It’s not widely appreciated that the Green Bay Packers is actually a nonprofit. And while shareholders can participate in the company’s annual meeting, their stock confers no financial benefits. There are no dividends, and shares cannot be sold (though they can be gifted to family members). But Packers fans are nevertheless mindful that their investment has given the community a great stadium, sports team, and global name recognition. Call it Cheesehead pride. And it’s another example of what we often call “a social rate of return” on investment.

This week, the former CEO of the Green Bay Packers, Mark Murphy, came to Portland, Oregon, to announce his support for another nonprofit being launched with a similar community stock structure. Led by Susan Bladhold, the Frog Ferry System will give local commuters an opportunity to trade bumper-to-bumper traffic jams on Portland’s bridges for a relaxing, quick ferry ride to work. Anyone in the country—not just Oregonians—can buy a share of the ferry for $300. The goal is to raise $2 million from supporters of the project and leverage $20 million from other sources to make the ferry a reality.

We’re pleased to interview Susan this week, and encourage readers to consider becoming Frogsters themselves. If this project succeeds, prepare to see a proliferation of these kinds of community-stock nonprofits across the country.

Also in this issue, you’ll find our latest listings of opportunities for you to invest in local businesses and local investment funds.

Finally, a reminder that if you like what you’re reading, please become a paying member. One perk is that you can come to our monthly “Mondays with Michael” online discussion. This Monday, I’ll be talking about how localists won the U.S.-Iran War!

Michael H. Shuman, Publisher

Publication of The Main Street Journal depends on your support. If you like what you’re reading, please become a paid subscriber today. You’ll enjoy special events like our monthly “Mondays with Michael.” If you can afford to send a gift, better still!

Make a Donation

Subscribe now

MS: Before we get to the Frog Ferry, let me ask you about your hometown, Portland. It’s been under a lot of stress in recent years with homelessness and violence, and this year it had a huge onslaught from ICE. How’s the city doing?

SB: The honest answer is: it depends. I’m downtown at least five days a week. I love walking along the waterfront, meeting people in coffee shops, and attending local events. This time of year—cherry blossom season—Portlanders turn out by the thousands for key attractions and gatherings.

At the same time, we’re still facing a 32% commercial vacancy rate and ongoing challenges with drugs and affordability. Crime is trending down, but the city is still in recovery. What gives me hope is that Portlanders deeply love their city and are actively trying to lean in and be part of the solution.

MS: Tell us about the Frog Ferry. If you are successful, what will it look like? What market will it serve?

SB: Success starts with launching one or two electric, passenger-only ferries connecting Cathedral Park in St. Johns to RiverPlace on the downtown waterfront. From there, we would scale to a fleet of seven vessels serving nine destinations—from Vancouver, Washington, to Oregon City.

Our success metrics include shifting single-occupancy vehicle commuters to ferry riders, drawing residents and visitors onto the river, and increasing foot traffic to help reactivate downtown. We see Frog Ferry as part of a broader ecosystem that supports a thriving local business community.

MS: You structured the Frog Ferry as a nonprofit. Why?

SB: We stepped in to conduct an operational feasibility study on behalf of the City of Portland in 2018, and we later received our 501(c)(3) designation because we’re doing work typically led by a public agency.

At our core, we believe affordable and accessible mobility is essential to a healthy community. A private model that serves only those who can afford it has never aligned with our vision. Our goals are to decarbonize the region, strengthen community resilience by adding an emergency response option, and increase access and activity downtown.

MS: The part of your model that caught my attention is your desire to recreate the “souvenir stock” model of the Green Bay Packers. What does that model look like, and why did you choose it?

SB: Over the past nine years, I’ve had the benefit of learning from thousands of thoughtful people who have offered ideas on how to move Frog Ferry forward—especially through budget challenges, the pandemic, and political transitions. I’ve kept detailed notes from those conversations.

The Green Bay Packers model came up, but it didn’t feel like the right fit while we were still in early research and planning phases. That changed in summer 2025, when the City of Portland granted us permission to use two public docks for a pilot. Suddenly, we were “shovel-ready.”

Last October, I revisited my notes and noticed how often that model had been suggested. I explored it further with AI, which generated a compelling community ownership framework. When I shared it with our board, our secretary mentioned a personal connection to Mark Murphy, the Packers’ CEO, and offered to make an introduction. It felt serendipitous.

Now, with Mark’s guidance, we’re launching our own Community Ownership Campaign. For $300, individuals can purchase a share of non-equity, community-based stock. It’s a tax-deductible investment in Portland’s future, with a variety of community-centered benefits outlined on our website.

MS: How many shareholders do you envision having, and how will they participate in the company going forward?

SB: We don’t know exactly how many people will join Team Frog Ferry, but our initial goal is to raise $2 million. That funding will demonstrate community support and help build confidence with elected officials and institutional funders as we pursue the remaining $20 million. Participation could include attending an annual owners meeting, joining “Owners Day” for free rides, having your name on a seat plaque, or even naming a vessel.

MS: Who can purchase the stock and where?

SB: Anyone 18 or older can purchase shares, and they can also be given as gifts. All the details are available in the section on our site describing the Community Ownership Campaign.

MS: What other capital contributions do you need to the Frog Ferry for it to succeed? And what are your plans for securing them?

SB: We need about $22 million total to launch the system, after already delivering an estimated $40 million in planning value. We’re actively pursuing multiple funding sources.

The Federal Transit Administration recently announced two passenger ferry grant programs totaling about $200 million. Locally, we’re exploring support from the Portland Clean Energy Fund’s transportation decarbonization program, and we’ve submitted an $11 million request to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

Once operational, we anticipate needing an annual subsidy of about $3 million. Given ferries’ relatively low capital, operating, and maintenance costs—and their ability to reduce roadway wear and congestion—they are one of the most affordable and scalable transit options available.

MS: Reading your resume—tennis aficionado, economic developer—I don’t see transportation system planner. What was the professional journey that got you to this place?

SB: Right out of college, I was asked to research and then serve as the founding Ride Director for Cycle Oregon, a statewide cycling event that’s now 38 years old. That experience gave me deep exposure to transportation systems as we worked closely with ODOT, Oregon State Police, and local jurisdictions to map and manage routes.

I’ve also spent time flying in small aircraft, which gave me a unique perspective on regional geography. From the air—especially at night—you can clearly see the gridlock on our roads, particularly on Portland’s 12 bridges. But you also see something else: wide-open rivers.

One day after a flight, I called a friend who had worked in river transport for years. I asked if a passenger ferry system could work here. Her answer: it should be a no-brainer.

MS: I almost forgot to ask. Why the frog?

SB: I didn’t set out to start a ferry system—it emerged from a sense of urgency and responsibility: if not us, then who?

When I was CMO at the Port of Portland, I had the privilege of working with Chinook Tribal Nation Chair Tony Johnson and artist Adam McIsaac. As a thank-you for a collaborative project, they gifted me a lithograph of “Frog,” which now hangs in my office.

When I began early ferry research, I asked permission to use Frog’s likeness. In Chinookan tradition, Frog taught people how to fish—gathering nettles and weaving them into nets. It’s a story about ingenuity and connection to the river. And of course, frogs are amphibious—perfectly suited to our project.

MS: Finally, do you personally support Oregon businesses through local purchasing or local investment? If so, how?

SB: This is very important to me. Having worked in global trade, I understand its value—but I also believe deeply in supporting local businesses. They reflect our culture and identity.

In an increasingly homogenized world, choosing local matters. It supports entrepreneurs, reduces resource strain, and strengthens community resilience. At Frog Ferry, one of our core principles is to be radically local—from hiring talent to sourcing onboard products and services.

It’s not just a strategy—it’s part of who we are, and it reflects the spirit of Portland.

MS: Thanks for talking with us, and good luck with your raise!

NEW INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Below is our list of recently posted investment opportunities across the United States. Please note that our listing of these opportunities does not constitute an endorsement. Remember that all investments carry risk. Click on the hyperlinks and read the details carefully before investing.

Use the map below to help you find an investment opportunity near you. Each issue, we’ll highlight about a half dozen active campaigns.

COMPREHENSIVE LISTINGS

Click the images below to view our comprehensive list of investment opportunities, organized by theme or region.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES BY KEY THEMES

✔️ Energy 💡

✔️ Food & Farming 🌱

✔️ Housing 🏡

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES BY REGION

✔️ Great Lakes

✔️ Mid-Atlantic

✔️ Midwest

✔️ New England

✔️ Rocky Mountains

✔️ South

✔️ Southwest

✔️ West

FUNDS OPEN TO GRASSROOTS INVESTORS

The following is our first draft of funds that invest in local businesses and are open to non-accredited investors. Please help us add to this list!

(Fund Types: BC = Short-Term Business Credit Institution; NP = Nonprofit; RE = Real Estate Investment Fund)

PARTNER EVENTS

• Making Homeownership Affordable: Bringing Fannie and Freddie Back to Mission - Virtual Event: April 16, at 1 pm ET

• Making Sense of AI within the Cooperative Movement - Virtual Event: April 17, at 10 am ET

• The Federation of Southern Cooperatives Co-op Symposium - In-Person Event (Gainesville, AL): April 17

• Accelerating the Transition 2026 - In-Person Event (San Francisco, CA): April 18 - 20 (Virtual option also available)

• Turning Culture Into Ownership - Virtual Event: April 23, at 2 pm ET

• Connecting for the Common Good - In-Person Event (Cincinnati, OH): May 4 - 6 (Virtual option also available)

More Events

JOBS BOARD

• Chicago TREND: Vice President, Advisory Services

• Equal Exchange: Marketing & Web Team Generalist

• New Majority Capital: Community Manager

• Transform Finance: Program & Operations Associate

More Jobs

BECOME A MAIN STREET CHAMPION

Whatever your interest or ambition, we invite you to “go public” to help others in your region find you, scheme with you, and start a local investment movement in your community. We aim to identify dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of Main Street Champions like you in every corner of the globe. Together, we can move our hard-earned savings from Wall Street to Main Street, putting them to work in our own communities. Fill out the intake survey below to join this growing cohort!

Become a Main Street Champion

About The Main Street Journal

The Main Street Journal aims to catalyze the movement of $50 trillion from Wall Street to Main Street, facilitating economic development and economic justice. It’s sponsored by the National Coalition for Community Capital. We welcome feedback on all aspects, from our design to our content. Please send your ideas to Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

If you would like to support our work, please use the button below. Thank you!

Make a Donation

Our Team:

• Michael Shuman – MSJ Publisher

• Paul Spinrad - Decent Tuesdays Writer & Editor

• Jen Risley - MSJ Editor

• Wendy Wasserman - Strategic Advisor

PARTNERS

Abrams+Angell | American Independent Business Alliance | Candide Group | Capital for Change | Capital Institute | Community-Vision Solutions | Cordata Capital | Council Fire | Crowdfund Better | Crowdfund Capital Advisors | Democracy Collaborative | Eleanor LeCain | Exit to Community Collective | Fair Food Network | Garlic and Roses | Impact Finance Center | ImpactPHL | Initiative for Local Capital | Institute for Local Self-Reliance | The Kassan Group | Longfellow Health Clubs | Mission Driven Finance | National Coalition for Community Capital | Natural Investments | Neighborhood Associates | Neighborhood Economics | New Majority Capital | Next Egg | Nonprofit Quarterly | Ownership America | Ownership Capital Lab | Ownership Matters | Partnership for Southern Equity | PathLight Law | Project Equity | Project for Public Spaces | Prospera Partners | Raise Green | Revalue | Rising Tide Capital | Schumacher Center for a New Economics | Shelterforce | Slow Money | SOCAP | Sun Valley Institute for Resilience | The Super Crowd Inc. | Sustainable Business Network of MA | Transform Finance | Uwharrie Bank | Village Well | Zebras Unite

We welcome any nonprofit or for-profit entity committed to local investment as a partner. If your organization is interested, please contact Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

If you believe in reparations, there would be no better starting place than returning Native American land to its original tribes. Until then, perhaps the best we can do is support the small but impressive community development financial institutions (CDFIs) serving Native Americans. One of the newest is Turtle Island Community Capital, which focuses on Native businesses and projects in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states.

This week, we’re pleased to interview the founder of Turtle Island, Alexander “Brave Journey” Sterling. With ancestral roots in the Ramapo Lenape Nation, Cuba, and the African diaspora, and a deep commitment to relational finance, Alexander brings two decades of experience in clean energy, community development, and impact investing. His work is impressive, and if you know any impact investors looking for a great new fund, please direct them to Turtle Island.

— Michael H. Shuman, Publisher

Publication of The Main Street Journal depends on your support. If you like what you’re reading, please become a paid subscriber today. You’ll enjoy special events like our monthly “Mondays with Michael.” If you can afford to send a gift, better still!

Make a Donation

Subscribe now

MS: Before we discuss your fund, Turtle Island Community Capital (TICC), I want to ask you about your nickname “Brave Journey.” Where did it originate, and how does it connect with the professional evolution that took you to TICC?

AS: Thank you, and that’s not a nickname, it’s my traditional name, which some people would say is my Indian name. It was given to me when I was very young, and it’s just been a part of who I am and how I see the world. “Brave Journey” is a name that reflects both path and responsibility. In many Indigenous traditions, names aren’t just identifiers; they’re reminders of who you’re becoming and what you’re accountable to, and hoooo boy has this one carried weight.

For me, it speaks to a willingness to move into uncertainty with intention. My career hasn’t followed a straight line in any sense, and much of it was developed through intention and courage in times of uncertainty. It’s moved through art, construction, energy, community development, and finance. At each step, I’ve had to learn, adapt, and stay grounded in the idea that the work is ultimately about people.

TICC is a continuation of that journey. It’s about building something that hasn’t existed here in the region… ever. We’re building financial systems that are aligned with community, culture, and long-term wellbeing. That requires courage, but also humility and listening.

MS: Your previous career role was running a private consulting firm in San Francisco and supporting renewable energy projects in tribal, rural, and urban communities. Tell us a little about that work. What were some of the projects that you helped get off the ground?

AS: That work really grew out of a career that’s been intentionally cross-disciplinary and what we now call multi-hyphenate, spanning tech, construction, solar, music and event production, film, hospitality, and large-scale community builds like Burning Man. I started in live production and fabrication by running sound, lighting, and stage systems, building sets, and managing crews to create functional, immersive environments under tight timelines. At the same time, I was doing construction and custom fabrication work, which grounded me in materials, logistics, and problem-solving.

I carried those skills into renewable energy and tech. In solar construction, I managed installations, permitting, and supply chains. Later, at a solar technology company, I helped build testing and reliability operations by developing systems, managing teams, and scaling processes across engineering and operations. Alongside that, I stayed deeply engaged in community-based work in organizing large-scale builds, supporting food systems, and creating shared spaces.

So when I moved into this work, I wasn’t just bringing technical expertise; I was bringing systems thinking shaped by real-world experience. That allowed me to support projects holistically, especially in tribal communities, where success depends as much on trust and adaptability as it does on technology.

MS: I just completed a study on solar energy for the City of Irvine, and came to the conclusion that the combination of rising utility rates and falling solar equipment costs is now making decentralized rooftop solar with batteries the most economical means of providing communities with electricity. Given that many tribal reservations have very limited transmission and distribution infrastructure, decentralized solar seems especially promising in Indian Country. Do you agree?

AS: I do, and I think we’re already seeing that play out in real time with the federal clawbacks from Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and Solar for All funding, and grid failures during major climate events. Decentralized solar, especially when paired with battery storage, is becoming one of the most practical and cost-effective ways to deliver energy, particularly in communities where grid infrastructure is limited, aging, or expensive to expand. Surprising no one, tribal communities are those communities.

In many tribal communities, extending traditional transmission systems can be cost-prohibitive and slow. Decentralized systems allow communities to build resilience more quickly, reduce long-term energy costs, and increase local control over how energy is produced and used. But the real opportunity goes beyond the simple access to technology. When these systems are community-owned or locally managed, they become a foundation for economic development by creating jobs, building technical capacity, and keeping more value within the community.

So yes, decentralized energy is a powerful tool, but its full potential is realized when it’s paired with ownership, workforce development, and access to capital that allows communities to lead these projects themselves.

MS: Your website says that TICC is “a Native-led community development financial institution dedicated to advanced economic sovereignty, generational wealth, and community resilience in Indigenous and historically excluded communities.” What are the projects and businesses you are funding that fall into these categories?

AS: We focus on three interconnected areas that we see as foundational to healthy and thriving communities. The first is basic needs: projects that support food and water sovereignty broadly. That includes small-scale agriculture, food distribution, and infrastructure that ensures communities have reliable access to essential resources. Plus blue-green economy work supporting living shorelines, fishing, and supply chain connections.

The second is access to community: This is an infrastructure commitment to things like energy systems and connectivity. Clean energy projects are a major part of this, especially where they can reduce costs and increase local control.

The third is what we call “reasons for living,” and it’s one that’s near and dear to my former fine art studio major heart: arts, culture, and small businesses that create vibrancy, identity, and opportunity within a community. Music, Fashion, Venues, LIFE!

Across all of these categories, we provide flexible capital by often blending grants with low-cost loans, staging them to be most supportive to the entrepreneur or community, and pairing that with technical assistance. The goal is not just to fund projects, but to ensure they succeed and can grow over time. We’re really focused on building the conditions for long-term economic sovereignty, rather than just supporting one-off investments.

MS: The geographic focus of your fund is the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states. Why did you choose this area?

AS: Every time I’m asked this question, I’m reminded of the Guardians of the Galaxy quote where Star-Lord gets asked why he wants to save all the idiots in the system, and he responds: “Because I’m one of the idiots who lives in it!”

This region is home to me, and it’s also a place where Native communities have deep historical roots that are often overlooked. My own tribe is based historically and currently in the NY-NJ-CT corner and is among the earliest denizens of Lenapehokiing, now known as New York City.

There’s a strong presence of Indigenous communities across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, but relatively limited financial infrastructure designed specifically to support them. At the same time, the region has significant economic activity and access to capital that creates a gap—and an opportunity.

We chose to focus here because we believe regional institutions matter. Being grounded in place allows us to build relationships, understand local contexts, and support projects in a more meaningful and responsive way. But it also allows us to connect communities that are often working in isolation and help build a stronger, more coordinated ecosystem.

Over time, the goal is to demonstrate a model that can be replicated in other regions, but it starts with building something that works deeply and authentically in one place.

MS: Oweesta and other CDFIs have been serving Native American needs for several years. How do you see TICC as carrying out—or differing from—the kind of work they have been doing?

AS: We see ourselves as part of a broader ecosystem and deeply respect the work that organizations like Oweesta have done to build the foundation for Native CDFIs, including us. Oweesta has been an enormous support in helping us get started, as have several non native CDFIs in our region, like Boston Impact Initiative and Nectar Community Investments.

Our approach builds on that foundation while focusing on a few key areas. One is how we structure capital and our target deployment. We intentionally blend grants, recoverable capital, and low-cost debt to meet communities where they are and reduce the burden on borrowers. We’re building directly into entrepreneurship communities instead of intermediate lending to other CDFIs. While I would love to help spawn a dozen other Native CDFI-type institutions here for each tribal community, that’s not where we are capacity-wise, and I’m grateful for the organizations that have been around to build those systems.

We also place a strong emphasis on relationship-building through programs like Native Impact Nights and Resilience Circles. We’ve found that capital moves more effectively when it’s grounded in trust and community connection, and that the methodology for building that trust is most effective when we really get to the table together.

So while we share a common mission, our role is to help expand the field by bringing new tools, regional focus, and integrated approaches to how capital supports Native communities.

MS: Your website has the numbers 38, 610,000, 7, and 96 highlighted: 38 entrepreneurs supported, $610,000 in capital raised, 7 convenings, and 96 hours of technical assistance provided. What’s your target for capital raising this coming year? What kind of capital will you provide to Native entrepreneurs, and what size will your investments be?

AS: We’re currently working toward raising 8 million dollars in catalytic capital to support our next phase of growth (our Watershed Capital Fund), with a longer-term goal of building a $30 million regional fund (the First Fires Fund) in 2027.

Our approach is to provide flexible, accessible capital that aligns with community needs. That often includes small business loans in the tens of thousands of dollars, alongside larger project financing as we scale. Since we also focus heavily on how capital is structured, we aim to keep costs low for borrowers and pair financing with technical assistance so projects are set up for long-term success by raising grant funding to cover operations and employing fee-for-service in other areas of consulting and contracting while we build towards self-sufficiency.

In many cases, for our investments, we’re blending capital by combining grants with low-cost debt to reduce risk and increase accessibility.

The goal isn’t just to deploy capital, but to build a system where capital can circulate effectively within communities and support sustained economic growth.

MS: Can grassroots investors put money into your fund, and if not, do you imagine at some point they might be able to do so?

AS: At this stage, most of our capital comes from foundations, institutions, and aligned investors. That allows us to structure the fund in a way that prioritizes mission and flexibility. That said, we believe strongly in the idea that communities should have pathways to participate in and benefit from the systems being built.

Over time, we’re interested in exploring models that allow for broader participation, whether that’s through community investment vehicles or other mechanisms that align with regulatory frameworks. It’s important to do that thoughtfully, because we want to ensure that participation is meaningful and that community members are not taking on undue risk. Which means we need to do the back-end work of structuring the buy-in to be supportive and simple, and protected from portfolio shocks.

So while we’re not there yet, it’s very much part of how we’re thinking about the future of the work. (Check back next year or point us in the direction of your self-directed IRA advisor!)

MS: Well, in my case, it’s a solo-401k, and yes, I’d be interested. Turning to your non-investment offerings, two sounded really interesting: Native Impact Nights and Resilience Circles. Tell us about these.

AS: So, our Native Impact Nights are community gatherings that bring together Native artists, entrepreneurs, and community members alongside funders and partners. (Learn more about the Native Impact Night Rhode Island on April 1.) They’re designed to create space for connection, storytelling, and relationship-building. We’ve found that when people gather in that way—around food, shared experience, and conversation—it opens the door for collaboration and investment that wouldn’t happen otherwise.

In Sitka, that really came to life as we learned more about the resilience circles model that TICC is bringing to New England. We spent time with artists, culture bearers, and local leaders who are building businesses rooted in place, whether through traditional art, food systems, or community-based enterprises. What stood out was how much innovation is already happening, and how often the barrier isn’t ideas! It’s access to the right kind of capital and support!

These Resilience Circles, in partnership with Jumpscale, take that impact night model a step further. They’re structured, peer-based spaces for practitioners to come together regularly, build trust, and move from conversation to coordinated action. They’re designed to reduce isolation, strengthen decision-making, and align indigenous entrepreneurs across sectors around shared goals by offering access to mental health, physical health, and business health services.

Together, these programs form the relational infrastructure of our work by helping surface opportunities, strengthen networks, and ensure that when capital shows up, it’s ready to move in a way that communities can actually absorb and benefit from.

MS: Finally, tell us about your own community, and how you personally invest in it?

AS: For me, investment starts with presence, but it extends across all forms of capital we carry and circulate.

My community is layered. It includes my California community, where I built much of my early career across tech, solar, and creative work. It includes my tribe in New Jersey, where cultural responsibility and lineage ground how I move. It includes my entrepreneur and philanthropic communities, where we’re actively shaping new models of capital and ownership. And it includes my queer, polyamorous family, where care, trust, and mutual support are lived daily practices.

Across each of these spaces, I’m investing different forms of capital. Financial capital, when I can move resources. Social capital, by connecting people and opportunities. Intellectual capital, through sharing knowledge and strategy. Cultural and spiritual capital, by honoring identity and relationship. Human and living capital, by supporting wellbeing and growth.

The work I do through Turtle Island Community Capital is one expression of that, but it’s all grounded in these relationships.

At the end of the day, strong communities are built through trust, and trust is built by consistently showing up and resourcing each other across every form of capital we have.

NEW INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Below is our list of recently posted investment opportunities across the United States. Please note that our listing of these opportunities does not constitute an endorsement. Remember that all investments carry risk. Click on the hyperlinks and read the details carefully before investing.

Use the map below to help you find an investment opportunity near you. Each issue, we’ll highlight about a half dozen active campaigns.

COMPREHENSIVE LISTINGS

Click the images below to view our comprehensive list of investment opportunities, organized by theme or region.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES BY KEY THEMES

✔️ Energy 💡

✔️ Food & Farming 🌱

✔️ Housing 🏡

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES BY REGION

✔️ Great Lakes

✔️ Mid-Atlantic

✔️ Midwest

✔️ New England

✔️ Rocky Mountains

✔️ South

✔️ Southwest

✔️ West

FUNDS OPEN TO GRASSROOTS INVESTORS

The following is our first draft of funds that invest in local businesses and are open to non-accredited investors. Please help us add to this list!

(Fund Types: BC = Short-Term Business Credit Institution; NP = Nonprofit; RE = Real Estate Investment Fund)

PARTNER EVENTS

• Making Sense of AI within the Cooperative Movement - Virtual Event: April 17, at 10 am ET

• Move Your Money Month: Bank Local, Invest Local - April 1 - 30

• Small Tech Roundtable: Community-Rooted Developers - Virtual Event: April 9, at 1 pm ET

• Registration Closes March 31! The Living Systems Summit: From Doughnuts to Deep Roots - In-Person Event (Okotoks, Alberta): April 13 - 15 (Virtual option also available)

• Early Bird Registration Closes March 30! Accelerating the Transition 2026 - In-Person Event (San Francisco, CA): April 18 - 20 (Virtual option also available)

• Connecting for the Common Good - In-Person Event (Cincinnati, OH): May 4 - 6 (Virtual option also available)

More Events

JOBS BOARD

• Chicago TREND: Vice President, Advisory Services

• ImpactAlpha: Edge – Data Fellow

• New Majority Capital: Community Manager

More Jobs

BECOME A MAIN STREET CHAMPION

Whatever your interest or ambition, we invite you to “go public” to help others in your region find you, scheme with you, and start a local investment movement in your community. We aim to identify dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of Main Street Champions like you in every corner of the globe. Together, we can move our hard-earned savings from Wall Street to Main Street, putting them to work in our own communities. Fill out the intake survey below to join this growing cohort!

Become a Main Street Champion

About The Main Street Journal

The Main Street Journal aims to catalyze the movement of $50 trillion from Wall Street to Main Street, facilitating economic development and economic justice. It’s sponsored by the National Coalition for Community Capital. We welcome feedback on all aspects, from our design to our content. Please send your ideas to Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

If you would like to support our work, please use the button below. Thank you!

Make a Donation

Our Team:

• Michael Shuman – MSJ Publisher

• Paul Spinrad - Decent Tuesdays Writer & Editor

• Jen Risley - MSJ Editor

• Wendy Wasserman - Strategic Advisor

PARTNERS

Abrams+Angell | American Independent Business Alliance | Candide Group | Capital for Change | Capital Institute | Community-Vision Solutions | Cordata Capital | Council Fire | Crowdfund Better | Crowdfund Capital Advisors | Democracy Collaborative | Eleanor LeCain | Exit to Community Collective | Fair Food Network | Garlic and Roses | Impact Finance Center | ImpactPHL | Initiative for Local Capital | Institute for Local Self-Reliance | The Kassan Group | Longfellow Health Clubs | Mission Driven Finance | National Coalition for Community Capital | Natural Investments | Neighborhood Associates | Neighborhood Economics | New Majority Capital | Next Egg | Nonprofit Quarterly | Ownership America | Ownership Capital Lab | Ownership Matters | Partnership for Southern Equity | PathLight Law | Project Equity | Project for Public Spaces | Prospera Partners | Raise Green | Revalue | Rising Tide Capital | Schumacher Center for a New Economics | Shelterforce | Slow Money | SOCAP | Sun Valley Institute for Resilience | The Super Crowd Inc. | Sustainable Business Network of MA | Transform Finance | Uwharrie Bank | Village Well | Zebras Unite

We welcome any nonprofit or for-profit entity committed to local investment as a partner. If your organization is interested, please contact Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

One of the foremost U.S. advocates for cities doing this is Ben McAdams, a former congressman and mayor of Salt Lake City. In a frontispiece for a recent study called “Putting Assets to Work,” he wrote that when he was mayor, he worked “to map all commercially viable publicly owned real estate in my county. We discovered a gold mine: government entities own more then $10 billion in public assets.” That’s billion with a b.

This week’s interview is with Adam Trevaskus, one of the pioneers of this concept in Australia. He and his colleagues at Impact Neighbourhood International creatively weave the mining of municipal assets with principles of local investment and placemaking. For example, working with the City of Merri-bek (in greater Melbourne), he transformed an old school into the Brunswick Design and Innovation Centre that has thus far netted 200 new jobs.

If you’re itching to do local investment more quickly, please check out our latest listing of local businesses and local investment fund opportunities.

— Michael H. Shuman, Publisher

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MS: Before we talk about Impact Neighbourhoods, I want to go back a bit. The precursor organization was called Ethical Property Australia. What was the aim of that organization, and what did it accomplish?

AT: Yes, before Impact Neighbourhoods, I was involved with Ethical Property Australia (EPA), which was inspired by the Ethical Property model that began in the UK. The basic idea was simple: many social enterprises, charities, and mission-driven organizations struggle to find affordable, flexible workspace in city centers, yet those organizations are often doing the work that makes cities better places to live.

Our focus at EPA was to create shared commercial spaces where these organizations could cluster together. The aim wasn’t simply low rent. It was to create an environment where organizations working on social change could learn from each other, collaborate more easily, and strengthen their missions.

Over time, we noticed something interesting: When organizations eventually left our spaces, it was usually because they had grown large enough to move into their own premises. In other words, tenants leaving wasn’t a failure of the model. It was often a sign that the model had worked.

Across the sites we were involved with, roughly 80 percent of organizations that moved on did so because they had outgrown the space we originally provided.

MS: So, how do you think the shared space nurtured the organizations?

AT: We saw that when you bring organizations together that have a purpose-led mission into the same building, something interesting happens. Informal collaboration begins to emerge, knowledge flows more freely, and people feel less isolated in their work. That experience planted the seed for thinking more deeply about how physical places can support social and economic change.

It also gradually shifted our thinking from a simple rental model toward what we now describe as a shared value model.

That idea was really put to the test during the COVID lockdowns. Across our three sites, we asked tenants whose funding or revenue streams were less affected by the pandemic to continue paying their rent if they could. The intention was to focus rent relief on organizations that had been severely impacted.

The response was extraordinary. Out of a community of 35 organizations, we lost only two tenants, and many of the others actively supported one another during that period. It showed that when organizations feel part of a community rather than just tenants in a building, they often step up to support each other, especially when the work they are doing for society is most needed.

MS: That’s a remarkable outcome. So, moving forward, the launch of Impact Neighborhoods involved a rethinking of your strategy for social change. What changed and why?

AT: Creating a shared workspace for social enterprises was valuable, but it was also relatively small in scale. We began to ask whether the same principles could be applied more broadly at the neighborhood level. Instead of thinking about a single building, what if we thought about entire local ecosystems where shared places of activity like businesses, community organizations, and local government all intersect? That shift in thinking led to a different strategy. Rather than focusing only on providing space for social enterprises, we began exploring how underutilized civic assets could become anchors or catalysts for local economic development.

The idea is that many cities already own assets (old schools, warehouses, civic buildings) that have the potential to support local enterprise. With the right partnership structures and innovative models, those assets can become platforms for economic and social activity rather than simply buildings that cost money to maintain.

That thinking ultimately led to the Brunswick Design and Innovation Centre (BRUDI) as a first proof of concept.

MS: So, tell us a little more about the BRUDI. What’s the vision, and what have been the impacts on the community thus far?

AT: We started with an old school site, but the vision for BRUDI was never just to refurbish it. What interested us was whether a council-controlled civic asset could become a genuine local economic anchor if the right structural conditions were in place and a delivery partner was willing to bring capital, operating capability, and long-term stewardship.

We began with a short assessment of the site to determine whether those conditions existed. Once that looked viable, we moved into a long-term activation model under lease. The City of Merri-bek retained ownership of the asset, while we invested the capital, carried the operating risk, restored the buildings, curated the tenant mix, and built the enterprise ecosystem around the site. Significantly, the council didn’t have to fund the capital upgrades, source tenants, or manage the day-to-day operation.

The results have been encouraging. According to Merri-bek’s own assessment, the site has shifted from costing the council around $50,000 a year to returning roughly $400,000 a year. Lettable space increased from 48 percent to 95 percent, jobs on site grew from fewer than 100 to more than 200, and more than $3.2 million of private capital has been invested into a public asset.

One example of how those conditions can unlock opportunity involves two local entrepreneurs who were developing a science venture. They had the technical capability and early research, but like many early-stage biotech founders, they ran into a very practical barrier: laboratory space is extremely expensive to build and operate. At the same time, the council didn’t have the capital available to develop specialized facilities on the site. Because we were able to bring private capital into the asset, we invested in building what is now the largest community lab-tech facility in Australia. That gave the venture a place to grow. The founders have gone on to raise over $50 million in investment, with the potential to generate around 350 additional local jobs as the company scales.

For the community, this means more than a refurbished building. It means a local place where enterprise, design, technology, and creative activity can cluster and grow together. BRUDI has gradually become a platform for employment, collaboration, and local economic energy. For me, the deeper lesson is that a civic asset can shift from being a maintenance liability to becoming a piece of economic infrastructure for the neighborhood. Even a learning catalyst for a whole precinct.

MS: Do you integrate local investing into your projects? If so, how?

AT: Local capital has played an important role in the BRUDI project, although it evolved in stages rather than appearing all at once. In the early phase, we funded around $3.2 million of capital works from a trust fund we manage that held about $50 million in assets. That allowed us to partially transform the buildings and demonstrate that the site could function as a viable employment and enterprise environment.

Once the first phase was operating successfully, we were able to show a sustainable business model to a local lending bank. They could see both the economic and social value emerging from the site, supported by a 15-year business case and an early operating track record. That gave them confidence to support the project with commercial finance, providing the majority of the capital required, with the balance coming from equity invested by Impact Neighbourhoods.

What was encouraging was that the bank didn’t see BRUDI as just a single project. Instead, the bank saw it as a proof of concept that could potentially be replicated with other councils and civic assets over time, which would reduce the need for the initial seed funding we provided through the trust fund.

We’re still early on that journey, but so far the project has been meeting its lending covenants, and the experience has given us confidence to begin conversations with more councils across Victoria and New South Wales about similar opportunities.

For me, the broader lesson is that when civic assets are activated well, they can begin to attract mainstream financial support alongside community energy and entrepreneurial activity.

MS: So what’s the strategy of helping other communities activate more places in their jurisdiction? And how does your strategy help improve the cost-effectiveness of these projects for the city?

AT: One of the things the BRUDI experience revealed to us is that many councils already hold assets that could play a much stronger role in their local economies than they currently do. The challenge is that activating those assets often sits outside the traditional operating model of local government.

Councils are typically good custodians of public assets, but they rarely have the mandate, capital, or operating capability to run those sites as long-term enterprise environments. As a result, many civic buildings end up being managed primarily as property assets rather than as pieces of local economic infrastructure.

What we’ve been exploring is whether a different partnership structure can help bridge that gap. In simple terms, the council retains ownership of the asset while a delivery partner brings capital, operating capability, and long-term stewardship. That allows the site to evolve into an employment and enterprise hub without requiring the city to fund capital upgrades or manage the operational complexity itself.

A key insight that influenced our thinking came from visits to innovation organizations in Montreal and Toronto. They talked about “deserts of investment” that often appear during the translation process when ideas are trying to move from research or early experimentation into viable enterprises. Often, the problem isn’t a lack of ideas or entrepreneurs; it’s that the surrounding conditions don’t yet exist to support them.

What we’ve found is that civic assets can sometimes help bridge those deserts by creating the right conditions for community enterprises to grow. When you provide affordable space, shared infrastructure, networks, and a supportive ecosystem in one place, ventures that might otherwise stall can actually move forward.

That idea of understanding and investing in the conditions first is really what led us to develop the Regenerative Neighbourhood Compass. It’s essentially a field manual designed to help communities look at a place together and ask whether the ingredients exist for it to evolve into a stronger employment and enterprise environment.

Often, the first step is simply identifying civic assets that are absorbing maintenance budgets but not contributing much to the local economy and asking whether they could function as economic platforms instead. Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes it’s not yet. But even that conversation can open up new possibilities for how places support local economic vitality.

MS: Tell us a little more about the Regenerative Neighborhood Compass. What exactly is it? How do these tools work?

AT: The Compass came out of a pretty practical frustration. Again and again, whether I was looking at shared workspaces, community development, or projects like BRUDI, I kept seeing the same pattern: good people, good intentions, and often good plans, but very little that helped different actors read a neighborhood as a living system and then act in a coordinated way. So the Compass is really my attempt to build a practical bridge between systems thinking and action.

At its core, it’s a diagnostic and navigation tool for neighborhoods. It helps people look at a place and ask two simple but important questions. First, how much vitality does this neighborhood have? In other words, how alive, adaptive, and responsive is it? Second, how much synchronicity is there? Are planning, governance, infrastructure, and community effort working together, or are they fragmented?

Those two signals matter because a neighborhood can be energetic but chaotic, or well-coordinated but stagnant. The Compass helps make that visible. From there, it becomes less about imposing a master plan and more about asking what conditions need to change, what small experiments are worth trying, and where energy could be concentrated to shift trajectory.

So I’d describe it less as a conventional planning tool and more as a field manual for learning your way forward in complex places. The book looks like a textbook on purpose, because I wanted it to feel practical and usable, but the real idea is simple: if neighborhoods are living systems, we need tools that help us read them, test things, and adapt together rather than pretend we can control them from above.

MS: Another one of your projects is the Donkey Wheel House in Melbourne. Tell us about that project.

AT: Donkey Wheel House is actually an earlier chapter in this journey, and it taught us many of the lessons that later influenced projects like BRUDI.

The building itself has deep roots in Melbourne’s history. It was originally the headquarters of the Melbourne Tramway and Omnibus Company, which helped build the foundations of the tram network that the city still relies on today. It was constructed during the gold rush era, when Melbourne was one of the wealthiest cities in the world.

By the time the founders of the Donkey Wheel Foundation became involved in 2008, the building had fallen into a fairly dilapidated state. The first phase of the project was simply restoring the heritage structure and bringing it back to life. Once that was done, the focus was on filling the building with organizations that were working on social and environmental challenges. Over time, it evolved into what was described as a “living commons for changemakers.” The idea was that if you brought together people working on different aspects of social change under one roof, they could learn from each other and collaborate in ways that wouldn’t normally happen.

That environment proved to be very productive. A number of social impact initiatives that began inside the building eventually grew into independent organizations in their own right. When COVID arrived, it forced us to rethink the future of the building.

Like many shared workspaces, we had to reconsider how physical places support collaboration and social impact in a very different environment. What has emerged since then is a kind of Renaissance strategy for the site. We’re increasingly thinking of Donkey Wheel House less as a space to work in and more as a place-based platform for social change, where programs, networks, and ideas can converge.

In many ways, Donkey Wheel House became a small-scale laboratory for understanding how place, community, and enterprise interact, which aligns closely with the ideas behind the Compass. Whether you’re looking at a building, a street, a neighborhood, or an entire city, the same basic principle applies: if you create the right conditions for collaboration and enterprise to emerge, the place itself can begin to generate new possibilities.

MS: How did you personally get involved in this work?

AT: My path into this work has come through a combination of finance, community development, and sustainability, which probably explains why I tend to look at neighborhood change through a systems lens.

Early in my career, I worked in asset finance and asset management with Lloyds Banking Group and Standard Chartered Bank. That experience gave me a grounded understanding of how capital structures work and how complex systems operate inside large institutions. It also reinforced the importance of discipline around long-term asset stewardship.

Later, I spent time working with World Vision in international community development. Part of my role involved reviewing how the organization coordinated activity between the donor side of the organization and the field teams delivering programs on the ground. That experience showed me how even mission-driven organizations can struggle if the mechanics of the system aren’t aligned with the outcomes they’re trying to achieve.

After that, I moved into the sustainability sector with a biochemical company developing environmentally focused technologies. That work received the Victorian Premier’s Award for Sustainability and Innovation, which was a great reminder that innovation only becomes meaningful when it can operate successfully in real markets and real users.

A turning point for me was a study visit to Canada and the United States, where I met organizations working on social innovation and place-based development. In Montreal and Toronto, I spent time with groups like the Maison de l’Innovation Sociale, the McConnell Foundation, MaRS Discovery District, and the Centre for Social Innovation. They were experimenting with ways to bring together capital, research institutions, entrepreneurs, and communities to tackle complex challenges.

MS: Was there a U.S. chapter in this journey?

AT: Yes. In Atlanta, I also had the opportunity to learn from organizations like Purpose Built Communities and the Reinvestment Fund, which are coordinating capital, analytics, and long-term investment to strengthen neighborhoods.

Alongside those experiences, I was also influenced by the ideas behind Asset-Based Community Development that came out of Northwestern University. The core idea that communities already possess assets that can form the foundation for development resonated strongly with what I was seeing in practice.

Looking back across those experiences, what became clear to me is that neighborhoods are one of the most powerful units of change available to us. They sit at a scale where economic activity, civic institutions, and everyday community life all intersect in the same place. When the underlying conditions of a neighborhood are healthy, those systems tend to organize themselves in productive ways. People start businesses, institutions collaborate more effectively, and communities gain the confidence to shape their own future.

MS: What community do you live in, and how do you personally invest in it?

AT: I migrated with my family to Melbourne in April 2008, and it’s where many of the ideas behind Impact Neighbourhoods have been tested in practice.

When Impact Neighbourhoods invests in a place, we’re not just advising from the sidelines. We’re usually investing capital, signing long-term agreements, and taking responsibility for the stewardship of real assets. That means a project carries our name and reputation, including mine personally. In that sense, we very much have skin in the game.

What’s been interesting is that the work we first tested in one Melbourne suburb is now being shared with councils across the city and increasingly with others across Australia. At the moment, we’re in conversations with more than forty councils about how civic assets might contribute more strongly to local economic and community life.

But the other side of that question is simply family life. My wife and I have four children and, like most families, that means a lot of time spent in schools, sports clubs, local parks, and neighbourhood events. Those everyday experiences keep you grounded in the reality that neighborhoods are not abstract systems. They’re the places where people live their lives, form friendships, and imagine their future.

NEW INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Below is our list of recently posted investment opportunities across the United States. Please note that our listing of these opportunities does not constitute an endorsement. Remember that all investments carry risk. Click on the hyperlinks and read the details carefully before investing.

Use the map below to help you find an investment opportunity near you. Each issue, we’ll highlight about a half dozen active campaigns.

COMPREHENSIVE LISTINGS

Click the images below to view our comprehensive list of investment opportunities, organized by theme or region.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES BY KEY THEMES

✔️ Energy 💡

✔️ Food & Farming 🌱

✔️ Housing 🏡

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES BY REGION

✔️ Great Lakes

✔️ Mid-Atlantic

✔️ Midwest

✔️ New England

✔️ Rocky Mountains

✔️ South

✔️ Southwest

✔️ West

FUNDS OPEN TO GRASSROOTS INVESTORS

The following is our first draft of funds that invest in local businesses and are open to non-accredited investors. Please help us add to this list!

(Fund Types: BC = Short-Term Business Credit Institution; NP = Nonprofit; RE = Real Estate Investment Fund)

PARTNER EVENTS

• Exit, Succession Planning, and Employee Ownership Options - Virtual Event: March 17, at 3 pm ET

• Why You Should Make Money with Impact Crowdfunding - Virtual Event: March 18, at 12 pm ET

• CLTs, Neighborhood Trusts, & MINTs: Approaches to Creating and Preserving Rental Housing with Lasting Affordability - Virtual Event: March 18, at 1 pm ET

• Cities Model Good Transparency on Economic Development Incentives - Virtual Event: March 18, at 2 pm ET

• Break the Silence Around Money - Virtual Event: March 17, at 3 pm ET

• Planet Local Sharing Circle - Virtual Event: March 25, at 11 am ET

• Making Sense of AI within the Cooperative Movement - Virtual Event: April 17, at 10 am ET

• Accelerating the Transition 2026 - In-Person Event (San Francisco, CA): April 18 - 20

• Connecting for the Common Good - In-Person Event (Cincinnati, OH): May 4 - 6

More Events

JOBS BOARD

• Black Farmer Fund: Impact Lending and Relationship Manager

• Center for Community Wealth: Development Director

More Jobs

BECOME A MAIN STREET CHAMPION

Whatever your interest or ambition, we invite you to “go public” to help others in your region find you, scheme with you, and start a local investment movement in your community. We aim to identify dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of Main Street Champions like you in every corner of the globe. Together, we can move our hard-earned savings from Wall Street to Main Street, putting them to work in our own communities. Fill out the intake survey below to join this growing cohort!

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About The Main Street Journal

The Main Street Journal aims to catalyze the movement of $50 trillion from Wall Street to Main Street, facilitating economic development and economic justice. It’s sponsored by the National Coalition for Community Capital. We welcome feedback on all aspects, from our design to our content. Please send your ideas to Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

If you would like to support our work, please use the button below. Thank you!

Make a Donation

Our Team:

• Michael Shuman – MSJ Publisher

• Paul Spinrad - Decent Tuesdays Writer & Editor

• Jen Risley - MSJ Editor

• Wendy Wasserman - Strategic Advisor

PARTNERS

Abrams+Angell | American Independent Business Alliance | Candide Group | Capital for Change | Capital Institute | Community-Vision Solutions | Cordata Capital | Council Fire | Crowdfund Better | Crowdfund Capital Advisors | Democracy Collaborative | Eleanor LeCain | Exit to Community Collective | Fair Food Network | Garlic and Roses | Impact Finance Center | ImpactPHL | Initiative for Local Capital | Institute for Local Self-Reliance | The Kassan Group | Longfellow Health Clubs | Mission Driven Finance | National Coalition for Community Capital | Natural Investments | Neighborhood Associates | Neighborhood Economics | New Majority Capital | Next Egg | Nonprofit Quarterly | Ownership America | Ownership Capital Lab | Ownership Matters | Partnership for Southern Equity | PathLight Law | Project Equity | Project for Public Spaces | Prospera Partners | Raise Green | Revalue | Rising Tide Capital | Schumacher Center for a New Economics | Shelterforce | Slow Money | SOCAP | Sun Valley Institute for Resilience | The Super Crowd Inc. | Sustainable Business Network of MA | Transform Finance | Uwharrie Bank | Village Well | Zebras Unite

We welcome any nonprofit or for-profit entity committed to local investment as a partner. If your organization is interested, please contact Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

Here are my thoughts:

(1) Revamp Your ED Department – Chances are very good that your economic developers are wasting tax dollars on the wrong things, like attracting manufacturers, AI data centers, or biotech giants. Corporate attraction of any type, for any reason, is a dead end, because those same dollars could generate significantly more jobs—often 10 to 100 times more per dollar—were they to focus on local businesses. Clearly communicate the following marching orders to your economic developers: If you want to chase and seduce outsiders, please quit. Your job, henceforth, is to support locally owned businesses—period. The savings from doing the wrong things will give you the resources to do the right things below.

(2) Perform a Leakage Analysis – This is a foundational piece of analysis that most communities lack. To what extent are residents and businesses unnecessarily purchasing goods and services from outside the community? Every dollar that leaves the community means lost jobs, income, and taxes. Those sectors with the highest leakage should be the top targets for local expansion. The next question, then, is how that expansion should proceed.

(3) Facilitate Leak Plugging – Starting with the sectors with the biggest leakages, work with existing local businesses to expand their capacity. If, for example, legal services are a big leak in your economy, target existing lawyers and law firms for expansion. Let them know about the local market opportunity and help them find the capital to expand. Every business in your community should try to create more of its own supply chain. Speaking of capital…

(4) Increase Local Investment – At least one full-time person on your economic development team should be promoting local investment. Through public education (not only of investors and businesses but of local investment advisors and community bankers). Through online listings of local securities offerings (just put a tab on your economic development website). Through local tax incentives (on property tax bills, for example).

(5) Create a Local Fund – Cities should create one central local investment opportunity for community members. Pick one priority—housing, renewable energy, food security, business incubation—and create a fund that allows grassroots investors in your community to participate. A growing number of fund designs are available (our back issues are filled with models), as are back-office services (legal, administrative, insurance) that allow your local fund to plug and play and get started quickly. Funds offer a way of raising capital for local problem-solving without increasing taxes or bond indebtedness.

(6) Local Procurement – With whatever tools are legally available, increase local purchasing by the city. Raise the threshold for no-bid contracts. Give bidding credits to local bidders (commensurate with their tax payments). Recruit larger anchor businesses to partner with smaller businesses to improve the quality of local bids. One easy target for local purchasing is banking services. Make sure your city banks with a local bank or credit union, and insist that they use your deposits to expand lending to local businesses.

(7) Green Everything, Everywhere – Many of your leaks will be imports of electricity, gasoline, and building materials. Localize all of them. Make your city more energy self-reliant, expand the use of EVs, and shift your building materials to locally available wood, stone, and fibers. Charge everyone per pound of garbage to encourage more recycling and household efficiency. Design your new neighborhoods (or redesign old neighborhoods) with walkability and proximity in mind.

(8) Support Entrepreneurs – How easily can a young person start a new, leak-plugging local business? Do you have courses, mentors, incubators, accelerators, co-working spaces, and finance in place to support them? The better your answers, the more likely talent will come and stay in your community. Also, knock on doors, discover, and support the expansion plans of every other business in your community. Successful economic development is not about attracting one company promising (but never delivering) a thousand jobs. It’s about a thousand existing companies expanding themselves by one-sies and two-sies.

(9) Make Every Square Inch Special – Economic development should include placemaking, the art of bringing dead spaces to life for residents and visitors. Engage neighborhoods throughout your community to discover the dreams they have, and THEN hire outside developers to realize those dreams.

(10) Set Appropriate Indicators – Finally, set measurable goals for each of the points above and publish an annual report showing progress. Is the level of economic leakage decreasing? Is local investment increasing? Is local procurement expanding? Are energy imports going down? Are business startups going up and business failures going down? Is the city increasing its attraction and retention, not of useless outside businesses, but essential talent? Indicators will hold your economic developers accountable.

As was the case for the state policy list I provided, these items are not necessarily cheap, quick, or easy. But they are cheaper, quicker, and easier than the counterproductive corporate attraction policies being done today.

The starting place for most of our readers is to compare this list with what purports to be economic development in your community right now. Note the gaps—I doubt you’ll find more than one or two of my items being taken seriously—and push for change. We at The Main Street Journal are here to support you.

We are also here to make local investment easier. So please check out our latest lists of local investment opportunities below.

— Michael H. Shuman, Publisher

Publication of The Main Street Journal depends on your support. If you like what you’re reading, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. If you can afford to send a gift, better still!

Make a Donation

Subscribe now

NEW INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Below is our list of recently posted investment opportunities across the United States. Please note that our listing of these opportunities does not constitute an endorsement. Remember that all investments carry risk. Click on the hyperlinks and read the details carefully before investing.

Use the map below to help you find an investment opportunity near you. Each issue, we’ll highlight about a half dozen active campaigns.

COMPREHENSIVE LISTINGS

Click the images below to view our comprehensive list of investment opportunities, organized by theme or region.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES BY KEY THEMES

✔️ Energy 💡

✔️ Food & Farming 🌱

✔️ Housing 🏡

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES BY REGION

✔️ Great Lakes

✔️ Mid-Atlantic

✔️ Midwest

✔️ New England

✔️ Rocky Mountains

✔️ South

✔️ Southwest

✔️ West

FUNDS OPEN TO GRASSROOTS INVESTORS

The following is our first draft of funds that invest in local businesses and are open to non-accredited investors. Please help us add to this list!

(Fund Types: BC = Short-Term Business Credit Institution; NP = Nonprofit; RE = Real Estate Investment Fund)

PARTNER EVENTS

• Choose Indie Sustainable Month - National Campaign - Begins March 1

• When Algorithms Set the Price: How Dominant Corporations Inflate Costs and Undermine Competition - Virtual Event: March 3, at 1 pm ET

• Unnamed: A Conversation at the Edge of Sense - In-Person Event (Great Barrington, MA): March 7

• Rethinking Succession: Employee Ownership for Licensed Professionals - Virtual Event: March 10, at 1 pm ET

• How Ownership Actually Works in a Worker Co-op: A Hands-On Introduction to Ownership Design - Virtual Event: March 11, at 12 pm ET

• Purchasing with Purpose: Putting People and Planet First - Virtual Event: March 12, at 1 pm ET

• The Living Systems Summit: From Doughnuts to Deep Roots - In-Person Event (Okotoks, Alberta): April 13 - 15

More Events

JOBS BOARD

• Black Farmer Fund: Impact Lending and Relationship Manager

• Democracy at Work Institute: Worker Ownership Cities Program Manager

More Jobs

BECOME A MAIN STREET CHAMPION

Whatever your interest or ambition, we invite you to “go public” to help others in your region find you, scheme with you, and start a local investment movement in your community. We aim to identify dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of Main Street Champions like you in every corner of the globe. Together, we can move our hard-earned savings from Wall Street to Main Street, putting them to work in our own communities. Fill out the intake survey below to join this growing cohort!

Become a Main Street Champion

About The Main Street Journal

The Main Street Journal aims to catalyze the movement of $50 trillion from Wall Street to Main Street, facilitating economic development and economic justice. It’s sponsored by the National Coalition for Community Capital. We welcome feedback on all aspects, from our design to our content. Please send your ideas to Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

If you would like to support our work, please use the button below. Thank you!

Make a Donation

Our Team:

• Michael Shuman – MSJ Publisher

• Paul Spinrad - Decent Tuesdays Writer & Editor

• Jen Risley - MSJ Editor

• Wendy Wasserman - Strategic Advisor

PARTNERS

Abrams+Angell | American Independent Business Alliance | Candide Group | Capital for Change | Capital Institute | Community-Vision Solutions | Cordata Capital | Council Fire | Crowdfund Better | Crowdfund Capital Advisors | Democracy Collaborative | Eleanor LeCain | Exit to Community Collective | Fair Food Network | Garlic and Roses | Impact Finance Center | ImpactPHL | Initiative for Local Capital | Institute for Local Self-Reliance | The Kassan Group | Longfellow Health Clubs | Mission Driven Finance | National Coalition for Community Capital | Natural Investments | Neighborhood Associates | Neighborhood Economics | New Majority Capital | Next Egg | Nonprofit Quarterly | Ownership America | Ownership Capital Lab | Ownership Matters | Partnership for Southern Equity | PathLight Law | Project Equity | Project for Public Spaces | Prospera Partners | Raise Green | Revalue | Rising Tide Capital | Schumacher Center for a New Economics | Shelterforce | Slow Money | SOCAP | Sun Valley Institute for Resilience | The Super Crowd Inc. | Sustainable Business Network of MA | Transform Finance | Uwharrie Bank | Village Well | Zebras Unite

We welcome any nonprofit or for-profit entity committed to local investment as a partner. If your organization is interested, please contact Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

President Trump is now talking about federalizing elections, an unconstitutional move in the absence of an emergency. But an emergency is exactly what he is trying to foment. The military invasion of big cities has now included Los Angeles, Portland, Washington, Chicago, and Minneapolis. The cruelty and violence inflicted on these cities seem designed to trigger enough resistance for the President to use the Insurrection Act, send troops across the country, and monkey with the upcoming midterm elections—or cancel them entirely.

The evidence of Trump’s desperation to thwart the opposition party from regaining the House is obvious. The push for Congress to pass the SAVE Act, which, according to the Brennan Center, will prevent millions of Americans from voting. The confiscation of voting machines in Georgia to try—for the umpteenth time—to prove voter fraud in the 2020 elections. The extreme gerrymander in Texas has had a domino effect across the country, disenfranchising millions. (By the way, what could be more hostile to localism than voting bills that remove communities, whether liberal or conservative, from having national representation?)

We need a Plan B for protecting democracy. The Democrats almost mustered enough votes in 2021 to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would have helped reduce the influence of money in politics, repeal voter suppression laws, and prevent extreme gerrymanders. To try to pass these reforms again will require turnover not only in Congress but also in the Senate and the White House.

Enter David Plouffe, one of the strategists who helped engineer President Obama’s ascension to power in 2008. In the January 15 edition of The New York Times, he wrote: “Right now, Democrats have no credible path to sustained control of the Senate and the White House.” His principal argument concerned population shifts: “After the adjustments to the Electoral College map that look likely to come with the next census, the Democratic presidential nominee could win all the states won by Kamala Harris plus the blue wall of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and still fall short of the 270 electoral votes needed to win.”

Plouffe is wrong. There is a credible path.

Plouffe and other pundits have overlooked a simple strategy that would be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick. If about half a million Americans strategically relocated, they could radically remake the electoral map. Let’s call this potential movement Democracy Homesteading.

Consider that in four states, the margin of victory of Republicans over Democrats in the 2024 election was under 150,000: 134,000 in North Dakota, 125,000 in South Dakota, 123,000 in Wyoming, and 120,000 in Montana. The strategic in-migration of half a million Democracy Homesteaders would be enough to swing these states back to the center. True, they wouldn’t make much of a difference to the electoral college count, but they could add eight blue Senators and maybe five Representatives (possibly more through redistricting).

The proposal here requires fewer than two of every thousand Americans to sign up. And for context, participation in the most recent No Kings rallies was ten times greater.

Most of us, of course, don’t like to move—and I’m one of them. I wake up every morning in Palm Springs, go outside to collect my newspapers, and am in awe of desert birds, deep blue sky, and gorgeous San Jacinto Mountains around me. My life, moreover, is all about promoting the power of place. But if I needed to move to be closer to my kids, for example—and every year about seven million Americans move to another state—perhaps I should do so with thwarting fascism in mind.

Personally, I think people like me—recent or near-retirees living in dark blue states like California and New York—should lead the way. The work my wife and I do is largely home-based and can be done anywhere in the country. And the four states I mention offer generous tax systems, beautiful landscapes, and a low cost of living (except, recently, certain parts of Montana).

If people see the choice starkly—stay put and lose your democracy, or move and save it—I suspect other demographic groups might be inspired to join the Homesteaders. Recent college graduates might make this calculus when they seek to find jobs and settle. People dissatisfied with the downsides of urban life—crime, noise, crowding, high taxes—might move as well.

Democracy Homesteaders don’t have to move permanently. Just long enough to shake up the system, and pass serious voting rights legislation that demands campaign spending disclosures, kills gerrymanders, and ends voter suppression. And long enough to give Washington, DC, statehood and add two more senators to the pro-democracy coalition.

If the Democratic Party is serious about winning, it might even offer Democracy Homesteaders a financial incentive to move. In the last election, the Democrats ultimately spent $1.1 billion on the lackluster campaign of Kamala Harris. How about reserving 10% of future hauls to provide a $1,000 bonus to the first 100,000 Homesteaders? Smart party elders might also use the Homesteaders to rebuild the party apparatus in rural places long written off.

If this seems unrealistic, consider the alternatives: Most of the other ideas for radically changing the political landscape, like rebranding the Democratic Party, registering new voters, rebuilding party trust in red states, or just changing millions of minds, will take a generation to succeed. Democracy Homesteaders, if well-organized, could achieve their mission in just a year or two. Again, the proposal here is to convince a tiny fraction of those who will move to other states anyway to do so with a political purpose.

This proposal connects deeply with American history. Europeans sailed to the colonies to secure religious freedom. The first homesteaders moved west to remake their lives as farmers. Mormons moved across the country to find freedom in Utah. Southern blacks moved north to escape Jim Crow. Rust belt workers have been moving west and south in search of jobs for two generations.

The political system today, unfortunately, gives smaller states an outsized influence. So if we care about democracy, we just need to play by these unfair rules more effectively and vote with our feet.

Anyone willing to sign on?

For wherever you live—or choose to move to—we also have in this issue our latest listings of local investment opportunities in companies and funds. Look them over and see if you might move 1% of your wealth into your community this year.

— Michael H. Shuman, Publisher

Publication of The Main Street Journal depends on your support. If you like what you’re reading, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. If you can afford to send a gift, better still! All supporters are entitled to attend our monthly “Mondays with Michael” event as well as periodic consultations.

Make a Donation

Subscribe now

NEW INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Below is our list of recently posted investment opportunities across the United States. Please note that our listing of these opportunities does not constitute an endorsement. Remember that all investments carry risk. Click on the hyperlinks and read the details carefully before investing.

Use the map below to help you find an investment opportunity near you. Each issue, we’ll highlight about a half dozen active campaigns.

COMPREHENSIVE LISTINGS

Click the images below to view our comprehensive list of investment opportunities, organized by theme or region.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

ENERGY INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

FOOD INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

HOUSING OPPORTUNITIES

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES BY REGION

✔️ Great Lakes

✔️ Mid-Atlantic

✔️ Midwest

✔️ New England

✔️ Rocky Mountains

✔️ South

✔️ Southwest

✔️ West

FUNDS OPEN TO GRASSROOTS INVESTORS

The following is our first draft of funds that invest in local businesses and are open to non-accredited investors. Please help us add to this list!

(Fund Types: BC = Short-Term Business Credit Institution; NP = Nonprofit; RE = Real Estate Investment Fund)

PARTNER EVENTS

• Impact Investing Info Session - Virtual Event: February 12, at 6 pm ET

• How to Help Your Local Government Break Up with Amazon, Save Money, and Support Local Business - Virtual Event: February 13, at 12 pm ET

• How the Financial Sector is Rigged Against You and How to Fix It - Virtual Event: February 19, at 1 pm ET

• Meet the Funds - Virtual Event: February 19, at 2 pm ET

• Innovations in Capital: RLFs Leading the Way - Virtual Event: February 19, at 2 pm ET

• Science and Practice for Just and Sustainable Communities - Virtual Course: Begins February 23

• Rupture vs Solidarity Economics: La Siembra and Equal Exchange Integrate -Virtual Event: February 25, at 12 pm ET

• Building Prosperity: Employee Ownership for Chicago’s Industrial Sector and Communities - In-Person Event (Chicago, IL): February 26

More Events

JOBS BOARD

• Black Farmer Fund: Impact Lending and Relationship Manager

• Democracy at Work Institute: Worker Ownership Cities Program Manager

• Doughnut Economics Action Lab: Business & Enterprise Lead

• The Agroecology Fund: Agroecology Investment Consultant

More Jobs

BECOME A MAIN STREET CHAMPION

Whatever your interest or ambition, we invite you to “go public” to help others in your region find you, scheme with you, and start a local investment movement in your community. We aim to identify dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of Main Street Champions like you in every corner of the globe. Together, we can move our hard-earned savings from Wall Street to Main Street, putting them to work in our own communities. Fill out the intake survey below to join this growing cohort!

Become a Main Street Champion

About The Main Street Journal

The Main Street Journal aims to catalyze the movement of $50 trillion from Wall Street to Main Street, facilitating economic development and economic justice. The National Coalition sponsors it for Community Capital. We welcome feedback on all aspects, from our design to our content. Please send your ideas to Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

If you would like to support our work, please use the button below. Thank you!

Make a Donation

Our Team:

• Michael Shuman – MSJ Publisher

• Paul Spinrad - Decent Tuesdays Writer & Editor

• Jen Risley - MSJ Editor

• Wendy Wasserman - Strategic Advisor

PARTNERS

Abrams+Angell | American Independent Business Alliance | Candide Group | Capital for Change | Capital Institute | Community-Vision Solutions | Cordata Capital | Council Fire | Crowdfund Better | Crowdfund Capital Advisors | Democracy Collaborative | Eleanor LeCain | Exit to Community Collective | Fair Food Network | Garlic and Roses | Impact Finance Center | ImpactPHL | Initiative for Local Capital | Institute for Local Self-Reliance | The Kassan Group | Longfellow Health Clubs | Mission Driven Finance | National Coalition for Community Capital | Natural Investments | Neighborhood Associates | Neighborhood Economics | New Majority Capital | Next Egg | Nonprofit Quarterly | Ownership America | Ownership Capital Lab | Ownership Matters | Partnership for Southern Equity | PathLight Law | Project Equity | Project for Public Spaces | Prospera Partners | Raise Green | Revalue | Rising Tide Capital | Schumacher Center for a New Economics | Shelterforce | Slow Money | SOCAP | Sun Valley Institute for Resilience | The Super Crowd Inc. | Sustainable Business Network of MA | Transform Finance | Uwharrie Bank | Village Well | Zebras Unite

We welcome any nonprofit or for-profit entity committed to local investment as a partner. If your organization is interested, please contact Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

As Merrian Fuller and I wrote in “Profits for Justice” for the Nation in 2005, nonprofits are actually the worst vehicles for social change. They are generally poorly managed, treat their employees like indentured servants, and are legally limited in their ability to lobby and participate in electoral politics. The better path, we argued, was to create a new generation of local businesses that delivered the goods and services communities most needed. Worker co-ops, renewable energy companies, co-housing projects, health clinics, you name it.

It was that thinking that led me, ten years ago, to start teaching at Bard’s Green MBA Program, where I now teach classes in economics, economic development, community investment funds, and “sustaining mission.” And what I can report is that the several hundred students I taught have created, run, or improved an amazing assortment of mission-oriented enterprises. Unlike most business schools that relegate sustainability to one day in a 15-week course, every hour of every course—from economics to marketing to finance—teaches how business can change the world.

This week’s interview is with the program’s co-founder and Dean, Eban Goodstein. If you know anyone who is thinking about grad school and wants to support local economies, please share this interview with them. We’re always looking for the next generation of great business leaders.

Also in this issue, you will find our latest listings of local investment opportunities. Please share those as well!

— Michael H. Shuman, Publisher

Publication of The Main Street Journal depends on your support. If you like what you’re reading, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. If you can afford to send a gift, better still!

Make a Donation

Subscribe now

MS: When you and Hunter Lovins set up Bard’s MBA in Sustainability Program, what was your vision? Why did the United States need another business school?

EG: A lot of people think about driving social change through policy or education. But no matter how many rules we change through policy, or minds we change through education, business ultimately has the power to change the game. This means radically reinventing how we get food on the table and keep the lights on by designing out waste, pollution, and the exploitation of nature and people. Almost all business schools today are trapped in a profit-first paradigm. Bard’s MBA supports students in building businesses (and nonprofits) that are in business to solve today’s profound social and environmental challenges. You have to make money, of course—“no margin, no mission”—but we teach our graduates how to put mission and sustainability first, with confidence that financial success will follow.

MS: So now, in the program’s 14th year, how is it going? Is the need as great now as it was?

EG: Definitely now more than ever. Fundamentally, there are eight billion of us on the planet, soon to be nine and then ten. Half of those people are barely getting by, living on less than ten dollars a day. And everyone is aspiring for more and a better quality of life. At the same time, the planet continues to heat up, our oceans and our bodies are filling up with plastic, and we are losing major ecosystems at an accelerating rate. At the heart of these problems are businesses—and business schools—still centered around profit-first, linear systems: “take, make, waste.”

We are on the cusp of a circular economy revolution, grounded in ecological design, where all waste from one production process is food for another. It’s been an incredible privilege to work with faculty like you to design this new kind of business school that teaches students how to lead that revolution.

MS: How many students have gone through the program? And what kinds of careers have they gone into?

EG: We have around 650 alumni from our three sustainability grad programs. We were recently recognized as the MBA ranked #1 for Impact in the World. The ranking outfit looked at 170 MBA programs worldwide, and we were #1 by far in the percentage of our alumni working on business sustainability teams, or for companies well known for a focus on sustainability.

Career success is at the core of our program, grounded in our “Individualized Career Planning,” in which students meet regularly with our career advisor, Ayana Pilgrim, to map out their two or three-year career journey with us.

Our grads are working in finance, food systems, energy, fashion, the built environment, affordable housing, supply chain, and nature-based solutions. And as entrepreneurs, consultants, in conventional business roles in mission-oriented local businesses and nonprofits, and on sustainability teams. You can see where all of our graduates are working—and get a sense of what a sustainable business career looks like in our online alumni profile book.

The sustainability job market grew at a ferocious pace from around 2012 to 2024. Now, with the economy reeling from chaotic government policies plus AI, hiring has slowed. But work on climate, energy, food systems, justice, toxics, and biodiversity—all this continues. Especially in this environment, the Bard MBA—with a strong alumni and professional network—is among the best graduate programs in the world for launching or retooling a mission-driven career.

MS: Tell us a little about the curriculum. In what ways is it similar to a traditional MBA program, and in what ways is it different?

EG: We teach a lot of conventionally sounding MBA courses: marketing, strategy, finance, economics, operations, supply chains. But in every course, we focus on how to use those business skills to build or transform companies into a mission-centered orientation.

We have three verticals. The first is Sustainability Vision: how to see profitable opportunities where others see social and environmental costs. The second is Leadership: once you have the vision, how do you get your people aligned? This means personal leadership, leading teams, designing organizational systems, and—as in your capstone course “Sustaining Mission”—how do you keep a mission-oriented approach when competing against profit-first companies? The third vertical is Business Execution, covering the standard MBA toolkit.

In addition, we have a curricular commitment to ensure that all of our students are effective leaders for what we call JOI—Justice in Organizations and Impacts—with a particular focus on ensuring racial equity in organizations and in business impacts.

Finally, the curriculum is highly experiential. We are the only MBA in the world to offer a year-long course in sustainability consulting where students work in teams for corporations, startup and nonprofits; students also participate in two different semester-long business model projects culminating in pitch competitions; in addition, our students conduct B-corp assessments as part of their coursework; and finally in our year-long capstone, students do more hands on work as they build out the experience needed for a resume bridge to their desired career outcome.

MS: Plus, I should mention that we recently created a student-run consultancy, actually a worker-owned co-op, called the Bard Innovation Group or BIG. Let’s shift to the structure of the program, which is an interesting mix of residential and online learning. How exactly does that work?

EG: Classes meet in person one weekend each month in Dumbo, Brooklyn, for four ten-hour days, plus online, synchronous classes on Tuesday and Thursday nights. So I think of the program as twenty 4-day retreats spread out over two years, or thirty 3-day retreats spread out over three years, and tied together online. This kind of intensive retreat-based learning is really the best approach for a skills-based curriculum. We are big believers in the power of in-person learning, and overall, the program is ⅔ in person and ⅓ online.

Our students are all working professionals. The three-year program is for people working full-time, and the two-year intensive is for those working half-time. Students attend from the NYC area and from all over the US—LA, Houston, Denver, Boston— flying or driving in monthly for the weekend sessions.

MS: Bard College is based in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, about a two-hour trip up the Hudson River from New York City. Why did you base the program in Brooklyn?

EG: New York is the US center of sustainable finance and consulting, home to a vibrant startup community, and also the location for Climate Week. This creates a very deep talent pool for our faculty, guest speakers, and internship and conference opportunities. NYC is also easy to get to for students travelling in for the weekend intensives. Plus—great food and bars! We do have one weekend each year in September on the main Bard campus, with accommodations and food included as part of tuition.

MS: How would you describe the profile of the typical student in the program in terms of age, gender, racial diversity, and background?

EG: “I never thought I’d get an MBA” is the common refrain. We have very few who were undergraduate business majors. The students all share a desire to build a meaningful career in for-profit or nonprofit organizations, helping to create a better world. Our students include artists, bankers, biologists, actors, engineers, writers, and entrepreneurs. More than 70% of the students are women, which is very unusual for an MBA program, which is typically 60% male. About 40% of our students identify as non-white, and about a third are first-generation college attendees. Most students are 26-34, with a couple of folks right out of undergraduate, and a few in their 40s and 50s.

MS: The cover of a 2022 issue of The Economist was titled “ESG: Three Letters that Won’t Save the Planet.” It discussed the growing critiques from both conservatives and progressives about how to nudge businesses to perform with higher environmental, social, and governance standards. Where does the Bard program stand in this battle, especially given the deep hostility of the current administration to these ideas?

EG: Michael, let’s imagine a future 50 years from now where we get a lot of things right. In particular, businesses have figured out how to design out both pollution and exploitation of workers, communities, and suppliers, and a just, circular economy is really beginning to emerge. On climate, businesses have largely transitioned to solar plus storage for energy and transportation, and CO2 levels have stabilized. This shift will take good state and local policy. It will take better education. But ultimately, businesses have to figure out how to deliver all this innovation in a financially successful way. Some of our students are doing this work now in large corporations—Walmart, Target, McDonald’s. Some of them are doing it in worker-owned cooperatives and other local businesses, some in small and large nonprofits.

ESG value creation was the Wall Street term for sustainable business. It’s the idea that companies pursuing social and environmental benefits could outperform companies focused on short-term profits. For the last twenty-five years, there was a lot of hype—but also a lot of genuine experimentation—on business strategies to solve pressing social and environmental challenges, and transitioning to circularity. From a base of roughly zero in say 1999, at an intellectual level, we have made huge progress in advancing these ideas within the C-suites of big corporations—even replacing profit-first capitalism with stakeholder capitalism as a declared purpose of business at the Business Roundtable.

This has triggered a ferocious, politically led backlash, with many companies abandoning their stated commitments and most American business schools retreating into their comfort zone of profit-first business education. Who wins this battle of ideas? Time will tell, but it is important to recognize we are just getting started. In this particularly dark moment, Bard continues to champion and prove out the idea that “business for good” is ultimately, “good business.”

MS: If readers of The Main Street Journal know of prospective students who might be interested, how can they get more information? And are scholarships available for those who cannot afford the tuition?

EG: Here is a video, and our website. We are also having an online information session on February 10, at 7 pm, and you can register here. Scholarships and financial aid are available, including need-based aid, as well as dedicated scholarships for first-generation college graduates, for people who seek to pursue careers driving social equity, and for higher education sustainability professionals. More details on tuition and financial aid are here.

MS: A growing number of your professors—myself included—teach students about the virtues of local investing and how to do it. So how do you invest locally where you live?

EG: I bank and borrow through a local credit union. I don’t yet do any direct local investment, but I work with a local sustainable investment firm to manage my retirement savings.

NEW INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Below is our list of recently posted investment opportunities across the United States. Please note that our listing of these opportunities does not constitute an endorsement. Remember that all investments carry risk. Click on the hyperlinks and read the details carefully before investing.

Use the map below to help you find an investment opportunity near you. Each issue, we’ll highlight about a half dozen active campaigns.

COMPREHENSIVE LISTINGS

Click the images below to view our comprehensive list of investment opportunities, organized by theme or region.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

ENERGY INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

FOOD INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

HOUSING OPPORTUNITIES

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES BY REGION

✔️ Great Lakes

✔️ Mid-Atlantic

✔️ Midwest

✔️ New England

✔️ Rocky Mountains

✔️ South

✔️ Southwest

✔️ West

FUNDS OPEN TO GRASSROOTS INVESTORS

The following is our first draft of funds that invest in local businesses and are open to non-accredited investors. Please help us add to this list!

(Fund Types: BC = Short-Term Business Credit Institution; NP = Nonprofit; RE = Real Estate Investment Fund)

PARTNER EVENTS

• Community-Centred Tourism: Principles and Practices - Virtual Event: January 30, at 1 pm ET

• Choose Black-Owned Month - National Campaign - Begins February 1

• Investment for a Regenerative Economy Course - Virtual Event: Begins February 2

• 2026 Employee Ownership Roundtable in Perth - Virtual Event: February 3, at 7:30 pm ET

• Owners Session: Passing the Torch Without Losing the Mission - Virtual Event: February 5, at 2 pm ET

• Black Farmer Fund: Investing in Black-Owned Food and Farm Businesses - Virtual Event: February 12, at 1 pm ET

• Impact Investing Info Session - Virtual Event: February 12, at 6 pm ET

• Meet the Funds - Virtual Event: February 19, at 2 pm ET

• Science and Practice for Just and Sustainable Communities - Virtual Course: Begins February 23

• Building Prosperity: Employee Ownership for Chicago’s Industrial Sector and Communities - In-Person Event (Chicago, IL): February 26

More Events

JOBS BOARD

• American Sustainable Business Network: Finance Director

• Equal Exchange: Systems Operations Manager

• Project Equity: Senior Manager Business Engagement

• The Agroecology Fund: Agroecology Investment Consultant

• The Industrial Commons: Business Services Specialist

More Jobs

BECOME A MAIN STREET CHAMPION

Whatever your interest or ambition, we invite you to “go public” to help others in your region find you, scheme with you, and start a local investment movement in your community. We aim to identify dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of Main Street Champions like you in every corner of the globe. Together, we can move our hard-earned savings from Wall Street to Main Street, putting them to work in our own communities. Fill out the intake survey below to join this growing cohort!

Become a Main Street Champion

About The Main Street Journal

The Main Street Journal aims to catalyze the movement of $50 trillion from Wall Street to Main Street, facilitating economic development and economic justice. It’s sponsored by the National Coalition for Community Capital. We welcome feedback on all aspects, from our design to our content. Please send your ideas to Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

If you would like to support our work, please use the button below. Thank you!

Make a Donation

Our Team:

• Michael Shuman – MSJ Publisher

• Paul Spinrad - Decent Tuesdays Writer & Editor

• Jen Risley - MSJ Editor

• Wendy Wasserman - Strategic Advisor

PARTNERS

Abrams+Angell | American Independent Business Alliance | Candide Group | Capital for Change | Capital Institute | Community-Vision Solutions | Cordata Capital | Council Fire | Crowdfund Better | Crowdfund Capital Advisors | Democracy Collaborative | Eleanor LeCain | Exit to Community Collective | Fair Food Network | Garlic and Roses | Impact Finance Center | ImpactPHL | Initiative for Local Capital | Institute for Local Self-Reliance | The Kassan Group | Longfellow Health Clubs | Mission Driven Finance | National Coalition for Community Capital | Natural Investments | Neighborhood Associates | Neighborhood Economics | New Majority Capital | Next Egg | Nonprofit Quarterly | Ownership America | Ownership Capital Lab | Ownership Matters | Partnership for Southern Equity | PathLight Law | Project Equity | Project for Public Spaces | Prospera Partners | Raise Green | Revalue | Rising Tide Capital | Schumacher Center for a New Economics | Shelterforce | Slow Money | SOCAP | Sun Valley Institute for Resilience | The Super Crowd Inc. | Sustainable Business Network of MA | Transform Finance | Uwharrie Bank | Village Well | Zebras Unite

We welcome any nonprofit or for-profit entity committed to local investment as a partner. If your organization is interested, please contact Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

Our interview this week is with Susan Witt, who cofounded the Schumacher Center for a New Economics in 1980 with Bob Swann. No one has done more in the United States to keep the vision of Schumacher alive than Susan. The Center pioneered Community Supported Agriculture (CSAs), Community Land Trusts, local currencies, specialty loan programs, and much more. If you look at the Schumacher lectures over the years, you will see a “who’s who” of the greatest thinkers in the world on decentralization. Now, Susan is creating a school that will help spread these ideas across the country. Don’t be surprised if you, your children, and your grandchildren attend.

Also in this issue are our periodic listings of local businesses and funds you can invest in. If you’re not investing locally yet, give it a try!

— Michael Shuman, Publisher

Publication of The Main Street Journal depends on your support. If you like what you’re reading, please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. If you can afford to send a gift, better still!

Make a Donation

Subscribe now

MS: Susan, thank you so much for joining us today. The Schumacher Center was founded in 1980. What was the founding vision?

SW: Fritz Schumacher published Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered in 1973. Among other things, the book argued that the most logical approach to economic development was to produce locally for local consumption. The goal of Bob Swann and other founding directors was to amplify the message of the book both in theory and practice.

MS: Over the 45 years you’ve operated, what would you say have been your greatest accomplishments?

SW: In 1994, Schumacher’s family donated his personal books and papers to the Schumacher Center. Since then, the collection has grown to include the libraries of some of the most respected decentralist thinkers from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The works are catalogued and maintained in our beautiful office and research library, where they can be accessed by a new generation of activists.

Along the way, we convened the Annual E.F. Schumacher Lectures, providing a forum for new voices working to build thriving local economies. Each lecture is transcribed, edited, and published in our lecture pamphlet series.

Our website is a treasure trove of decentralist history and stories from local economies.

MS: You’re one of the few people I know who has been in the “local economy movement” longer than I have. How do you think we’re doing? Where are we winning? And what needs to change?

SW: The local food movement was a wonderful impetus to the local economy movement, driven by consumers’ demand for fresh food, not jet-lagged. The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement started in 1986 at Indian Line Farm, just down the road from the Schumacher Center. CSAs, in which consumers share the risk with local farmers, are now well known and broadly established.

What is needed is a citizen-led Community Supported Industry movement to complement CSAs. Community Supported Furniture using local wood. Community Supported Toys—safe, nontoxic, child-oriented. Community Supported Woolens. Community Supported Pottery. At a regional industrial scale. Larger than artisanal. Citizens working together to guarantee a level of production to justify the purchase of equipment and the hiring of workers.

It is not policy that will grow the local economy. It is consumers and producers working together out of shared interest. Random associations. Unpredictable. A spirit of inventiveness and risk-taking. Think of Jane Jacobs and her sidewalk ballet. An insurance agency that plans a new office and is willing to have all the office furniture sourced locally. Big enough to be bankable. Small enough to be beautiful.

MS: You often say that you’d like the local economy movement to focus more on “land.” What do you mean by that?

SW: All production requires access to land and natural materials. Land is nature given. It is finite. No new wealth is generated when transferring land—only speculative wealth. When businesses have to service debt on the land in addition to the costs of production, it often makes the resultant costs of goods unaffordable in the local economy.

Following the leadership of Bob Swann, we advocate holding land in Community Land Trusts (CLTs) to lease out in 99-year leases. The leases provide for private equity in the buildings and other improvements on the land, but not in the land itself.

We have come to realize that all the money in foundations and private philanthropy combined cannot pay for CLT purchases of land in quantities adequate to the needs of local economies. Consequently, we have initiated a movement for gifting working lands (suitable for workforce housing, office, retail, and light manufacturing) into CLTs. Our online directory of CLTs identifies groups ready to accept donations. Or start one in your own region!

MS: Rumor has it that you’re starting an adult education center. What would it look like? And when do you think it might open?

SW: Early in the history of the Schumacher Center, we convened weeklong seminars titled “Tools for Building Sustainable Local Economies.” The course material described the model programs we pioneered in the Berkshires: the Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires, SHARE loan collateralization program, BerkShares local currency, Community Builders, Indian Line Farm CSA, as well as applications in other regions.

Those were powerful gatherings. But always the most lasting was when more than one person attended from the same region. They spent the time imagining together how these tools could be applied in their own communities. Not merely a personal acquisition of skills, but a step toward a community-wide training.

Online learning, for a while, took the place of in-person training. Now in the legacy phase of the Schumacher Center’s work, reflecting on what is critical to make lasting change, the board of directors is newly committed to in-person training. The objective is to expand the Schumacher Center’s campus in the Berkshires to accommodate a year-round “academy” for regional economies. Certificate courses rather than formally accredited. Both short and multiyear courses. Where 10 to 20 people from one region can explore strategies for building their economies.

We also expect to partner with aligned groups who can offer their own courses.

We’ve learned over the years not to burden our ongoing programs with debt. We built out the research Library only as funds were available. So we are in the midst of a fundraising campaign with an exceptional property in our sights. We will keep you informed of progress and, of course, will want you on the faculty!

MS: That’s very kind—and of course you can count me in. Let’s shift to local money. In 2006, you embarked on a local currency effort called BerkShares that the New York Times called “a great economic experiment.” How has the experiment fared? What percentage of the local economy, would you estimate, does its transactions in Berkshares?

SW: When Jane Jacobs delivered her extraordinary 1983 E. F. Schumacher Lecture “The Economy of Regions,” she argued that regional economies required their own independent currency to regulate the flow of money appropriate to the unique regional capacities for production and consumption. The depressed Rustbelt of the Midwest would require a lower interest rate to free investment capital, whereas the heated-up Silicon Valley would do well with higher rates of interest to slow investment.

At the Schumacher Center, we had worked with local businesses to issue their own self-financing scrip—Deli Dollars, Monterey General Store Notes, Berkshire Farm Preserve Notes. But it was not until 2006 that we were funded to issue BerkShares. Jane Jacobs died that same year, ahead of seeing the printed currency.

We worked with local banks, which provided the storefronts for local exchange. A division of Crane Paper printed the currency under close security. The handsome design features local heroes and the paintings of local artists.

125,000 BerkShares remain in active circulation, mostly in the Southern Berkshires. Over 300 businesses formally accept payment in BerkShares, while more do so informally and on occasion.

With the rise of digital transactions, the use of paper currency has dwindled. We are exploring an open ledger system to issue a digital BerkShare, while still retaining a close tie with our local banks.

MS: Back in the 1930s, during the Depression, a number of cities and towns used local currencies to revive their economies. Would it be valuable if municipal governments deployed local currencies today? If so, what would they look like? And why haven’t more done so already?

SW: While individuals and organizations are permitted to issue currency by Constitutional authority, municipal governments cannot. We encourage municipalities to partner with nonprofit, regionally based, open membership organizations to issue local currency. Permission to accept tax payments in scrip should be sought by the Department of Revenue for the state. Employment contracts may be difficult to amend, so the payment of wages in a local currency would be on a voluntary basis.

A currency program also could create a scrip to loan to partnering municipalities at no interest or at least lower interest than what is charged on the market. These savings could encourage the citizen taxpayer to participate in recirculation.

In Barcelona, Spain, officials found municipal support of the arts, sports teams, and social welfare agencies was quickly leaving the local economy through purchases at big box stores and other international corporations. They invested in exploring how to issue a Catalonian currency until the mayor and other officials left the country under threat of arrest for encouraging secession.

In her song “Declare Independence,” the Icelandic singer, Björk, admonishes us to:

Start your own currency
Make your own stamp
Protect your language
, , , , , ,

Raise your flag!

Raise your flag (higher, higher)!

Find out which regions had the courage to start their own currencies with our international directory.

MS: One of the things I really respect about your approach to decentralization is that you often work with conservatives. What advice would you give to other groups about the importance of creating a multipartisan coalition for change?

SW: Building a local economy is not a Left or Right issue; it is a community issue. When you are deeply engaged with practical programs, there are wonderful stories to tell. Those stories give credibility to the programs and pull in others engaged locally, regardless of ideology. It is not theories that build local economies, but action—the action of enthusiastically supporting local merchants even when selection is limited, placing a farm into a CLT to lease to a farmer who grew up in the region, serving on the board of a local nonprofit, and advocating that they move to a local bank. Small acts, daily acts, showing up.

MS: I’ve long viewed you as a wise mentor, and you’ve helped launch the careers of hundreds of amazing young people. Many young people today, however, despair about their future and have trouble getting out of bed—let alone building a new world. What advice would you give them?

SW: Again, the secret is engaged action. When the Schumacher Center’s young colleagues see the surprised reaction from strangers when they pay for a meal in W.E.B. Du Bois 5s or Robyn Van En 10s or Herman Melville 20s, rather than Lincolns or Hamiltons or Jeffersons, they experience the hopeful possibility of local economies. When they see a young farmer enter a secure lease for land that they helped acquire after many hours of tabling at the farmers’ market and stuffing envelopes, the effectiveness of local action is visible. And seductive.

MS: Finally, do you invest your savings locally? If so, how?

SW: When Bob Swann and I founded the Schumacher Center in 1980, we had a clear vision of the work before us—decommodify land, democratize currency, and cooperativize labor. We did not chase the latest foundation funding. Our needs were simple. No children to support. Bob built our small home on CLT land. There were lean years. If we ran out of funds, Bob would go back to work as a contractor. I would often quip that, “I was a kept woman by a carpenter.”

So, my savings are modest. What savings I have are in cash or BerkShares or in the checking account of a locally owned mutual bank—one of the banks small and flexible enough to participate in the BerkShares local currency program, small and flexible enough to offer mortgages on community land trust land. All my contributions are made in BerkShares to local organizations that I know will circulate them in the local economy.

NEW INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Below is our list of recently posted investment opportunities across the United States. Please note that our listing of these opportunities does not constitute an endorsement. Remember that all investments carry risk. Click on the hyperlinks and read the details carefully before investing.

Use the map below to help you find an investment opportunity near you. Each issue, we’ll highlight about a half dozen active campaigns.

COMPREHENSIVE LISTINGS

Click the images below to view our comprehensive list of investment opportunities, organized by theme or region.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

ENERGY INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

FOOD INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

HOUSING OPPORTUNITIES

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES BY REGION

✔️ Great Lakes

✔️ Mid-Atlantic

✔️ Midwest

✔️ New England

✔️ Rocky Mountains

✔️ South

✔️ Southwest

✔️ West

FUNDS OPEN TO GRASSROOTS INVESTORS

The following is our first draft of funds that invest in local businesses and are open to non-accredited investors. Please help us add to this list!

(Fund Types: BC = Short-Term Business Credit Institution; NP = Nonprofit; RE = Real Estate Investment Fund)

PARTNER EVENTS

• From $10 to Impact: How Anyone Can Become an Impact Investor - Virtual Event: January 21, at 12 pm ET

• Business On Purpose Virtual MeetUp and Info Session - Virtual Event: January 22, at 7:30 pm ET

• SuperGreen Live - Virtual Event: January 22 - 24

• Deep Dive: State of the Employee Ownership Fund Marketplace - Virtual Event: January 27, at 2 pm ET

• 2026 Employee Ownership Roundtable in Perth - Virtual Event: February 3, at 7:30 pm ET

More Events

JOBS BOARD

• Equal Exchange: Systems Operations Manager

• East Bay Permanent Real Estate Cooperative: Community Stewardship & Property Manager

• Project Equity: Vice President, Marketing

More Jobs

BECOME A MAIN STREET CHAMPION

Whatever your interest or ambition, we invite you to “go public” to help others in your region find you, scheme with you, and start a local investment movement in your community. We aim to identify dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of Main Street Champions like you in every corner of the globe. Together, we can move our hard-earned savings from Wall Street to Main Street, putting them to work in our own communities. Fill out the intake survey below to join this growing cohort!

Become a Main Street Champion

About The Main Street Journal

The Main Street Journal aims to catalyze the movement of $50 trillion from Wall Street to Main Street, facilitating economic development and economic justice. It’s sponsored by the National Coalition for Community Capital. We welcome feedback on all aspects, from our design to our content. Please send your ideas to Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

If you would like to support our work, please use the button below. Thank you!

Make a Donation

Our Team:

• Michael Shuman – MSJ Publisher

• Paul Spinrad - Decent Tuesdays Writer & Editor

• Jen Risley - MSJ Editor

• Wendy Wasserman - Strategic Advisor

PARTNERS

Abrams+Angell | American Independent Business Alliance | Candide Group | Capital for Change | Capital Institute | Community-Vision Solutions | Cordata Capital | Council Fire | Crowdfund Better | Crowdfund Capital Advisors | Democracy Collaborative | Eleanor LeCain | Exit to Community Collective | Fair Food Network | Garlic and Roses | Impact Finance Center | ImpactPHL | Initiative for Local Capital | Institute for Local Self-Reliance | The Kassan Group | Longfellow Health Clubs | Mission Driven Finance | National Coalition for Community Capital | Natural Investments | Neighborhood Associates | Neighborhood Economics | New Majority Capital | Next Egg | Nonprofit Quarterly | Ownership America | Ownership Capital Lab | Ownership Matters | Partnership for Southern Equity | PathLight Law | Project Equity | Project for Public Spaces | Prospera Partners | Raise Green | Revalue | Rising Tide Capital | Schumacher Center for a New Economics | Shelterforce | Slow Money | SOCAP | Sun Valley Institute for Resilience | The Super Crowd Inc. | Sustainable Business Network of MA | Transform Finance | Uwharrie Bank | Village Well | Zebras Unite

We welcome any nonprofit or for-profit entity committed to local investment as a partner. If your organization is interested, please contact Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

Bendigo Bank in Australia demonstrated the virtues of this design when it decided to offer a turn-key community bank to small, outback communities. Here was the deal: Provide local capital and a qualified board, and Bendigo will give you essentially a “bank in the box.” Boring back-office services will be provided by Bendigo HQ, while the important work of selecting and managing deposits, loans, and other banking products will be done locally. Hundreds of small communities in Australia developed much-needed local banks this way, and Bendigo created an impressive new portfolio of businesses.

This week’s featured interview is with Goran Jeras, a finance genius based in Croatia. He is now setting up a European Ethical Bank that will invite any of the roughly 8,000 communities in the European Union—where 450 million people live—to set up their own community banks. Capital and decision-making stay local, while expensive back-office services are provided cost-effectively by the mothership. This is not a pipe dream. Goran has obtained an operating license and has raised $15 million in capital.

Also in this issue, paying subscribers will find the latest listings of local companies and funds in the United States. If you’re not a paying subscriber and like what you’re reading, please click on one of the two buttons below.

(A final note: Saint Nick and Hanukkah Harry ordered a workplace shutdown for the last two weeks of December. But we will return, with all our new toys, in early 2026!)

— Michael Shuman, Publisher

Make a Donation

Subscribe now

A Paid Subscription Gets You:

✔️ News Links

✔️ In-Depth Interviews

✔️ Latest Listings of Local Investment Opportunities

✔️ Monthly In-Person Meetings with Michael Shuman

✔️ Notable New Resources

✔️ Partner News & Voices

✔️ Events

✔️ Job Listings

MS: Thank you for talking with us today. I’m curious how you got interested in ethical banking? Is there a special need for it in your home country, Croatia?

GJ: Thank you for having me, Michael!

Well, I got interested in ethical banking through my work as a consultant in mainstream finance for large international banks and insurance companies. As a physicist by education, I was always interested in understanding how things work “under the hood” to grasp the mechanics of things. And by consulting for banks, I wanted to understand how banks work and operate.

I started this journey during the financial crisis of 2008-2009, while I was working on a project to improve the risk-assessment framework of one of the largest global banks. I was utterly shocked by everything I saw there. For the first time, I understood how destructive and extractive today’s banks have become. I realized that banking as a discipline has transformed itself from responsible managers of communities’ assets into an engine extracting value from local communities for the sake of profit maximization of the small class of bank owners and managers. This process is mathematically unsustainable and, I believe, the primary cause of today’s extreme levels of social inequality and breaches of planetary ecological boundaries. I just realized that morally, I could not spend even one more day contributing to it.

I decided to dedicate my time, money, and energy to developing an alternative—a nonprofit, sustainable, growth-agnostic, inclusive banking model that could keep local money in local communities, increasing community wealth and quality of life. Such banks are needed everywhere, including Croatia, where four foreign banks comprise over 90% of the banking market and extract tremendous amounts of money from local communities.

MS: What a marvelous journey! Before we talk about the European Ethical Bank, what have been some of the other ways you have promoted socially responsible investing?

GJ: From the moment I realised that the economy is a social construct (not an easy revelation for a physicist!), I’ve been thinking and testing ideas on alternative economic systems that would lead to better results for people and the planet. I’m a big believer in cooperatives, and my colleagues and I have helped to incubate over 30 cooperatives in Croatia in various sectors, including affordable housing, agriculture, fisheries, architecture, IT, journalism, energy, and even chimney sweeping.

We have also invested a lot in improving sustainability measurement methodologies and how they might be applied to the banking system. We are all aware that Gross Domestic Product is not an ideal measure of anything. But what are the alternatives? There has been a lot of effort invested, especially in Europe, in the ESG framework, and various sustainability reporting standards defining what should be considered green and what should not. However, all those efforts have some significant, almost insurmountable shortcomings.

For example, they are defining sustainability reporting frameworks, but at the same time, we don’t have universally accepted, scientifically backed sustainability measurement standards, except for maybe CO2 emissions and a few other aspects. How can we authentically report on something we cannot measure? We don’t have a good answer on that. That’s why we have proposed more rigorous and quantitative methodologies such as Sustainable Development Performance Indicators (SDPI) and Economy for the Common Good Balance Sheet (ECG).

MS: Got it. So, now, you are trying to create a digital ethical bank for communities across Europe. What will make its banking services more “ethical” than the banking options customers currently have?

GJ: In our banking model, we start with our values and integrate them into the design of every single one of the bank’s processes. Technically, a bank is an institution that takes deposits and manages assets of the community and transforms those assets into credit that creates new value in that community. Our model is exactly that, designed to maximize value created for communities and not profit for its shareholders.

We believe that banks, as a crucial part of financial infrastructure, should be owned by the communities whose assets they manage—whether that ownership is private, public, cooperative, or some kind of hybrid. Also, SDPI/ECG sustainability measurement of all banks’ investments is embedded in our process. If the project doesn’t reach the required threshold in its sustainability score and has no plan for how it will increase its sustainability, it will not get funded. The bank will transparently publish the profiles of its investments so that people in the community can know that their assets are invested sustainably.

Ethical banks have a maximum allowed ratio between minimum and maximum pay in the bank set to 1:5. We are considering keeping it at 1:3.

Finally, our bank transparently prices interest to the level that it covers credit provision costs, period. Operational costs are covered through transaction fees. A surplus is created through the provision of off-balance sheet investment management services to bank customers and other non-banking ethical financial institutions.

MS: You’ve chosen a nonprofit structure for your bank rather than a cooperative or other models. Why?

GJ: It’s actually a hybrid model. We are a nonprofit cooperative managed by stewards. In our view, a nonprofit structure is the only way managers can fulfill their fiduciary duty to shareholders by prioritising long-term value-creation investments. On the other side, we also insisted on being a cooperative to actively involve communities in the management of the bank. Finally, we decided to add a stewardship layer to it to preserve the mission, vision, and values of the bank long-term and avoid demutualisation of the ownership model (as has unfortunately happened with many cooperative banks around the world).

MS: One feature of your design is that communities can become part of your bank, but largely retain control of the capital deposited by local residents and communities. Do you guarantee a certain percentage of local capital is retained locally? And what other safeguards are there to ensure that local capital is not simply moved from one region to another (as is the case today)?

GJ: The model is designed to be decentralised and put communities at the center of it. The bank will centralize provision of its shared services where it makes sense: transactions, payments, cards, treasury services, money-laundering and know-your-customer compliance, and so forth. But it will keep credit provision as decentralized as it gets, by offering credit exclusively through a network of cooperative members. Those members are community organizations serving as local representatives of the bank. They will create and manage local credit portfolios. No credit will be given without the approval of the local partner organisation.

Additionally, in collaboration with our partner, Swiss social enterprise Ecoloc, we are designing our credit lines to use the concept of “endogenous money,” which is debt-free funding arising from circular transactions within the community itself. This approach can greatly increase the liquidity within the community, reduce dependency on external debt, and increase the percentage of money and newly created value kept within the community. Our goal is to keep at least 80% of the spending within the community.

MS: What does a community need to provide–especially in terms of capital and expertise–to become part of your new bank?

GJ: The community needs to provide a trusted, local organization that becomes a cooperative shareholder and partner of the bank. This local organization needs to be able to identify local funding needs and structure those needs into a sustainable credit portfolio. We roughly expect that this organization’s capital raising capacity should be around one million euros, which would allow it to manage a credit portfolio leveraged by a factor of ten through various bank instruments.

Additionally, the community needs to bring in local knowledge about the local needs, trustworthiness of loan applicants, an understanding of the local legal framework, loan monitoring capabilities, and so forth. In short, it needs to be able to act as the front office of the bank.

Of course, we provide education, training, and if needed, a revenue-sharing model for communities to cover the costs of doing this work.

MS: I understand that you will soon have a license to set up your headquarters in Lithuania. Where else will this license enable you to operate?

GJ: The European Union has introduced the so-called bank-passporting regulation, which essentially creates a single market of banking services across Europe. A bank licensed in Lithuania or any other EU member state can, without further licensing, operate in all 26 EU countries and also in 3 additional European Economic Area (EEA) countries, namely Norway, Liechtenstein, and Iceland. This is a unique opportunity in which one banking license covers the market of 29 countries and nearly half a billion people. We believe the EU is an ideal place to develop this type of systemically different banking model and scale it up globally through open-sourcing and social franchising.

The need for local community banks to manage and leverage local assets without external debt is a crucial missing link in development finance, not only for all developing countries but also for many deprived communities in developed countries.

MS: How much capital have you raised for the bank thus far, and how much more do you need? From where do you anticipate that capital coming?

GJ: From the community organizations we work with, we have thus far collected 15 million euros of core capital. However, our ambition is to reach over 50 million euros and run a more ambitious business model of partnering with the European Investment Bank and other multilateral and national development institutions.

As a nonprofit bank, we are not looking for classical profit-seeking investors. We are looking for catalytic capital providers—family offices, foundations, philanthropists, and companies willing to commit part of their assets to a bank that can leverage it for the common good.

Sustainability-minded bank customers tend to focus on bank investment decisions. But just by keeping their capital in a bank with a mission in sustainability, customers are supporting the credit policy of the bank and leveraging its positive impact multifold.

MS: One of the important new functions of community banking, I would argue, is to help connect their customers to local investment opportunities—that is, to educate and mobilize investors, and to connect them with local businesses looking for investors. How do you envision your bank serving this need?

GJ: You are absolutely right! The role of the community bank is to make money circulate and incentivize local customers to invest in local businesses. Our approach to that is very simple. As a bank, we will have a lot of projects coming to us and looking for funding. We will analyze them and decide if they are ready to get funded or not. But after approval of the funding, we will incentivize applicants not to return for another loan. Instead, fund your project through local crowdfunding facilitated by the bank. In this way, the project owner will get new partners, bank clients get a new investment opportunity, and the bank can support its businesses without impacting its balance sheet.

MS: Finally, do you invest personally in your own community in Croatia? If so, how?

GJ: Before starting the European Ethical Bank project, I was living abroad for almost a decade and had accumulated some savings. When I returned to Croatia, I decided not to invest in property but instead put all my savings into various cooperatives, including Cooperative for Ethical Financing (ZEF), my home organization that is the initiator of the European Ethical Bank project. It is probably not the most profitable decision, but it is the most rational one from the perspective of sustainability. Sustainability is not something you can negotiate with. You cannot be 60% sustainable. Either you are 100% sustainable, or you are unsustainable and are going to disappear.

Financial markets, as they are designed today, are extractive, and financialization that has occurred on the financial markets has led to catastrophic consequences. It has transformed homes into financial assets, food into commodities, and deprived communities of very basic human needs. So if somebody asks me about my investments, my reply is always that investing in local farmers or local energy projects is the most valuable investment in the marketplace.

Read more

This is the week we give thanks with, and for, our families. And we’d like to thank you, our own family, for another great year—our fourth—promoting the field of local investment. If you feel thankful for what you read, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for $5 per month—cheaper than a Starbucks latte.

I know you’re besieged with funding requests, so let me give you ten reasons I hope you say YES to my ask.

(1) IMPORTANCE – Our mission is to move trillions of dollars from Wall Street to Main Street. Which of your passionately held causes wouldn’t benefit from this?

(2) UNIQUE - We are the only regular periodical promoting the local investment movement in all its forms—through articles, commentary, events, resources, investment opportunities, and job openings.

(3) COMPREHENSIVE – We unify the movement by cutting across single-issue silos. We amplify the voices focused on local economies, employee ownership, cooperatives, B Corps, decentralization, state and local policymaking, securities laws, retirement strategies, community funds, and much more.

(4) GLOBAL – We’re Americans, but we cover local investment everywhere, including Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Japan.

(5) MULTI-PARTISAN – We support initiatives on both sides of the aisle, whether public banking on the left or securities deregulation on the right.

(6) PRACTICAL – Our twice-a-month “Community Capital Live” webinar series has built a library of three dozen models for readers to create their own community investment funds. Please use this!

(7) HANDS ON – Through our “Mondays with Michael,” we support the initiatives of more than a hundred of our readers through networking and brainstorming.

(8) OPTIMISTIC – At a time when the world seems dark, we offer regular doses of light—what you can do, immediately and affordably, to improve your and your neighbors’ lives.

(9) COST-EFFECTIVE – Thanks to our many generous volunteers, we’ve done all of this for under $25,000 per year for four years. Every dollar you invest goes a very long way.

(10) IMPACTFUL – Don’t believe us? See what some of our 8,000 readers think on this flyer.

My hope is that if I can convince 100-200 of you to become subscribers, we can open up all the “subscribers only” sections of the newsletter. To give you a taste of what you’re missing now, take a look at our stock and fund listings below (which our paid subscribers see every other week).

I’d be thankful if you would click on one of the two buttons below, and let’s grow Main Street together.

- Michael Shuman, Publisher

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A Paid Subscription Gets You:

✔️ News Links

✔️ In-Depth Interviews

✔️ Latest Listings of Local Investment Opportunities

✔️ Monthly In-Person Meetings with Michael Shuman

✔️ Notable New Resources

✔️ Partner News & Voices

✔️ Events

✔️ Job Listings

NEW INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Below is our list of recently posted investment opportunities across the United States. Please note that our listing of these opportunities does not constitute an endorsement. Remember that all investments carry risk. Click on the hyperlinks and read the details carefully before investing.

Use the map below to help you find an investment opportunity near you. Each issue, we’ll highlight about a half dozen active campaigns.

COMPREHENSIVE LISTINGS

Click the images below to view our comprehensive list of investment opportunities, organized by theme or region.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES

ENERGY INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

FOOD INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

HOUSING OPPORTUNITIES

INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES BY REGION

✔️ Great Lakes

✔️ Mid-Atlantic

✔️ Midwest

✔️ New England

✔️ Rocky Mountains

✔️ South

✔️ Southwest

✔️ West

FUNDS OPEN TO GRASSROOTS INVESTORS

The following is our list of funds that invest in local businesses and are open to non-accredited investors. Please help us add to this list!

(Fund Types: BC = Short-Term Business Credit Institution; NP = Nonprofit; RE = Real Estate Investment Fund)

EVENTS

• When Ecological Care Meets Economic Resilience - Virtual Event: November 27 at 1 pm ET

• Shop Indie Local Week - Grassroots Campaign: November 28 - December 2

• Graduation Showcase: Black Community Wealth Accelerator - Virtual Event: December 5 at 1 pm ET

• Keep Compost Local: A Roadmap for Public-Private Partnerships - Virtual Event: December 9 at 12 pm ET

• Cooperative Learning Journey Webinar - Virtual Event: December 10 at 11 am ET

• Introduction to Community Wealth Building - Virtual Event: December 10 at 1 pm ET

• SuperGreen Live - Virtual Event: January 22 - 24, 2026

More Events

JOBS BOARD

• Candide Group: Director of Business Development & Partnerships

• SHARE Baltimore: Human Resources Consultant

More Jobs

BECOME A MAIN STREET CHAMPION

Whatever your interest or ambition, we invite you to “go public” to help others in your region find you, scheme with you, and start a local investment movement in your community. We aim to identify dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of Main Street Champions like you in every corner of the globe. Together, we can move our hard-earned savings from Wall Street to Main Street, putting them to work in our own communities. Fill out the intake survey below to join this growing cohort!

Become a Main Street Champion

About The Main Street Journal

The Main Street Journal aims to catalyze the movement of $50 trillion from Wall Street to Main Street, facilitating economic development and economic justice. It’s sponsored by the National Coalition for Community Capital, with grants from the Heron Foundation, Wallace Global Foundation, and the Bondi Foundation. We welcome feedback on all aspects, from our design to our content. Please send your ideas to Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

If you would like to support our work, please use the button below. Thank you!

Make a Donation

Our Team:

• Michael Shuman – MSJ Publisher

• Paul Spinrad - Decent Tuesday Writer & Editor

• Jen Risley - MSJ Editor

• Wendy Wasserman - Strategic Advisor

PARTNERS

Abrams+Angell | American Independent Business Alliance | Candide Group | Capital for Change | Capital Institute | Community-Vision Solutions | Cordata Capital | Council Fire | Crowdfund Better | Crowdfund Capital Advisors | Democracy Collaborative | Eleanor LeCain | Exit to Community Collective | Fair Food Network | Impact Finance Center | ImpactPHL | Initiative for Local Capital | Institute for Local Self-Reliance | The Kassan Group | Longfellow Health Clubs | Mission Driven Finance | National Coalition for Community Capital | Natural Investments | Neighborhood Associates | Neighborhood Economics | New Majority Capital | Next Egg | Nonprofit Quarterly | Ownership America | Ownership Capital Lab | Ownership Matters | Partnership for Southern Equity | PathLight Law | Project Equity | Project for Public Spaces | Prospera Partners | Raise Green | Revalue | Rising Tide Capital | Schumacher Center for a New Economics | Shelterforce | Slow Money | SOCAP | Sun Valley Institute for Resilience | The Super Crowd Inc. | Sustainable Business Network of MA | Transform Finance | Uwharrie Bank | Village Well | Zebras Unite

We welcome any nonprofit or for-profit entity committed to local investment as a partner. If your organization is interested, please contact Jen Risley at jen@main-street-journal.com.

Our featured interview in this issue is with John Haines, who has pioneered the concept of community investment trusts (CITs) to save neighborhood malls. As you’ll read, these are very carefully structured ways for committed impact investors and nonprofits to stabilize a neighborhood by localizing ownership of a mall. Their first CIT, launched in Portland, Oregon, seven years ago, has successfully paid local shareholders (many low-income) 7% dividends each year and doubled their share price. Now they are replicating their work across the United States.

Paying subscribers will also find our latest listings of local stocks and funds you can invest in. If you’re not a paying subscriber and like our work, please click one of the buttons below. It will cost you less than a Starbucks coffee every month.

— Michael Shuman, Publisher

Make a Donation

Subscribe now

A Paid Subscription Gets You:

✔️ News Links

✔️ In-Depth Interviews

✔️ Latest Listings of Local Investment Opportunities

✔️ Monthly In-Person Meetings with Michael Shuman

✔️ Notable New Resources

✔️ Partner News & Voices

✔️ Events

✔️ Job Listings

MS: John, thanks for talking with us today. Before we dive into your current work, I’d like to learn a little more about your background. You were the executive director of Mercy Corps Northwest for 15 years. Tell us a little about Mercy Corps and how your work there shaped your interest in community investment.

JH: Since 1979, Mercy Corps has been a nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon, working globally in 40+ countries facing crisis, conflict, and economic collapse. In 2002, they hired me to initiate a domestic version of their work in the Pacific Northwest, focusing on economic development for low-income communities. At that point, I had come from a banking background at two banks in Portland, started a loan fund in Trenton, New Jersey, and served as an advisor under Chemonics International to the Czech Republic’s State Environmental Fund. I helped Mercy Corps Northwest establish a wide range of programs in Oregon and Washington: business training, lending, matching savings grants (IDAs), incubating farming skills in refugees, preparing women in both states’ correctional facilities for reentry and entrepreneurship, and organizing a felon-led, high-volume Reentry Transition Center for the formerly incarcerated in Portland.

As we were scaling our investment model nationally, we decided to separate the community investment trust (CIT) work from Mercy Corps in early 2015. We became an independent nonprofit entity, CIT Holdings, Inc., and operate through a fiscal sponsor, Possibility Labs.

MS: The conventional understanding of community investment trusts is that they allow a community to buy local real estate over time. A big purchaser makes the deal, and gradually, residents buy that purchaser out. Is that right?

JH: Not exactly. The community investors buy out the equity (40%) of the commercial property value from impact investors. This is important: the model is an equity shift, not a capital raise. Community investors, therefore, are owners from the first month they make an investment ($10, $25, $50, or $100).

We listened to renters, the working poor, and refugees, and designed the CIT to fit their needs. Among them: Grassroots investors should be able to make low-dollar monthly investments that fit a budget. They should be supported through education on goal planning, budgeting, and investing. The investment should provide dividends annually. The long-term share price should be adjusted as the mortgage is paid down and the property value changes. Investors should receive ongoing downside risk protection, meaning they are guaranteed not to lose everything. And there should be enough liquidity so investors can cash out at any time without loss. (Investors who leave early, however, may forgo year-end calculated dividends and share price increase.)

MS: So what’s your underlying theory of change?

JH: We want to link wealth building with community ownership. And we want to show that it’s possible to do this without depending on legislation, subsidies, or entanglements of any level of bureaucracy. With our pilot CITs, we have built out a platform to be the backbone for nonprofits nationwide to build their own CIT projects.

We actually support CIT efforts across the country right now. We support feasibility studies with three to four organizations in various cities at a time. This process, which takes about four months, shares all we have learned from community engagement and mapping, property selection, capitalization strategies, legal structures, and investor training using our proprietary “Moving from Owing to Owning,” peer-led curriculum.

MS: The first model you initiated—and the one that certainly captured my attention—was in Portland, where you live. Residents in a low-income neighborhood are now gradually becoming the owners of a shopping center. How did that deal come about?

JH: Mercy Corps NW bought a 1962-built, 29,000 square-foot commercial-retail property for $1.2 million with $450,000 down payment under an LLC, before the ultimate owner, East Portland CIT Corporation, was formed. Then we transferred the LLC ownership to the corporation. The $450,000 came from Mercy Corp NW and an impact investor, whom we paid 2% and 4%, respectively. We then offered 45,000 shares at $10 per share to residents of select zip codes. We found a bank that provided a mortgage and a Direct Pay Letter of Credit, which stands as financial insurance for the amount of the total shareholder stock value, updated annually. This is underwritten by the bank as a line of credit alongside the mortgage.

MS: Tell us about the Portland model from the standpoint of investors. How exactly does a community member become an owner? And what’s the cost?

JH: Investors must live in one of four zip codes surrounding the property, have a tax ID number, and take a peer-led course, “Moving from Owing to Owning,” which covers goal setting, budgeting, and the risk-and-return of investments. They sign up on our portal with a commitment for that year to invest a minimum of $10 and a maximum of $100 per month. Then they resubscribe annually at a new share price, calculated by the mortgage reduction and up to 50% of the change in value of the property. Over the past 7 years, the share price has grown from $10 to $20.21 per share. (See our Case Study: Community Investment Trust.)

MS: I’m curious about the legal structure you’re using. Are you formally structured as a trust? And what are the legal hurdles you need to clear for grassroots investors to be able to participate?

JH: The CIT is not a trust. We use the name to suggest the similarity to REIT—a Real Estate Investment Trust. We are like a mini, localized REIT without the tax advantages and with low-income investors. The CIT itself is a state-registered C Corporation named East Portland Community Investment Trust.

Each CIT uses a provision in the 1933 Securities Act—the 3(a)(2) exemption—that allows the stock offering to be made to unaccredited investors, if the shares are guaranteed by a bank through a Direct Pay Letter of Credit (a credit-backed structure sometimes used in municipal finance to enhance bond underwriting). This Letter of Credit is in place at all times, should all investors cash out at once. Our target is low-income investors to serve the purposes of wealth building or financial inclusion. The CIT is both a family investment and a localized community investment.

MS: I understand that the next big project is in Dallas. Tell us about it.

JH: One of four CITs likely to launch in 2026 is in South Dallas, led by St. Philips, a private school and community center with housing and a community development arm. The institution has been widely trusted in the neighborhood for over 80 years, which is a key for us in choosing a replicator. They are pursuing what we refer to as a “necklace” of smaller properties, each 3,000 to 8,000 square feet.

MS: Where else might we see CITs popping up?

JH: Albany (New York), Omaha (Nebraska), and Minneapolis (Minnesota) will also launch in 2026. The CIT can thrive anywhere where there is a population of eager first-time community investors and a trusted nonprofit to oversee the operations of the CIT. (See our 2025 CIT Progress Overview.)

MS: If I were to start a CIT in my own community, what are the basic criteria–in scale, location, market, financing, etc.—I should be looking for? And how do I enlist your services to get the project done?

JH: Most important is a trusted lead nonprofit to oversee the CIT, properties in the range of $1 million to $5 million, a low-income community in which to invest, a bank to provide financing and the Direct Pay Letter of Credit (which, again, acts as the legally required security for investors), and a strong long-term funder network to seed and support the operations.

We engage with potential replicators through a feasibility study, and then we coach them. They create their own plan and their own local implementation team. We charge $50,000 for the package of feasibility sessions and resources, access to our CIT network Community of Practice, and support for our team.

MS: You’ve now been working at this for seven years. What are the indicators of success you are proudest of?

JH: The Portland pilot proved that low-income people can and will invest locally, even without subsidized matches. We have delivered annual dividends averaging 7% for each of the seven years, and doubled the share value. We have shown that local commercial real estate is a motivating investment that knits its commercial and nonprofit tenants into the surrounding community. Most investors are low-income and have never invested before. The majority are renters and women. We can see that the CIT inspires investors to vote, volunteer, and build relationships. Finally, we have established that business and nonprofit tenants do better and gain visibility when, in our case, 350 families own and visit the property. It starts with People and Place, and grows with Property, Profit, and Belonging.

MS: Finally, are you an investor in your shopping center?

JH: I don’t live in the zip code for the Portland project, but one of our team members does, and she invests.

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Research suggests that every federal dollar put into CDFIs has leveraged $8 of private capital. They have historically created about 3.4 million jobs. These findings underscore the foolishness of the Trump Administration, as we reported in the last issue of The Main Street Journal, recently firing all the staff running this program.

CDFIs are down but not out. And this week’s interview with Liz Rogers of Tern Strategies, based in Maine, suggests that CDFIs anticipated this moment. Liz honed her financial skills working for one of the most successful nonprofit community development organizations in the country, Coastal Enterprises in Maine.

Liz and her colleagues have found that 91 CDFIs now accept grassroots investment. And with the government spigot closing off, even if only temporarily, more CDFIs may move in this direction.

You will also see in the interview my annoyances with CDFIs. Many of my progressive friends, for example, see CDFIs as the only legitimate form of community investing. The truth is that almost every local investment—whether in a tech startup or a grocery store—generates local income, wealth, and jobs. It’s great to invest in distressed communities, but we should applaud investment in all kinds of communities, all kinds of entrepreneurs, and all kinds of sectors.

Paying subscribers will also find our latest list of local securities and funds that they can invest in. If you want to review these, please click on one of the two buttons below.

— Michael Shuman, Publisher

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MS: Liz, before we dive into your current work, a bit about your background. You used to work for Coastal Enterprises in Maine. Tell us about that organization and what you worked on there?

LR: Coastal Enterprises, or CEI, is one of the best-established community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, in the country. CEI finances businesses and projects with the goal of improving people’s lives through economic opportunity. To ensure the greatest possible chance for success, CEI also provides thousands of hours of business advice and technical assistance to entrepreneurs on an annual basis. I served as chief communications officer and managed CEI’s investment note program.

MS: You have since created your own consultancy, Tern Strategies. Why the bird name? And what does your consultancy do?

LR: The name and spirit of Tern Strategies were inspired, in part, by Migrations, a novel by Charlotte McConaghy, about a woman determined to follow the migration of the last of the Arctic terns from Greenland to their nesting grounds in the Antarctic. It’s a story about loss, on many levels—the loss of natural habitats and the living things they support—birds, animals, and fish—and the impact on human beings.

The people in the book experienced great loss in their personal lives, as well, driving them to follow their hearts as the only way to keep living. I read about the Arctic terns and their journey, year after year, over huge expanses of ocean, through extreme weather, from one pole to the other and back—the longest migration of any animal on the planet, and it astounded me. Six months after I started my business, I lost my husband, unexpectedly. What had been an intriguing brand became something greater, a call to keep flying, even when your partner drops out of the sky. There is darkness in Migrations, but also hope and light.

Through the consultancy, I help my clients, all CDFIs, create and raise capital through investment offerings, connecting investors to local economies.

MS: You clearly admire CDFIs and want to expand their mission. What have they accomplished, in your estimation?

LR: I am not sure “admire” is exactly the right word. I am a part of the CDFI ecosystem, and I hope to grow the number of people who know about and support them. I had no idea what a CDFI was when I started at CEI. The more people know, the more I believe they will want to participate in this direct investment path to making communities stronger and more resilient. In Maine alone, countless number of businesses have been started with CEI financing and advice. That gives people a chance at ownership, wealth creation, job creation, economic participation, and community engagement. Multiply CEI’s impact across more than 1,400 CDFIs across the country, and you have a powerful economic engine that is at work 24-7.

MS: My progressive friends love CDFIs, but honestly, I’ve been frustrated with them for several reasons over the years. One is that some seem as demanding with their distressed borrowers, or more so than mainstream banks. What’s your view?

LR: That’s not what I see at all. It’s easy to paint a picture of an industry with broad brushstrokes, but that really doesn’t get at the complexity and depth of CDFI relationships with their clients. I see CDFI colleagues doing everything they can to help people who are struggling to pay back a loan, not just by modifying loan terms, but also by connecting borrowers with advice, technical assistance, and skills development in order to be successful.

As nonprofits, CDFIs are always partnering with others to bring in additional resources for the people they serve. It is a sad day for all when a business is not able to move forward, but that’s sometimes a reality, whether a business works with a CDFI or not. Overall, CDFI loan loss rates are very low, consistently lower than those of FDIC-insured institutions. CDFIs are nonprofits, but they depend on borrowers being successful and paying back loans because CDFIs have to pay their investors back as well. It’s a model that is unlike any other and keeps CDFIs motivated, both through mission and through their business model, to make sure capital is constantly revolving from investors to communities and back again, while managing risk, rates, return, and mission in a pretty sophisticated way.

MS: But in a way, you’re making my point. If CDFIs have loan losses below mainstream banks, doesn’t that suggest they are not taking enough risk?

LR: Risk is relative in this case, given the amount of services CDFIs offer to help borrowers succeed. It would be interesting to create a formula that calculated the benefit of those services in a way that made CDFI lending and investment comparable to traditional lenders. Also, risk is, in some cases, determined by the requirements of CDFI investors. This is a very active conversation within CDFIs and across the industry, and decisions are being made carefully, with investors, borrowers, and investees in mind, on a case-by-case basis, in the context of a total portfolio. My view is that along a continuum of capital, CDFIs have their place. We should be celebrating the role that each plays in creating a whole.

MS: My second frustration with CDFs has been that historically, many didn’t allow for grassroots investors to participate in their model. There were some exceptions, like Calvert Notes, but for the most part, money for CDFIs came from the government, philanthropies, and deep-pocket investors. I was stunned to learn from your recent report that 91 CDFIs now accept grassroots investment. Tell us more about your findings and what those investment opportunities look like.

LR: Let me begin by giving a shoutout to my project partner, Pam Porter, Managing Director of Stepping Stone Partners, and our research funders, the Center for Impact Finance at UNH’s Carsey School and Citi Foundation. Our research builds on Pam’s prior surveys. To be clear, not all of the CDFIs on our list have formal investment note programs. But they indicated in our survey that they are open to investment. It’s an invitation for investors to start a conversation with CDFIs in their region.

Pam and I are not investment advisors, broker-dealers, or securities lawyers, and we do not provide investment advice. We are just two people who want you to get to know your friendly CDFI. Of the 99 on our list, 28 indicated that they have structured notes programs for individual and institutional investors. The majority of the 28 have offerings for retail investors. In the instances where a CDFI limits its offering to accredited investors, there are good reasons, such as the legal structure of the organization and its purpose.

The investment process usually involves multiple conversations among investors, investment advisors, and the CDFI, and includes a subscription agreement or contract. In the end, the average CDFI investment note pays a 1-3.5% rate of return, with terms from one to ten years.

MS: What are two or three good examples of CDFIs integrating local grassroots investment into their model?

LR: Think about Capital Link and its financing arm, Capital Fund. Capital Link provides financing and deep technical assistance and advice to community health centers across the country. These are healthcare providers that are meeting the needs of communities often underserved by our healthcare system. Because healthcare centers are typically paid through reimbursements from Medicare or Medicaid, it can be hard for them to get traditional financing due to the timing of revenue. Capital Link understands how community health centers operate and can respond to complex financing structures. Program and mission-related investments have been an important part of their growth.

Another example: Appalachian Community Capital (ACC), a CDFI serving 43 member CDFIs throughout Appalachia, has a new investment note program raising capital to be distributed to its members. As an intermediary, ACC has the capacity that the smaller member CDFIs don’t have to raise capital. But those CDFIs are close to communities and understand their needs. So it makes sense to have a nonprofit CDFI intermediary that is not adding to the cost of capital. ACC’s first investor in the notes program is an individual who is compelled to direct resources to communities in Appalachia.

On the whole, CDFIs are boots-on-the-ground, economic development practitioners in constant communication with small business owners and people providing needed community services.

The earliest investors in CDFIs came from faith-motivated individuals and institutions, and that support is strong to this day. Through asset managers like the Religious Communities Impact Fund (RCIF) and Mercy Investments, organizations of women’s religions are investing their pooled funds in CDFIs for mission—and return. CDFI investors are often closely monitoring impact and seeking active engagement to ensure that investments are meeting their goals. It’s notable that the CDFIs we interviewed have an 85% renewal rate when notes reach maturity.

MS: Your report also looked at the motivations of those who invest in CDFIs. What did you find?

LR: Overall, CDFI investors are engaged and growing. About 84% plan to renew their CDFI investment at maturity, and 95% plan to increase their investments. Investors see CDFI investments as aligned with their own mission (95%), as alternatives to Wall Street (63%), and they are also motivated by CDFIs’ reputations (63%)—geography and sector focus factor in as well.

MS: Back to my reservations about CDFIs. I’m very worried about any movement that depends on ongoing infusions of cash from the national government. Now that the Trump Administration has gutted the CDFI program at the Treasury Department, what’s the future going to be like for these institutions?

LR: The industry has been around for decades and has adapted to economic upturns and downturns. Since 1994, the CDFI Fund has provided irreplaceable levels of funding. And while the scale of the Trump Administration’s current actions is unprecedented, the industry is mobilizing the bipartisan support CDFIs experience on Capitol Hill by encouraging people to get in touch with their elected officials.

CDFIs are committed to diversifying their sources of capital. Long-term, a growing number of investors will help the sector thrive. The challenges are significant, but we are going to have to keep strengthening systems and structures that respond to local economic needs.

MS: Many of our readers are very interested in CDFIs—either strengthening those in their backyards or starting one. What kinds of research and other assistance does Tern Strategies offer communities?

LR: Right now, my primary focus for Tern, in partnership with Stepping Stone Partners, is on CDFI notes programs and their investors. But any time we engage in research, the aim is to create resources for a broad audience. For example, Tern partnered with Wake Forest University School of Law’s trade and development clinic to create a memo on securities law governing investment note offerings. As a communications professional, my job is to make things accessible. I also like to build connections—and a shared strategy. So, if I don’t have answers or needed expertise, I’m happy to connect the dots with someone who does.

MS: Finally, how do you invest locally yourself in Maine?

LR: I am an investor in the Genesis Community Loan Fund (and Partner Community Capital in West Virginia), and I also donate my time and resources. I’ve served as a volunteer tax preparer with the United Way and support wildlife conservation through the State of Maine. I also try to be prepared to help. For example, I have a Wilderness First Responder certification. Local investing is ultimately about supporting our shared life experience.

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The need for local exchanges supporting local companies remains, but the old model of exchanges, elite clubs with members hawking trades at the top of their lungs, is now obsolete. We now have electronic “clearance” systems. And increasingly, what is being traded are not traditional securities but digitized tokens connected in complex ways to the underlying securities.

One way of thinking about exchanges is that they serve as the plumbing of the financial system, connecting investors, securities issuers, and funds. And one person who is thinking creatively about deploying cutting-edge financial tools to local finance is DW Ferrell, the architect of LocalFund. Today’s interview is with DW, the Plumber in Chief.

LocalFund adapts the tools once reserved for private equity to make digital markets simple enough for anyone to navigate. It’s not a fund itself, and it’s not a stock exchange, though it runs on the same highways. Instead, it aims to move capital through established legal lanes without the audits, fees, and overhead that keep most small players out. In my mind, there remain legal and conceptual challenges in his model, but see what you think. He’s onto something important.

Paying subscribers can also find our latest list of local securities and funds that they can invest in.

— Michael Shuman, Publisher

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MS: DW, thanks for chatting with us today. Why don’t you give us the big picture of LocalFund.org? Who is it for, and what makes it distinct in the ecosystem of community capital funds?

DWF: My Gen-Z kids were surprised to hear that we used to have regional stock exchanges across the U.S. before everything got swallowed up by Wall Street giants. We’re bringing that local exchange idea back, replacing ticker tape with modern tools. The framework is built for reliable returns, diversification, and scheduled liquidity windows to cash out or rebalance.

The LocalFund network connects independent funds—much like the ACH network links banks—providing the clearing rails for community capital. These include CDFI funds that lend to small businesses and Qualified Opportunity Funds that invest in real estate. We also connect with regional funds that focus on place, and thematic funds that focus on purpose, like affordable housing or clean energy.

MS: So LocalFund is a fund of funds?

DWF: It isn’t a fund of funds, and it’s not a monolithic fund either. Think of it as an index of funds that were disconnected and had limited liquidity, but now they share a common liquidity system. For example, the Capital fund in D.C.—stewarded by CIEconomy.com—is using our LIFT Framework...

MS: Let me stop you there. What do you mean by “LIFT Framework”?

DWF: It’s a mouthful, Legacy Impact Futures Trust. It’s really about trust in both senses of the word, the legal kind and the human kind. You can think of LIFT as a community-based version of a REIT, only broader than just real estate. It’s designed for double-equity, which is financial equity and stakeholder equity, while lowering the bar so anyone can get started with a LIFT Certificate.

MS: Can grassroots investors buy these certificates?

DWF: Absolutely. Certificates create a gateway for everyday people to learn about community investment through regional funds, or regenerative impact from companies like Hyera Inc. It works like a community CD—but instead of a lump sum, people can put in a small amount like $50 monthly and earn a reliable return. They also know their dollars are helping community projects or purpose-driven entrepreneurs. It’s simple and certain, and designed for credit unions and community banks to offer LIFT Certificates alongside their CDs and savings accounts eventually.

MS: Can people choose what priorities their certificates are funding?

DWF: Yes. Each person chooses their own priorities—like affordable housing, local food systems, or a region such as the Southeast—and their dollars are placed in portfolios managed by partner funds that match those goals. For example, the Proactive Fund focuses on affordable housing, with investments in North Carolina, checking two of those boxes at once. Normally, that fund has a $50,000 minimum from accredited investors, but LocalFund bundles smaller Lift Certificates to make the Regulation D investment. As Funders learn more about each priority-driven portfolio, they are gaining the sophistication needed to invest directly if they choose. This also helps funds and issuers reach grassroots investors in ways that are typically challenging under SEC rules.

MS: So you basically create a ledger that connects a group of community-aligned funds?

DWF: Exactly. SEC guidance in 2024 clarified how community funds can safely coordinate liquidity without becoming brokers or custodians. That cleared the path for the LIFT Framework and the LocalFund network. This summer, Congress made 100% deductions permanent for certain qualified properties placed into service after January 2025—a major incentive for community investment. We help funds leverage these legal and tax changes to structure portfolios that qualify. This gives investors tangible impact and financial upside tied to productive enterprises and real-world assets, rather than speculation.

MS: Tell us a little about the history of LocalFund. When was it founded, what did you learn from your roots in crowdfunding, and how did those lessons lead to today’s networked fund model?

DWF: LocalFund began in 2015 as a crowdfunding consultancy. We helped local businesses raise millions and saw up close what worked and what didn’t. Regulation Crowdfunding opened doors for everyday investors but also brought high legal, audit, and marketing costs. Investors had a higher risk from investing in single companies, with little room for diversification or liquidity. Once the round closed, investors were locked in, and founders faced compliance burdens that slowed growth.

Those lessons made it clear that the future doesn’t need more crowdfunding portals; it needs better infrastructure. We needed a way to make local investing as fluid as online banking and as fair as community lending. That’s what the LIFT Framework was built for: giving funds and Founders shared tools for liquidity, transparency, and trust, so capital can circulate instead of getting stuck.

Since its quiet rollout this year, LocalFund has connected flagship funds in each U.S. region—Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Southwest, and West—plus purpose-driven funds aligned with certificate holder priority “votes”. The Capitol Fund in D.C. now mentors new stewards, showing how scheduled liquidity and shared reporting keep local control while scaling regional impact. Most activity still runs through private placements, but new public campaigns will open the door for grassroots investors this fall, starting with Geoship Landings, where land co-ownership will enable regenerative housing communities to blend architecture, ecology, and equity into intergenerational wealth.

MS: Your website says that LocalFund is about supporting “Regenerative Capital for business owners, worker cooperatives, anchor institutions, and transformative startups.” Can you say more about how you define “regenerative” and “transformative”?

DWF: Sure. Much of traditional finance is built for extraction. Private equity strips companies for parts, and conventional debt can trap entrepreneurs in rigid terms. Even “sustainable investment” usually means doing less harm, not creating more good.

Regenerative capital works more like a flywheel—once it’s moving, each return propels the next cycle. Waste becomes fuel, recirculation creates jobs, and value accelerates instead of being drained away. Meanwhile, traditional loans and common stock are rigid capital tools, brittle enough to break a company. So we flipped the model. Founders can start with Convertible Yield—flexible, revenue-based financing—and later choose to convert it into Shares with dividends, or pay it off as a Note with interest. Each agreement is structured and administered through our LIFT framework under an Exempt Reporting Advisor (ERA) or compliance-trust arrangement, ensuring that every contract operates transparently and in accordance with securities regulations.

I’m influenced by economists like Mariana Mazzucato and John Fullerton, who challenged shareholder primacy with the idea of regenerative economics. A regenerative investment produces spillover benefits—better jobs, stronger supply chains, and community wealth that fuels the next generation. That’s why the LIFT Framework embeds double-equity: both governance equity and financial equity, a balance missing from most stakeholder models.

Transformative startups fit that vision, too. They don’t just scale—they rebuild systems as they grow. Take Geoship, which promotes trust-based co-ownership of land and shared commons. Or Hyera, which turns agricultural waste into activated carbon while capturing CO₂ and producing clean hydrogen. It’s the “Back to the Future” hover car come to life—waste in, clean energy out. LIFT lets those complex parts align under one structure, so value compounds across the ecosystem on a single transparent ledger.

MS: Your website has a map of five regional funds that you target: It says, “Each regional fund or thesis fund is independently managed, but connected by the shared infrastructure of the LIFT Framework, with the full backing of the Exchange Reserve.” Can you describe the “infrastructure” you are offering these funds, and describe what the “Exchange Reserve” is?

DWF: I’ll compare it to the status quo. The financial plumbing that funds typically rely on was built for big banks—it moves deposits up and out of communities through sweeps, securitization, and national money markets. That system rewards scale, not regenerative equity value.

The LIFT Framework provides modern financial plumbing centered on stakeholder equity, aligning place and purpose. Instead of daily trading, it coordinates scheduled liquidity windows across funds and maintains a transparent valuation protocol. Funds use the Exchange Reserve only for clearing, redemption, and rebalancing, while full custody stays with each independent fund or trust. So, to sum up, it gives fund stewards the same financial muscle as big institutions, just without the Wall Street middlemen.

MS: So if I’m a grassroots investor and want to invest in a regenerative business in, say, Tucson, what are the exact steps you will lead me through to facilitate my investment?

DWF: If you’re a grassroots investor who wants to support Tucson businesses, you’d start at LocalFund.org and click “Funder”. From there, you set your priorities—for example, Tucson for the region and Indie Businesses as a priority. You’ll start receiving stories about those priorities and the regenerative ideas behind them, like the local multiplier effect. There’s no cost to learn more, and no investor accreditation is required.

When you’re ready, you can fund a LIFT Certificate, either 36 months at 10% fixed growth or 60 months at 20%. About three-quarters of funders choose a monthly contribution, earmarked for their chosen priorities. Your money is diversified and professionally managed, not tied to a single company or property. From there, your participation grows naturally. Certificates are just the starting point—the on-ramp to learning about the regional and thematic funds across the network.

As certificate funding builds around a shared priority, those pooled commitments flow into funds that match that focus. The result is a reliable return and a front-row seat to the impact that aligns with your priorities.

MS: How many investors have you attracted thus far, and how much investment?

DWF: So far, investors number in the hundreds, including some as far away as Australia. A funder doesn’t need to be “local”. This year has been more about validation than volume. Our major milestone was to prove that independent funds can coordinate liquidity without giving up custody. The next phase is expanding access to grassroots funders through public campaigns, including participation in a Regulation A offering this fall.

MS: So let’s ask the question from the standpoint of a business. If I’m a small business looking for local capital in Tucson, how exactly would you help me?

DWF: For a business in Tucson, support starts with local fund stewards—partners like Groundswell Capital or Aliados Tucson. They meet you where you are, assess your goals, and match you with the right type of capital. If a traditional loan makes sense, they’ll connect you to a local credit union or CDFI. But you can also start without taking on debt using LocalFund tools.

A great example is Courtney Sanders, founder of Trembo. As a mostly deaf innovator with a breakthrough haptic device, she was able to start raising funds by offering a Convertible Yield—without giving up equity or taking on debt. Unlike a SAFE, it’s backed by pre-sales or recurring revenue, not speculative future value.

As community backing grows and your performance data builds, you can qualify for equity investment through the regional fund once a shared milestone is reached. You’re not raising money in isolation. You’re part of a coordinated network where funders and founders grow together. That alignment creates more than financial capital: it builds community capital in the form of social proof, trust, and clear pathways to shared ownership, whether through anchorship, worker cooperatives, or community buyouts.

MS: How many businesses do you reckon you’ve helped so far?

DWF: I’ve personally worked with at least six to seven hundred business owners, and fund partners add multiples to that. Back in 2014, I took over a former Crate & Barrel in a struggling part of Long Beach and turned it into a Localism incubator. It was probably the first revenue-based incubator—and it became a huge community success. In its first year, we helped about 150 businesses start or grow. Then, in 2015, we layered LocalFund crowdfunding on top to help founders launch and fill empty storefronts.

One recurring challenge was the misalignment between independent merchants and property owners—a key driver of displacement during gentrifying development. That realization became a turning point for me. I had previously co-written a book on trusts and estate planning, and also served on a land-trust committee. It sparked an idea: what if a trust framework, similar to a REIT, could align stakeholders and property owners—or even prevent displacement altogether?

That insight led to our Anchorship.org work with partners, modeling community-led development playbooks and pathways to build community and generational wealth. It’s no longer just a theory. We’ve operationalized the LIFT Framework through the Anchorship Lab.

MS: Finally, how personally do you invest locally?

DWF: My wife and I live in Long Beach, California, where we own property and invest in the local creative economy—from indie merchants to visual artists and musicians. We still hold some positions on Wall Street, such as a clean-energy fund, but building this network has opened our eyes to high-performing, place-based alternatives that I plan to double down on. I also teach through Small Business Development Centers and mentor founders, which has become one of the most rewarding investments of time I can make.

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I jumped at the opportunity to interview Hartmann, in part to expose him to ideas around community capital. As you’ll see, this effort is a work in progress!

For our more conservative readers, I want to assure you that I would be delighted to interview any right-leaning luminaries as well. Pundits across the political spectrum need to get local investment onto their radar screens.

Paying subscribers will also find our latest listings of local investment opportunities from around the country. If you’re not a paying subscriber, please click on one of the two buttons below.

- Michael Shuman, Publisher

Make a Donation

Subscribe now

A Paid Subscription Gets You:

✔️ News Links

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✔️ Notable New Resources

✔️ Partner News & Voices

✔️ Events

✔️ Job Listings

Interview with Thom Hartmann

MS: Thanks for talking with us today. Your latest book, “The Last American President,” suggests that you’re doubtful about the United States having another election. Why have you come to that conclusion?

TH: I haven’t come to that conclusion. I do think, however, that since Trump seems so dedicated to following the playbook blazed by Putin and Orbán, the 2028 election (if he’s still alive and capable) could be so badly rigged that no Democrat could win. As reporter Greg Palast has documented, if Republicans hadn’t succeeded in throwing 4.2 million registered American citizens off the voting rolls—or prevented their votes from being counted—Harris would have easily won.

MS: I’m interested in Palast’s argument. You write: “[T]he suppression factor in 2024 was at least 2.3 percent of the vote. That translates to approximately 3,565,000 votes that, largely, should have gone to Kamala Harris. With those ballots properly counted, she would have topped Trump’s official total by 1.2 million and won the Electoral College with 286 votes.” If this is really the case, then shouldn’t the top priority of Democrats be to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill that outlaws many voting suppression practices?

TH: Yes. And it was the top priority of Democrats in 2021, when ending Citizens United and restoring voting rights were their first two pieces of legislation. Unfortunately, Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema stabbed the Democrats—and the country—in the back by refusing to break the Republican filibuster.

MS: Your book summarizes awful initiatives in the first few months of the Trump administration: the reckless DOGE cuts, the weaponization of the Justice Department, the extortion of colleges and law firms, the deployment of troops in blue cities, the betrayal of Ukraine, the freeing of the J6 insurrectionists, and the evisceration of climate policies. Several more months have passed since you put the manuscript to bed. What worries you the most now?

TH: My biggest concerns today have to do with the repression of the First Amendment guaranteed rights of free speech and assembly for protesting government policies. These cornerstones of republican government, embraced by the Founders, are essential to democracy and are among the first things autocrats set out to destroy. I also believe you could make an argument that quartering troops into cities that don’t want them is a violation of the Third Amendment, one that most people couldn’t even identify.

MS: Your book weaves together a powerful indictment of President Trump. You trace many of his worst personality traits—exaggerating, lying, being cruel, deflecting blame—to his stern father, Fred Trump, and his mentor, Roy Cohn. Why do you think so many Americans with a strong moral compass—I’m thinking, for example, about fundamentalist Christians—embraced this style of politics?

TH: I think that depends on what you mean by “strong moral compass.” I see fundamentalist Christians cheering on the death penalty, trashing queer people, wanting women and minorities to be second-class citizens, opposing low-cost healthcare and college for all Americans, opposing government-funded food aid to hungry people, and promoting hatred of immigrants as all fundamentally not just the opposite of a strong moral compass but also completely in conflict of the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and Matthew 25 (sheep and goats parable). Trump shares the views that are typically held by authoritarians, so there’s a natural alliance there. But it’s the antithesis of true Christian morality that anybody who’s actually read the words of Jesus would immediately recognize.

MS: You also argue that Trumpism is not just about Trump. It’s about a Republican Party that has steadily sacrificed its democratic principles since the presidency of Richard Nixon. Are there any Republicans left who can lead the party to be conservative and pro-democracy? Maybe Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger?

TH: I’m hopeful that Republicans of good conscience will step up. There’s a long list of Republicans and former Republicans who still believe in democracy. Most have abandoned Trump. Let’s put them in three categories.

First, there are former GOP politicians openly calling out Trump’s authoritarianism or opposing his previous candidacy because of his anti-democratic and unconstitutional behavior. This list includes the people you mentioned plus Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Larry Hogan, Charlie Baker, Jeb Bush, Christine Todd Whitman, Tom Ridge, Charlie Dent, Barbara Comstock, Fred Upton, Joe Walsh, Will Hurd, Denver Riggleman, Susan Molinari, and Ken Buck.

Second are former senior Republican officials who’ve awakened to the danger Trump represents to our republic. Their ranks include James Mattis, Mark Esper, H.R. McMaster, John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Bill Barr, John Kelly, Miles Taylor, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Olivia Troye, Stephanie Grisham, Sarah Matthews, and Anthony Scaramucci.

Third are former GOP leaders, strategists, consultants, and conservative thinkers who’ve called out Trump’s authoritarian behavior. They include Karl Rove, Bill Kristol, David Frum, Peter Wehner, Mona Charen, Charlie Sykes, Tim Miller, Amanda Carpenter, Lev Parnas, S.E. Cupp, George Will, Michael Steele, Joe Scarborough, Rick Wilson, Steve Schmidt, George Conway, Reed Galen, Mike Madrid, Jennifer Horn, Ron Steslow, Stuart Stevens, Tara Setmayer, Jeff Timmer, Chris Vance, and Fred Wellman.

MS: Clearly, though, they are no match for the MAGA takeover of the Republican party. You seem to blame primarily Republicans and Conservatives for the authoritarian mess we’re in now. Do you think there’s also some blame for Democrats and progressives?

TH: Inasmuch as Democrats followed the Clintons in adopting Reagan’s neoliberalism in 1993, abandoning the progressive principles of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, they set up the collapse of the Democratic Party’s embrace by average working class people. Biden pulled them back from that edge with some great progressive programs, but he and his White House communications team were so incompetent that to Americans, Trump and the GOP were able to paint him in a way that anybody who was paying attention wouldn’t have recognized.

MS: One thing I learned from your book was that you spent much of your life as a small business person. As you know, small business people are primarily affiliated with very right-leaning organizations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or the National Federation of Independent Business. I’m curious how you think small business people can be organized on behalf of reinvigorating democracy in the country?

TH: I do think this is possible. But a project of that scope takes money, which is why the Chamber has succeeded and the attempts to replicate it with progressive small business owners have failed. I helped start a small business owners’ group in Atlanta back in the 1980s that’s still around and is generally populated by progressive small business owners (although there are some conservatives). I believe most small business owners are offended by the GOP’s embrace of monopolies and low taxes on billionaires and massive corporations.

MS: Finally, do you invest locally yourself? If so, how?

TH: I’ve invested in and built my own businesses, including my writing and Substack newsletter and radio/TV show, and both pay considerable local taxes that help the local community. But I don’t play capitalist inasmuch as I don’t look for local opportunities for investment.

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Lyneir is a featured speaker at the upcoming Neighborhood Economics conference in the windy city on September 30 and October 1. I’ll be there as well, along with many of the community capital pioneers you’ve read about in these pages. Please consider coming and saying “hello” if you do!

Register today!

Paying subscribers will also find our latest listings of local investment opportunities around the country. If you’re not a paying subscriber, please show your love by clicking on one of the two buttons below.

- Michael Shuman, Publisher

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Interview with Lyneir Richardson

MS: Neighborhood Economics is about to descend on Chicago at the end of this month for its next conference. What are the most innovative forms of community economic development going on in the city that you hope attendees learn about?

LR: There is a growing innovation related to democratizing ownership of assets and strengthening neighborhoods. Many promising models are now coming online to address community and economic development goals. I think of this as “doing capitalism differently,” and I am excited to see the possibility of capitalism working for more low- and moderate-income people.

MS: Your own focus has been on real estate development through your company, Chicago TREND. Tell us about the origins of that company and how you decided to focus on real estate.

LR: Bob Weissbourd invited me to start working as a consultant on a project for the MacArthur Foundation. The initial research focused on strategies to strengthen commercial corridors, since they often provide the first impression of a neighborhood. We could see that if the commercial properties are blighted, disinvested, and “under-retailed” (meaning an oversupply of dollar stores, check cashing, and liquor stores), they can become a liability for the larger neighborhood, bring down home values, and attract crime. Our research resulted in a business plan for a for-profit social enterprise that is now Chicago TREND.

MS: Your current portfolio of projects includes five shopping centers. Why do you believe that shopping centers are a good entry point into community economic development?

LR: Neighborhood shopping centers, or strip malls as they are sometimes called, are a visible part of a community’s fabric. I believe that they help anchor small businesses, bring essential goods and services to residents, and they can help keep neighborhoods vibrant and attractive without causing gentrification. Investing in shopping centers (and other commercial real estate) is therefore an untapped and easy-to-understand wealth-building opportunity for low- and moderate-income people.

MS: Which neighborhoods did you choose for redevelopment and why?

LR: We invest in neighborhoods that have a majority Black population, such as Roseland and Bronzeville. My view is that, for a variety of reasons, the commercial property in these places is often overlooked and undervalued. It is a special niche. We now have the expertise to analyze opportunities for improving these commercial properties, evaluate the financial plausibility for reinvestment, and then structure financing. We also have relationships with national retailers and know how to help local small business owners.

MS: What’s the process by which you organize the projects to ensure that they are inclusively owned?

LR: I summarize our inclusive ownership work often in this way: fintech tools meet old school community organizing. Once we complete our due diligence and financial underwriting and decide a given shopping center meets our acquisition criteria, we draft a business plan and project pro forma. We have now worked three times successfully raising capital with the Small Change crowdfunding platform (a shout-out to Eve Picker, who is quirky but meticulous).

The platform allows us to post all of the information about the project for people to see and then make their investment decision. We leave the offering open for 45-69 days, and during this period, I have meetings in church basements, apartment building common areas, public libraries, and on Zoom calls. This is what feels like community organizing, because I meet with people face to face and communicate our vision and qualifications. I hope that they see the value of our work even if they decide not to invest.

MS: Your first project was helped with grants and loans from the MacArthur Foundation and The Chicago Community Trust. Does that mean that anyone who wants to replicate what you’ve done needs a big foundation in their backyard?

LR: It’s true that this work often requires grants, subsidies, and philanthropically motivated large impact investors. Why? Because we are in many instances trying to jump-start market-driven economic activity in the face of a history of disinvestment and, often, structural racism.

MS: How have your projects performed thus far for your investors? And how do you ultimately plan to exit them?

LR: We recently had two financial wins.

We sold a shopping center asset and achieved a 20% internal rate of return for our community investors. It showed that we have the ability to identify opportunities, enhance value, and exit profitably while staying true to our mission. We believe that similar financial outcomes will be achieved when other shopping centers we have invested in are sold.

We also had our first project that was able to make a 6% distribution from operating cash flow after only one year.

These proof points should help us to raise additional equity capital and continue to expand our work nationally. Our investors are especially pleased that we have provided leases, contracts, and business opportunities to 23 Black entrepreneurs and professional service providers.

MS: How can readers of The Main Street Journal invest in your projects?

LR: I am proud of the fact that we have now helped over 380 community investors become co-owners of shopping centers in Baltimore and Chicago. My goal is to get to 1,000.

We currently have shopping centers under contract for acquisition in Columbus, OH, and Detroit, MI. As soon as we have SEC approval to launch, your readers will have the chance to invest with as little as $1,000. I hope that our offering in Columbus will be open for investment when the Neighborhood Economics Conference convenes in Chicago.

MS: Finally, how do you personally invest locally in Chicago?

LR: Chicago is my hometown, and I have spent the first 43 years of my life there. I have invested time in service as a commissioner on the City Planning Commission and board member of the Cook County Land Bank, Southland Development Corporation, and numerous nonprofit organizations and civic initiatives. Early in my career, I invested in and developed, built, or rehabbed over 300 units of housing in south and west neighborhoods. I am proud to actively invest capital and support small developers and mentor Chicago entrepreneurs.

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It all came crashing down. The movement’s best leaders got distracted, frustrated, or bored. Some got ill as they aged. Foundations lost interest. Personal fights thinned out the boards. A few thought that the best way to diversify the movement was to kill the concept of business networks altogether.

Many of us—myself included—continue struggling to figure out how to pick up the pieces of the movement and start anew. The power of local businesses in building local economies and a sense of community remains as potent a force as ever. And that power remains largely untapped as economic developers continue to embrace failed strategies of corporate attraction.

Around the country, two dozen or so business networks have survived—and some of those are thriving. None more than Local First Arizona, which now has more than 2,700 dues-paying members and more than 60 full-time staff. In this issue of The Main Street Journal, we’re pleased to interview Kimber Lanning, the founder and CEO of Local First Arizona. Yes, a statewide scale has contributed to her success, but so have effective business services, a powerful media strategy, and smart politicking. You’ll learn all about it below.

Paying subscribers will also find the latest listings of investment opportunities in promising local businesses and funds. If you’d like to see—and use—these listings, please click on the second button below.

Finally, a note that as tireless as we are in serving you, we need a break. We’ll take the next two weeks off, and will be back—rested and reenergized in early September.

- Michael Shuman, Publisher

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Subscribe now

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✔️ News Links

✔️ In-Depth Interviews

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✔️ Notable New Resources

✔️ Partner News & Voices

✔️ Events

✔️ Job Listings

Interview with the Founder of Local First Arizona

MS: Kimber, thank you for talking with us today. Let’s go back to the beginning in 2003. Why did you start Local First Arizona?

KL: I think it's important to recognize the context at that time. My background is in the arts, and I opened a record store in Phoenix called Stinkweeds in 1987, which placed me squarely in the middle of the arts community. And I still believe bookstores and record stores have a special place in holding communities together. They were the most important “Third Places” before placemaking was a thing. I saw my store as creating culture in a city that was largely overrun by chain stores. In fact, our city leaders were fighting to get more chain stores to move in. There was a point at which we had two chain restaurants for every local one. Today, by the way, that ratio is reversed.

I believe that unique, independent businesses create a culture that connects people to their hometown and makes them feel connected to each other and to their place. But at that time, we had many bright young people leaving Arizona to go do great things in someone else's state because, they'd say, this place had no culture and no soul.

My focus was to simply connect more people to their place and keep young people here so they could do great things in our state. But then Civic Economics did a study in 2002 that showed the economic case for supporting a local bookstore and a record store in Austin, Texas. The study showed how counterproductive it was for the city to subsidize Borders to move in across the street from these stores. It was the economic case, not just the cultural value, and that cinched it for me. That's when I launched Local First Arizona.

MS: Fast forward twenty-plus years to the present, and you now have 5,700 certified local business members. Given that most local business networks have 100 to 500 members, that’s a remarkable number. How did you achieve this level of recruitment?

KL: This is a tricky question that has a very lengthy answer. We have quite nearly tried everything over the years, but I think some of our biggest reasons for success would include hiring an in-house marketing team, which has grown to eight full-time people, and leveraging earned media through storytelling and exceptional pitches. We have 2,700 paying members, but another 3,000 are listed in our directory.

The directory serves two important functions. The first to build value for the paying members to help them improve their search engine optimization and gain new customers. And the second is to create an easy-to-use and high-quality search tool for everyday people. If we’re going to change consumer behavior, we need to make it easier for them to find options. We are currently using AI tools to create a search experience that is as comprehensive as Google, but eliminates nonlocal businesses from the results entirely. So, over time, we've come to look at the directory as a tool that’s as valuable for the public as it is for businesses.

Some businesses join to help get found by consumers. Many join because our dues are still very low (starting at $79 for rural areas with up to 5 employees), and they want to demonstrate their hometown pride as well as participate in some of our civic engagements. Startup businesses join to have access to our business educational classes or resources. Another group of joiners are the large legacy businesses that want to be known as “Arizona grown,” or those such as our community banks and credit unions, who truly benefit from our “Move Your Money” campaigns that require people to open a local account.

MS: What is the range of services you provide to your members today?

KL: We provide a lot of services for small business startups, as well as for businesses looking to grow from, say, three to 10 employees or from 10 to 25 employees. Some examples:

• Currently, we have six-month business accelerator programs in English and Spanish that help launch or strengthen startups. Those include a whole range of learning opportunities such as improving a personal credit score, building a loan readiness strategy, or strengthening capacity for HR, marketing, and business planning.

• We also offer a wide range of boot camps (6-8 classes each) aimed at specific industries such as food businesses. We have launched five incubator kitchens, which cost the entrepreneurs about 25% market rate, and they also gain access to specific types of technical assistance within the food industry.

• We believe that in-language support is important, and as such, we offer technical assistance in five different languages.

• As part of our overall strategy to increase access to capital and financial power, we run four different micro-loan programs, which are aimed at rural communities, indigenous entrepreneurs, food businesses, or those businesses looking to reduce their environmental impact.

• Finally, we offer assistance on specific topics such as Employee Ownership and Zero Waste initiatives.

We do our best to be responsive to what our business community needs!

MS: That’s an impressive portfolio. You also seem to do quite a bit of media for your members.

KL: Yes. We have helped thousands of businesses get a media spotlight over the years. And our networking mixers still have hundreds of attendees. Some businesses find value in our policy announcements, too, which alert them to both good and bad small business impacts.

MS: Were there any mistakes you made along the way that you think other local business network organizers could learn from?

KL: So many! I think early on, our biggest mistakes revolved around how we talked about the work. For many years, we promoted “Buy Local.” But then we decided that it is not the right message, because it flies in the face of equity. There are many communities that have no local ownership or no local options. So in about 2013, we started talking about diversifying the economy and creating opportunities for all. I recently gave a talk called “The Economics of Dissent,” where I spoke about the importance of buying secondhand and bartering, as well as DIY strategies like growing your own food.

I think also, at least initially, it was not great to have both a 501c6 and a 501c3 for a solid 10 years, because we had to do everything twice when we were still trying to figure out how to do it in the first place. But as it turns out, now 23 years in, the dual nonprofits are really beneficial.

MS: If foundation and government grants were to disappear tomorrow, would Local First Arizona still thrive? And what advice would you offer to other business networks trying to develop revenue streams to pay for their activities?

KL: Well, government grants have gone away already. We’ve had about 23% of our budget evaporate starting in January. But we have been able to replace that largely through foundation funding. Our budget is pretty diverse and includes foundation and corporate grants, membership dues, sponsorships, donations, and contracts, which we consider fee-for-service work. Having many different kinds of revenue streams helps us handle volatility. Given that, if foundation grants went away, we would still survive, but not in the same way, not with the 65 or so staff that we have today. Our membership dues only pay for about three or four employees, and many of our other programs would be vulnerable, but most would still be standing.

I think our biggest area of opportunity is fee-for-service work. For example, our County invested a million dollars in us to manage their small business technical assistance. And we were able to deliver a beautiful ROI for them. We hired an economic study group to show them how they won back their $1 million investment within one year in sales tax generation, and how that payback would also continue every year for the next decade. So they got a 10 to 1 ROI for that one contract with us.

We now have a $1.2 million line item in the state budget for rural economic development. We are also negotiating a contract with our local credit union coalition to drive new customers their way.

MS: One of your efforts that I was particularly impressed by focused on procurement. You commissioned a study from Civic Economics that showed how much more tax money in-state procurements generated for the Arizona economy. What changes in public policy came about as a result of that study?

KL: While that effort did not successfully lead to a permanent change in the state's procurement policy, it did lead to a permanent change with the City of Phoenix. The City now has a separate procurement process focused on local businesses, and the only way they will open the RFP to national or international companies is if they do not get three competitive bids from Arizona-based options. That has led to tens of millions of dollars being spent with local businesses. We recently helped the City break up their landscaping contract, which had been one massive contract with one national company for over 20 years. We were able to split that into 12 smaller contracts, and four graduates from one of our Spanish-language business accelerator programs won a piece of that business, which was huge for them.

The Speaker of the House, who blocked my state-procurement reform bill so many years ago, called me up just recently to tell me that he was wrong. I may get back around to it sometime soon.

MS: What other public policies have you successfully advocated for? And given Arizona’s conservative bent, how have you been able to sell these policies?

KL: Local First Arizona played a key role in limiting corporate subsidies in our state. We were able to get the state legislature on our side by showing the economic absurdity of the strategy, and they, in turn, limited municipal ability to issue corporate subsidies, period.

We also played a critical role in requiring Amazon to collect sales tax just like the rest of us. Many of us remember when Amazon claimed that local tax codes were too complicated and that they should be exempt, which they were for a very long time.

I think part of our success in Arizona is simply being able to speak comprehensively about business and economics, which is a lot more commonplace in Republican circles. I think even looking at the most recent presidential campaign, the Harris-Walz ticket was not able to speak intelligently about small business or economics, and I think it really hurt them in the end.

Today, I have friends from across the country who will send me talking points and ask me to offer suggestions when they know they're going to be in front of a conservative audience. I guess it's just a skill I picked up living here and cutting my teeth in front of audiences that will throw you out if you sound like a ‘bleeding heart liberal’ rather than a business leader. And when you’re a small female like me, you get only one shot! And I’m here as proof one can be both a bleeding heart liberal and a business leader. It’s all in the language you choose and the stories you tell.

MS: While Local First Arizona has been thriving, I would say that the national effort to spread local business networks has sputtered and almost disappeared. What ideas do you have for reviving the national movement and spreading your success?

KL: There are several factors at play. First, it's important to know that there's a whole new generation that doesn't join anything. There are only two kinds of power: there is money, and then there's organized people, and right now, money is kicking our asses. That motivates people to get involved, but they’re still not likely to join or pay an annual membership fee.

Second, to get businesses involved, it's important to include them in your overall strategy. That means that the typical Chamber of Commerce version of a Buy Local network is irrelevant and dead. We instead need to teach people, not just businesses, how to create and lead a movement based on the principles of local economies. If you can get one person to change their spending habits in a way that's way more valuable than one more business paying membership dues.

Overall, I would love to find more people like me who are business-minded but rooted in Triple Bottom Line ethics, who truly understand and value what an inclusive economy means. We are pro-business progressives.

MS: We at The Main Street Journal are interested in local investment. What kinds of programs do you have to facilitate more local investment in Arizona?

KL: I have a couple of answers for you. First, we have partnered with philanthropic foundations to get them to tap into their reserves, to give us low-interest funding, which we then turn into microloans. For example, we have a local foundation here that invested $250,000 at 1% over five years, which we then, in turn, lend out in microloans up to $30K at 3-4% interest. In addition, we run the Rural Energy for America program, which helps small businesses and small towns secure funding for clean energy projects. Often, we help them connect to SSBCI funding, which is the State Small Business Credit Initiative, to create investment pools. We also launched the Arizona Economic Resource Center during COVID, which helped small towns and tribes secure over $120 million in new grants and loans. We’re currently advocating for the state to set aside $50M for small towns to use as bridge funding for capital projects. Finally, we are using our voice to shape the Greater Arizona Development Authority so that they are more inclusive toward small regional projects and small businesses.

But in terms of 401(k) plans, or other types of Individual Retirement Accounts, we are not currently active in that space. We send those with interest to you!

One other thing I’m working on is opening up our Green Loan Fund to local investment. So folks could contribute a few thousand dollars, which we would then loan to small businesses to reduce their environmental impacts. People need to be very values-aligned because they won’t be making more than 3-4% on their money, but if they want to help, it’s better than having it sit in the bank.

MS: Finally, how do you personally invest locally?

KL: In a way, I've invested my whole life locally, meaning I have truly hung my hat on local economy work, and I eat this stuff for lunch. Investment for me looks like local banking, local mortgages, local spending at every turn. I use independently owned companies for nearly everything that I do (our local utility is a co-op), and I mostly invest any extra money that I have in real estate, which I then, in turn, leverage to support the local economy. Oh–and I give to local nonprofits as well.

MS: Amazing.

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All I wanna do when the day is through
Is linger here on the front porch with you
From the wicker swing, while the night birds sing
We'll watch the fireflies sparkin, do some sparkin to

How the hours fly, as the moon drifts by
How sweet the air as we stare at the sun
Oh how I'd love to linger here like this,
Hold your hand and steal a kiss or two on the front porch with you

~ Burl Ives, “On the Front Porch”

Most U.S. residents can find out what’s going on in their communities through a website and a linked app called Nextdoor. My own experience with Nextdoor is that it systematically destroys neighborly goodwill. People use it primarily to post complaints about their least favorite friends, neighbors, and local businesses. The dialogues are unconstructive and mean, and the algorithms nudge users to engage in the topics with the deepest, angriest divisions. Meanwhile, the advertisements encourage readers to spend their money at the big national chains and brands that can afford big ad buys.

Nextdoor represents what more and more of us have come to hate about Big Tech. Its business model is to bring out the worst in us and manipulate us into making the Musks, Zuckerbergs, and Bezos of the world richer while our communities become poorer.

This need not be our fate! For 25 years, Michael and Valerie Wood-Lewis have developed a local online network in Vermont called Front Porch Forum (FPF). They have built a base of nearly a quarter of a million users. And through careful moderation, curation, and design, they bring out the best in their users. Dialogues are polite. Problem-solving is the focus. Everyone—users, communities, local businesses—wins.

This issue of The Main Street Journal features an interview with Michael Wood-Lewis, who explains FPF’s history, strategy, and services. Their success highlights opportunities for communities everywhere to take back their social capital from the destructive hand of Big Tech.

Paying subscribers will also find the latest listings of investment opportunities in promising local businesses and funds. If you’d like to see—and use—these listings, please click on one of the two buttons below.

- Michael Shuman, Publisher

Make a Donation

Subscribe now

A Paid Subscription Gets You:

✔️ News Links

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✔️ Monthly In-Person Meetings with Michael Shuman

✔️ Notable New Resources

✔️ Partner News & Voices

✔️ Events

✔️ Job Listings

MS: Michael, thank you for talking with us today. As I understand it, Front Porch Forum was founded by you and your wife, Valerie, in the neighborhood of Burlington, Vermont, where you live, 25 years ago. How did it come about?

MWL: It's a pleasure to speak with you, Michael! I'm a big fan of your work with The Main Street Journal.

Front Porch Forum is rooted in the concepts of localism. Way back in 2000, my wife Valerie and I were new to our Burlington neighborhood, and we were eager to connect with neighbors and find community. But at that moment, it was proving difficult! And, in many ways, it's just gotten harder in our country. We were influenced in part by the just-published book, Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam, and started a neighborhood email group, which was the cutting-edge digital technology of that moment. And it took off! Soon, most of the 500-household neighborhood was participating, and wonderful things started happening: Lost dogs were found, ladders were borrowed, rides to the airport were secured–and each exchange was with a clearly identified nearby neighbor.

In 2006, we made a leap and started a business around this concept, calling it Front Porch Forum (FPF). We built software based on the lessons we learned, and opened up to about 50 neighborhoods and small towns in greater Burlington.

MS: You’ve grown enormously since you started. I read that you now have about 240,000 users. Over what geographic area do you now operate? And do you have any expansion plans?

MWL: Vermont is a small state. Among the existing 270,000 households here, FPF has 240,000 active member accounts. In many places, FPF is far and away the most popular way to communicate and tune in.

While we have some experiments running in adjacent states, FPF's focus is clearly on improving our services in our home state of Vermont. Rather than be "a mile wide and an inch deep," we aim for the opposite. Further, as I mentioned above, FPF is grounded in the concepts of localism. We've seen too many examples of compelling start-ups that metastasize into Big Tech behemoths that then inflict huge harms on the world. No, thank you.

MS: What are the main services you provide?

MWL: At this stage, FPF serves every town and neighborhood in the state of Vermont. Each local community has its own dedicated online Forum, Community Calendar, and Business Directory. Further, each of these features is networked, so in addition to focusing on their single local community, FPF members can explore content from neighboring communities via the Forum, Calendar, and Directory. We also have a popular Search feature. And FPF members access their local FPF via our mobile app, our website, or email.

MS: Give us some examples of how the communities in your network have made good use of your services?

MWL: FPF helps people in each Vermont locale solve everyday problems: find a babysitter, get a job, line up a reliable plumber, find a free couch, and so on. But FPF isn't designed to optimize for babysitters or plumbers. It's made to increase local social capital, and it works.

Vermonters sign up for their local Forum. They read their daily issue of postings from neighbors (with a few from local government, small businesses, and nonprofits in the mix). They respond to individual posts. They occasionally post themselves. They talk about what they read on their Forum with people in their lives. Having a town full of people who witness daily acts of neighborliness on FPF has a profound impact on each and every community in our state.

MS: I love your emphasis on social capital, and that you include local businesses as part of it. You said you maintain a list of local businesses in your network. How does a business qualify as local, and how do you encourage members to support them? Are there local investment opportunities you flag?

MWL: Any business that operates in a Vermont town is welcome to create an FPF member account and participate in their local FPF. We don't have a "local" test for them to pass. That said, the vast majority of our nearly 16,000 business and nonprofit members that have come to us and created accounts and Directory listings would easily fit even the strictest definitions of "local." Walmart and Amazon have likely never heard of us, and, if they have, they're not interested.

Our local business and nonprofit members can participate in their local Forum and create a Business Directory listing for free. They can pay $10-20 per month for an enhanced plan that gives them modestly more access. And they can purchase advertising to reach more places beyond their hometown or neighborhood. These good folks keep coming back and share many stories of how FPF helped them find customers, employees, vendors, and volunteers. FPF has a huge impact on micro and small businesses in Vermont.

MS: Have you ever tried to quantify that impact?

MWL: That's a challenge that I would love to tackle at some point. What I know now is that more than 16,000 small businesses and local nonprofits have created listings in our statewide network of local Business Directories and participate in our local Forums. Further, an independent survey found that 48% of our members report buying from local businesses due to what they read on their local FPF in the past year.

We also have lots of specific success stories: A local music festival coordinator said that 57% of its audience came from a FPF campaign. A local advertising company has gotten much higher response rates to its surveys conducted through FPF. Another company found itself inundated with job applicants after marketing a position on FPF.

MS: One of the features of Front Porch Forum I find striking is moderation. Like much of the rest of America, my community has been taken over by Nextdoor, an app that has very limited moderation, and the stream of comments is often angry, insulting, and unhelpful. Tell us about your decision to moderate all the dialogues.

MWL: Front Porch Forum pre-dates Facebook. We also began many years before Nextdoor. We believe Big Tech social media is extractive. It pulls wealth from local communities and exploits them. Its content is driven by algorithms that fuel division, disinformation, and worse. By contrast, FPF is constructive: our model builds local trust and social capital, instead of tearing these concepts down.

FPF moderates all content before publication. Our model is more like a newspaper's letters-to-the-editor section than Big Tech social media. Our staff of professional moderators compares each posting against our Terms of Use. The vast majority of postings take a few seconds to review and approve (e.g., "bicycle for sale"), but catching the one rotten apple before it has a chance to spoil the barrel is key to our model. Our nonpartisan Terms of Use focus on common-sense things, e.g., nothing illegal, no personal attacks on neighbors, and no spreading of harmful disinformation.

MS: It all makes such simple sense. I see that users can subscribe for free. What, then, is your revenue model? Do you receive government grants?

MWL: Our staff has grown to 30 people, so payroll is our largest expense. We do not pursue grants. FPF's core service is free and open to everyone in a given Vermont community. Our primary source of revenue is advertising sales to local businesses, nonprofits, government agencies, and candidates for office. We also sell some forms of expanded access to that same collection of entities. Finally, we gratefully accept donations from our generous members.

MS: I understand that you’re thinking of converting the company to employee ownership. What framework will you be using, and when do you plan on beginning?

MWL: FPF is a family-owned small business that is also a Vermont public benefit corporation. Our public benefit—that is, our social mission—is to help neighbors connect and build community. We're all about more resilient small towns and neighborhoods in Vermont.

We're actively exploring our next stage of ownership and governance. We're particularly interested in the employee ownership trust model. Stay tuned over the next few years!

MS: Big picture, you’ve been operating for a quarter of a century. Do you feel like the communities you’re serving are stronger as a result? What are the indicators you follow to determine whether you are successful?

MWL: We have literally thousands of FPF member testimonials about how FPF has made a big positive impact on individuals, small businesses, and local communities. Additionally, external researchers conducted large member surveys in 2017 and 2023 that confirmed quantitatively what we've long observed anecdotally: that FPF works! Here are some highlights from the 2023 independent survey of more than 13,000 FPF members:

• 97% find FPF valuable for their community

• 89% take action locally multiple times per year in response to postings

• 85% frequently turn to FPF for local news (vs 61% for radio and newspapers, 51% for TV, 37% for Facebook)

• 65% are more informed about local contractors due to FPF

• 48% have made a purchase from a local business in the past year due to FPF

MS: Impressive! Okay, one final question: How do you and Valerie invest locally yourselves?

MWL: Of course, our biggest local investment is in the business! That is, FPF is a family-owned small business, so much of our capital is tied up in it, and making payroll twice a month for 30 staff is a huge responsibility! Beyond that, we have savings invested in a credit union. We love our local food co-op and recently recouped a member loan we made in support of the co-op's expansion a few years back. Further, we have enjoyed being active members of various CSAs (community supported agriculture) over the past 25 years. We also work hard to buy local. Check out Myti.com as a cool example!

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“There’s one thing worse than being ignored by investors and financial institutions: being bought and sold like chattel on global markets for profit by investors who are already rich and powerful.”

Abello writes powerfully about new and emerging neighborhood-scale capital institutions in Next City. Over a decade, he has written more than 600 articles about these innovations, and we frequently offer links to his excellent journalism. He has also recently written a new book, The Banks We Deserve: Reclaiming Community Banking for a Just Economy.

We’re pleased to interview Abello in this issue below. He offers provocative thoughts about gentrification, Opportunity Zones, New Markets Tax Credits, and the overall arc of the local investment movement. He sees it bending toward justice, but very imperfectly. You can—and should—read more by subscribing to Next City and Oscar’s weekly newsletter, both filled with great reporting.

Paid subscribers will also find our latest listings on local investment opportunities—in businesses and community funds. If you’re not yet a subscriber, please consider clicking the second button below.

- Michael Shuman, Publisher

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MS: Your most recent article, “Trump’s Big Beautiful Tax Bill and the Future of Economic Development,” notes that you’ve now worked for Next City for a decade, interviewed 1,500 people, and published more than 600 stories. That’s a remarkable track record. How has Next City grown over the past decade?

OPA: I guess there are a few ways to think about growth. In terms of daily newsletter subscribers, we’re up past 60,000 now. Of those, 12,000 new subscribers have joined us since January of this year. Take that as you will. I could also say the bi-weekly newsletter I write, called The Bottom Line, has gone from 2,000 subscribers in 2020 to 12,000 today. We’ve also grown in terms of partner newsrooms with whom we’ve collaborated or have an ongoing partnership, like Shelterforce on our housing coverage. Since I’ve been around, we’ve also partnered with El Paso Matters, Virginia Public Media, The Jersey Bee, CivicLex, and others like those in our Detroit reporting hub.

MS: We appreciate how many of your articles are about local investment. How, in your view, has this movement evolved since you started writing about it?

OPA: A lot of community-controlled real estate or locally controlled finance models I first encountered early on in this work were just conversations or organizing hubs. Today, they’ve made investments, they’re acquiring real estate, and they’re growing, learning, and evolving in how they govern and make decisions about land and money. These models are more connected today, in part because of the pandemic that forced everyone to get comfortable with video conferencing. But also a few months ago, at a conference in Philadelphia, I was enjoying happy hour with representatives of four such groups from four entirely different cities across the country. One of the topics of discussion? The challenges of doing property management in a way that aligns with the values they all share around non-extraction and non-exploitation.

MS: Tell us about a couple of the most inspiring local investment stories you’ve covered in recent months.

OPA: One of the first stories I did this year was a follow-up looking at Philly’s Kensington Corridor Trust, which recently turned five years old. So far, they’ve acquired 30 properties and just made their first multi-million-dollar acquisition. We talked about how things are going so far, what’s been working for them, and what some limitations or barriers are still lingering on their road ahead.

Another story was about Texas National Bank, a community bank in the Rio Grande Valley, which is at the very southern tip of Texas. It’s more than a hundred years old, and one of the oldest Hispanic-led banks in the country. They had trouble finding developers building homes at price points that their moderate-income clients could afford, so they found a way for the bank to lead the development of those homes itself.

MS: In your most recent article, you write: “From New York to the Twin Cities to Denver to the Bay Area, I’ve seen protest chants, protest signs and flyers pasted to telephone poles saying some version of one message: This neighborhood is not for sale.” Can you elaborate on the implications for grassroots approaches to economic development?

OPA: For so many Black and Brown communities across the country, there are painful memories of how they’ve been exploited for the sake of profits for absentee landlords or shareholders who remain mostly nameless and faceless. There are too many examples to list of when a new investment comes into a neighborhood with no prior relationship to anyone in the neighborhood, and the next thing you know, everyone who was there before the investment came in gets priced out. It happens even when the new investment makes promises to do something good for the community. The developers and their investors get profits, while those who were there before lose their community for the sake of those profits. Rinse and repeat. People are tired of seeing that cycle, and they’re wary of any economic development approach that depends on any version of that cycle.

MS: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, in their book “Abundance,” seem to argue that neighborhood forces like those you write about are the enemies of progress. To accomplish big things, like a massive expansion of the housing stock, they say we need to shorten project approval processes, even if it means ignoring some neighborhood opposition. How do you see it?

OPA: I haven’t read the book, so I’m not going to comment on something I haven’t read or seen myself just yet. What I can say generally about shortening project approval processes is, shortening them for whom? If we magically eliminated all environmental impact analysis laws and all zoning or permitting, who do you think would benefit the most? Even with all that bureaucracy gone, it would still take a lot of resources up front to acquire property and do all the pre-development architecture and engineering work before any shovels break any ground. And besides, there are also plenty of examples to show that if a project is politically desirable enough, the approval process can be dramatically shortened.

MS: You report that Trump’s “beautiful bill” makes two community development programs, Opportunity Zones (OZs) and New Markets Tax Credits(NMTCs), permanent. But you then say that from a community development standpoint, we should be happier with the NMTCs than OZs. Why?

OPA: I wouldn’t use the word “happier,” necessarily, but I do think there is an important distinction to make between NMTCs and OZs. It comes from that growing sentiment around “this neighborhood is not for sale.”

OZs literally invite outside investors into low-income neighborhoods and put essentially zero requirements on them to provide actual benefits to actual residents of these communities. It’s just assumed that the lack of investment is the problem, and any investment from any investor wealthy enough to use the tax break will solve the problem.

Under NMTCs, which I also report is far from ideal even now, the structure of the program does two things: first, it avoids the use of speculative investor profits as a driver of investment; and secondly, it opens up possibilities for returning ownership of property to their surrounding communities, potentially breaking the “buy and sell” cycle of financialized real estate asset management.

MS: Those are good observations. Let’s shift to your recently published book called The Banks We Deserve: Reclaiming Community Banking for a Just Economy. Tell us about the book’s central argument.

OPA: In order for this country to do big things like closing racial disparities in quality of life, building enough housing that most people can actually afford, or transitioning to entirely clean and renewable energy, we need a more locally owned and locally controlled banking system. We’ve never done anything big in this country without little banks. Even today, after decades of banking consolidation, little banks still do a lot more for communities than the biggest banks. The four largest banks in the U.S. collectively have upwards of $8 trillion in assets, of which around $54 billion are construction loans. Meanwhile, the 4,000 remaining community banks across the country have just $2.7 trillion in assets, of which $151 billion are construction loans. It wasn’t that long ago when we had a much more local banking system. We need it to be so again, only without the redlining and the funding of car-based suburban sprawl.

MS: I find your writing about the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) pretty positive. The CRA places affirmative obligations on bigger banks to reinvest locally. My own view is that it also provided a permission slip for these banks to merge and gobble up smaller banks. Would the expansion of community banking require rethinking the CRA?

OPA: We probably agree more than you think about the CRA. One of the statistics I cite in my book is that in the late 1970s, when the CRA was written, more than half of bank branches belonged to a bank that was headquartered in the same county as the branch. Another stat I cite is that the four largest banks today account for around 40 percent of assets in the banking system, but 40 years ago, these same four banks only accounted for six percent of the banking system. The CRA was written as a way for people to hold banks accountable based in their own communities. It was not envisioned at the time that any single bank would need to be held accountable for meeting the credit needs of thousands of communities across the entire country because no such bank existed at the time the law was passed.

MS: You note–with justifiable pride–that 75% of the people you’ve interviewed are women or people of color. But we’re now in an era where the federal government is demanding that we avoid any gender or racial preferences. What do you think is the future of DEI in the community capital movement?

OPA: As a journalist, I’m privileged to talk with many different people on a regular basis, and I get to see so many different possible futures based on the different backgrounds and contexts of my sources. Not all of them, in fact, I’d guess it’s a minority of my sources, describe what they do as doing or bringing DEI to community capital or whatever sphere of work they’re in. For most of them, they’re building power, they’re building institutions, they’re practicing alternative ways of doing real estate or finance or commerce more broadly. They’re building alternatives that reflect the values they share. And there is certainly a lot of fear, and I would add a lot of grief, floating around these networks and spaces right now for so many reasons. But these efforts are still moving forward because they embrace the notion that growing these alternatives is a necessary part of building a world where no one feels this kind of fear or grief.

MS: I like that observation! Okay, final question: Are you able to practice what you preach? How do you invest locally?

OPA: For the sake of avoiding any sense of impropriety, I won’t say which one, but I do bank with an institution headquartered nearby where I live in New York City, and it’s one with an unusual history and ownership structure that helps protect its mission-driven orientation and accountability to the communities it serves. That’s about all the local investing I can do on a journalist’s salary.

MS: Thank you again for all the important writing you do!

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The “decent” part refers to both decency and decentralization. If you believe in localization, as Paul and I do, then it’s time to figure out how to reorganize our increasingly centralized and dysfunctional political and economic systems. Decent Tuesdays will bring you articles, ideas, and interviews with provocative thinking about decentralization.

To understand my own views on decentralization, read this paper I wrote for The Next System Project nine years ago. It’s called “A Million Utopias,” and I argue for giving every community—left, right, and center—more freedom to craft their own policies without central government interference. Nearly a century ago, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote about the importance of 50 state laboratories for democracy through federalism. I would prefer we think about the 36,000 laboratories in our cities, towns, and villages.

I’ve tried to distill the ideas from that paper into the “Localism Manifesto” below. I hope you enjoy it—and welcome your feedback. It’s a work in progress.

Paying subscribers will also find our latest listings of local investment opportunities. If you’re not a paying subscriber and like what we’re trying to do, please click on the second button below.

- Michael Shuman, Publisher

Make a Donation

Subscribe now

A Paid Subscription Gets You:

✔️ News Links

✔️ In-Depth Interviews

✔️ Latest Listings of Local Investment Opportunities

✔️ Monthly In-Person Meetings with Michael Shuman

✔️ Notable New Resources

✔️ Partner News & Voices

✔️ Events

✔️ Job Listings

A Localism Manifesto

Planet Earth is experiencing a five-alarm emergency, yet our political systems are paralyzed and incapable of responding. Unprecedented hurricanes, floods, droughts, fires, and other climate disasters are overwhelming us. Inequality is at a historic high, with 3,000 billionaires shaping our political systems and civil societies. Our once open and vibrant democracies are mutating into dictatorships. Our economies, which were remarkably stable after World War II, continually careen between uncontrolled inflation and unemployment. The list of seemingly insoluble national and global problems is growing.

But we also believe there is a clear path forward that has received little attention. And that solution is localism: a commitment to place, supported through the decentralization of power, action, and our economies.

Around the world are exciting examples of localism’s success: communities increasingly able to feed themselves through greenhouses, vertical growing, and food sovereignty programs; urban organizations solving homelessness through tiny houses and community land trusts; cooperatives, nonprofits, and B Corps removing the walls between managers and workers; neighborhoods using cutting edge technologies to be self-reliant in energy and water. Localism is about accelerating the start-up, maturity, and spreading of these kinds of projects worldwide.

We believe that localism can not only provide a powerful new framework for solving our most pressing problems. It’s also a philosophy that offers a radically hopeful politics and opens new possibilities for cracking our calcified political systems, collaborating across ideological lines.

Localism is not utopian. It describes the reality of power for most of human history. And it can be seen today—however imperfectly—in the federalist structures of countries like Canada, Germany, and the United States. Perhaps the closest living example of localism is Switzerland, where the national government is so minor that almost no one can name its President, and yet the country ranks at the top of global rankings of economic, social, and environmental performance.

What Is Localism?

Localism is fundamentally about our power in place. We all have it, whether we exercise it or not. It rests on four principles:

Principle #1 – The Imperative of Action

Localism means that if we discover a problem in our backyard, we address it immediately and locally. We don’t wait for permission, assistance, or money from higher levels of government, and we don’t waste time pointing fingers at others. Localists are fundamentally solutions-oriented.

If we can’t solve the problem on our own, we solve as much of it as we can and recruit other jurisdictions—both neighboring communities and high levels of government—to work with us.

The goal is not to go it alone, but to favor mindful action over inattention. Act, experiment, learn, try again. The operable phrase is not NIMBY (“not in my backyard!”), but BIMBY (“begin in my backyard!”).

By solving as much of any problem as we can locally, we maximize our power and minimize the burdens on higher levels of government. The less they have to do, the greater their chance of success.

Principle #2 – Subsidiarity

Localists insist that power be held primarily at the local level, with states holding less power, countries less still, and global institutions the least amount. By power, we mean the power collectively to tax, regulate, and administer projects. Political scientists call this structure subsidiarity. The logic of localism suggests that local governments in most countries should have significantly stronger powers of taxation, regulation, and spending than they have today.

Only when there is a strong consensus that power must be exerted at a higher level—perhaps because local solutions are unworkable, unfair, or inefficient—should power move up. Absent a good reason to go higher, the presumption is always that power should remain local.

Localism doesn’t mean that any community’s choices are acceptable, no matter how cruel, foolish, or insensitive. It just places a higher burden on the central government before it thwarts local action. Greater levels of consensus should be required for power to move upwards.

Principle #3 – Partnership

Localism does not necessarily mean going it alone. It can also mean finding partners to serve local needs. Sometimes that’s higher levels of government—the region or the state—but increasingly, it’s other communities around the world struggling with similar challenges. Responsible localists look everywhere for solutions and insights.

Principle #4 – Tolerance

Localism means live and let live. Localists appreciate that every community is different, with different values, ideas, and traditions. When appropriately empowered, every community will make different choices. In a world where your community is allowed to move closer to its ideals, other communities may choose to move further away. A localist world is one where we learn to tolerate choices made by other communities we despise, as long as they respect basic human rights.

Localists are not powerless to express their dissatisfaction with other communities. They can protest and lobby. They can create partnerships with beleaguered allies in those communities. They can divest, boycott, or avoid economic interests in these communities. But ultimately, the decision about how to organize a community is primarily the responsibility of its residents.

Localism shifts our political purposes. Instead of striving to grab central power and impose one solution on all communities, we strive to create frameworks that allow communities to make different choices that we all can live with. This is a fundamentally different kind of political project—one that will disappoint and frustrate the total victories sought by the left and right today.

Why Localism?

The cornerstone of localism is a belief that neighbors are the best stewards of their own well-being. Communities have a better sense of their own needs and interests than distant politicians, and are best able to organize a meaningful, participatory democracy. They have natural incentives for managing their resources, as many Native American cultures demonstrate, for seven or more generations.

Because local leaders have closer and more personal relationships with their constituents, they are more inclined to approach problems pragmatically, build coalitions, and get things done. The level of trust in state and local leaders in the United States, for example, is significantly higher than trust in national leaders.

The leaders of central governments, less tethered to the responsibilities of governance and less connected to the impacts of their policies, are more inclined to ideology, posturing, and polarization. And we worry especially about leaders of countries with tens or hundreds of millions of people being fundamentally unable to understand, process, reflect, and act effectively to address local problems.

We know that local leaders are not perfect stewards. They are no less human than national leaders and are as susceptible to greed, corruption, and stupidity. That’s why local governments must operate in a larger political system with checks and balances. Communities that behave irresponsibly—who dump pollution into the global environment, who violate the rights of their minority residents, who launch wars—should be held to account.

Among the basic yardsticks of accountability are these:

• Is a community respecting its territorial boundaries with neighboring communities?

• Is a community operating its economy so that it can meet the basic needs of its citizens?

• Is a community operating sustainably within its resource base?

• Is a community giving all its members, including the young, the old, the disabled, and minorities, equal rights and dignity?

When a community can answer all these questions with a firm “YES,” there is little justification for any higher authority to infringe on local autonomy.

We appreciate that localism means that different communities will answer these questions differently. But we are confident that a world with hundreds of thousands of lively experiments is more likely to generate real solutions.

Here are some basic propositions of the potential power of localism, reinforced by logic, history, and common sense:

• A world of relatively self-reliant communities will be one where few communities are inclined to go to war to meet their basic needs.

• A world of communities that each operate sustainably within their natural resource base will be a sustainable world.

• A world of expanding, successful community-based economic models will be one that is more likely to provide the jobs and income required by the world’s eight billion people.

• A world of communities with healthy democracies will help identify, marginalize, and resolve threats to democracy sooner.

Take the example of indoor, vertical farms. If one community in a cold, northern climate can perfect the technologies for growing enough food indoors to feed its residents cost-effectively, the bases for success—the technologies, the growing structures, the planting regimens, the business design—can be shared with other communities worldwide. The more communities there are collectively working on this challenge and sharing their innovations—without impeding the spread of information with secrecy, trademarks, and licenses—the faster the world will be able to feed itself.

The same is true for climate solutions. While we should welcome the role of national governments pushing one another to act in COP meetings, we should not expect this to be the locus of innovation or progress. Rather, it will come from communities—ramping up their economic efficiency standards, deploying more cost-effective solar and electrical storage technologies, decarbonizing their goods and services—and sharing these innovations as rapidly as possible. It may be more important not to mobilize national assistance for these initiatives than to make sure national governments do not get in the way.

We should see the world as a million community laboratories, where all kinds of problems—environmental, economic, social, and political—can be addressed in small, practical, meaningful ways.

The Practices of Localism

The principles of localism can be applied in almost every policy domain, but the most important test is the economy. Can more localized economies better serve the basic needs of their citizens? We believe there is an overwhelming body of evidence that says the answer is “yes.”

It’s easy to caricature a local economy as detached, autarkic, and backward. But a smart local economy is globally engaged, free-trading, and economically dynamic. Here are, in our view, ten principles that define successful local economies:

(1) Local Ownership – A community’s residents should strive to own locally as much of their economy as possible. Through local ownership, we have the best opportunity of controlling our own destiny, of making decisions that are genuinely in the interests of our neighbors. There is vast evidence that communities with high levels of local ownership have higher levels of social stability, political engagement, and volunteerism. Local ownership also means more local purchasing, which maximizes the “multiplier effect” with greater income, wealth, and jobs. They have greater latitude to make sound adjustments in times of crisis.

(2) Local Investment – The flip side of local ownership is local investment—you cannot have one without the other. Too much of our savings—for retirement, education, and medical needs—is placed in publicly traded companies that are least connected to community well-being. The alternative is to invest in local businesses, projects, and people. And while many tools for doing this already exist, we must change policies and practices to make local investment cheaper and easier.

(3) Self-Reliance – Whatever the benefits of trade—and there are many—they must be weighed against the dangers of dependence. A community that is self-reliant in the basics—such as food, energy, water, housing, and education—is more able to trade from a position of strength. It is also better able to meet the needs of its citizens and be resilient during periods of national, regional, or global crisis.

(4) Placemaking – Every community has the potential for greatness by tapping the deep roots of place. In local music, art, storytelling, and traditions, there is the local cultural DNA, often of multiple cultures with complex histories, which attracts visitors and brings residents into public spaces. Every community should find its points of pride and incorporate them into the local businesses and infrastructure.

(5) Participatory Democracy – Every community should strive to engage as many residents as possible in its public choices around laws, regulations, taxes, and spending priorities. While structures of democracy are varied, they should be designed to minimize the inherent unfairness of giving more power to those with wealth.

(6) Human Scale – Just as small scale is essential for the world of communities to thrive, so must businesses and institutions within communities be limited to a human scale. All monopolies, even local monopolies, should be distrusted and broken up or run as regulated public utilities, so that markets and politics empower all residents. So should obsolete remnants of centralized power within our countries.

(7) Regeneration – A community must operate within its annual “income” of renewable resources, such as water, energy, plants, and animals. It must operate its economy circularly, converting as much waste as possible into “food” for positive activities. It must minimize and eliminate any toxic pollutants. And it must apply these principles and tools to repair and bring back to life already damaged ecosystems

(8) Worker Fairness – For both moral and practical reasons, workplaces should be designed to be as humane as possible, with fair wages and benefits.

(9) Entrepreneurship – Achieving the goals above requires an entrepreneurial ecosystem that fully taps the community’s creativity for new businesses and projects. Entrepreneurs should be able to find within the community the capital, training, and support they need to succeed. And the universe of entrepreneurship should include not just the people typically seen as “the best and the brightest,” but also the old, the young, women, minorities, and people with disabilities.

(10) Connectivity – Communities are practicing the above in literally millions of different ways. The key for any community that wishes to make progress in these areas is to find and partner with the best practitioners in the world. Too many urgent global crises are pressing to waste any time with “reinventing the wheel.” Wherever possible, communities must leapfrog ahead rapidly based on one another’s successes.

It’s worth underscoring that the ten points above are principles, not prescriptions. Local ownership of business, for example, can be accomplished through family ownership, local stock companies, cooperatives, nonprofits, public enterprises, and other forms. Worker fairness can be accomplished through worker ownership, unions, or local laws. Entrepreneurship can be supported through education, technical assistance, partnerships, capital, incubators, and other tools. The strength of localism is that we can develop a million ways of meeting the principles.

The Fears of Decentralist Injustices

Skeptics of localism are right to point out the obvious concerns: Some communities will inflict terrible injustices on their residents, often disempowering minorities who are discriminated against because of their race, ethnic origins, gender, sexual preferences, or religious beliefs. Some communities will dump pollution, crime, or underpriced goods on neighboring communities. Some localist leaders are incompetent, insane, or criminal. And some necessary policies—like a response to a global pandemic—cannot possibly be effective without central coordination.

To all these skeptics, we say, yes, but…

Stronger governance at the local level does not mean no governance at higher levels. Chaos is not our goal. Subsidiarity assumes that some challenges cannot be addressed exclusively at the local level—and must be taken care of at the state, national, or global levels. A presumption against limiting the freedom of communities does not mean local power is unlimited. The concerns above—and many others—suggest areas where this presumption can and should yield to a consensual decision about centralizing power.

A good example of this is the protection of minority rights. Most localists favor state, national, and global protections against racial or religious discrimination, whether through legislation or constitutions. But where there is no consensus at, say, the national level—perhaps to protect the “right” of teenagers to vote—localities should be permitted to experiment with the voting age.

What constitutes such a consensus? While we are reluctant to give a mathematical answer, it probably means more than 51% of the voters. Many countries have provisions that require supermajorities for very important decisions—maybe 60% or two-thirds—and that, for us, is the threshold that should be required for overriding local decisions.

This debate about the right allocation of local power is often misframed as an abstract debate about how to assemble a country from scratch. That ship sailed centuries ago, starting with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. The laws, rights, and practices are already in place worldwide, and except in a few notable places like Switzerland, they are constructed around a powerful central state. The real debate in the 21^st Century is how to shift power back down to communities gradually and mindfully. Our belief is that smart countries will find many areas where greater local action is sensible and begin shifting their laws accordingly.

For example, just allowing local governments to set their own taxes—perhaps testing creative new taxes like those on carbon or pollution—will enable them to choose the appropriate size of the local public sector. That would be a huge step. Or giving local governments broad discretion on whether to procure local goods opens up new strategies for local economic development. Or enabling citizens to create community investment funds without national securities law filings. Countries should encourage suggestions for devolution, and, if they are nervous, they can call these programs “experimental.”

Those who hold centralized power now, of course, can be expected to resist these changes. That’s natural—change is difficult. But localists insist that if we wish to fix pressing global problems that have become intractable, we need millions more experiments, and we need a new system of politics that reduces increasingly dangerous polarization.

How Localism Can Depolarize Politics

Every democracy today is experiencing sharp polarization, where a growing number of voters fear that “a win” by the other side could destroy their way of life. Large political parties, which once mediated these differences and provided assurance that the system was more important than any given election, have now splintered into more specialized and extremist parties. And this level of national polarization has now increasingly infected local politics. We are especially concerned about the growth of nationalist, religious, and fascist parties that would expand state powers to oppress various minorities, like immigrants, whom they disfavor.

Localism, we believe, provides an important way of channeling the steam in these movements constructively. Empowering and encouraging localities to experiment with different policies—and insulating those experiments from being quashed by those at the top—provides positive alternatives to increasingly angry and radicalized voters. Your way of life may be threatened at the top, but rest assured, there are safe spaces at the bottom where you can construct a better way of life. Enlist yourself in the service of local experiments that excite you. To be sure, there are always people who want to tear things apart, but they are a tiny minority that can and should be isolated.

The unfortunate truth is that we are all responsible for this dangerous polarization. Every time we celebrate the defeat of our political opponents, we sow the seeds of an incendiary counterreaction. Instead, we should help our opponents find localities where they can test and live out their ideas. And maybe those of us who were once resolutely opposed may learn a few things from these experiments.

An example of these dynamics is universal health care in the United States. Under President Obama, Congress narrowly approved a universal health care system—without a single vote from the other political party, the Republicans. And for the decade following its passage, pitched battles were waged by the Republicans—all unsuccessful—to reverse the vote. Their opposition also blocked simple fixes to the existing law that could remedy its shortcomings. An alternative scenario might have been for the national government to provide equal resources to the states to test different health care alternatives. Conservative states like Alabama might embrace medical savings accounts, while liberal states like Vermont might try to implement state-wide “single payer.” This is how the Canadian national health system evolved—from the bottom up.

National policymakers should think creatively about how they can unleash different approaches at the local level rather than how they can squash those approaches they dislike. One salutary benefit of this approach is that it brings ideologically divergent parties together to come to a reasonable compromise on how their local adherents can thrive.

In fact, many current national challenges can be solved—or at least made more manageable—through localist solutions. Here are some examples:

• Demand-driven inflation can be tamed through an adjustable local consumption tax (the tax increases and decreases with inflation). Greater local ownership of housing and other assets can also reduce long-term inflation pressures.

• Supply disruptions, which have also caused inflation recently, can be remedied through greater local self-reliance, which reduces dependence on unreliable nonlocal supply chains.

• Housing shortages and chronic homelessness can be ameliorated through the local rethinking of zoning laws that impede new construction, and through the deployment of tiny homes, community land trusts, and housing cooperatives that keep more housing affordable.

• Carbon neutrality, which seems unreachable at the national level, can be reached at the local level through localist programs promoting energy efficiency, solar energy, food self-reliance, and the regreening of every available space, whether empty lots or rooftops.

• In a recession, localities permitted to run modest deficits can increase public spending (a classic Keynesian stimulus) or they can issue their own currency usable only at local businesses (a monetary stimulus).

• To alleviate poverty, a local government might provide guaranteed (low-wage) jobs in the service of community needs. Work teams might focus on placemaking projects.

Again, different communities will approach these national problems in different ways. Some will be smarter than others, and some will be executed more successfully.

Starting Places

Where might national governments begin ceding authority to support this vision of localization? Here are some of the starting places we favor:

• Investment Law – Deregulate local financial institutions that exclusively handle local securities, such as local banks, credit unions, stock exchanges, investment funds, and retirement funds.

• Taxation Law – Allow localities broader freedoms to tax people, businesses, and goods in their jurisdictions, as long as the taxes are applied equally to residents and non-residents.

• Regulatory Law – Give localities broad authority to regulate the environmental, workforce, governance, and community standards practices by businesses within their jurisdiction, provided that the laws apply equally to local and nonlocal competitors.

• Procurement Law – Allow local governments to selectively buy goods and services from local businesses whenever the hidden benefits of local purchasing (e.g., paying local taxes) exceed the hidden costs of nonlocal purchasing.

• Zoning Law – Give communities broader authority to set—or undo—land-use requirements, to encourage mixed-use, denser, more livable communities.

• Trade Law – Withdraw from any trade agreements, or amend any agreements, that have provisions to restrict the recommendations above.

This list is just suggestive of sectors ripe for devolution. We recommend it as a starting place because it suggests areas where left and right might easily find common ground. But by no means should it be the finishing place.

In fact, even in areas commonly believed to be impervious to devolution, we believe there are virtues to unlocking local creativity. In foreign policy, for example, there is a rich history of cities using a variety of powers—persuasion, education, lobbying, cultural ties, trade relations, aid, etc.—to influence other countries. Indeed, where countries fall short, cities have taken a leadership role—in imposing sanctions on apartheid South Africa, for example, in the 1980s and 1990s. The absence of military powers at the local level (which we favor) means that cities participating in international affairs have to be more creative using nonviolent tools of influence.

Which suggests another piece of the localist vision…

An Alliance of Planetary-Minded Cities

Consistent with our principle of connectivity, localism means finding, partnering, and working with like-minded cities. Yes, one-to-one partnerships among cities are powerful, but entities with hundreds of thousands of municipal members are even more powerful. For more than three decades, for example, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) has spread state-of-the-art environmental protection technology and policies among its thousand municipal members. We need networks like this promoting local self-reliance, new local ownership models, and local democracy innovations.

We can imagine these networks maturing into powerful forces, lobbying recalcitrant national governments to yield more power to their communities; setting higher environmental and labor standards for the goods they exchange; entering into joint research and development projects; developing interlocal funds and currencies. Indeed, every part of the global system, whether the World Bank or the United Nations Development Program, could soon have localist counterparts. The world’s most important treaties may be those that do not involve nation-states, but key cities.

From Here to There

We appreciate that localists constitute a minority in every country in the world. Conventional political parties—left, right, and center—currently ignore or ridicule our views. We are then relegated to small projects in our communities that rarely seem to add up to global solutions.

Yet in sheer numbers, we represent millions of people—perhaps hundreds of millions. With this manifesto, we are putting national governments everywhere on notice. We are not going away. We will become bolder in our local experiments and in our challenges to your authority. And we will begin to hold you accountable to the principles and practices laid out here. If current political parties do not incorporate our decentralist views, we will form our own.

We welcome the support and partnership of everyone, irrespective of party, politics, or place.

As the economist Kenneth Boulding once wrote: “Cities of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your slums, your poverty, and your military expendability.”

NEW INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Below is our list of recently posted investment opportunities across the United States. Please note that our listing of these opportunities does not constitute an endorsement. Remember that all investments carry risk, so click on the hyperlinks and read the details carefully before investing.

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Use the map below to help you find an investment opportunity near you. Each issue, we’ll highlight about a half dozen active campaigns.

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Almost all of us have stories like this. We are here through our ancestors, who took enormous risks and got into the country through persistence and luck. This makes the lack of compassion of the Trump administration toward immigrants all the more revolting. Sure, deport criminals. But don’t deport the people cutting our grass, raising our children, processing chickens, picking our fruit, and all the other jobs we Americans are reluctant to do ourselves.

Our current policies are not just cruel but genuinely dumb economic policy. All my business students learn in my introductory economics class that immigration creates short-term wage drops but long-term boosts to the economy. That’s because immigrants are disproportionately risk-takers and entrepreneurial.

This is the essential case being made by Frank Knapp, the founder and CEO of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce. In this week’s interview, Frank explains his advocacy and how he has made headway on many surprising policy issues in a very conservative state. It’s a great read.

If you’re a paying subscriber, you will also find our latest listings of local investment and local fund opportunities across the country. I recently used our lists to invest in the Vermont Community Loan Fund and the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund.

Finally, a celebratory moment: Believe it or not, this marks our fourth anniversary. 🎉 Our first issue was published in June 2021. Thanks to the many people who have made our work possible—Jen, Wendy, Sophia, our funders, and most of all, thanks to you. Please help us continue our work by pressing one of the two buttons below.

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MS: Frank, thank you for talking with us today. You have been doing serious policy advocacy for small businesses longer than almost anyone else I know. How did you get involved with small businesses and become so passionate about them?

FK: I started a public relations/advertising firm way back in 1991, and in that role, I worked with many small businesses. Prior to that, I had experience as a lobbyist in South Carolina and in public relations with our state public television network. So, I knew that small business owners worked hard and that their voices were not always being heard in the state legislature, especially when big businesses wanted legislation that was not in the best interest of small businesses. So, in 2000, I co-founded the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce to represent the general interests of small businesses. Our work often conflicts with the organizations that represent big business. We are not as well financed as they are, but we are proud of our 25-year track record of delivering victories for small businesses.

MS: I’m going to ask you about immigration policy in a moment, but first, tell us a little about your organization, the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce, and the range of policies you’ve focused on in the past few years.

FK: Our policies have been all over the map. Our earliest success was in representing small business interests in utility matters, especially proposed rate hikes. Since 2002, either I or the Chamber has intervened in every electricity rate hearing with great success, knocking down proposed rate hikes for small businesses by 50% or more. We’ve intervened to protect owners of rooftop solar, ensuring that they continue to receive full credit for generating their own electricity. We were quite involved in the fight to reduce the $9 billion construction debt of two failed nuclear plants being passed on to all ratepayers. In the state legislature, we were successful in reducing the state income tax on small business profits. And we have had success in promoting small business workforce development, government procurement opportunities for small businesses, and other issues to generally make the state more small business-friendly.

MS: That’s an impressive track record. You have also been active at the national level, haven’t you?

FK: Yes, I’ve served on the Board of the American Sustainable Business Network for more than a decade. I’ve provided testimony to Congressional committees numerous times, mostly on the need for good regulations, not tossing them all out as big corporate interests would like. I led the ASBN’s national Business for Democracy campaign and have provided leadership to other national business organizations on making health insurance more affordable and opposing massive tax cuts on big corporations. And in 2016, I co-founded the Business Alliance for Protecting the Atlantic Coast, growing it to over 40,000 East Coast small businesses, to successfully stop offshore oil testing and drilling. I put together the national coalition, Reform the SBA, to promote more small business lending. And this year, I co-founded the Secure Growth Initiative along with the ASBN, the Small Business Majority, and other business organizations to advocate for comprehensive, pro-small business solutions to our present immigration enforcement chaos.

MS: The political valence of small businesses historically has been very conservative, and the same could be said for South Carolina. Yet your organization has taken some stances that some would regard as quite progressive. How have you successfully managed to take these positions?

FK: Big businesses have always pushed the message that small businesses agree with what the big businesses want on policy. The reality is that what is good for big business is not always good for small business. Small business owners are really just your neighbors who happen to run a business. Most have the same concerns that their employees have. They want affordable health insurance. They don’t want to pay high taxes. They want their electric bills not to go up. They don’t like extreme weather events. They want their elected officials to be concerned with their needs. The South Carolina Small Business Chamber has a successful track record on all of these issues. When we frame our legislative agenda, it is always easy to understand why it is in the best interest of small businesses.

MS: So you’re currently organizing a national campaign to fight the Trump Administration’s immigration policies. You argue, in a statement you recently released, that “more than 20% of new businesses—totalling 3.9 million—are immigrant-owned, employing more than 8 million Americans and generating $1.3 trillion in revenue.” That’s an astonishing fact. Why is it that immigrants seem more entrepreneurial than the population overall?

FK: The statistics come from immigration organizations, and they do show the entrepreneurship of immigrants who come to our country. Many have been small business owners in their own countries, but could not live with the threat of gang violence or government oppression. They bring that entrepreneurial spirit with them to the United States…the land of opportunity, where if you work hard, you can be a success. They don’t come looking for a handout or to be taken care of. They want to contribute to our economy, support their community, and provide for their families. And most of us understand that we can benefit from more entrepreneurship in the country. It is what has made us great.

MS: What should be the main planks of a better national immigration policy?

FK: The guiding principles of the Secure Growth Initiative are pretty common sense:

• Secure the border and deport the undocumented with violent criminal records after due process.

• Create a comprehensive visa program addressing the workforce needs of businesses of all sizes.

• Replace mass deportation with earned permanent legal status…paying restitution, getting right with the law, passing a criminal background check, and paying outstanding taxes or debts.

• Hold the federal government responsible for the economic loss due to mass deportation policies.

These are principles that most Americans will nod their heads in agreement with. The last one, holding the federal government responsible for the financial loss small businesses are experiencing and will experience due to mass deportation efforts, is particularly important. Many small businesses have become reliant on the labor of undocumented workers because the federal government, for decades, told those immigrants to get a job and pay their taxes. We believe that the small businesses experiencing financial losses because of the dramatic immigration policy shift should be compensated by the federal government. I hope that small business owners will take the time to indicate their support on our website.

MS: How have the current immigration policies adversely affected small businesses? Give us some specific examples.

FK: Small businesses are now losing employees due to immigration arrests. Immigrant employees, even those with a legal status, are afraid to go to work. The businesses they work for are losing revenue because productivity is down. The intentional fear tactics of the federal government have also caused the immigrant community to cut back on spending, and families don’t want to go out in public, even to shop for food. All these factors are hurting local small businesses. A small general construction contractor told me that his revenue is down 50% because his subcontractors, who use immigrant labor, can’t find workers. When ICE raided a nearby business, a Jamaican restaurant catering to immigrants was almost empty, and the food prepared for the day had to be thrown out. Whole communities with immigrant small businesses have been turned into ghost towns because of these immigration crackdowns.

MS: Have the other mainstream organizations that represent business, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business, or the Business Roundtable, had the guts to step up on this issue?

FK: Well, let’s just say that any concerns those big business organizations have about the current immigration enforcement chaos are being expressed in closed rooms or not at all. Big corporations are conflicted. They know that the Administration’s immigration crackdowns are not good for their members or the nation’s economy. But they are afraid of criticizing the President and getting attacked on social media. They don’t want to get sideways with the MAGA base in Congress and have a target put on their backs for retribution. They believe if they can just talk to the President privately, they can change his mind.

How’s that working out? As long as the stock market stays healthy, corporate America, for the most part, will stay quiet. Small businesses don’t have the luxury of shareholders propping up their business. Our success depends on a healthy local economy, where we take care of our workers, and our customers want to buy our goods and services. What’s going on now with mass deportation works against all this.

MS: Have you been able to recruit Republican representatives to support your efforts? And what kind of traction have you gotten from other business organizations?

FK: We just officially launched the Secure Growth Initiative in late April. We haven’t had a lot of time to do everything that needs to be done, including outreach to members of Congress. We’re working on that. I am pleased with the support we’ve received from numerous national and state small business organizations, as well as individual small businesses from across the country…California, Arizona, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Maine, North Carolina, Georgia, and, yes, South Carolina.

MS: Okay, final question: As you know, The Main Street Journal focuses on promoting local investment. How do you invest in local businesses in South Carolina?

FK: For 25 years, my investment in local small businesses has been in creating a governmental environment that increases their chances of being successful. Cutting small business taxes, getting tax credits for hiring new employees, supporting health care reform at the state and federal levels, fighting increases in worker compensation insurance and utility bills, supporting better access to capital and government contracts, promoting better election systems to foster more responsible government. You get the picture!

MS: Thanks, Frank, for the work you’re doing. And good luck motivating other states to follow in your footsteps.

Read all of our past interviews here.

Read more

Rather than invest your life savings in global stocks and bonds, you can begin to put your savings into local businesses, local real estate, and local personal loans. Using a solo 401(k), you can also give yourself a loan, which can sometimes be as high as $50,000, and use it to pay off credit cards or make a down payment on a home. You can then repay yourself over five years, and your retirement account earns interest on your payments.

Several hundred people have used the Next Egg’s resources, but now active members are asking harder questions: How, for example, can I invest in bringing down the costs of retirement? If I invest in making my community energy self-reliant on cheap solar energy, then I’ll need less money for future utility bills. If I grow some of my own fruits and vegetables, I’ll have lower grocery store bills.

We are pleased to feature in this MSJ Extra! an interview with Erin Axelrod, one of the principals of LIFT Economy, who now oversees the Next Egg. She shares many of the cutting-edge strategies for localizing retirement, including a novel kind of 401(k) set-up for LIFT Economy employees.

Erin would like to see a world where current investments bring down the costs of retirement to zero. Given rising health care costs for the elderly and likely cuts to Medicare and Medicaid coming from Congress, I’m skeptical about achieving that goal. But it’s certainly possible to use one’s solo 401(k) to invest in community-owned infrastructure to make retirement a lot more affordable.

As always, paying readers can also view the latest listings of local stock offerings and local investment funds from around the country. You can enjoy our full range of news, opinions, jobs, and events, including our monthly in-person “Mondays with Michael” gatherings, by just clicking on the “Subscribe now” button below!

- Michael Shuman, Publisher

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MS: Before we dive into the Next Egg, tell us a little about LIFT Economy. What exactly is the organization, who works for it, and what projects do you carry out?

EA: LIFT Economy is an impact consulting firm with a mission to create, model, and share a racially just, regenerative, and locally self-reliant economy. Our leadership comprises five worker-owners: Kevin Bayuk, Phoenix Soleil, Ryan Honeyman, Shawn Berry, and me. We also have several worker-owners, including Jeanette Morelan, LIFT Marketing Lead, and Emmy Allison, LIFT B Corp Consultant Lead.

Our projects vary quite a bit. Our Next Economy MBA is an online learning program that has been going for nearly a decade and has engaged more than 750 students. We also teach conflict resolution and team-building through our popular Next Economy Leadership series and personal life design through our Next Economy Living online training. Our consulting projects range from helping companies get certified as B Corps to consulting with Next Economy Social Enterprises. For example, we facilitated a collaboration between Patagonia and Winona LaDuke. We also help high-net-worth individuals and family foundations like Jonas Philanthropies develop their grantmaking priorities.

MS: When we put together the Next Egg about five years ago with the Sustainable Economy Law Center (SELC), our original vision was to help participants create and manage self-directed IRAs and Solo 401(k)s. The idea was to empower more people to redirect their tax-deferred pension savings to local businesses or projects. What appealed to you and your colleagues at LIFT Economy about this mission?

EA: Initially, the appeal was somewhat personal. In 2019, I wanted to earn a lower salary as a war-tax resistance strategy, and also to be less reliant on other people supporting me financially. Here was my big thought: What if I could use my pre-tax savings to build up the infrastructure around my bioregion so that more people might need less income to live? How can we all engage more deeply in a gift economy? I imagined that this would enhance my own sense of personal security while also making a bigger impact on the war tax resistance movement. My business partner, Kevin Bayuk, referred me to research that Janelle Orsi of the Sustainable Economies Law Center had done using their retirement savings. So I reached out to her, you joined the mix, and the Next Egg was born!

MS: What is the mission of the Next Egg, and what kind of resources does it provide?

EA: The Next Egg operates as a community of practice that aims to reimagine and transform the conventional understanding and use of retirement savings and individual wealth.

The Next Egg challenges mainstream retirement assumptions and advocates for a justice-focused “next economy.” We provide a platform for learning, community, and action. We encourage members to move existing savings out of harmful investments and into community-based investing via self-direction or by taking it out of retirement savings altogether and swallowing the tax penalties. This might include investing in transformative initiatives like land rematriation, local agriculture, and mutual aid. We also encourage members to use CDFIs, credit unions, and other Next Economy institutions. The Next Egg is committed to radical repair and systemic change.

We provide members with a wealth of resources, including a public-facing Google Drive where anyone can access our past webinars, read our published blogs, and more.

MS: The Next Egg now lives at LIFT Economy. Tell us a little about who’s participating. How many individuals use the platform? And who are they? What seems to be their demographic makeup?

EA: We currently have between 300-400 members who participate in a Mighty Networks platform, where they engage with one another on questions about retirement, both personally and collectively. Based on surveys we’ve conducted, our members have between $10 million and $15 million in retirement savings. Our members include certified financial planners, community organizers, longtime activists, solo-entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, legal and accounting professionals, and members of our Next Economy MBA alumni network.

Members are driven by the mission of creating life-affirming retirement strategies that weave together the goals of freedom, personal fulfillment, connection with others, and a comfortable elderhood. They also deliberate on common concerns related to retirement, like rising healthcare costs and higher costs of living. They want to develop greater literacy around retirement planning and managing investments effectively.

MS: What do you think Next Egg members have learned about self-directed IRAs and solo 401(k)s?

EA: I would prefer to ask the bigger question: What have users learned about retirement in general? And I would answer that a big learning for all of us is that since the passage of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) in 1974, the tax benefits of using traditional retirement mechanisms have decreased substantially. So we encourage our members to consider looking at other mechanisms for “saving for retirement,” which could include making investments in communal housing, off-grid energy and water systems, and resilient food systems, to name just a few possibilities.

That said, there is so much inertia within the existing retirement mechanisms that we cannot ignore them entirely. Solo 401(k)s are easy to create, and sooner or later, most people have the opportunity to roll over their existing retirement accounts into a solo 401(k) vehicle. These 401(k)s give users many options to invest directly in their community. We have lots of resources on the Solo 401(k), including an in-depth, all-day webinar we held on the topic.

MS: Well, the Solo 401(k) has been a lifesaver for me and my wife. You and your colleagues are now interested in getting members to think more broadly about their retirement savings. Can you elaborate on the kinds of conversations you want them to have?

EA: Yes! One difficult question we raise is, do you really need to have retirement savings at all? What is the world going to look like when you retire? How are the tens of trillions of dollars currently invested in the US in the name of retirement undermining possibilities for you to have a liveable planet to retire to?

The big three pension investment companies—Vanguard, State Street, and Fidelity—are, by and large, not investing in cooperatives, renewable energy, or regenerative systems. They favor priorities like surveillance, weapons, policing, carceral system, detention facilities, extractive mining, chemical manufacturing, perpetration of human rights abuses, criminalization of civic protest, and more ugly stuff. The Next Egg members want their money invested in a future that works for all of us, with no one left out.

Many of our members challenge our cultural norm that wealth accumulation in retirement is the sole means for attaining personal security. There may be better ways to redirect our capital towards more equitable, sustainable, and community-centric economic systems.

MS: When we first put together the Next Egg, we considered the possibility of creating our own Solo 401(k) product. I paid Rocket Dollar about $400 upfront for my Solo 401(k), and now pay a monthly maintenance fee of $15. I still believe these costs are way too high. Is there any interest in the Next Egg revisiting this possibility?

EA: Absolutely! In addition, we are exploring ways of reducing transaction costs through collective investment trusts. Through collective power, we can unleash ourselves from the traps of capitalism!

MS: LIFT Economy also has a virtual MBA program. Tell us a little about that program, who’s enrolled, and how they plan to practice what they are learning?

EA: Our online Next Economy MBA program is perfect for entrepreneurs, people in career transitions, students, and graduates interested in new economic models. It is the perfect program for impact entrepreneurs, those starting or growing cooperatives, people interested in steward ownership, impact investors and those in worker self-directed nonprofits We cover all the basic concepts taught in a traditional MBA program, but through a values-aligned lens that also covers non-traditional topics like nonviolent communication, democratic governance, alternative currencies, and much more. Your readers can learn more at our Next Economy MBA website.

Our fifteenth cohort will begin on September 30 and is a nine-month course that runs through June. Courses are taught in 90-minute live sessions every other week. I encourage anyone interested to attend a free introductory session taking place on June 24, August 5, August 21, and September 2.

For our wider audiences, we recently launched a course called Next Economy Living. Among the things we introduce in that course is a tool called the Radical Retirement Calculator. It shows that the average American using business-as-usual methods needs more than $500,000 to retire comfortably and have their needs met. If, instead, you spend your decades leading up to retirement investing in alternative living strategies such as in the realm of housing, food security, off-grid energy, and water catchment systems, and much more, you can reduce your financial needs for retirement to as low as zero! Folks can learn more about the course at go.lifteconomy.com/next-economy-living. Our next cohort starts on September 11.

MS: How did you personally get interested in this work? What was your professional journey before LIFT Economy?

EA: When I first started my career, I helped lead permaculture-oriented education programs. I was in charge of developing and launching gray water programs in collaboration with municipal governments. What I observed was that many of our volunteers were just doing this work on the side or as a hobby. I wanted to find a vocational path for implementing alternative living strategies. That is fundamentally what I see as my role with the Next Egg and our courses. I’m inspired by people like Ethan Hughes, who started an organization called the Possibility Alliance, which housed a couple of dozen adults and children for under $10,000 a year. And by the millions of people worldwide who are creatively meeting their needs outside of the financialized realm.

MS: Finally, how do you personally invest locally? Do you have a self-directed IRA or a solo 401(k)?

EA: At LIFT Economy, we set up an employer self-directed 401(k), which means each LIFT Economy worker-owner is both a trustee and administrator of their individual portions of our workplace 401(k) at LIFT Economy. Each of us has checkbook control, meaning we can personally make the investments. My own retirement savings in that plan are invested in a local ecovillage that practices regenerative agriculture.

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