Innovative Housing Solutions

I’m excited about some of the innovative housing solutions that will be showcased at our conference in February. They go far beyond traditional government affordable housing, thanks to some innovative philanthropic funders who are targeting their catalytic investments at precise inflection points in the system to make real change.  And what’s even more significant is […]

Building an interdependent economy: Shared ownership is focus for foundations

Foundations have often been observed to move in something resembling rugby scrums: many of them focused on the same issue. Shared ownership of businesses is the hot topic this year for many of them. And last week I went to Rockefeller Center to what was a major gathering of the leading catalytic foundations, funds focused on the various […]

Why Foundations Show Up for Neighborhood Economics

Our Neighborhood Economics conference in Jackson, Mississippi, this past spring had a surprising degree of success attracting the leading national catalytic foundations that invest in economic justice.  The Jackson conference was just our second in-person event since the pandemic, and we attracted the MacArthur, Surdna, Heron, and Kellogg foundations, and we are in conversation with […]

Meet Strong Towns, Important New Partners in Our Work

Background You Need to Know One key principle that the team at Neighborhood Economics has taken from our experience in building SOCAP, the impact investing and social enterprise conference we started and ran for a decade, is finding the valuable strangers and helping them become unlikely allies.  That principle is one reason SOCAP became the […]

Community Banks are Local Fountains of Money; We Have to Restore Them

When someone like Oscar Perry Abello, one of a small handful of journalists with deep and broad knowledge of the important innovative solutions to systemic economic justice, finally decides to write a book, my first question is why it’s not about those new things that are delivering economic power to those who have been historically […]

Solutions to Repair Local Economies are Starting to Replicate

Mixed Income Neighborhood Trusts, or MINTS, were a brand new concept three years ago, but Trust Neighborhoods has quickly grown from two buildings in one city to 170 residences in five cities. MINTS are a rare economic justice innovation that found the right inflection point in the system at just the right point to halt […]