Publisher’s View

My Investing Journey (Part Two)

My Money Transformation

I’ve begun shifting more and more of my money into funds and enterprises where their governance and ownership structures give the decision-makers a chance to consider the environment, worker dignity, and community needs as part of their internal capital allocation and planning.

I want CEOs and Boards of Directors to consider my returns expectations right alongside the social mission of their business. If it means lowering my return from 13% to 11% to not go around regulators to dump toxic waste, I’d like CEOs to find a way to clean up the pollution and not push that off on an unlucky poor community or future generations.

If a board has to lower the returns on my money from 11% to 8% to be able to give some equity, profit sharing and a living wage to each worker and contractor that productively contributed, then I’d prefer everybody make a decent family sustaining wage versus a wage that also forces them to rely on food stamps or disability.

And if the board and executive team also think they need a budget for strategic initiatives to be inclusive in the workplace, to listen to community and facilitate participatory decision-making at every level appropriate, then I’m happy to have the CEO tell me that’s what lowered my return from 8% to 5%.

I’ve chosen to allocate the largest portion of my retirement savings to Kachuwa Impact Fund. Kachuwa is a mix between an impact real estate and impact company investments. Read about their strategy here.

Holdings include: Organic Valley, Equal Exchange, Namaste Solar, SJF Ventures, The Working World, LEAF, BlocPower, and others you can read about here.

I’ve also chosen to invest my time to directly helping:

• Apis & Heritage Capital Partners — helps business owners sell their businesses in a way that allows workers to buy it over time as the business grows in value. Their focus is on communities of color.
• Equitable Economy Fund — helps early stage co-ops get vital catalytic capital and introduces them to a community of co-op friendly investors.

The sad part is that because I have less than $1 million (!) in assets, the Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) labels me an “unaccredited” investor. And because I’m unaccredited, most small funds (like Apis & Heritage and the Equitable Economy Fund) can’t directly offer a way for me to invest in them without taking on pretty burdensome and costly legal work. This 1933 rule was set up to prevent people from selling “snake oil” investments to less sophisticated investors. The result is that it essentially prohibits me and 99% of America from investing in equitable governance and ownership structures.

The Break Room: Informal Conversations about Work

A Conversation with Steve Dubb of Nonprofit Quarterly (Part One)

Steve Dubb is a senior editor at Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ), where he directs NPQ’s economic justice program, including its Economy Remix column. Steve has worked with cooperatives and nonprofits for over two decades, including twelve years at The Democracy Collaborative and three years as executive director of NASCO (North American Students of Cooperation). He was also one of the originators of the concept of community wealth building.

Book Review

At the Intersection of Property, Power, and Place: Community Land Trusts

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Leopold’s statement in his iconic 1949 essay collection (one of Wendell Berry’s top six books on environmental protection) is visionary but not utopian, as I hope to show here. While Leopold’s land ethic focuses on our relationship with the biotic community, there is also the land ethic of the human community, now also endangered and at a global scale.

On Common Ground, the book under review here, is partly a collection of case studies of local solutions to the land crisis for human settlement, specifically through the use of community-led solutions called community land trusts (CLTs). These legal structures could be said to represent “the intersection of property, power, and place.”

Published by the Center for CLT Innovation and edited by John Emmeus Davis, Line Algoed, and Maria E. Hernandez-Torrales, this is an anthology of pieces by 42 authors, with sections covering the origins of CLTs, the shift from models to a movement, regional seedbeds (in Latin America and Africa), urban applications (including urban agriculture), and critical perspectives.

Some initial distinctions. The CLT model could be seen as the center of a Venn ñdiagram in which the three elements of community, land, and an organization acting in trust (usually a non-profit, rarely a literal real estate trust) overlap. (“Trust” in this context refers to how the CLT operates, not how it’s organized.)

Notice also that “community” here does not merely equal “public,” even though local governments are usually needed as partners.

CLTs first appeared amidst the 1960s Civil Rights movement with the New Communities project near Albany GA, a group whose vision emphasized the ability to be rooted in place.

Other notable examples of CLTs profiled here include the Champlain Housing Trust (VT), the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (Boston), the El Caño Martín Peña (Puerto Rico, the latter adapting the model of an informal settlement), and the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust (led by Indigenous women in the San Francisco Bay area).

Some CLTs focus less on provision of housing and more on preservation of watersheds, woodlands, and agricultural lands.

Nevertheless, CLTs today are a key strategy in community responses to the impacts of gentrification and dispossession, along with land banks, limited equity cooperatives, resident-owned communities, and community benefits agreements. They usually operate within geographic boundaries — from a single neighborhood to an entire region.