One of the things that became clear in the Design Labs at Neighborhood Economics in Indianapolis is that every practitioner had a slightly different approach to creating a solution and that each had a lot to learn from the other.
“We saw people at the conference doing, for example, neighborhood investment trusts differently in Indianapolis, Chicago, Kansas City and Crenshaw, Los Angeles. People were sharing lots of good practical knowledge.” said Elias Crim, founding editor of Ownership Matters. “People were deciding what marketing means when you have an employee-owned business. They were thinking about how you talk to investors. There were so many questions.”
Longtime observers of how markets form are noticing that we are moving from the initial period of isolated, uncoordinated innovation to the phase in which it is easy for practitioners to share what they are discovering. This is the next level that’s needed. This is a time when connecting the dots between practitioners is so important.
Sometimes the infrastructure that emerges could be a collaborative investment fund. That’s the case with Neighborhood Investment Trusts (NIT). There is a surprising variety in how NITs are structured, and yet they all seem to work to enable neighbors to invest in neighbors, to preserve Black Wall Streets, and to help them thrive. That means the sharing by practitioners is extraordinarily rich.
Members of that Design Lab group are, in fact, looking to raise a fund of funds that would enable the NIT model to reach scale in twenty or more cities across the country, fighting off hedge funds bent on extracting the value from neighborhoods of color. Together, they want to create NITs as one of the foundational pieces of a neighborly economy. People of faith who were at the conference, people who lead endowed churches, are very interested in putting some of their assets to work to make that a reality.
Along with new ways to invest for justice together, it’s good to make these discoveries–discovering who is doing what, but also who has gained traction with an emerging solution. Crim is building that essential piece of infrastructure, a collaborative digital storehouse for the practitioners to share their solutions. He has started it; it’s called Solidarity Workshop.
Neighborhood Economics will be joining the eight groups that Crim has already gotten to sign up. We will be adding solutions to the storehouse, like funds focused on bridging the racial wealth gap and other economic justice focused platforms and tools.
Both investors and entrepreneurs need more clarity in order to accelerate the flow of capital to good at the neighborhood level, Crim says. Investors say they need projects big enough to get to the next level. Crim, who edits a newsletter on democratic ownership called Ownership Matters, says investors tell him they have difficulty connecting with the solidarity economy and worker ownership. They also tell him that the funders who get it tend to be smaller. Larger investors are also asking for metrics, metrics to help judge if a project is a success. The shared solution and case study collaborative can do the research to validate the category and make it easier for investors to understand shared ownership.
“I hear from funders two things,” Crim said. “They don’t know how to connect with the solidarity economy or worker ownership. And they don’t know what metrics to use, so they are not sure what success looks like.” Crim is talking about the need to define the category for investors, to make sense of the mix of impact and below market financial return they can expect when, say, an endowed church invests in a platform designed to create economic justice in their town.
Investors also want bigger deals; they need ways to move money into more investments that will not have great financial returns but will offer a modest financial return. Practitioners need to know each other’s solutions and how they can be bundled into a coherent story for larger investors. That’s a key benefit the Solidarity Workshop can provide.
“On other side, people running these businesses have to learn what marketing means when you democratize the business, what democratic governance means, all the ways these businesses are different,” Crim said. The digital storehouse can put some cohesion and order into the new economy, if it catches on and becomes, as Crim and the initial group of social enterprises and coalitions hope, a community of practice.
“There is no chamber of commerce for these businesses, “Crim said. “There is no easy place to do what we did (at Neighborhood Economics) to talk about what’s working and what’s not working. I think we can help people with similar challenges and also provide mutual inspiration.”
Due to launch in September, the research and solution sharing collaborative includes Zebras Unite, Transform Finance, Start.coop, Shareable, the Workerslab, the Med Lab, the Platform Cooperative Association and Crim’s newsletter Ownership Matters, along with Neighborhood Economics. Plans call for it to also include places for academic research, as well as practical tips and case studies for practitioners.
“Each of the members is creating content about what they are doing, how they are figuring it out. We need a place where we can find all of that easily so the people doing the work can find other knowledgeable people to help them with their challenges.”