Yeah, the Bronx is a million and a half people, never mind the rest of New York City at eight and a half million. The borough on its own has a similar population size to Philadelphia or Dallas.

The BCDI came out of a group of organizers back in 2011, basically Bronx folks, most of whom are still active on our board today. So they carried this longstanding history of organizing and institution-building with them: housing justice, education justice, racial justice, economic justice — Bronxites have been on the frontlines of local and national campaigns for years in all of these spaces. But about a decade ago, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, this group of organizers started to agitate each other around the fact that trend lines in the Bronx, particularly along the lines of wealth, were not getting better despite this organizing work.

And so the question arose, “We’ve been doing this work for a really long time. But it’s not having the kind of transformative impact we need. How could we do it differently or better?”

So a few different hypotheses about what that would mean started to take shape. And in the specific context of a really large-scale redevelopment fight over the Kingsbridge Armory.

Right. They began thinking regionally, thinking about the whole borough rather than at the neighborhood level. After all, the real estate industry looks at the Bronx at a borough-wide scale. We can’t only be thinking about our neighborhood and this block or that block. Take the example of the Armory: that was a 20-year fight to get a community benefits agreement for one building.

So an agreement to create a borough-wide infrastructure that supports economic democracy with a variety of capacities — that was the launch point.

Right, and there are a lot of possible fault lines in trying to scale up something that ambitious. And I think that we are discovering all of them.

Like the Amazon project for Queens or other large scale redevelopment efforts that are anchored in a very clear-cut, trickle-down model.

Exactly. Back in the 2012 presidential election, around the time when BCDI was getting started, let’s say 75% of New Yorkers voted for Obama against Romney. But every single day in New York City we re-inscribe and reproduce the same logic of trickle-down economics that we’ve voted against at a national level.

Our local NYC elected officials reinforce an economic development logic that is no different from what Romney, certainly what Bloomberg was about. For decades now, when you look under the hood of most “progressive” mayors you haven’t really seen a substantively different economic development program or vision.

I find it incredible the role that place plays in local politics and how that impacts people’s perspective on what makes sense for certain kinds of economic development.

Yes, there has to be a different way of doing development. That’s what emerged in the years after the 2008 recession, with the Occupy movement and so on — a deeper visionary rethink.

It’s been held up as a model in a bunch of different ways. They basically did what in the co‑op world we would see as pretty familiar — a direct public offering. They created what they called a community development IPO, where people from the neighborhood essentially took ownership over the land and the shopping mall they were putting up.

These kinds of examples are sprinkled across the country and globally, where something happened — over a period of decades — that moved the community from a few co‑ops to something substantially larger. Mostly the places where its substantially scaled are in other countries, so you see in the US a bit of a bottleneck — a point beyond which these shared ownership projects and initiatives have not grown or progressed. So that’s the core thing that BCDI and others in the last decade or so have been grappling with: what are the foundations — or “infrastructure” — of these larger regional cooperative economies.

Correct. In order to have something that challenges the primacy of that way of thinking and the mechanisms that lead to those development outcomes, you need a research body of knowledge to counter it, you need a powerful group of civic bodies on the ground — to challenge things politically.

You need elected officials who are validating, not undermining, your message. You need business development capacities that can support the kinds of businesses that are the proof of concepts for the alternative that you’re doing. You need a financial infrastructure to invest in all of that. This is sometimes called the work of “worldbuilding” — so you start to see again the depth of ambition and scale of the challenge and stakes involved.

Additionally, to sustain this work, the co-founders all came out of organizing, so the core values embodied in BCDI were that all of this work had to be deeply integrated with and accountable to the work of community organizing and those who are working for structural change everyday. It’s a mixture of movement and model.

When I came on, we were launching four programs at the same time. The thinking was: if you launched them one at a time, you would get stuck in the bureaucracy and the usual inertia. So we launched four things: Bronx Exchange, the Economic Democracy Learning Center, the Planning and Policy Lab and the Bronx Innovation Factory.

We were working on the idea that the interacting effects among these programs would be powerful and would prove that they’re scalable. I think what we learned is that there are always structural constraints. And we all had our own learning journeys about what we’ve been trying to do. And the impact of external and internal factors — those always exist.

If you want a great book on these issues, by the way, look at Mike Menser’s We Decide: Theories and Cases in Participatory Democracy.

So the Planning Policy Lab has carried a huge amount of the load, convening community based partners on development without displacement. It’s now one of the key anchor partners for the Bronx-wide planning process that we’re doing, which is a 30 year economic development effort.

In the context of COVID, which has made everything ten times harder to do, we’re trying to innovate around the idea that the Bronx is basically seen as a reserve pool of cheap labor for the region — for Westchester and Manhattan.

There is a substantial industrial and manufacturing legacy in the Bronx. So we’re thinking through what manufacturing can look like in urban places. The Bronx still has some of that type of land available, which is rare in New York City. And we’re thinking about advanced and digital manufacturing capacities in the Bronx, as part of diversifying the regional economy as well as building shared wealth for people of color, specifically. Most of the manufacturing innovation spaces you see generally across the board are like the tech spaces — i.e., white-led, white-dominated. And even if they are values-aligned, they’re still mostly majority white spaces.

So an innovation space that was politically sort of sophisticated was ready right before COVID, and then that derailed and the space has been closed since then. We’ll probably try to open it back up again sometime in the New Year.

So the Learning Center is my work. We’ve been working on supporting a lot of the stakeholder learning engagements. We do workshops and we create materials for these popular education spaces.

Yeah, and then I also support and present to the leadership of anchor institutions, professionals and elected officials. The Learning Center is a learning and training space focused on this idea of building infrastructure and leadership development. We want to keep people on their game and bring in key stakeholders to learn and deepen their analysis of how economic democracy can actually get them where they want to go.

We’re looking to launch a fellowship for youth and teachers starting in January, which would bring schools into the process of designing and imagining what education for economic democracy would look like.

That program’s focus is on small business development and co‑ops, connecting co‑ops to markets. We have a strong set of relationships with other business development orgs. And we have worked diligently to kind of build a bench of local Bronx businesses that are owned by people of color, including co‑ops that are able to take on contracts that meet anchor institution procurement needs.

So we took the sort of anchor approach. And in the Bronx, it’s a long tail effort, like all of these things are. The businesses are not readily able to just grow capacity by tenfold to meet institutional needs, right.

And also not all small businesses need to scale or are meant to scale, you have to have an owner who’s interested in sharing ownership, which is part of our criteria. And also wants to grow to meet those procurement needs. And so those two things together narrow the field even more.

Yes. With that project, the initial percolation of it from our Bronx-wide planning process is leading to creating a Bronx-wide policy agenda. It’s a first iteration — we previously did a congressional one. But civic action is more than just a policy agenda. It’s also about building the capacity of our partners, and of anyone doing base-building work in the Bronx that develops analysis around economic democracy. So that campaigns are being developed with these goals in mind.

I would call it the challenge, again, of sequencing, which not only BCDI is facing but so many other organizations. We say, Okay, we see we need political power, we need economic power, we need social movements, we need education and technical assistance, we need all these pieces. This is coming into coherence broadly it seems, as you see similar frameworks from the Climate Justice Alliance in terms of what they identify as 6 core “meta-strategies” for change. They also use a hexagon like BCDI too!

And we know they need to be in relationship to one another. And I think Menser’s book points this out well. But then just seeing the outcomes isn’t the end, you have to think about how they build upon each other over time. So the challenge for us and others doing this work now is which ones come first? How does one lead to the next? What are the processes that slowly but surely keep you able to convert opportunities into success and building out those supports, the infrastructure, the institutions you need?

Because basically none of this stuff gets built in under ten years. It’s all 20-year, 30-year timelines. Philanthropy certainly doesn’t, even government often doesn’t, operate under those kinds of timelines.