I had the opportunity to go last week, with Rosa Lee, to the Ostrom workshop at the University of Indiana to explain the post-disaster economy I see sprouting through several initiatives in and around Swannanoa where we live; it was the epicenter of Hurricane Helene.
Our neighborhood, which is often called Swannana-nowhere in the Asheville region, has now been on the front page of the New York Times more than five times. Trump has been here twice for photo opps. Our governor spent an hour and a half with the mutual aid network that is becoming the backbone organization to coordinate and connect the multiple non-profit and aid groups now fixated on this previously forgotten, low status, unincorporated, largely blue collar, low-property-value part of our county.
As an ambitious new executive director of one of the two most powerful environmental non-profit organizations told me, it’s easier to raise money now for Swannanoa because of our sudden prominence than it is to raise money anywhere else in the eighteen-county western North Carolina region.
Swannanoa has gone from “nowhere” to likely becoming the target of a non-profit fueled gold rush of aid dollars. If federal dollars do dry up, nonprofits are finding it easy to raise money to bring to our community, where our persistent debris-filled landscape of fallen down buildings invites photo opportunities that tug at people’s hearts.
Yet what we are building here is even more significant. We had one of those fairly common evanescent post-disaster utopias that are documented so well in Rebecca Solnit’s book Paradise Built in Hell. In our case, we are trying to build the infrastructure to keep our post-disaster economy alive, with its awareness that there is abundance, enough for all of us, if we share.
Going to the Ostrom workshop helped me crystalize what I see building, the emerging post- disaster economy.
At a high level, the new economy is more local; it creates more wealth in producers and growers of food. It links food security, climate resilience, and reparations in a model that’s compelling and replicable. And these values are expressed well in the currency that launched in a free food marketplace on the nearby campus of Warren Wilson College.
Elinor is the Nobel Prize-winning economist who proved that the commons, the open spaces where we share and pool our resources, are not a tragedy of scarcity as we’ve been told, but that actually a community, say ranchers, can manage a watershed 43% better if every voice is heard than if there is a top-down plan by government.
That has been a key principle of our events, where we try to find the invisible voices that need to be heard. Other impact investing events focus on getting the right people in the room. We bring into the room the people the “right people” wouldn’t know or likely listen to. Those strangers whose value you discover may become unlikely allies with solutions suggested by the community.
The people in the zip codes where people die 10 years younger, typically zip codes long ago red-lined by the federal government, do not need a plan or a foundation that wants to impose its theory of change with a program grant, they need access to the friends and family capital affluent neighborhoods can easily get from their relatives.
Neighborhood Economics was instrumental in developing the lowest cost, most grass roots philanthropic investing platform that is being plugged into several initiatives through the Common Cents Fund. If a lot of money is coming this way, and before it does, this vehicle, to express the view of the community – where they want to put their money,– is needed.
Funders need to follow and add to what the community wants to fund. With Stephanie Swepson Twitty and Eagle Market Streets CDC, as well as SelfHelp Credit Union, led in this region by Tara Brown, we created that philanthropic grassroots investment platform called the Common Cents Fund. We are working with several groups who will be presenting at Neighborhood Economics April 1-2 who will be using the fund for their own projects that will start with grassroots support.
We will be focusing on the entrepreneurial ecosystem that is based on listening to the entrepreneurs and finding the right kind of capital to fill the friends and family gap for underrepresented entrepreneurs. The Common Cents Fund is only one of the ways we are doing that at the conference.