Convening, Recruiting, and Connecting People Who Repair Local Economies
Leroy Barber, Executive Director I think my life may have been built around cooperative economic activity on just about every level. This way of life led to flourishing based on everyone having a voice and ownership. I don’t believe my mom would have been able to raise us alone without our community and a place […]
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 […]
These past two weeks, I have had the opportunity to travel the roads of Texas to listen, learn, and visit organizations and possible partners in our work of convening and supporting the process of getting resources to places they haven’t gone historically. I have driven about 2,000 miles and still haven’t seen a giant portion […]
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; […]
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 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 […]