How do artists build an economy that works for everyone?
By Nyia Hawkins, Impact Investment Strategist & Storyteller, Ambitio US
“You have to have some kind of creativity to reimagine the world the way you want it to be.”
That’s what Victoria Jones , artist, entrepreneur, and community developer working to revitalize Orange Mound, Memphis, the first neighborhood in America built by formerly enslaved people, told me when I asked how she responded to funders and investors when asked about her non-traditional route into real estate development. What was once the largest concentration of Black Americans outside of Harlem by 1970 is now a community where more than 1 in 4 properties is vacant. Reimagining Orange Mound and other local economies is an investment in the sustainability of the U.S. economy.
Victoria’s answer in my first podcast set the tone for much of what The Soul of Capital became: two seasons of conversations with people who are already rebuilding the world, reimagining capital, ownership, infrastructure, and community that work for us all. Why?
The top 10% of households hold 67% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 50% hold 2.5%. More than one-third of the U.S. workforce now works in the “gig economy,” despite the fact that full-time employment is largely linked to social benefits, like healthcare, retirement savings, and unemployment protection. The median Black household holds 15 cents for every dollar held by the median white household. These gaps are not shrinking, they’re growing.
The Soul of Capital is rooted in the cultural impact and opportunity cost of leaving all that talent, creativity, and economic potential on the table. The cost is significant. Cultural production that never scales, businesses that never capitalize, communities that never compound wealth across generations. But it is also immeasurable. The ideas left unfunded, the innovation that is never built, the neighborhoods that never get to build upon what they never have access to. This is not a flaw in the system. It is the system.
The thread running through every podcast episode was the question — who gets to steward resources and on whose terms? Vanessa Roanhorse, CEO of Roanhorse Consulting , has helped move $4 million to over 300 Indigenous entrepreneurs through character-based lending. ‘Why?’ Because relationships and values are data and key to assessing risk, even when traditional underwriting refuses to value them. Sara Chester , a former member of the executive team leading The Industrial Commons in North Carolina, discussed efforts to build worker ownership through textile manufacturing in rural Appalachia, a region that has lost 85% of its textile jobs since 1992. ‘Why?’ Because someone had to believe that the local working class could be reconstituted around democratic decision-making rather than market-based economic extraction. The Industrial Commons is helping to revive a lost fiber industry that is gaining momentum.
CEO of Invest Appalachia, Andrew Crosson , is also near TIC. Invest Appalachia, based in Asheville, began with a locally rooted diagnosis: Appalachia is a resource-rich region whose wealth has historically been extracted. Appalachian coal and timber powered American industry for 150 years before decades of disinvestment that began in the late 60’s. The wealth left, and the externalities stayed (stripped mountains, communities without clean running water, and chronically underfunded schools). The $35 million fund isn’t chasing the next corporate factory to replace main street stores, and local entrepreneurs. It’s building capital stacks that finance what banks won’t, blending flexible loans with recoverable grants to root wealth in local communities that receive one-tenth the per capita philanthropy of the national average.
Noni Session , executive director of East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative (EB PREC), has helped bring community-owned real estate from proof of concept to an internationally recognized model. EB PREC is the nation’s first permanent real estate cooperative to qualify through the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a Regulation A+ Direct Public Offering. So far, the cooperative has acquired eight buildings (totaling more than 70,000 sq ft) for West Oakland residents, proving that land need not be a speculative commodity, proving that the financial infrastructure built to move capital toward investors can be rebuilt to move it toward the people who call a place home. Nearly 600 members, including neighbors and non-accredited investors, people who have historically been locked out of commercial real estate, govern the properties held in perpetuity off-market through deed restrictions and easements.
The final two podcast episodes feature Rudy Fraser , founder of Blacksky Algorithms and former fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, who brought that argument into the digital world. Rudy is building a community-governed social media that lets users moderate on their own terms, pool funds, and own their data. Blacksky, a decentralized platform with over two million users, has not had to invest in growth. The users do it on their own. Why does tech decentralization matter? Because moderation is care work, and when social media cares, the community is both the primary investor and stakeholder.
Rudy’s answer to my final question for all the podcast episodes, ‘What is the soul of capital for you?’ was similar to almost every previous answer to that question, just built in code: you have to be willing to reimagine the infrastructure itself. Don’t optimize the existing system. Replace the assumptions. But, as I wrap up The Soul of Capital podcast and its conversations about an economy that works for everyone, Andrew Crosson’s answer resonated with me most:
“Show me your investment terms, and I’ll show you the soul of your capital.”
This article was originally published on Medium. Read it on Medium →