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 […]

Trinity Christian College Takes On the Challenge of Student Debt

Trinity Christian College in Chicago is making real progress in creating a system of funding higher education that does not leave students burdened with tens of thousands of dollars of debt that, unlike business or personal debt, cannot be eliminated by filing bankruptcy.  College President Aaron Kuecker used a cup of coffee to transform the […]

Finding the Catalytic Philanthropy to Help Black Funds Scale

The influential Aspen Institute has decided that the goal of their Future of Wealth initiative is to see Black family wealth grow ten-fold over the next twenty-five years. This would bridge a significant chunk out of the racial wealth gap; the average white family has 10x the assets of the average Black family. Aspen’s grounding […]

Watershed Fund is Thriving in Asheville

Kevin Jones We’ve raised a year of operating capital to launch The Watershed Fund, https://emsdcmarketplace.org/donations/watershed-fund/ which offers zero interest loans to local farmers serving our farm-to-table sector in Asheville. The connections and reciprocity within our food systems are already proving to be one of the surprising benefits. With the Watershed Fund, https://neighborhoodeconomics.org/wiki/index.php/Initial_design_of_the_Watershed_Fund what we are […]