Though I have said I am moving out of operations and on to special projects for Neighborhood Economics. Moving from operations (I managed the content, Rosa Lee managed the business) to advisory status. But it seems I am still needed in operations around shepherding and recruiting partnerships around specific collaborations for a purpose at a point in time. I just got to do that with the mashup of Eagle Market Streets CDC portfolio of philanthropic investment funds and the new Catacap platform from Impact Assets.
Catacap greatly democratizes the ability of small groups of people, Sunday School classes, Rotary Clubs eighth grade environmental science classes, people who want to keep the county from closing the library and only gathering place in their rural area.
Rather than needing a minimum of $5,000, Catacap lets you set up your own persona philanthropic, give to invest investment fund for only $250. But at Catacap, you need to gather $25,000 to be able to make a philanthropic investment in a for profit business you believe in or in a zero interest loan to a non profit. Working with Eagle Market Streets, we can get the money out on the street and to heal the problem for only $5,000. This is designed for groups that need several people to join together to reach $5,000. I doubt that any innovative financial platform has ever been designed for a demographic with that little money. This is economic power delivered to poor folks. If they are a non profit with a donor base, their donors will get their gift back to give again if they find a small capital expenditure that will pay off patient, low cost, flexible capital willing to go in early; all the characteristics of what the MacArthur and other foundations defined as catalytic capital but done at the grass roots level with no program officers theory of change to tell the people what to do. This is cheap, accessible capital that is designed to cede control in the way we are using. And of course each investment will be reviewed for feasibility by Eagle’s experienced investment officer, Steven Lawrence. And Stephanie and Jazmin and I will be involved with the first deals
It gives cutting edge economic power to the grass roots. And we, me representing Neighborhood Economics as a convener, working with Stephanie Swepson Twitty, my long time partner who leads Eagle, accompanied by her new community engagement whiz Jazmin Rogers, have made what Catacap has done; greatly reduce the cost to set up your own personal philanthropic investment fund that resides with Catacap at a foundation. You get a standard tax deduction and then you get to invest in for profit companies with a mission you believe in, or you can lend to non profits, at zero interest, paid back by revenue share or similar method.
I am setting up all the funds I am working on to be consciously anti usury; don’t use interest, if you can avoid it. Find other ways for the loan to be paid back. Interests puts the rights of the investor ahead of the entrepreneur in a way that is extractive. Interest is the core principle of what makes an extractive economy, it’s the historical inflection point where money was granted more weight than it should have and the rights to get investor money out first, even when they invest in coops and don’t take have a vote is still wrong. Getting your money out first is a form of interest, according to the Somali imams I got to know a few years ago when I was working with Somali’s to create a no interest housing corporation that was a version of a hybrid coop. Unfortunately covid hit two weeks before we would have had a multi mosque feast to launch it. And then our CEO got poached by the U.N.
But in that time, I realized the imams and islamic investors and thought leaders I was talking to were able to have a much more trust anchored relationship with their investees, because they were not going to put the cost and power burdens of interest on their investments. It is a cleaner kind of finance. There is a reason Moses said usury was a sin. The things i am going to build, because it seems
I am going to keep building the new stuff that doesn’t exist yet, but should so 1. I am going to keep coming up with ideas that need to be built into new kinds platform that deliver economic power to folks who mostly haven’t had it And that I will be in this one sub set of operations 2. When you require a specific set of partners to enable something new to happen that is adds to what already exists. I am good at the first emergent mini phage stage of an economic platform; the first deals that add to each other easily; I can see those faster than others. The pattern they would fit in in what, it just became a bit more clear, needs to be built. I am not building from design. I am building from what looks like the next thing to do.
And so for that space, until I got Ken Kurtzig the Catacap CEO who’d been hired by my long time business partner Tim Freundlich who co founded Socap and led our impact fund, Good Capital and owns part of Neighborhood Economics to vette the entrants, to agree to ask Tim if our previous deal, struck before Ken was hired, was intact. It was, and the operators have stepped in and my agency has been evaporating in this deal around the equity fund.
They said yes, Steph said she and Jazmin, her community outreach person, who also does some marketing, will review and edit my draft of our investment page on the Catacap site. We will have an investment page in a few days. And I am doing none of it, but they are using my draft. It wouldn’t have happened without me pushing it, but now its in the hands of operations. I suck at operations. This is my typical pattern, btw, birth an idea, find a partner who can bring to life, hand it off. And on the Community Equity Fund once it gets on the Catacap marketplace, I will be making some school and church connections.
I am feeling really called to what could emerge at Warren Wilson. The rights of the river group is interested in that as a path forward for rights of nature, incorporating the college entrepreneurs and their gigs into a network of coops, with the whole being in an intergenerational steward form of trust that can have a business operate like nature has rights. As B Corps showed changing the operating agreement of a business, which is at the heart what B corp does, changes the relationship of the business to the world. This is just another step down the path of a relational economy. Reciprocity, interdependence, coordinate climate change response on a bio regional basis and part of a watershed.
The easy path to climate money is a good story I need to get out. Will work on that next week.
Building an interdependent economy 