Snapshot of the Community Equity Fund

Fund Profile: Community Equity Fund

Addressing the “Rich Uncle Problem” with Venture Philanthropy

By Elias Crim

Stephanie Swepson Twitty and Kevin Jones are North Carolina-based veteran social entrepreneurs. And they are doing just what such folks love to do: filling a gap they spotted in the way the world works.

The two make a powerful combination. Twitty is the CEO of Eagle Market Streets Community Development Corporation in Asheville NC. Her neighbor in the region, Kevin Jones, is the co-founder of the Faith+Finance network, the GatherLab, and the SOCAP Conferences.

Some years ago Jones had a lightbulb moment. He was collaborating with two different small business incubators aimed at launching Black entrepreneurs. In thinking about bootstrap funding, he threw out the idea of a Kiva-like approach: each entrepreneur would simply ask 25 friends or family to put up $25.

Not one of the entrepreneurs could put the money together. That’s when Jones realized this economic dilemma–the lack of friends-and-family funding, i.e., the “rich uncle” problem for BIPOC business people–was one middle-class white folk like himself typically didn’t even see.

Looking beyond startups, he and Twitty also realize that over 90% of the Black-owned businesses in the United States are sole proprietorships which could rarely find financing to hire their first employee, but that almost no one was focusing on them.

In Charlotte, NC, 95% of Black-owned businesses are one employee. But there is almost no support for them, while there are four accelerators focused on startups led by entrepreneurs of color. It’s huge, but invisible.

In Buncombe County, Asheville, where CEF is based, 93% of Black owned businesses are classed as sole proprietors; meaning they have from one to three employees, total.

After months of testing their idea with various parties, Twitty and Jones created a new financing mechanism, the Community Equity Fund. The CEF works to create a virtual family of support, drawing on donors who are specifically committed to building racial ownership. 

But the donations in this case are not pure charity: they become of equity investments in the businesses, that are paid back via a revenue-sharing model. Thus each investment from this “evergreen” fund repays itself over a 5-year period. This method, called “venture philanthropy”–i.e., giving to invest, not just giving is common in other countries but is seldom used in the United States. Once the investment is repaid, CEF does not own any part of the investee’s business.

Instead of focusing on startups and the seed stage or companies at the later first-loan stage (where CDFIs typically come in), the CEF addresses the gap in between them. Here’s a summary of its features:

• The CEF is a growth fund for BIPOC sole proprietors with 3-5 years of operations, annual revenues of $50K to $100K, not yet loan-qualified

• Via the Twitty’s Eagle Market Streets CDC, the fund already has several well-qualified sole proprietorships to work with: a coffee shop, a landscaping business, a realtor, a temp to hire agency.

• The CEF aims to make investments of between $35-65K with a goal of paying 7% of its gross revenue, starting after two years of runway to hire a couple of employees and gain the ability to focus on sales and growing the business to five employees (Seven percent is a kind of national standard for this kind of non-debt, revenue sharing deals). As Jones describes it, “The program is not really for a barber shop but maybe for a barber school; the business has to have a path to growth.”

• The donor’s initial gift thus doubles every 5 years as their donation is reinvested in the next batch of sole proprietors, and doubles again five years after that. The fund has a 15% loss reserve to cover business failures built in to the amount the businesses repay, to ensure that the money will actually recycled as another round of investment.

Twitty and Jones recently approached Buncombe (Asheville) County government and secured commitment for $ 700,000, which coupled with money from a local foundation and local church groups and their online crowdfunding, put them at $1 million. It plans to start investing in June or July and has a goal of becoming a $10 million state wide fund. A friend in the U.K. is now talking up this idea of venture philanthropy for sole proprietors Parliament, where 2 billion pounds is earmarked for jobs stimulus and local investment in the rustbelt industrial north

The Thriving Communities Fund: how it works

I wrote earlier about the concept of how church youth could engage across race, class and economics to design the future, fueled by the money they earn investing friends and family level capital in Black and brown small businesses that don’t have a rich uncle. This post is on the nuts and bolts of how that can work.

1. When a congregation wants to invest to help eliminate the racial wealth gap it starts by a member writing a check to the church or its local mission fund, designated for the Thriving Communities Fund, for which the member gets the standard tax deduction. That check is deposited in a Donor Advised Fund (DAF), a charitable vehicle that allows people to both give to nonprofits as well as to invest in mission aligned for profit businesses. For simplicity’s sake, we are using the national investment advisory firm Edward D. Jones’ DAF platform for the churches in the pilots we are working with across the country.

2. Once the donations from a particular church are deposited in the DAF, in North Carolina, they will go to Eagle Market Streets, the non profit Community Development Corporation (CDC) leading the Community Equity Fund. In other states, Stephanie Swepson Twitty, who leads Eagle Markets, partnering with Kevin Jones, of Faith+Finance, work with congregations to find a local CDC who can take the money and invest it in the portfolio of a local Community Development Corporation’s (CDFI) fund that is investing in local minority businesses. We use a CDC as the conduit to the CDFI, because, unlike a CDFI, a CDC is unregulated. The local CDFI knows how to pick investable businesses owned by Black and brown entrepreneurs. It performs due diligence, picks probably winners, makes the loans and collects loan payments.

3. The church doesn’t have to choose the businesses. It just gets paid back, with interest, when the loans are repaid.

4. If there is no CDFI doing small business lending, we can work with the church to find suitable alternative places to invest philanthropic dollars that will get a financial return that can be given or invested again through the DAF. Stephanie Swepson Twitty who leads Eagle Market Streets, the non profit CDC behind the initial Community Equity Fund in North Carolina, will work as consultants with each congregation to make those connections and offer guidance on the choices involved.

5. When the loans are repaid, we are recommending that the proceeds be split in two. Half of it goes to the church’s local mission fund; it can’t go to Africa or fund a mission trip to Guatemala; it has to be deployed locally or reinvested in the CDFI fund. The other half is given to the youth of the church (in some churches that means people under 18; in other churches that includes people under 26 years of age).

We are calling the money given to the youth with every loan paid back the Future Resilience Bond. There are two design parameters around the Bond:

1. It should be put toward something that will take at least five years to accomplish. This encourages the young people to take a long term perspective, which can enable them to look at systemic issues and root causes that will require patience and persistence and grown up allies to address.

2. Second, the decision about what to focus on should be undertaken with youth from the Black and brown communities they are investing in. These can be young people from a local church, or kids involved in the local Boys or Girls Clubs, or sometimes a YMCA or YWCA other non profits.

In Asheville, NC, two non profits that have been recommended to us are the Center for Participatory Change, which helps people in marginalized communities express their voice, and Asheville Youth Mission which gives young people of all races and ethnicities a variety of experiences working in several justice focused non profits. Both perspectives seem important for this project; partnering with a non profit rooted in listening to marginalized community voices, and one that knows how to engage them in projects where they learn.

Faith+Finance, the non profit Kevin is affiliated with that’s led by his wife, the Rev. Rosa Lee Harden, will curate an initial pilot cohort of no more than half a dozen churches to help them learn from each other, through recorded regular zoom calls, and helping make needed connections.

We will be blogging continuously about the progress of the project; our successes, our failures and our learnings. Once we’ve validated the proof of concept, we plan to launch other cohorts of churches using their local mission donation dollars to invest to create systemic change.

Demand grows for churches to invest to solve the racial wealth gap

Our first presentation went well on using a faith based lens of the Community Equity Fund. 15 people attended from a dozen churches in half a dozen states. There is demand from North Carolina, to Louisiana, Indiana, Seattle and beyond. We are presenting virtually Wednesday March 5 at the Hopeful Economics Conference for the United Church of Canada. Registration is free for the 11:30 a.m session.

The CEF uses philanthropic, local congregational based Donor Advised fund donations given through the church to the fund to invest friends and family capital in entrepreneurs who don’t have a rich aunt to give them runway to grow, before they are ready for loans. Those sole proprietors are not able to grow to access traditional and even new style Community Development Finance Institution (CDFI) loan funds. We are also working with other group DAF distribution plans for this fund, (civic clubs, college clubs).

We see friends and family as a hidden asset class that needs to be solved by a new class of philanthropic funds like ours, spawned locally, to create an interim step to helping sole proprietors hire an operator, grow sales and get two years of clean Quickbooks under their belt to enable them to reach the unused loan funds.

The need is national, but only now being discovered. In talking with ACCION, (a major international lender to marginalized communities) in Chicago, they have had 4,000 entrepreneurs go through their accelerator, but only one percent of those entrepreneurs of color, or 40 companies, were able to access the follow on loan funds from them or LISC or any other CDFI loan fund. It’s a national gap and people charged with creating funds have networks with money, so they don’t see that gap when they create their solutions.

Churches are among those groups who we think can see the need for catalytic patient, and flexible capital layered into the capital stack that incorporates philanthropy mixed with financial return to solve the racial wealth gap at the crucial, catalytic beginning point

About Catalytic Capital.

Young people engaging across race, class & economics

The Community Equity Fund solves a problem that Black familes live with that most white people don’t realize exists, but that is a a crucial element in why the racial wealth gap exists. That wealth gap means the average white family’s assets are 12 times greater that of the average Black family.

A key reason for the economic disparity is the friends and family gap; black business owners don’t have a rich aunt or uncle or alumni network member to help give their business the runway to grow. When a Black family owns a business, the racial wealth gap shrinks by 75%, to a still terrible three times higher for white people.

The hidden friends and family gap is why in many cities 90 % plus of African American owned businesses have fewer than two employees. Businesses that small aren’t elligible for the new loan funds that have cropped up in cities across the country to help minority businesses in response to last summers protests about racial inequality.

Ironically, because the people designing the loan funds have extensive networks of investors in their friends and family to call on as they build their funds, many don’t realize the “rich uncle” gap exists for Black and brown families. The CEF gives these micro businesses the philanthropically motivated capital they need to go full time, hire an operator and grow sales so they can take on loans to help them grow and become viable businesses.

Now we’ve constructed a way for individual faith-based congregations to be involved in solving the racial wealth gap through their contributions; money designated for their church or synagogues’ local mission outreach. Even more significant, we have devised a way for a church’s young people to become deeply engaged in solving systemic problems of racial equity and economic justice in response to the Gospel, while creating meaningful and practical relationships across race and class.

We are in talks to launch pilots with churches in Asheville, NC, Chicago, in a poor rural community on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi Delta and in South Bend, Indiana.

Here’s how it would work: members of a church would donate to the CEF through their church and get a standard tax deduction. When it’s done in a church we are calling the community equity fund the Perpetual Mission Fund. So the church would then pass on individual and church budgeted contributions to CEF, doing business as the Perpetual Mission Fund. The PMF would invest in the pre-vetted Black businesses to help them grow. The church would be paid back in five years when the businesses paid back the fund. But the church will continue to receive income from it’s initial donation for 25 years, every year, as succeeding businesses pay back the church’s contribution that was recycled into each new business every five years.

Here is where it gets interesting and young people can engage. We call the money that’s paid back the Harvest Premium, and we ask that it be designated for local mission; you can’t send it to Africa, but instead you have to give to or invest in something in your own home town. We recommend that the Harvest Premium’s local mission should reach across race, class and neighborhoods and that it be allocated in partnership with the people from community’s of color that the church is investing in, rather than having the church decide what’s needed.

Half of the Harvest Premium every year should be handed over to the control of the young people of the church. You give the young people a steady, reliable stream of capital and the responsibility to design the future.Those funds should be for investing in the future; things that take at least five years to come to pass.

We call the money set aside for young people to create their future the Future Resilience Bond. Since we can expect the Harvest Premium to come in for at least 25 years, we can afford to think long term, ask questions about systemic and structural problems that require patience to solve, from local climate change resilience in poor neighborhoods to deeper economic problems that may require changes in laws and regulations to solve..

The problems to be solved with capital with a long term horizon, the purview of the Resilient Future Bond, should not be decided by the young people of the church alone. We recommend that they reach out to the Black business owners the church has invested in to and get in touch with the youth groups in those predominantly Black churches to co design the future they will create together. It will take time to get to know the problems from each group’s viewpoint, and that’s fine. They will have five years before the first money starts to come in, and they can spend the time learning how to collaborate on solutions together.

The secret to this model is that the money from that first investment will continue to come in for 25 years. And if the Perpetual Mission Fund becomes a line item, regular expenditure for a portion of the congregation’s local mission fund every year, it can go on forever, creating intergenerational wealth in communities without a rich uncle, and helping young people solve long term problems across race, class and neighborhoods.

We will be presenting on the model Wednesday March 3 at 1130 at this Canadian conference.

Indigenous sovereignty and crypto; looking for ethical ninja to build something better

My friend Desiree Kane, a Miwok journalist and activist and I have been talking and wondering if the crypto/Ethereum/bitcoin surge, coupled with the crumbling of the power of the nation state and its growing inability to control capital flows, while digital states and mini states are emerging could create a meaningful step forward in restoring land sovereignty (video on the Doctrine of Discovery that enabled the theft) to the people it was stolen from in the United States.

We are looking for an ethical ninja in the crypto world to help us explore this new territory and see if, as things fall apart and reform, we could find a way to create a territory, and use new digital capital, to support and enable indigenous rights of land? If you are interested, you can contact me or Desiree des at desireekane.com I’m Kevindoylejones1 at gmail.I am working with an indigenous journalist and activist and we are looking for an ethical crypto ninja to help us see if we can create something using digital capital and sovereignty to help restore indigenous land rights

On Feb 11, 2021, at 2:21 PM, Desiree Kane <des at desiree kane wrote:

Dependent nation status is the linchpin for indigenous tribes to ensure reparations are made, in some small form, for the mass theft of land experienced. As the nation state model degrades under capitalism, a rise of a new type of currency is rising in tandem; cryptocurrency of many varieties. Many issues with legacy capitalism like corruption and grift have carried over unfettered into the crypto space. Resources collected whether material or digital does not a sovereign nation or body make yet the groups amassing crypto billions are creating expansive off grid compounds and currency systems domestically outside the view of both the US AND tribal government frameworks. That’s what we already have, it’s called Settlers 2.0.

Is this crypto resurgence part of an electorate destabilizing effort? Because what’s happening is that these crypto capitalist folks are FEASTING on native folks not knowing what’s going on and that ultimately really helps Putin, who has famously emboldened almost every sovereign citizens movement, which loves crypto. What is the role of both financial product architects and tribes in the time of a crypto capitalist onslaught and how can Indigenous peoples, collectives, organizations, and tribes use this moment to ensure the digital human rights of indigenous people and the rights of the land these digital and physical resource hoarders operate upon endure?

Is this crypto resurgence part of an electorate destabilizing effort? Because what’s happening is that these crypto capitalist folks are FEASTING on native folks not knowing what’s going on and that ultimately really helps Putin, who has famously emboldened almost every sovereign citizens movement, which loves crypto.

AWhat is the role of both financial product architects and tribes in the time of a crypto capitalist onslaught and how can Indigenous peoples, collectives, organizations, and tribes use this moment to ensure the digital human rights of indigenous people and the rights of the land these digital and physical resource hoarders operate upon endure?

desireekane.com
desireekane.youcanbook.me

The demise of the nation state and the rise of networked local economies

Conspiracy theories that doubt authority (anti vax to q anon) are just symptoms of the collapse of the nation state, along with the nation state’s ability to control capital flows, from either big tech or crypto.

I think Rana Dasgupta is right about the impending demise of the nation state. And U.S. centric analysis by Dasgupta. majority looks at the u.s.https://harpers.org/archive/2020/12/the-silenced-majority/

I’m working with people creating locally replicable, modular, democratic financial vehicles aimed at providing catalytic capital access to the dispossessed under the current system, which could also be adapted to higher economic strata for system-wide resilience. Some things, like loan loss reserves and home and health insurance can be centralized but mutualized. A new economy can emerge.

I love most all of what Biden is doing and it will slow the breakup of the nation state here, and probably more broadly but Apple has more cash reserves offshore than Great Britain has in total. To that point, Amy Klobuchar’s new anti monopoly bill also covers monopsony; buyer monopolies; you have to sell your books through Amazon, have to use Google to sell online ads. Its a big deal. Cory Doctorow wrote a good piece on it and is covering it in his daily email newsletter.

Never the less, the trend is clear. The nation state will become less relevant and more nations will proceed to crack to become failed states. The nation state model no longer works. The nation state and the capitalist market economy freed us from feudalism, where upward mobility and pricing your labor based on skill would result in death and all wealth was in land. It served its function. It also turned us into commodities with capital in control. People are walking away from it, to coops and local economies. It’s not certain if that will work, but that’s where I am working. The solution to a global problem is not a global solution. It’s a polycentric solution, says Elinor Ostrom.

An example of what I am working on that’s locally replicable and catalytic, aimed at reducing the racial wealth gap. Friends and family funding for entrepreneurs who don’t have a rich aunt

As my brother looks at 100

Today is not an ordinary day. It’s been 800 years since Jupiter and Mars were in line like this, looking like one star. Some people think that’s what the Star of Bethlehem was, over Jesus’ manger in the story. It’s a day to look at the sky and think about time.

It’s also 500 years ago today that Galileo died. He looked at the sky and realized, using early science, that we were not really at the center of the universe; the sun and the cosmos did not revolve around us. We are part of a grand cosmic choreographed orbital dance; part of it, but it doesn’t revolve around us. Science makes us see the world in a different way. Galileo wanted to teach the world that truth and they put him in prison. Some teachers, some of the best teachers, they put in prison. They challenge things that the people in power don’t want disturbed.

It’s also a time to think about my brother, Gary Jones, the scientist and teacher. It’s a milestone day for him. He’s more than three quarters of a century old. He’s closer to 100 than to 50. And he’s in remarkably good shape, through disciplined exercise for a guy his age. I just came from a funeral and people said great things about a great guy, my brother in law, Roy. And I was thinking people should say those things while we are still alive to hear it, to hear what our impact was.

Gary was, more than anything a teacher. He understood the fourth grade mind. And he used chess to teach kids that things were possible for them, things that other people didn’t think were possible for people like them. And he let them prove it to themselves through teaching them strategies and ways to win in chess. He led a team of almost all farm worker, immigrant kids, three quarters of whom had only one parent at home, not native English speakers, to the national chess championship, beating the rich kids from Groton on Hudson. They were going to do a story on 2020, the CBS news show about his team, but at the last minute picked the Black Bishops instead. They were from Philadelphia, a major media market.

What his kids got from Gary was exceptional. I remember one kid who came back, a chess team member, who had become rich in real estate. He’d been so poor, kids had laughed at his tennis shoes. But he mowed lawns, got other kids to work for him mowing lawns and used the profit to buy foreclosed houses, fixed them up and sell them. He worked with Gary to set up a combination of financial literacy and chess training for hispanic young people. I remember another girl who came back after her first year at Harvard. The first member of her family to go to college, who came back to tell him that she learned it was possible for her to succeed in Gary’s classes and chess team training. She said she would not be at Harvard if it weren’t for Gary and chess.

Teachers can have that kind of impact. In my life, a teacher transformed my direction in about a minute. I was held after class for messing up and Mr. Pacheco, my social studies teacher, came back to me and looked at me, and said he expected more from me. At that time, nobody was expecting much from me. In fact, I was screwing up in exactly the way my family system expected one of the sons of Doyle Jones to screw up; I was meeting their expectations by failing and getting in trouble. But Mr. Pacheco looked at me and said he expected more from me. I can still see the way he looked at me.

I believed what that teacher saw in me, and I changed my life. I stopped hanging around with car thieves down in the lower parking lot, and got on the honor roll and went to college. And he never did know that that minute, after class, changed the way my life turned out. Teachers can do that. They can teach us to see ourselves in a different way. I’ve looked for Mr. Pacheco to tell him, but haven’t found him yet.

Gary did that for untold numbers of immigrant kids whose futures were already decided, according to people around and used the discipline and strategy of chess, coupled with winning to give them a different story. Some of them believed it and their lives were changed. He’ll never know which ones, but they are there. Like Galileo he taught them to see the world differently and their place in it. I’m proud of my brother, even though he is heading toward 100 and is incredibly goofy a lot of the time.

Now, his son Eric is going to freestyle a rap tribute to Gary and then everybody else tell stories about him and his life, now that’s he’s more than three quarters of a century old.

Collaborative forms to make Chicago housing more affordable

A unique collaboration between a Christian liberal arts college, a community planning network leader, an entrepreneurial accelerator and fund, and our Faith and Finance team has formed to create a community embedded app to guide homeowners and renters in ways to make housing in redlined Chicago neighborhoods more affordable.

Anton Seals, a board member of South Shore Works a transformative community network and planning initiative on Chicago’s South Shore, will guide community engagement. Seals, who is deeply connected in non profit, activist and business circles in the city has his eye on two linked neighborhoods that are at risk of gentrification to start the research.

The research will be done by two classes from Trinity Christian College, one a freshman class doing directed research and an class of older students directing the younger students and doing field research. “As an institution, we want to be deeply embedded in the community so that we can keep learning what it is to be neighborly. One of our leading goals for ourselves and our students is that we would learn to celebrate gifts and address challenges in local and global contexts – and we want that to lead to practical solutions guided by scholarship and our faith. We want to help people remain in their homes. That’s our simple goal. We are excited to be part of this partnership and project, “ said Aaron Kuecker Trinity’s Provost.

We will be looking for information and methods that different community groups, housing counselors, and others are already using to make housing more affordable, and bundling them into a mobile app. “We will be taking an asset-based approach,” Seals said, “finding what’s already happening, working with existing groups, and putting the information together.” In our initial scan we found groups like Blacks in Green with ways to help residents cut their utility bills, while Sarah Hope Marshall, a local housing expert helps people take advantage of a little known mortgage subsidy. Marshall has signed up to be an advisor to the project.

When appropriate, new but already existing innovations from other places will be brought into the mix, like the micromortgage marketplace created by the Urban Institute, an online marketplace which makes home ownership possible for low and middle income people through enabling small $100,000 mortgages, which most banks won’t provide.

Or there could be an opening for an online service like Padsplit, which makes it easy for an older person to rent out a spare bedroom on a long term lease to a younger person, to bring in more income to enable them to hang onto their house as prices rise when new, gentrifying development that can displace existing residents starts to come in.

Rounding out the initial partnership is Rowan Richards, who leads Assemblize, an Accion startup accelerator working with under represented local entrepreneurs. Richards will be an advisor to the project and if the app becomes a reality he says there’s a place for it in his accelerator. Knowing that possibility exists will help guide the app design.

We are in discussion with a design firm that typically works with corporates that each year does a social good focused app, to bundle all these micro solutions into a comprehensive app that can be used by individuals and families and that neighborhood housing advocates can use to guide their clients. The app is part of an overarching project goal of enabling resilient home ownership in Chicago’s redlined neighborhoods. We are also in talks with prospective collaborators at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s design school about being part of the project and app design.

In the other part of the Chicago project, focused on entrepreneurship and business ownership to reduce the racial wealth gap, Trinity, and I will be working closely with Richards and his cohort of Assemblize entrepreneurs.

We are in negotiations to bring the Community Equity Fund we’ve created in my hometown of Asheville, North Carolina to Assemblize to enable it to fund entrepreneurs who need friends and family level funding who don’t have a rich aunt to give them a runway until they are ready for the local loan funds. Richards has worked with 4,000 entrepreneurs over the last five years but only gotten 40 funded, or one percent, because they fall in that gap.

“Maybe we should just take off our masks and get it over with”

I’m in a group we call “left leaning” people from the poor Mississippi county where my children and wife were born. It’s the only support group some people have who still live in the county that went 83 % for Trump. People get called names for wearing masks; a young man in the group was the only mask wearer at a wedding and was called a “pussy fag” and worse. An old woman yesterday said in a store, to public approval, that they should all take off their masks and just get it over with. That was the saddest thing I read all day.

This is where I should think of something profound to say about maintaing hope. It’s not coming to mind. I think there is a despair that’s growing in places like that. And I’m no longer there, just in touch with people who still are. And I was never any good at changing their minds when I lived there anyway.

I just feel something important fraying between us all when I think about that old woman and what she’s thinking of doing in a response to a pandemic that drags on and is getting worse. There is a healing, maybe for that way of thinking, but it’s beyond me to imagine it this morning.

With people who have grown up knowing they are marginalized, Black folks i work with on several projects, I feel more hope. For these new marginalized who weren’t prepared for it, who grew up with a different myth about their place in the world, they have no generational resilience. Other folks haven’t had the liberty to despair.

When the way they see the world kills you

I’m in conversation with two groups whose beliefs could kill me this Spring.

One is an old friend from a church youth group in the 70’s. He’s a militant Trumper, afraid of the phantom threat of socialism, thinks the election was stolen through voting machine software subterfuge. He also thinks the vaccine is part of the same individual freedom-robbing conspiracy of the mask police and plans to have none of it.

The second group whose sense making could be deadly to the rest of us are the West Asheville DIY hippy anti vaxers who write long, thoughtful conspiracy laden posts in private Facebook groups like Game B who don’t trust big pharma, can’t believe profit maximizing capitalist corporations have our health in mind with their imminent vaccine releases and won’t take the vaccine until the rigorous, traditional double blind tests are done; many months from now. I am trying to tell the anti vaxers that the vaccine should be seen in the context of wreck on the highway emergency medicine but their long disbelief in the possibility of big corporates doing good prevents them from taking the vaccine when it ready.

Both have elaborate epistemologies, ways of knowing, that in this case, will coincide to make us all more at risk. Vaccines work when everybody takes them. That’s when the positive, trustworthy kind of herd immunity kicks in. My older brother has a withered leg from polio because he was born before the vaccine. Vaccines require the body politic, the general public, to take the same action, believing enough that the institutions of government and big pharma are in the business of keeping them healthy to get a stand, socially distanced, in line and get a shot. That’s how we wiped out polio in this country.

The militant Trumpers won’t take the vaccine it because they don’t trust government, thanks to Trump working to destroy their trust in public sector institutions broadly, along with government epidemiologists and other public health sector professional. The DIY hippy anti vaxers distrust of corporates will prevent them from joining with the rest of us to spread the immunity that can keep us safe from the virus.

Two different ways of seeing the world, both flawed at their roots, to my mind, and in this case united to put the lives of people in my age group, as well as the immuno compromised who can’t take vaccine, at deadly risk.

The divide and multiple fractional sub divides in this country sometimes show up in longer term issues, like climate change deniers. This vaccine issue is a divide where those two groups view of the world could kill thousands or tens of thousands of people this coming spring.

The divide and multiple fractional sub divides in this country sometimes show up in longer term issues, like climate change deniers. This vaccine issue is a divide where those two groups view of the world could kill thousands or tens of thousands of people this coming spring.