Post Helene, here in Asheville, we are finding that in doing local, small scale convening around pressing problems like water, electricity, connectivity, and community free food, the work of connecting the dots that we do at Neighborhood Economics is more valuable than ever.
Gathering the people making a difference works in a disaster. And we should be ready to reveal what we have discovered here, locally, in a place where some are still without water or power, and almost no one has drinking water. What we see adds up to create what we are calling Neighborhood Scale Resilience. We are watching the social capital ties that create an interdependent economy. It functions with an assumption of abundance to be shared, where relationships are about reciprocity rather than commodification.
Alexandria Ravanel of the Noir Collective, who has attended our conferences, gave us a lens with which to identify some of those entrepreneurs. “The restaurants have an association, and so they become a line item” in how the government distributes aid money, grants to help businesses get back on their feet. Whereas, the caterers don’t have an association or any organized cooperative or other group, and so they are invisible on those spreadsheets, she explained.
Caterers often come from homes without the friends and family funding to open a restaurant, and so they don’t create a real estate asset with a brandable business on the street. They are vital to our tourism industry, but they were more fragile even before the unprecedented disaster hit.
The Noir Collective is a hub for Black entrepreneurs and creatives and is deeply involved in the mutual aid community engagement that has arisen everywhere here as we help each other get our lives back.
Stephanie Swepson Twitty of Eagle Market Streets CDC is using the lens of looking for groups who lack an association-like structure to receive the aid money with a coalition she has formed with several nimble CDFI’s, Self Help Credit Union, some technical assistance providers and business students from Warren Wilson College, and Neighborhood Economics. They are looking for business groups that are invisible to the agencies, foundations, and nonprofits handing out aid, like the caterers. That lens will also be used when the development money comes in from the government and foundation, to help businesses come back to being reliable job creators. Right now, most of their employees are without income.
In addition, Jeremiah Robinson, who leads the Catalyst fund at Mountain Biz Works, a local CDFI, and collaborates with us at Neighborhood Economics, is working on this, as well. Mountain Biz Works, which invests in underrepresented entrepreneurs, is gathering a pipeline of worthy entrepreneurs who are not in line to get the aid checks to restore business operations that are handed out. Working with Noir, Robinson created a directory of local Black-owned businesses.
Please help us get back on our feet.
We are still planning a conference here this spring. We have added a theme of Neighborhood Scale Resilience to the content that was set pre-Helene. We see first hand how people are making the concept of mutual aid an everyday reality we all rely on together as we recover and rebuild.
Warren Wilson College, the local college where Paula is on faculty, is also mapping all the aid funds that are coming. Many of them don’t know about the others and can cooperate much more clearly once that research helps them discover their peers and potential partners. Our capital stack went from community development to system change. Now, relief is front and center here were we live.
Entrepreneurs need grants to get their offices and stores back in business. Then aid funders will help with patient capital long-term loans; Twitty thinks the funds that arise will need to look for payment over 60 months or more, given how much was lost.
Neighborhood Economics will be back strong in the spring, here in Asheville. Plan now to join us. Our community will need visitors to return because small businesses depend on our tourism to survive. They typically make the majority of their money from October to December, so they will need and want this event as much as we do.