An unprecedented assembly of investment funds are going to gather in Asheville in a little over a month, all focused on helping local entrepreneurs succeed and become job creators. There will be sessions to help entrepreneurs learn how to best tell the story of their business to the capital players.
In addition, post Helene, a new and more reciprocity-focused post disaster economy is emerging, bringing scalable and replicable projects. This includes a network of neighborhood gardens creating food sovereignty through hyperlocal food production that makes each community more climate resilient. That project, rooted in the five redlined or often neglected low status neighborhoods, including Burton Street, Shiloh, Southside, Swannanoa East Side, and Emma, is based in reparations.
Using community scale hydroponic systems, Eagle Market Streets will be implementing its proven training and technical assistance methodology to help people in marginalized communities create food-based businesses producing both gig income and also full-fledged businesses from the 30 plus gardens in the Bountiful Cities network. The program will be expanded to the other, more affluent neighborhoods once it is established.
Another session will highlight the story of an innovative and potentially replicable program that will let local farmers, working with the Equal Plates Project through a $1 million grant from the Red Cross, supply the disaster feeding programs like those of World Central Kitchen. Traditionally, the big post disaster groups that provide free food source from traditional corporate distributors, further hampering local growers who don’t have restaurants or farmers markets to sell to.
What’s emerging in Western North Carolina is not simply the old story of “build back better” but actually build a better system that is more equitable and includes every neighborhood in the economic recovery. Come and see what’s new and encouraging that’s emerging, post Helene. We are shifting the system into one that creates abundance for all based on sharing and reciprocity in ways that will last. It’s early, but progress and acceptance is growing. The old commodifying economy that made people mere Human Resources to be manipulated by the corporates is shifting into something new, one project at a time.
An economy of interdependence is the only thing that helps people survive disasters including those resulting from climate change, and we are working to make that real in the Asheville Bioregion.