fill it out a little more:
Policy can evolve. People who create policy can become people who emerge policy.
Even with that addition, that’s a lot to chew on.
After a lot of chewing, I started to understand. Policy (government, business, whatever) typically gets handed down from some Leadership onto the Affected. Typically, the Affected have little to no say in what the Policy is, but they are obliged to abide by it. Not unlike, and some would say intentionally like, how colonial conquerors treated the people that they put under their foot.
For a person who’s spent most of a career dealing with public policy, and who now has to make policy for a new company, this assertion was more than a little unnerving. I don’t want to be a colonialist. How do you avoid being a colonialist if you have to make policy?
I actually talked to the person who germinated that statement for a long time one evening. “Emerging” policy means co-creating it, developing it in partnership with the people to whom it will apply. So that it’s not a Thing Imposed by Them, but a shared agreement among Us. And one that can be changed, and made conditional to the people and places where they fit.
That’s nowhere near as easy as making a policy in my Star Chamber and decreeing it to be the case.
Emerging a policy requires us to collaborate, to trust the wisdom of the group, to not push an artificial time frame. To potentially have our own opinions overruled, to not get our way. Even to be called something like a colonialist when we get too pushy, and to accept that call out without getting defensive or changing the rules.
I can hear my local government people snorting. Emerging policy in our communities sounds about as doable as a one-handed Everest climb. Have you seen what these people say about us??!
I get it.
There’s no magic pill (there never is, of course), but understanding our policy choices and decisions from this angle means that we have to understand how what we’re doing impacts, and is perceived by, the people we’re doing it to. And it means to understand that, as top-down, command-and-control approaches crash up against a populace with immediate information and easy access to collaboration, we’re going to have little choice but to learn to co-create. That simple phrase alerts us to the fact that the systems we have are not the systems we must have, and that the nakedness of the Emperor is becoming hard to miss for the people on the sidewalks.
Thanks for reading. This was fun, and hard. Kind of like the Neighborhood Economics convening itself. The official even production team is still working through all of the content (there was a ton of it). I’ll share their reports and videos and the like as I get them.
Go get ‘em,
Della