It’s always fun to be at SOCAP and to be able to connect with what Fran Seegull started referring to as the “OGs” who really are the team that started and grew SOCAP: Tim Freundlich, one of the founders; Lindsay Smalling, the amazing curator who managed content for most of the time our group owned SOCAP; and Kevin and me.
Both Kevin and I were at SOCAP23 in San Francisco this week, and it was a flurry of activity. I think that Kevin had twelve meetings on Tuesday alone, and they were all with people from organizations that are working deeply to find ways to repair local economies.
- Entrepreneurs with brilliant ideas
- Huge non-profit organizations
- Place-based groups working to build a more just economy in their town
- Investors with a place-based lens
- Foundations
- Venture philanthropy platforms
From Birmingham to Fresno and everywhere in between, people are hearing about Neighborhood Economics and seeking us out. It was very gratifying to see the growing response to our new venture.
And it was fun to see where SOCAP is going. Sidney Williams, of Crossing Capital and Drew University, was there with a cohort of doctoral students who had never seen this phenomenon before. And they, like just about everyone who attends SOCAP for the first time, felt like they were drinking from the firehose of innovation and finance. So much to absorb. So little time.
SOCAP is intentionally moving into the global marketplace. And that is great. But all the great things about SOCAP point to the need for a deep and local convening: Neighborhood Economics. SOCAP is about high-level financial markets, global solutions, and the need to change the way capital markets respond to critical needs.
Neighborhood Economics is not about those things. At all.
Neighborhood Economics is going much deeper and is working on basic, practical, and proven solutions to help repair local economies so that everyone living in that community has the opportunity to live lives of abundance.
SOCAP is doing its thing. A good thing. But not this new thing.
I can feel it in my bones that what we are on to with this new work could even be a bigger movement (and convening) than SOCAP ever was.
Mark Sampson of Rooted Good said on a panel at Neighborhood Economics in Jackson that we may never be able to change the national economy, but we CAN change neighborhood economies, one at a time.
And we are seeing that happen in front of our eyes.
Ram Gonzales in San Antonio is doing amazing work building a new economy in his West Side neighborhood, working with former mayor and cabinet secretary Henry Cisneros. Lawndale Community Church in Chicago has been doing it for decades. Folks in Jackson are applying new levers to their work and seeing change happen, with institutional faith-based funds taking existing grassroots Black church housing initiatives to scale.. Sidney Williams is helping Black pastors understand how to deploy their assets in a new way to serve not only their own congregations, but their neighbors, too. Change is beginning to pop up all around us.
Our goal is to have a very rough outline of the content for Neighborhood Economics in San Antonio to you in the next couple of weeks. And tickets are still on sale with a deep discount with code FALLSPECIAL so we hope you’ll go ahead and make your plans to join us for what we believe is going to be an amazing few days of learning, partnership building, and fun!