Editorial

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkThe Power of Neighborhood Economics

Elias Crim

I’m just back from three days in Indianapolis attending an unusual national gathering of over 100 engaged community wealth-building practitioners. It was called Neighborhood Economics, a project from SoCap founders Kevin Jones and Rosa Lee Harden, now co-founders of Faith+Finance.

The organizers asked themselves the question: what if you brought together people working on moving money from certain places (like big church endowments, impact investment funds, catalytic philanthropy) to certain other places (business transitions to worker-owned, commercial property with Black ownership, emerging ecosystems of support around these projects).

And then you let those people meet each other, talk about their work, and inspire even more work, hopefully in collaboration.

Attendees chose one of eight design labs with titles like “Catalytic Capital,” “Bridging the Racial Wealth Gap,” “Church Assets in Transition,” and “Community Equity Investments.”

This was a place to meet experienced, aligned people working locally (Downtown Crenshaw in Los Angeles), regionally (Co-op Cincy in Ohio), and nationally (Faith+Finance). And to explore how these levels could interact more successfully.

One issue addressed: the strategy of repurposing of church assets into community assets, given that as many as 100,000 of this country’s 384,000 churches are projected to close their doors over the next decade. (Sponsors related to this topic included Trinity Church Wall Street, the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis, and Duke Divinity School’s Ormond Center.)

Some other issues discussed: the “silver tsunami” (Boomer business owners without succession plans who could sell their companies to employees; investment funds which ignore or don’t know much about these projects; the racial wealth gap (sometimes called “the rich uncle problem”).

The group interaction, from my vantage point, was enthusiastic and even occasionally a bit intense. At one point in the schedule, the Community Equity lab (which included Downtown Crenshaw representatives, among others) seized the opportunity to stroll down the hall and drop in on a group they wanted to know better: the attendees at the Aligning Endowments with Mission lab.

The encounter resulted in a productive conversation, including an idea from the endowments group for a Neighborhood Fund which they described as “$100 million to organize social and financial capital in place-based projects (7 cities), using first-in capital, with a registry of matching funders to go 7X.”

Some other interesting ideas / projects which surfaced at the event:

• Michael Shuman pointed out the growing use of municipal bonds for a variety of purposes (clean energy, for example) — which could include the financing of projects which build community equity.
• Shalonda Ingram, a social entrepreneur and placemaker, spoke about how her work now includes the dimension of spiritual entrepreneurship.
• Marc Tognotti of Infinity Point CDFI argued for the advantages of ESOPs over co-ops (debate ensued!) via a striking proposal for “fractional” ESOPs.
• Dan Fireside described some of the new work going on with Local Code Kansas City, for which he is serving as a capital advisor.
• We had the opportunity to meet with and visit the organizers of two local Indianapolis projects, the Kheprw Institute (a Black-led creative community organization) and Big Car (an arts collective with a placekeeping focus).

Also present: folks from Chicago Trend, Ashoka, Rooted Good, Francesco Collaborative, Adasina Social Capital, Trinity Church Wall Street, and the Englewood Community Development Corporation.

The organizers are already planning another Neighborhood Economics event, so sign up at Faith+Finance for updates on what’s coming! 

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkMaking Beautiful Experiments with Money

A Conversation with Chordata Capital’s Kate Poole and Tiffany Brown

Elias Crim

Kate Poole has worked in the local investing ecosystem since 2009, and has been a member of Resource Generation since 2013. She co-founded Regenerative Finance in 2014 to organize other inheritors to shift control of capital to frontline communities. She has served on the board of the New Economy Coalition since 2018.

Tiffany Brown worked in the non-profit sector for over a decade before transitioning into her work in finance. Her career has ranged from being Co-Director at YES!, Board member at Common Fire Foundation, founding advisor to Kindle Project Foundation, to directing national leadership retreats at Resource Generation, and serving on the Finance Committee for Haymarket People’s Fund. Most of her work has been focused on working with young people with wealth.

Co-op Profile

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkWho Tells the Untold Stories?

In Maryland and D.C., Bloc by Block News Is Building Cooperative Local Media

Júlia Martins Rodrigues

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, an acclaimed Nigerian writer, warned us of The Danger of a Single Story, highlighting how the media and literature we consume — often contaminated with stereotypes and bias — comes from an incomplete understanding of peoples’ reality. Our misconceptions about the world come from accepting one experience or one narrow version of reality as the whole truth, reducing someone (or entire groups) to a single story, generalizing complex phenomenons, and jumping to defective conclusions. The author emphasizes how Africa has been historically reduced to a single tale of catastrophe due to how media generically portrays that entire continent.

The same process happens systematically to African-American communities when the media underrepresent their voices and show an incomplete narrative of their stories and struggles. Aware of the storytelling bias against people of color, the journalist and entrepreneur Kevon Paynter founded Bloc By Block News.

Since his early studies as a bachelor’s student of communication and media studies, Kevon started questioning the portrayal of people of color in the media landscape. Along the way, during his master’s studies in journalism at Georgetown University, he envisioned Bloc by Block as a channel for credible news accessibility, amplifying the people’s contact with what happens in their communities.

In the past, discriminatory New Deal-era redlining policies implemented by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration created segregated Black or mixed-race neighborhoods. The consequences of redlining remain in many counties nationwide. These areas with low-income, BIPOC families and devalued properties tend to become media deserts, where people have limited access to local news and information.

To tap into this systematic pain, Kevon deployed the old and gold “think globally, act locally” approach. Launching in Baltimore, Maryland, the founders conceived Bloc by Block as a media cooperative to change the local reporting landscape and consolidate a hub of local news written by journalists from diverse backgrounds.

Books

share this segment by right‑clicking icon to copy linkHow We Got Locked Out of the Asset-Owning Economy

The Asset Economy: Property Ownership and the New Logic of Inequality (2020) by Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper, Martijn Konings

If you are a millennial or know many people in that generation, this grim but clear-eyed analysis by three Australian academics will give you a new window into their lived reality. And into the macroeconomic transition which has so dramatically shifted the ground underneath them.

The thesis here is that the key element in shaping inequality is no longer the employment relationship — i.e., the implicit social promise that your wages will eventually accumulate savings in order to build a bridge into stable wealth. The history of wage stagnation in recent decades has gradually closed that door for most of an entire generation. Instead, the new challenge — one which most younger people cannot meet — is whether you are able to buy assets that appreciate at a faster rate than both inflation and wages.

In all our major cities, the betrayal of this promise is evident in the way housing assets have played a specific and major role in the creation of inequality.

The authors push back on Thomas Piketty’s emphasis on the top 1% and the notion that this phenomenon is due to a new Gilded Age: they locate the shift’s origins as far back as the post-New Deal era.

Historically, the key data point here is the long-term divergence between wages and assets values. They create a fascinating portrait of the Reaganite supply-side answer to this trend in the hugely favorable treatment of capital gains under that administration. The policy was couched as an invitation to participate in the asset economy (housing and the stock market) while ignoring the decline in wages. With cheap and abundant credit, anyone could buy their way into the asset economy via private housing, the traditional democratic generator of wealth.

Related to policies around this underlying divergence was the “information economy” vision in which knowledge became viewed as a source of value as much as owning a home or owning a stock. All this occurring at the expense, of course, of serious public investment.

Among several lessons the authors draw from this history: “Ultimately it is impossible to create a new middle class of highly paid knowledge workers while also enacting the rule of generalized wage suppression and public spending austerity.”

And they emphasize another element in the rise of the asset economy and the breaking of the generational contract: intergenerational transfers of wealth, a key indicator of class and a sign that that term needs updating beyond the old markers of work and occupation merely. In determining your life chances today, the latter transfers combine “the hyper-capitalist logics of financialization with the feudal logics of inheritance,” as the authors put it.

Increasingly, life in the asset economy means managing and planning asset-driven lives “ordered by the logic of asset appreciation, shaped profoundly by the dynamics of appreciation, and the struggle for liquidity.”

The future of the asset economy is a social question, in the authors’ view. The future of the current generation is perceived as having been stolen by the previous generations. The gates have closed to the newcomers, due to a combination of inflated capital gains and deflated wages. At this point, there are, they conclude, no easy ways out.