The Repair Fund has an intentionally decolonizing architecture. The decisions about the money are in the hands of the displaced communities. The money is paid by the tourism industry to help repair the damage done to communities and neighborhoods displaced by tourist attraction and by individuals who want to be associated with being part of the solution to the racial wealth gap.
The Repair Fund is an example what’s called Community Directed Capital. The capital is not handed out through a program grant aimed at solving some social ill. Program grants typically come from a foundation to a non profit to work in that community or group. Those grants are often more responsive to the theory of change of the foundation than to the needs of the community.
As much as we can, we try to avoid program grants in our work; preferring the more empowering and far more useful unrestricted operating grant or simple gift. Most times, even those great general operating grants are made to an intermediary, an NGO whose business it is to deliver services to help that community.
While non profits often do amazing work against really tough conditions, the Repair Fund will place at least half of the money that comes into it directly to the oversight of community associations in Asheville, in the neighborhoods where people are displaced. We anticipate the gifts, grants and donations from individuals, foundations and government and businesses and the philanthropic investment capital from the individuals and congregations via the donor advised fund set up as a public utility at a local community foundation will follow this design guideline.
Donors gladly ceding power to the powerless and control of capital to the formerly poor is at heart of the Repair Fund. Donors who don’t want to cede control of half of the money directly to the community will not want to participate in the marketplace.
Stephanie Swepson Twitty of Eagle Market Streets CDC who leads the fund, is also in a peer network examining how universal basic income could be added. We want to listen to the community as it deliberates, but studies have shown that you should also just give money to moms. $1k a month has worked in Stockton, new studies proved. And it looks to be working in Jackson, MS and other places.
The tourism industry, and business in general want to getting started on repair while the debates and studies happening at or being produced at city hall on what reparations are or should be will likely continue for the next three to five years in Asheville. We want to be smart about how to deploy this fund. Being smart means the displaced communities will be in the lead, with structural controls to keep it that way.
Community Directed Capital requires a different kind of investment capital, different even from for profit impact investing. It works best with patient, philanthropic, concessionary capital designed to be catalytic, take risks on things that could become significant.
The first few projects and companies and NGO’s in the marketplace are all focused on the racial wealth gap, including housing, average income Black people owning and investing in commercial real estate and intergenerational wealth creation in Black and brown families through small business ownership. Small business is Twitty’s home turf, and our closest partners work at the intersection of real estate and economic justice; so we are confident about them and their approach. There will still be due diligence by Steven Lawrence, the fund manager from Eagle with experience as both a banker and CDFI lender before he joined the Community Equity Fund before any deals are welcomed to the marketplace.
Creating a Faithful Economy that Works for All of Us
By Kevin D. Jones with Rosa Lee Harden
Those of us who are Southern Christians are living in a lie that was told three hundred years ago that we have even helped perpetuate. A lie we have to uncover and set straight if we are going to find a way to undo the years of harm this lie has done.
When you find a toxic cultural, social, or economic situation that just seems to be the way things are, and is accepted as normal, there is often a lie at the heart of it, a compromise of integrity spawned by our grandfathers or great grandfathers that we have collectively ignored. Those compromises leaking invisibly from the past into the present like the waste from mountain-top removal into the groundwater in North Carolina where we live now, are often the result of a real devil’s bargain, a deal actually struck between two parties hundreds of years ago that created today’s current, unexamined normal.
We are living in the unintended consequences of that historical deal. We are living with the lie our daddy’s daddy’s daddy’s told themselves. As William Faulkner when he famously wrote in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
For white Christians and slaves bound and dragged in chains from Africa, the deal that was struck in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s when Methodist and Baptist evangelists came to ask the plantation owners, who were largely Episcopalians, if they might preach the Gospel to the slaves. According to The Encyclopedia of Religion in the South by my friend Sam Hill, the masters held out for a long time, but the evangelists ultimately agreed to two conditions of the slave owners in order to be able to preach to the enslaved.
The bargain insisted that the Methodists and Baptists could evangelize the enslaved, but it had to be a watered-down, individualized version of the Gospel: salvation would only be personal and spiritual, not about changing social conditions. Collective assertions such as, “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” were not on the agenda, much less the calls by the prophets for whole cities and nations to repent, and definitely not the call in Exodus to “let my people go.” The dirt-farming evangelists agreed. Six colonies passed measures with that condition and state sponsored limitation of and diminishing the power of the Gospel was officially made an accepted policy across colonial America.
The slave owners created this new, less holistic view of the gospel as a risk mitigation strategy particularly when combined with the preachers’ promise that being converted would make slaves obedient and honest. The evangelists were told to preach a lie to preserve the property of the rich and remove a potential threat to the plantation owners’ wealth through exiling liberation beyond the reach of slaves, into the sweet bye and bye.
I met Sam when he was a visiting professor at Millsaps College, and I was the religion editor for the Clarion-Ledger in the 80s. As Sam explained it to me, the preachers, who could not afford to own slaves themselves, had to tell the Africans that Exodus was spiritual; swing low sweet chariot and in the sweet by and by. Liberation from bondage had to be spiritual and in the next life, not freedom in this one. They could not tell the real story that the book of Exodus recounted. They could not mention the real story of the Hebrew slaves, collectively, as a people, suffering trials but working relentlessly and ultimately successfully for freedom from their oppressive slave-owning overlords. They could not talk about how those slaves were also a captive means of production, how the Hebrew people were also property, a valuable asset and human resource under the Pharoah’s control. They couldn’t tell the story that would let Africans see similarities between the fight for freedom of Hebrew slaves and their own potential freedom.
The real Bible story, the real Gospel story, was too dangerous to people whose wealth and whose whole economy depended on unpaid labor. Dehumanization was an essential condition to keep their costs under control and their wealth growing. England had already discovered the industrialized production of cotton to fuel their empire, and demand for cotton was skyrocketing. These financial gains were possible because costs for cotton were low, given that the workforce was unpaid.
So, salvation had to be personal, not corporate or communal, or it might conflict with the story slave owners were telling themselves about their “thriving” crops, and it would certainly point out the hypocrisy of being both Christian and a slave owner.
That was one of the two key stories the new Christians who were property of the plantation owner could not be told. Keeping the Gospel to a purely individual relationship between the Christian and their savior enabled the cotton economy to grow with the slaves taught that liberation did not mean them in their bodies. Let my people go did not mean them. This version of the Gospel also helped keep the slaves obedient and designed to believe that they should remain in captivity. (A re-read of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is instructive on that topic.)
The second story the plantation owners explicitly banished from the evangelists’ Christianity was even more dangerous and could not be mentioned at all. That was Jubilee: the elimination of debts every seven years and the setting free of slaves and the return of all property to its previous owner every 50 years. The Biblical message is simple: and it prevents the creation of a permanent underclass was the clear design goal, as Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman says, “neighborliness trumps everything.” Dehumanization, the tearing apart of neighborliness, was the key to the cotton economy.
Some say there is no historic record that Jubilee ever actually happened, but it’s in the scripture. We can’t just ignore it because it is incompatible with our capitalist impulses, especially when we are loath to let go of other literal interpretations of scripture. Jubilee has to be wrestled with as being clearly God’s design for the economy. The question must emerge: If we are not going to enact Jubilee, then what ARE we going to do about the fact that there is a permanent underclass?
After the Civil War and Reconstruction, that foundation of depersonalization and dehumanization of African Americans as core to the plantation economy, which was also the foundation of northern industrialism, had become normal to middle- and working-class whites. They couldn’t imagine a different reality, and this “norm” has undeniably led to African Americans becoming a significant portion of our country’s permanent underclass.
This creation of this permanent underclass has been significantly aided and abetted through the years by federal government policies. These policies got the tacit approval from middle class white because it was taught that it was a zero-sum gain. A gain for Black people was a loss for whites. The story of the plantation was reified to keep the status quo on behalf of the rich.
But in reality, middle- and working-class whites and Blacks have more in common than rich whites and poor whites. But for working-class whites, maintaining status above Black people became core to white identity. Isabelle Wilkerson’s book Caste tells that story. Wilkerson draws parallels to the caste system in India; the preservation of the lower status is what enables the higher status of the upper castes. It’s more than race; the status is structural and core to the system.
Heather McGhee’s new book, The Sum of Us, talks about the social side of plantation thinking as an infection that permeates our culture. She gives an example of working-class whites siding with upper-class whites when it is against their own interests, an example that happened in Itawamba County, where my wife and business partner, Rosa Lee Harden grew up and where our children were born.
McGhee notes that after civil rights, when Black people could start partaking of the public goods they’d been denied, one iconic reaction was the closing of public swimming pools, filling them in and making them literally disappear. Rosa Lee remembers that happening in Itawamba County, both the whitest, and, when she was growing up there in the 50s and 60s, the poorest county in the state (both a factor of the poor red clay soil). Affluent whites started a country club that only a small minority of people who lived in Itawamba County could afford to join. In a county of roughly 15,000, approximately 10% of whom were Black, that kept at most 1,500 Black people from swimming but actually deprived more than 10,000 working-class white people from swimming, as well.
Yet the white majority passively went along with the loss of their swimming pool because they wanted to see themselves in step with upper-class white people instead of with working-class Black folks. The decision to eliminate the pool was made by the powerful and affluent white men who could afford the country club. The myth of the dangers of swimming with Black folks kept their eyes closed to the reality of their own loss.
That same crazy math can be displayed in the backing away from hundreds of other public goods that were valued highly before civil rights. For example, public sentiment was in favor of what we now call a basic income with 70% support before civil rights, but that shrank to 30% by 1968. It would have helped far more poor and working-class whites than Black people.
When Rosa Lee and I owned The Catfish Journal, a trade journal covering the exploding farm-raised catfish industry based in the Mississippi Delta during the late 80’s, I sat in on a country supervisor’s meeting in Sunflower County with representatives of the US Department of Agriculture. The county was being offered $750,000 in training and education for catfish industry workers. Catfish was different from other major crops. Whereas soybean farmers made three cents on the retail dollar and cotton farmers saw cents, catfish made a far higher margin; individually, quick frozen filets with glazes brought 87 cents of the retail dollar back to the catfish industry.
That meant it was not a commodity but a true retail product. It needed expert marketing and sales to get that high return. In that meeting, after the USDA men left, the supervisors decided to turn down the free three-quarters of a million dollars. Fearing that African Americans would get the training, the supervisors explicitly said in my presence, “If they get educated, they’ll leave us. Let’s just not do it.” That kind of thinking is why the ‘past is never past.’ It is yet another example of that devil’s bargain that still haunts us. Salvation for the community is risky to the upper class and must be avoided at all costs.
There are numerous other examples of the residual effects of this distortion of the Gospel message of community, corporate salvation and Jubilee. Black people experienced reduction of status and encountered foreclosed avenues to wealth creation otherwise offered to whites; this was the cultural norm and official federal government policy. Probably the federal policy with the harshest, longest lasting impact stipulated that mortgages on the millions of homes repossessed and in government hands after the depression should not be issued to Black homeowners, because they were seen as higher risk. And banking policies kept Black families from getting loans offered to white families, often because they didn’t have federally guaranteed mortgages as collateral, as redlining of whole neighborhoods kept housing valuations far below similar prices in white neighborhoods. That meant that family homes did not become the fount of intergenerational wealth that it was for white families, and Black entrepreneurs couldn’t get a second mortgage to start a business while their white counterparts could.
The past will never be the past until the lies are confronted.
Reclaiming the truth of the Gospel was the answer for Robert Moses, architect of the Freedom Summer voting drive in 1963. Moses told me that a major part of his work was to create a curriculum for older Black people that reclaimed Exodus from the purely spiritual to back to its true meaning; God meant for enslaved people to be set free in THIS world. The recent descendants of enslaved people needed that reframing of who they were and who God meant for them to be to take the audacious step of walking up the courthouse steps to register to vote.
Reclaiming the truth of the Gospel is also the core of our work with Faith and Finance. We work to help the Church reclaim the meaning of the Gospel; to realize that while Jubilee as taught in the Old Testament might not have ever happened, and maybe isn’t even possible in this world, but the Christian ideal of living in communities where EVERYONE is able to flourish IS. Helping to find innovative ways to create wealth in Black and brown communities we’ve held back by our attitudes, policies, and wrong theology is core to our own faith’s revival.
SOME PRACTICAL SOLUTIONS
Coming back from the purely personal Gospel many Christians still live with, when we realize, partly helped by Covid’s lesson that we need each other for our mutual survival, if we wake up and want to change, we find these economic disparities. That’s why more than 93% of Black-owned businesses are sole proprietorships, with average revenue under $30,000. Sixty percent of them are women owned. Because they don’t get money to grow from friends and family, they never become eligible for the CDFI loan funds designed to reach minority entrepreneurs. The racial wealth gap between white and black families, largely the result of federal policy that itself conforms to the plantation mindset, is 12 times. But when a Black family owns a business that is an employer, that gap shrinks by 75%.
I have recently assisted with the capital raise for a venture philanthropy equity investment fund that is led by a Black woman which addresses the friends and family gap. It has hit its first million dollars and has become a regular line item in the annual budget of the county in North Carolina where Rosa Lee and I live. Success for this fund is measured by the number of sole proprietors who become job creators, how many jobs are created, revenue growth and growth in founders and employees’ income.
As strange as it seems, economic mobility does not happen through education and jobs. True economic mobility comes when people create their own businesses and build intergenerational wealth. Here is yet another prime example of where the past isn’t past. African Americans don’t have a cadre of rich aunts and uncles who help them expand beyond sole proprietorships to grow into businesses that are eligible for CDFI and even traditional banking loan funds.
It’s a revolving fund, so with proper management the county’s money will be doubled every five years; the fund has a built-in loss guarantee to make that possible. Several other cities are currently working with us to replicate this fund. Entrepreneurship is “over indicated” as the path to intergenerational wealth for Black Americans, because the system is stacked against them.
This phenomenon is true nationally; for instance, in Chicago, Accion, a highly respected CDFI, had four thousand minority owned businesses go through its accelerator in the last five years, but only one percent of them, 40 businesses, were able to access its loan funds after they graduated, because of the friends and family gap.
The Community Equity Fund is only one of many new financial platforms coming online that together hope to help create a movement of white Christians who want to invest in the creation of intergenerational wealth for Black people, to solve the racial wealth gap as an act of faith and justice. It is an opportunity to restore the true Gospel to American culture.
Covid has shown us that our mutual survival is dependent on each other. We depend upon the health and safety habits of each other to keep us all safe. We are all in this together. That is the core principle of reimagining what God’s Economy can be; an economy of neighborliness and interdependence where public goods are shared without fear that someone else getting them diminishes what we get.
That thinking is just the holdover of the plantation owners’ devil’s bargain, setting poor people against each other to preserve the position of the one percent. It’s time to drop that devil’s bargain and write a new and old covenant of shared abundance. It is time to call out the mendacity for what it is, the big lie that has kept us from living out the Gospel.
Suggested Reading:
The Encyclopedia of Religion in the South by Sam Hill
Stephanie Swepson Twitty’s newest brainchild, that’s going by the working title of a Repair Fund, is a novel approach that could be used by communities to do some “right setting” of the harm that is perpetually continuing in communities of color. More specifically in the Black African American communities.Many of these communities suffered decimation during “urban renewal/removal” and have never recovered.
At the conceptual level, the Repair Fund would, or could, be a voluntary donation harvested from willing individuals by large tourist attractions in “Any Town USA” and also work with the tourism development authorities for institutional levels of support.
This can, we think, work particularly where there has been extractive displacement of communities of color where citizens were banished to small neighborhoods or public housing camps to make room for “booming tourism development”, development that they would not be sharing in. In small rural areas it might be the “offshoring of manufacturing” or the exodus from the use of coal, which both left behind small communities that are still reeling with little or no job markets, outdated infrastructure and most significantly the sense of “mattering”.
In our local area Twitty and I see the tax being captured by large tourist venues and hoteliers paid to the County and allocated back to the Tourism Development Authority for fiscal management and allocation.
In her current iteration of the concept, Swepson Twitty sees a group of community system entrepreneurs being the decision makers as to who, and how much allocation would be provided, say on an annual or biannual time table. Additionally, we would use “trust based philanthropy” to guide decision making vs traditional measures of philanthropic funding–a group of applicants competing for funding. This is not to say there would not be structure, rather, it would have the look and feel of being community driven by community for community benefit–“The Inclusive Community Currency Fund”
Additionally, we would use “trust based philanthropy” to guide decision making vs traditional measures of philanthropic funding–a group of applicants competing for funding. This is not to say there would not be structure, rather, it would have the look and feel of being community driven by community for community benefit–“The Inclusive Community Currency Fund” Two additional notes are
A Repair Fund could begin to “answer the bell” as one among many approaches to true Reparations– where the Root Word is Repair; It could be a way for People of Color and European American (that is, white communities) to finally “lay down our burdens”, down by the riverside, deal with and heal our mutual trauma on both sides of slavery, the immobilizing guilt it gives some would be white allies and the intergenerational trauma in Black communities and let us build equitable, inclusive “thriving communities”.
We are in process of developing a voluntary repair tax that the willing would pay at tourist destinations that were created through displacing people.
There are community led working groups in two cities and others looking at it. The taxes would give those willing to pay for the cost of repair of the damage to indigenous and poor people displaced. The design calls for the tax to be administered by those communities, which stayed intact after displacement and by the local heirs in places where they were dispersed.
Some of the tax could go to communities at risk of displacement, like the great Poder cooperative led by immigrants in Asheville who are buying the land under their trailer parks to prevent their communities from being uprooted by gentrifying property developers.
We are following the proven model of the Ohlone band of indigenous people with the tax they have been levying tfor preservation of their Shell Mounds in Oakland near Fisherman’s Warf. Their money is going to create a land trust that would be sovereign Ohlone land, which has some legal significance.
The Black man who leads the Indy initiative, and the Black woman who leads Asheville, co founder with me in the Community Equity Fund, are in contact with local tourism authorities about being part of it. This Repair Tax will greatly improve the tourism experience of a certain group of people who want to take simple and clear and easy action to show their support for Black Lives Matter is more real than their energetic facebook posts and likes.
We can make reparations increase tourism revenue. And then that revenue is allocated by the displaced communities and, possibly, recycled through a community inclusion currency model proven to improve nutrition, health, and community spending power and even saving.
A consultant we like who is working on designing the reparations model for the city (Both Asheville and Buncombe County have both voted to pay reparations) and new hotels have to show actions for diversity to get a tax break they want in Buncombe county, so we have lots of connections to taxing authorities we could be an extended arm of. The currency would value reciprocal, mutual aid relationships. It’s like the capital you’d store in DeAmon Harges Social Bank.
Again, the tax will signal you took action about Black Lives Matter. That in itself will enhance the tourism experience of system thinking, problem solving people who are glad to let the community lead in the work of repair. The media creation and convening potential of that group, and of the community doing the the repair, and the growing, respectful relationships that could go across neighborhood lines and humanize the poor while showing they are investable, is big. This could obviously lead to lifestyle clothing and other personal item brand opportunities (fair trade like distribution network with regeneratively grown body products on subscription), political clout, policy clout, etc in each city. We will be working with some community organizers who understand how to do that work, folks like IAF.
But as Stephanie said the tax should also, maybe as the default, have the option for people to do it on the downlow, who don’t want get into the middle of issues that divide families. Let them do good but not be called out by their obnoxious second cousin who trolls them on facebook and is a jerk at the family reunion. We want to sell donors who need their virtue to be in the closet, for protection in these divided times. We want both.
Anyway, this plan, which links a lot of things I’ve been working on for 20 years, has come together fast. Unlike new funds, the tax is a simple, philanthropic act (it will be deductible and paid to a respected community development corporation; the one leading our friends and family fund, in Asheville, Eagle Market Streets CDC.
The concept can go viral with local flavor, but the peer learning cohort potential are really great I think and somebody who’s good at that is excited to design that part.
DeAmon will be among those relied on to guide the tax to follow his “wandering listener “methodology to fund things the people have said they want, and to ask them what they want as we map out social capital abundances in Shiloh and the public housing community that a highway displaced. DeAmon makes invisible social capital visible and quantifiable. Which has resulted in people in poor communities getting the cost of mortgage refinancing cheaper because the banks effectively valued that social capital. His Ted talk explains that journey.
I think we could be onto the design of a financial platform that’s simple enough, based on the Ohlone model, that is simple enough to go replicable easily in every tourist destination. When you enhance a tourism experience across a distributed network, product and subscription media and food etc. sales across that network and to that self identified comunity are obviously reasonable to imagine. And those goods, obviously, would also pay the repair tax, as would businesses who want to be aligned with being part of the experience of paying the repair tax.
The Biltmore mansion is the anchor of the multibillion dollar Asheville tourism industry, bringing in millions and millions of dollars in tourists who buy tickets, eat at our restaurants, listen to live music, hike in our mountains or ride our world class white water. Christmas at the Biltmore is the thing you want to show all your visitors, and admit to being once again, overwhelmed by its industrial magnificent, opulent excess. The Biltmore is the anchor that brings the whole family, and then they find things young kids can do on our mountain biking trails, while the adults go, masked, to a concert.
And the Biltmore, the fountain and foundation of the massive and ever growing tourism industry was built on uprooting and evicting a Black neighborhood that was in the way of the grand plans of the Vanderbilts, and now, our tourism industry. And that community that got moved has survived, damaged but intact. But the Shiloh community, the direct descendants of the people who got displaced, get nothing, though the Biltmore cost them their homes, their neighborly relations, their community. That loss is still felt today.
We are proposing a voluntary tax of the willing, a deductible donation, called a Repair Tax. The root word in reparations is repair. Repair calls you to remember how the damage was done. The tax would go to the Shiloh Community, to create intergenerational wealth and a healthy and thriving neighborhood. The people in the neighborhood would be in charge of where to put the tax revenues from tourists who want to signal that they believe Black Lives Matter, and those who want to contribute quietly and not get into divisive conversations.
We could turn the memory and reality of that loss from displacement into an enhanced tourism experience for conscious tourists, who believe that Black Lives Matter, who stood up that summer. We could tax them, which they would only pay voluntarily, to repair the damage done to Shiloh while they tour the mansion built on its removal.
They could be given a button to wear to show they are not only clicking like for justice, they are taking actions to pay back the people harmed for the damage they were caused. To repair the damage which would let them enjoy the Biltmore’s magnificence more. The root word of reparations, is repair. They would be part of paying for that repair.
Just such a voluntary tax has been tried by the Oholone indigenous people in the Bay Area, to support the purchase of a land trust that would be sovereign Ohlone land, in its design, as native Americans work on getting the land back. The tax works. It’s doing what it was made to do, at the direction of the Ohlone. It’s got land under stewardship as donations roll in to enable them to buy the land
A network of places working on these local repair taxes could create a new national narrative, help connect a displaced neighborhood next to an affluent economic neighborhood, tourism attraction, or business center, at a time. Affluent resorts like Hilton Head could pay a tax to the Gullah and Geechee people who were removed from where the beaches and the hotels on the beach are now. The cost of tourism is often the displacement of the people in the way of the attraction to be built. The people who chose to pay the tax to pay for repair could become a significant political block, a shareholder advocacy base, a consumer market, an investment club opportunity, etc.
The simple hook is you attract people who want to pay reparations, and who want an enhanced tourism experience along with it, a deeper connection to the place where are going to see the fall leaves and drink from the many micro brew pubs.
But we could turn that loss into an enhanced tourism experience for conscious tourists, who believe that Black Lives Matter, who stood up that summer. We could tax them, which they would only pay voluntarily, to repair the damage done to Shiloh while they tour the mansion built on its removal. They could be given a button to wear to show they are not only clicking like for justice, they are taking actions to pay back the people harmed for the damage they were caused. To repair the damage which would let them enjoy the Biltmore’s magnificence more. The root word of reparations, is repair.
This is reparations that carries the pain of remembrance, but that creates an enhanced cultural experience for tourists who want to think of themselves as engaged in solving our problems, in cooperation with the community. The people who pay the tax are people who would also love the idea of the money being directed not by those taxed, but by the communities harmed. The lucky taxed demonstrate that Black Lives Matter in a way that feels good and creates communities among fellow button wearers, people who might want to vacation together once they get to know one another, or come back more often, or stay longer as they start to feel a connection to the community and feel better about their privilege. The tax could be huge in the schools as you would let young people have a weighted vote, perhaps, since they are the ones who will have to live in the world the tax creates.
This enhanced cultural experience, of your visit helping to repair the damage done by a racist, hierarchical system that you are part of, which enables you to enjoy yourself more and spend more money because of the feeling of peace and freedom paying the tax would give you. And the tax and its design is also a way to stay engaged, virtually with where you put your money, if system design and community led economics of interdependence and neighborliness as it evolves, probably messily, is something you’d like to be involved in.
Media, serialized stories for youtube, then a Netflix deal when it’s ripe, perhaps could easily ride on the desire for engagement in being part of the solution to the problem for the affluent people who’s system caused the environmental problems and the racial wealth gap. This tax could do the same sort of things and North and South Carolinas ocean front resorts. A lot of people at Hilton Head would pay a tax for the economic empowerment of the Geechee and Gullah people, and they have unique foods that people who engage would want to subscribe to for regular shipments.
The tax works to repair. The people hurt get to say what it goes for. And that enhances greatly the tourism experience of a certain kind of affluent, problem solving, system thinkers and actors. We can hold retreats and conferences for them, as they engage in community led bioregional economic development.
SDG tourism, in the South.We would attract the people we want to attract who would engage with helping the community thrive. We’d find ways to handle volunteer engagement, but they would only pay the tax. They’d help build the rest, and take what they learned back home, creating a real progressive party for cohorts’ experience, which would also engender more media and cultural expressions; art exhibits, musical performance geared for system thinking problem solvers with an understanding of the lane they play in and the lane the people of Shiloh, or Indiana Avenue, or the Gullah and Geechee communities who used to be in Hilton Head play.
We would attract the best doers, system thinkers, people with access to resources to get things done, and engage them with the Shiloh Community in a respectful and helpful way, for those who want to engage with the justice wing of the Asheville tourism experience. There is shopping, biking, hiking, rafting, music, galleries, and of course, the Biltmore, for the rest of the family.
Those are people we want to attract here,and then connect them and what they do with what we are doing here, and what people in our network in Indianapolis, or Chicago, or on Navaho land, etc.
This would create a great narrative to attract affluent, progressive people eager to show they want to take action to show they know Black lives matter. The tax would go to create intergenerational wealth as well as valuable and healthy residential districts and Black Wall Street business districts. Stephanie Swepson Twitty, CEO of Eagle Market Streets could serve as the administrator of the tax and the people deciding what to do with the money would be the Shiloh community, along with world class system designers who’ve built elements of community led just economies in other places as their advisors.
I was talking to Social Banker DeAmon Harges yesterday and he said the group behind the cultural trail in Indianapolis spent $63 million on the winding historical markered long path through parks and alongside canals. It’s brought in billions, they told DeAmon. How much of that money goes to Black and brown people? They couldn’t say. Some, for sure. Probably. But not much, they acknowledged, after a beat.
DeAmon thinks a tax like the one I’m describing would work there. It could also get you a 15 minutes free on the ubiquitous e scooters that litter their plazas and parks, who’d pay their tax that way, perhaps. Indy is an amazing park and exhibit city. It gives something to do to the spouses and families of the people who come to its conventions and conferences. It holds more conventions than anywhere. The parks and cultural attractions are an enticement to the business person to bring his or her family. DeAmon thinks a tax on the cultural trail would be something the Cultural Trail administration would like. He has a contract with them and wants to take the action forward.
When you want to think about doing reparations, as we have here in Asheville, the root word is “repair” to remedy the damage done. That’s what Stephanie Swepson Twitty, of Eagle Markets CDC, ceo of the Community Equity Fund, is advising the people here. And it’s a rubric that makes remembering what was done job one. Then repairing that damage. Like the Shiloh Community, the first Black neighborhood displaced to enable the creation of the Biltmore mansion; the top Christmas tourism attraction in the state.
A persistent idea which consistently fails in social enterprise is the second lens on shopping.
Social Mark, the idea that people would pay extra for products from socially beneficially businesses in the UK was far from the first, as documented in this case study.
Instead, Social Mark was one of a class of failures based on a delusion of what would cause consumers behavior to change. I had my own. Hoop Fund lost $250,000 in investor dollars and crashed and burned. It deserves its own story, and I will do another post to tell it.
Here are a few examples. Good Guide raised more than $8 million on the premise that they would analyze the underlying ingredients in a typical Walgreens medicine aisle and offer better choices to conscious consumers through a mobile app. They imagined people roving the aisles as they shopped trying to find the purest off-the-shelf medicine that was best for the world and best for people. What they found is that people didn’t want to do that. The ones who remembered to use the app would make one click, away from a toxic red product but not take the next steps to go from light red to yellow to green. That concept, beloved by investors and idealistic supporters, just didn’t conform to how people buy. They are in a hurry and want to get the right bottle and move on.
A similar idea was promoted by a company that supplied fair trade produced wool woven by Andean indigenous led coops making the fabric for Eileen Fisher, a major designer. Armed with some grants from foundations who believed that there was a new, more conscious buyer who wanted to know more about the story of the makers, they positioned the Trace Tool as a small tablet in the retail shops in San Francisco where Eileen Fisher clothes were sold. No one used it. They told the store that the Trace Tool did not add to the shopping experience. Many were supporters of fair trade, but stopping when trying to decide which sweater to buy to watch a story of Andean weavers was just an intrusion.
Similarly, a fund was a partnership with Kiva, a no interest online lending platform where you can invest for as little as $25 with several fair trade chocolate companies. The idea was that you’d see the card sticking out from the candy bar aisle, look at what the producing coops needed and make a $25 loan along with picking up the candy. Chocolate appeals to the amygdala; the mid-brain center that also controls sex, addiction to drugs and gambling. The loans activated the prefrontal cortex where you contemplate risk and reward. Those two parts of the brain, the immediate impulse response and the settled place where you assess costs and benefits, hate being in contact. It’s like bringing your accountant to a weekend in Vegas.
All of these examples failed because the entrepreneurs and investors willing to buy their vision believed that people want to be in two dimensions at once; a customer looking to buy a product and a meta level above assessing the hidden qualities in them or finding a way to help the producers. So far, none of those platforms has worked, but the concept still gets funding and attracts idealistic young social entrepreneurs who think they can design the experience to cause consumers to evolve to the level they imagine.
I’m 71 and in my tenth startup. I am more excited by the potential of this one, led by my wife, the Rev. Rosa Lee Harden, at Faith & Finance, than any of the others.
I am tired of sad boomers, transfixed by NPR-laced paralysis analysis, explaining how their lack of hope or inability to find a way forward, the decline they are finding in their professional abilities, is normal, buttressed by new books and science that validates their dingy pessimism.
I have lost many of the abilities of my youth, but in exchange, I have learned. I have gained what’s called crystalline intelligence to replace my youthful fast twitch fluid intelligence.
I am older, slower, weaker, but I lost weight during covid because I hiked five times a week during times I’d been driving to meetings. Your choices about the last part of your life are your own. They are not a generalizable reality or inevitable.
Concentrating on taking advantage of my growing crystalline intelligence, that increases with age, I am completing a field guide to transformation to transfer my approach to community development from a faith based perspective, along that of Rosa Lee and our team, to an online portal for faith based community development. Got a grant. A second, secular version of that work will follow. And it will be easy to turn the 11 chapters into a book when the time comes.
When you are older you lose the fast twitch, fluid intelligence that lets you hop from subject to subject, but you gain crystalline intelligence, which require pattern recognition, over time. My multi tasking is way down, but my ability to understand context, cultural and historical and psychological factors in a situation is greatly improved.
This study shows how crystalline intelligence increases when you get to 70. Typically, they measure the decline of memory and the other facets of fluid intelligence, without thinking to measure how your ability to see connections that matter, what could be called wisdom, can grow. Cognitive sciences are obsessed with what declines, not with what continues to deepen and get richer and more dimensional
We are writing a field guide to transformation, a manual that will be, by November, an online portal with a learning management system, thanks to a grant from Trinity Wall Street, that explains our process of working on community economic development to create economic justice in marginalized communities, working with the local leadership of people of color.
That’s not work that I could have done as a young man. When you get older, you see how the whole picture comes together, and how the key roles, like system entrepreneur, mother hen, connected evangelist, finance wizard, and anchor institutions are vital and interconnected. It began more than four years ago, working with Tim Soerens, of the Parish Collective, who led the meaning track at SOCAP for years and my wife and longtime business partner, Rosa Lee.
And the point is, a certain kind of intelligence grows over time, while you experience declines in your professional ability in other kinds of intelligence and capabilities. So do what old people do well. Think, remember, see the pattern, tell the important stories, and create guides for younger people from your successes and failures and the patterns you’ve seen that work and that don’t work.
A whole section of the Field Guide is about “good ideas” that social entrepreneurs still get funding for that have never worked, and have not worked for reasons that are still true. Pointing out the blind alleys that still sparkle and entice is one goal of the guide. The main goal is to point to the kind thing I’ve seen work, where well meaning white people can work well with the leadership of Black brown and indigenous people to create new financial platforms that enable justice to begin to roll down like a river.
People of faith, and dioceses were our first investors in our community equity fund; called to invest in their neighbors across race, class and neighborhoods. And now churches are also becoming some of the best customers, as they contract with the landscaper in our portfolio to take care of their sometimes extensive grounds.
The first checks for $200,000 went out to three Black owned small businesses and the fund has already proved to be an amazing job creator. Just two of the businesses have created 13 new living wage jobs. The third, MsLean, a landscaper, used the capital to be able to respond to a U.S. Forest Service RFP for trail maintenance and could create another 15 jobs along with a middle management position.
The equity investments of $50,000 to $75,000 are the first from the innovative Community Equity Fund Stephanie Swepson Twitty and I have been working for a couple of years. We’ve raised the first $1 million to invest equity in Black and brown sole proprietors who don’t have a rich uncle to give them friends and family money to enable them to grow to be able to take on CDFI loans.
We made Impact Alpha, the Wall Street Journal of impact investinghttps://impactalpha.com/community-equity-fund-readies-small-checks-for-black-and-brown-proprietors-in-north-carolina/
This is a problem I first tried to solve, working with Jessica Norwood as the leader, with the Runway Project, but it turned out debt doesn’t work as a model; you can’t make money investing in businesses that can’t get a loan. But you can invest patient equity in them, and make the fund itself viable through them paying revenue share over five years.
Donors to the fund get a standard tax deduction, paid back by revenue share from the entrepreneurs. They give; we invest in a venture philanthropy model similar to that of the New Schools Venture Fund, which has invested more than $26 million in education in the United States over the last decade. Their donation is recycled to invest in another sole proprietor after around five years. That means, say if your Sunday School class donated $5,000, in five years, that gift would be reinvested, and your gift will have grown to $10,000. In 10 years after the initial gift, your $5,000 will have grown to $15,000.
Buncombe County, here in our hometown of Asheville, is our largest donor; (they have committed but we are officially in the formal application process) we asked the county to judge us on 1. How many sole proprietors become job creators, 2. How many jobs are created, 3. What’s the increase in income for those sole proprietors and the people they hire, and 4. What’s the increase in revenue of those businesses. And that doesn’t count the increase in sales tax, potential increase in commercial property value, etc. that will come as those businesses expand.
The $1 million fund, which requires deep engagement with the entrepreneurs, has a $300,000 management fee and a 15% loan loss reserve baked in. When it reaches what Swepson Twitty believes its natural size as a $10 million statewide fund, the management fee will is projected to go down to a more normal 10% of the total funding.
The official press release:
Eagle Market Streets Development Corporation, CDC
Launches Community Equity Fund
ASHEVILLE, N.C., (July 12, 2021) – Stephanie Swepson Twitty, CEO of Eagle Market Streets Community Development Corporation, CDC announces the launch of the Community Equity Fund (CEF), an innovative opportunity for small businesses. With a generous award from the Dogwood Health Trust Foundation, the fund is being created as a virtual family of support, drawing on donors who are specifically committed to building racial ownership.
The CEF is a financing vehicle and growth fund set up to provide equity capital for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) sole proprietors of a viable business with three to five years of operations. The businesses must have one or less employees and annual revenues of $50K to $100K in annual gross revenues/ scalability (job creation or market share) and not yet debt ready.
The revenue-sharing model takes the place of traditional “friends and family” support not historically available to BIPOC businesses. Currently the fund has several sole proprietorships to work with, all with a path to growth, including a coffee shop, a landscaping business, a realtor, and a temp-to-hire agency.
“Looking beyond startups, over 90% of the Black-owned businesses in the area are owner, operators or sole proprietorships who find financing to hire their first employee a consistent challenge,” said Swepson Twitty. “Each investment from this “evergreen” fund repays itself over a five-year period. The idea of giving to invest, not just giving, is common in other countries but is seldom used in the United States.”
The CEF aims to make investments between $50-75K with a goal of
businesses paying 7% of its gross revenue, starting after two years of operating runway to create jobs, scale business revenues and gain the ability to focus on a marketing campaign to increase sales and grow their businesses to five employees.
To date, Buncombe (Asheville) County government provided a commitment of $700,000, which coupled with money from the DogWood Health Trust Foundation, local church groups and online crowdfunding, puts the CEF at $1million, with a goal of becoming a $10 million statewide fund.
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Meet the Team:
Fund Manager Steven Lawrence
CEO Stephanie Swepson Twitty
Advisors
Kevin Doyle Jones, a successful serial entrepreneur and founder of the SOCAP conference, now working on his ninth startup, Faith+Finance.
Vickie Meath, founder of Just Economics, the local living wage group
Matt Raker, Executive Director of Mountain Biz Works, our local CDFI
Franzi Charen, founder of the Asheville Grown business alliance , a local merchants marketing group
This is a sketch of a blog, with some examples of Neighborhood Investment Trusts and articles and research about them as a trend that can create democratic community wealth. It is only being sent to the people on this thread, working in Indianapolis and South Bend.
Neighborhood investment trusts let average people buy into real estate projects for as low as $10 or $100 alongside investors and philanthropic catalytic capital. They are meant to preserve things like BIPOC owned business corridors, strip malls, etc.
This was I think the first Neighborhood Investment Trust done about five years ago in Portland and replicated now, with modifications in Atlanta, Philadelphia and Baltimore. https://investcit.com/ I know the folks leading them in those three cities.
The neighborhood investment trusts are related to an older form, the community land trust (CLT). Experts believe they could be really effective to help organize churches with at risk portfolios in specific markets
Catalytic capital. A conference in the Spring bringing together people of faith who want to create an interdependent economy for all, local, on the first day. A Faithfinance.net pre event. Then a two days of a Neighborhood Economics focus and foundations and impact first impact investors. This will be taking a systemic view at the particular city where we are holding the event, but from a more than local perspective.
If this were SOCAP, this would be only for those who want to be in the deep end of the pool, dealing with systemic issues, rather than find ways to do good within the existing economic and financial system’s boundaries. This is not about impact investing at market rate; doing good with no discount to financial return. This is acknowledging that deep, game changing good can have a positive return on capital, but that really doing good has a cost, most of the time.
We will be mapping and we will curating content around the umbrella theme of Catalytic Capital
We will be asking: 1.Where is capital flowing to people who don’t typically get it (not people who look like me)
A. What is Catalytic Capital? It has four characteristics. Sometimes only one or two show up, sometimes all of them. It is 2.Patient 3. Flexible; willing to work with innovators doing new things on one off processes outside of templatable processes 4. Willing to take early risk, especially to create platforms (nun money that led to Shore Bank, the first CDFI’s, including Mountain Biz Works, Calvert foundation, Root Capital, in those and many others, Catholic religious women’s orders were the first money in, and finally, 5. Catalytic capital is concessionary when it needs to be; it understands there is cost to doing good (CODG). https://www.macfound.org/programs/catalytic-capital-consortium/
B. People can deploy catalytic capital when they are 1.people of faith; who are investing in the world they think matches what they believe the world out to become, 2. Or local; investing in the place their children live to create a place their grandchildren want to come back to, 3 or an enlightened foundation (sort of) like the coalition of Rockefeller, McArthur and Omidyar and 4. impact first impact investors. We are not and this event is not for mainstream impact investors; this is not for those who want to do good and do just as well. This is the deep end of the pool. We don’t want to change Wall Street. We want to change an unfair and racist economic and financial system.
C. And then what are the structural and systemic barriers to people being able to get access to the capital that creates intergenerational wealth?
Building an interdependent economy 