Convening, Recruiting, and Connecting People Who Repair Local Economies
By Joel Skene, Podcaster and Guest Writer As Host of The Mindful Marketplace on BizRadio.US, I am honored and humbled by the opportunity to partner with such a thoughtful and catalytic organization like Neighborhood Economics. My first career was in the Peace Corps, Housing for the Chronically Homeless, and Food Insecurity in Metro Detroit. […]
Neighborhood Economics is excited to add two new content partners this week. Michael Shuman, the acknowledged master of the ways people with average incomes can invest in businesses and real estate in their local economies, will be doing a twice-a-month webinar with me, highlighting one particular new innovative fund each time. The funds we interview […]
We need to delegitimize the often hidden and unconscious way that money and the wealthy rule the world, says Marjorie Kelly in a thoughtful new book Kelly and the Democracy Collaborative were among the early leaders in the movement toward shared ownership, with their innovative Cleveland Coop which generated jobs, new businesses, and democratic wealth […]
We have 18 months to get it done. We are in a once in 100 years opportunity to move the needle on economic justice over the next 18 months. That was the assessment of David Erickson, Senior Vice President and Head of Outreach and Education at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as he […]
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 […]
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 […]
Jeremiah Robinson and I had lunch today at Maria’s, billed as the best little taco place in Texas. If you’re from out of town, you won’t find it if you don’t know where it is. We were taken there by Janie Barrera. Her liftfund.com invested in the business run by Maria and her daughter Linda; […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]