Neighborhood Economics is excited to add two new content partners this week. Michael Shuman, the acknowledged master of the ways people with average incomes can invest in businesses and real estate in their local economies, will be doing a twice-a-month webinar with me, highlighting one particular new innovative fund each time.
The funds we interview will be in line with the continuing content themes of our conference: innovative housing solutions, community-focused commercial real estate, entrepreneurship as the path to generational wealth for marginalized communities, and shared business ownership: employee ownership in all its new forms. The American Independent Business Alliance, AMIBA and the National Coalition for Community Capital, NC3 along with Shuman’s Main Street Journal are partners in this work that bridges race, class, and zip codes to engage all the groups repairing their local economies.
We plan to put the edited transcript of our interviews online in a searchable online form on a wiki and organize them in a taxonomy to make them easy references for innovators around the country who are already engaged in the work of repairing their local economies through investing locally rather than in Wall Street.
Approximately half of the funds will be from the Neighborhood Economics point of view, focused on new financial platforms creating assets in disinvested neighborhoods and underrepresented communities, and roughly half will be from main street communities working to solidify their local economies through investing in small businesses to keep the economy locally-owned rather than at the mercy of multinational big box or chain stores or restaurants. Our hope is that we can make it easier for local communities to invest to repair their local economies across race, class and zip codes.
The other partnership is with Joel Skene of Mindful Marketplace. Joel has already started what will be regular podcasts with speakers from our conferences, offering their voices wider distribution through
a Neighborhood Economics youtube channel, and Mindful Marketplace will distribute them through Spotify, the Apple podcast marketplace, and other places.
There is a new economy being created that is popping up locally all over the country. It is designed to work for all. Neighborhood Economics gathers the people repairing local economies, and now we are working with partners to augment the voices of the people doing the work of repair so that more people realize that hope is arising and that they can be part of it.
Look for these two new ways to join in the conversation and, of course, join us in San Antonio.