Convening, Recruiting, and Connecting People Who Repair Local Economies
CategoriesAccess to Capital Racial Wealth GapPhoto by Mikelya Fournier on Unsplash There is a custom in our town. If you want a BIPOC person, especially one leading a nonprofit, to address your club, church coffee hour, or other group interested in learning more about the issues related to economic justice they are working on, you pay them an honorarium of […]
CategoriesFaith + Finance Faith on Main StreetIn Dave Kresta’s book, Jesus on Main Street, he outlines a path for Christian congregations to engage in community economic development. Unlike traditional economic development, which can result in marginalized communities being displaced and forced to move to make way for highways or housing projects for affluent homeowners or retail, community economic development includes the […]
CategoriesChurch Assets in Transition Faith + FinanceIf your church is under 100 members or the majority of your membership is over 70 years of age, you have some really remarkable choices about your next stage in life. You can refuse hospice care or be treated like less than a very sick, very expensive beloved cat – or you can make choices. […]
CategoriesAccess to Capital Faith + Finance“Why are you meeting?” That’s the first question Landis Graden asks of a dwindling congregation looking at options for their future when he engages with them. “What’s the purpose of your meeting, what’s at the center of your congregation, what’s your anchor?” Graden asks those congregations. “If I hear we’ve been worshiping together for 40 […]
CategoriesAccess to CapitalOne of the things that became clear in the Design Labs at Neighborhood Economics in Indianapolis is that every practitioner had a slightly different approach to creating a solution and that each had a lot to learn from the other. “We saw people at the conference doing, for example, neighborhood investment trusts differently in Indianapolis, […]
CategoriesAccess to CapitalIn our “field guide to transformation: taking seriously your congregation’s role to economic justice,” we describe a number of important roles in doing this work. One of the important and often misunderstood roles is that of the connected evangelist. In the public policy for Design Lab at our recent Neighborhood Economics, lab co-leader Scott Shallet […]
The neighborhood investment trust creators who participated in the Neighborhood Economics conference lab want to raise a $100 million fund to replicate their model across the country. Neighborhood Investment Trusts help neighbors invest in Black Wall Streets and their neighborhood businesses to keep them safe from the hedge funds. These hedge funds have raised billions […]
When we held the transform conference a couple of years ago, we decided we would not focus on regenerative agriculture and forestry, though that, as has been shown, was the largest market opportunity; it’s been growing at an accelerating rate. At our core, however, we, the founders of SOCAP, realized that we care about, and […]
CategoriesAccess to CapitalSome places have figured out how to respond to climate change intelligently, collectively, and practically, in a way that energizes communities and lifts people from the crippling fear and imaginations of impending doom that often besets progressives. I’ve been interviewing people from some of those places, and I have some initial patterns to report back. […]
CategoriesRacial Wealth GapThis is a story of how systems change. In this case, the power shifted because a Black entrepreneur asserted his power against the thoughtlessly oppressive credit card and banking fee system. He started a fund to help Black and brown sole proprietors become job creators, and this created the room for the system to shift, […]