Convening, Recruiting, and Connecting People Who Repair Local Economies
On our last night in Texas, just before we went to the Broken Spoke, we had an extraordinary conversation at Still Austin, where our friend, Chris Seals, told us what he is up to in the whiskey distilling business in Texas. He even gave me an exquisite bottle of rye to take home with me. […]
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; […]
The fall has brought on a busy travel season, and that’s because our work in Neighborhood Economics depends on connections with local communities and good relationships with partners. Resources can’t hit the ground in local neighborhoods unless we build together. The excitement of this work is being able to see and learn as we move […]
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 […]
Imagine a world where every Black entrepreneur doesn’t just survive—they thrive, shattering systemic barriers with unyielding resilience and innovation. Despite the unwavering spirit of Black entrepreneurs, the stark reality remains: 95% of Black-owned businesses are sole proprietorships, a figure reported by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2019. This overwhelming majority stems from pronounced financial disparities, […]
I recently visited San Antonio and had the honor of meeting community leaders and pastors doing some wonderful work in the city. I am thrilled to get to know so many people as we prepare for our convening there in February. One of the groups I had the chance to connect with was a few […]
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 […]
I’m not quite sure if I’ve ever produced a conference in February. The reason for our February event, Neighborhood Economics: San Antonio, is that we really wanted to go to San Antonio, and we don’t want to be there in the heat that strained the people and the grid last year.. We have amazing partners […]
There are many things that need to connect over time for a neighborhood economy to emerge, and it takes a connected community committed over time to see it come into view. This week, I want to emphasize a different factor in the work. We were a part of a committed community of faith that wasn’t […]