CategoriesAccess to Capital Faith + Finance

Why Are You Meeting?

“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 Capital

Walking away from the myth of the rugged individual: Building an Interdependent Economy

One 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 Capital

The Connected Evangelist Role

In 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 […]

Collaborative Work Toward $100 Million Fund Comes Out of Neighborhood Economics

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 […]

Transformation Through Replicable Local Platforms

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 […]