Convening, Recruiting, and Connecting People Who Repair Local Economies
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 […]
There is a movement growing across the country to establish the legal personhood of a river as a way to check the power of corporate personhood. If a river has legal standing to sue its polluters, a town or county could, for example, stop fracking in their community, or halt a pipeline the people living […]
We have a volunteer who is working on the Wiki that I am creating as an online information resource, separate from our website, of the themes and the emerging taxonomy of projects and funds that we convene at Neighborhood Economics. Scott Arvin adds order to my creation of the Wiki, which tracks who I am […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Kevin Jones The Neighborhood Economics model of bringing a national focus to local issues was in high focus in Jackson, Mississippi at our April conference. I want to tell you about one of the most exciting things that came out of our conference. Because of white flight and the city’s problems, developers had stopped building […]