Convening, Recruiting, and Connecting People Who Repair Local Economies
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; […]
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 […]
We have a volunteer who is working on the Wiki that I am creating as an online information resource, separate from our website, of the themes and the emerging taxonomy of projects and funds that we convene at Neighborhood Economics. Scott Arvin adds order to my creation of the Wiki, which tracks who I am […]
Mixed Income Neighborhood Trusts, or MINTS, were a brand new concept three years ago, but Trust Neighborhoods has quickly grown from two buildings in one city to 170 residences in five cities. MINTS are a rare economic justice innovation that found the right inflection point in the system at just the right point to halt […]
Trinity Christian College in Chicago is making real progress in creating a system of funding higher education that does not leave students burdened with tens of thousands of dollars of debt that, unlike business or personal debt, cannot be eliminated by filing bankruptcy. College President Aaron Kuecker used a cup of coffee to transform the […]
Note: Perhaps this isn’t 100% factual, but it IS a very true story. And I think it speaks to the work we are trying to do at Neighborhood Economics. Sharing this story feels risky because it is told from the vantage point of a single person (me!), and the way all the dots connect it […]
Kevin Jones We’ve raised a year of operating capital to launch The Watershed Fund, https://emsdcmarketplace.org/donations/watershed-fund/ which offers zero interest loans to local farmers serving our farm-to-table sector in Asheville. The connections and reciprocity within our food systems are already proving to be one of the surprising benefits. With the Watershed Fund, https://neighborhoodeconomics.org/wiki/index.php/Initial_design_of_the_Watershed_Fund what we are […]