Derek Peebles has a clear vision of what he wants to accomplish leading Cincinnati’s Common Good Collective.
“We want to create Black wealth in our community,” said the 30-something African American who also leads Amiba, a national association of independent businesses.
Nationally, the average white family has $140,000 and the average Black family has $14,000 in assets, not including their homes. 90% of Black-owned businesses are sole proprietors, lacking the friends and family funding to grow to the point where their businesses could receive one of the loan programs established to help marginalized entrepreneurs.
That problem is not new, but what is new is that, in cities across the country, new coalitions of unlikely allies are rising up to be part of the solution, crossing the boundaries of race, class and neighborhoods.
“We want to ground the Common Good Alliance in the values of creating well-being and beloved community. Another important piece is the work of building the ecosystem for local investing,” Peebles said.
This group has brought together people representing the Episcopal diocese’s endowed Proctor Fund, successful local business people who are willing to invest for a lower financial return in order to create the kind of community their grandchildren would want to move back to.
They are raising $5 million in the crucial, missing, and higher risk equity portion of a $20 million+ project to enable a large affordable housing and retail development to become a reality. And they are looking for a way to replicate a local program called “Renting Partnerships” that takes housing out of the real estate market to keep it permanently affordable and convey rights to low-income, asset-poor households–rights that are typically reserved for homeowners such as predictable payments, control over property, and a sustainable path to wealth building.
There is a desire in Cincinnati to do more, perhaps launch a fund that local people could participate in, but they don’t yet see how to make that happen.
“I need a playbook, a set of steps to follow to put these things together, but there doesn’t seem to be one,”Peebles said.
Launched by nationally known author Peter Block, one of the creators of asset-based community development with John McKnight and theologian Walter Brueggemann, Common Good arose from years of groundwork laid by a group called Economics of Compassion that built relationships across faith communities, neighborhoods, race, and class. That grounding of relationship and trust makes the current demand for action more resilient.
Cincinnati’s combination of local people willing to invest with new eyes in communities where they may not have had connections before and local church endowments willing to invest part of their corpus toward local economic justice for a five percent annual return is itself a nascent movement that is arising in cities across the country. At our recent Neighborhood Economics conference in Indianapolis, representatives of that same pairing–motivated local investors, willing to put in early, catalytic money investing across race and class along with people of faith realizing they have a responsibility to invest their endowments, not just use them as vehicles for annual giving–were present from Chicago, Baltimore, Kansas City, Crenshaw in LA, and Boston, as well as Cincinnati and other cities.
Meanwhile, we are hard at work on the playbook Derek is looking for. We are collecting the strategies and successes of others in our network in order to make of Derek and others like him more straightforward and efficient. And this movement is growing.
Photo by Matt Koffel on Unsplash