Convening, Recruiting, and Connecting People Who Repair Local Economies
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 […]
I will be the first to admit that my belief in a better world and systems that work for all people may be a little more hopeful than what is visible in our current condition. If I go down the rabbit hole of what is happening systematically, then my cynical self is called to the […]
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, […]
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 […]
This past week, my wife Donna and I were able to go back to Atlanta where we spent seventeen years of our lives. Our grandchild lives there, it’s where our oldest children were raised, and where our two oldest sons and daughter-in-law still live and work. Did I mention our grandchild lives there? Tuesday morning, I […]
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 […]
Markets are not value neutral or virtuous. They play by rules designed by the people that benefit from them. “Letting the market distribute wealth as it will” is simply a recipe for letting the status quo continue. The markets will produce what the markets are designed to produce – namely consolidation of wealth into the hands of […]