We’ve got several exciting and intriguing sessions teed-up for our fall conference in Asheville. Rev. Luke Lingle, who worked with three Methodist churches in Asheville as they became vital community centers while maintaining worship spaces, has joined our team. He is going to lead our faith-based sessions looking at how churches create shared and mixed-use spaces that both connect them to the community and make them economically viable when passing the plate isn’t paying the bills.
With Lingle’s leadership, Haw Creek Methodist has turned its commercial kitchen into a vibrant incubator for aspiring cooks who want to launch a food truck, while another has become the center of the community’s homeless community. This thriving downtown church also shares space with a popular Montessori school. Lingle, who also works with the Ormond Center at Duke, has been scouring the mid-south for examples of congregations engaging in this new model of engaging with the community, since most churches are only used nine percent of the time from 9-5, six days of the week.
In addition to this faith content, the new model of coops becoming connected and nested engines of community wealth creation is going to be on display through the work of the Industrial Commons, an amazing revitalization of North Carolina’s textile industry from Morganton. Similar in its model to Poder Emma, which started out as a coop to buy the land under an Asheville immigrant community’s trailer parks to save them from predatory displacement by developers, Industrial Commons has also created bookkeeping, community-owned commercial real estate development, and services to accelerate shared wealth creation in the community. Investors in these two projects, including our long-time partner REDF.org, will be telling their part of the story along with the Seed Commons, which funds coops all over the country, as well as Invest Appalachia, another funder. The model of nested, connected coops, modeled after the pioneering work of Mondragon, the Spanish cooperative giant, is proving to be replicable and more efficient at creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem than any other form.
There are several new investment funds focused on local business, and people working with these funds will be telling their stories. This group includes the following funds: one from the Asheville Chamber of Commerce focused on tech-enabled local businesses, one from REDF focused on small local businesses, and the Common Cents fund, a philanthropic investment fund on the Impact Assets catacap.org platform that is a joint project of Neighborhood Economics and Stephanie Swepson Twitty’s Eagle Market Streets CDC. Eagle This fund offers zero interest loans that plug-in well as an on-ramp to the existing, larger funds which support businesses at the next phase.
We are excited that Joe Minicozi of Urban3, who has presented his work at several of our events, will unveil his latest work on subverting redlining and making property taxes fair for all.
We will be highlighting other replicable solutions to create intergenerational wealth, repair local economies, and enlist allies in creating economic justice in respectful relationships with impacted communities. I will be writing about these in succeeding newsletters, so stay with us as we continue to build toward our Asheville event.