Building Local Economic Resilience: Three Innovative Strategies that Build on Local Strengths and Create New Economic Futures for Municipalities

centreforwelfarereform.org

No 1055, posted by fw, Citizen Action Monitor: http://citizenactionmonitor.wordpress.com/2014/05/18/building-local-economic-resilience-three-innovative-strategies-that-build-on-local-strengths-and-create-new-economic-futures-for-municipalities/

“True economic resilience isn’t about just weathering tough times or capitalizing on new technologies for external investment - it’s about building community capacity. Innovations that incentivize the kind of local pride that keeps dollars local, turn community leaders into business leaders, and increase access to information and communication are critical practices that help communities find their own power. Sustainable cities use innovation to steward this power, working bottom-up and cross-sector to channel hyper-local strength into city-wide opportunity” - Russon-Gilman, McCann, and Bullen.

Is your city or community building “true economic resilience” through strategic “local first” innovation? Or has it returned to the same old, unsustainable “business as usual” model?

The following article may help you to gauge where your community ranks along a continuum of “same old, business as usual” approach at one end of the scale, to a “resilience-based, strategic, local first” innovation model at the opposite end.

Think Local First: 3 Innovation Strategies for City Economies by Hollie Russon-Gilman, Laurenellen McCann and Georgia Bullen, New American Foundation: Open Technology Institute, May 12, 2014

 

This post from OTI’s Civic Innovation Team is part of the Meeting of the Minds Blog Event, posing the question - How could cities better connect all their residents to economic opportunity?

Every day in our cities, we interact with layers of social, technical and political systems. At the Open Technology Institute (OTI), we research, analyze, and experiment around the ways in which people interact with these layers and how that impacts equitable access to information, freedom to communicate, and economic and community development. 

One area of our work focuses on “Civic Innovation.” We believe civic innovations aren’t necessarily new city apps, but rather include processes and practices that re-imagine how cities can support and engage residents. 

As cities capitalize on these emerging innovations - both born locally and from peers - they pioneer a new frontier for sustainable community networks, social structures that have huge implications for the trajectory, strength, and inclusivity of economic growth.

Unlike the federal government, cities have more flexibility to fail forward and iterate. At the same time, cities also increasingly play the role of direct service providers, a position that comes with extra responsibility to ensure that economic opportunities are equitable. 

This tension, between risk and responsibility, can be a healthy incubator for innovation - demanding attention be paid to the entire local economic ecosystem and favoring multi-sector and multi-stakeholder approaches.

Below, we’ve rounded up three examples of economic innovation strategies wielded by municipalities and communities that attempt to address this tension: Incentives, Engagement, and Access. 

Although no innovation is perfect, these examples are useful inspiration for the kinds of community practices that integrate government, constituent, and business contributions to build on local strengths and create new economic futures.

Incentives: to bolster local business, encourage communities to think local first

When the question of economic stimulus arises, too often municipal governments turn their attention to entrepreneurs themselves, seeking either to attract new investment from external businesses or to bolster seedling local enterprises through tax incentives. What’s missing? 

Incentives for locals to steward local economic growth.

In early 2014, coffee shops within Washington, DC introduced a “Disloyalty Card” to incentivize customers to frequent locally-owned businesses, explore different neighborhoods, and meet members of the local coffee community. 

Similar cards are in use around the country, scaled to a particular industry or wielded state-wide, with incentives ranging from a free cup of joe for customers to special partnerships with local Chambers of Commerce and discounted advertising deals for participating businesses. 

Loyalty cards and their kin, Cash Mobs - “happenings” where dozens to hundreds of residents spend money at local establishments - aren’t local economic cure-alls, but their thoughtful implementation could do wonders for incentivizing the movement of people and dollars within a community - and for encouraging local business to create jobs and hire locally. 

Imagine if a tax incentive program for women- and minority-owned businesses came paired with a loyalty card to ground these businesses as city staples and a Cash Mob, organized by a public-/private-partnership, to welcome these organizations into the community. 

Community resilience starts with local pride.

Engagement:  Generate community investment by tapping into local expertise

Governments can engage residents to be actively involved in collaborative governance.

For example Philly’s Ambassador program taps into citizens’ energy. The program equips citizens with tools to serve as “Ambassadors” to incentivize business into Philadelphia. 

This also serves as a business development leadership training that citizens can effectively use in their daily lives. Residents, with local expertise, can serve as critical connectors and translators. 

This program is an example of how city government can empower citizens with skills, information, and resources to support and promote economic development. 

Citizens want to do meaningful work. Diverse platforms, not limited to only government, can provide critical venues and pathways for meaningful citizen engagement.

Access: Develop a healthy digital ecosystem by building shared community infrastructures

New digital systems for communication and collaboration don’t always require large, up-front investments from local governments. 

Communities themselves can pool resources and build local infrastructure to provide last mile access to the Internet - or even just a neighborhood information platform. 

In Red Hook, Brooklyn, a community-based non-profit, the Red Hook Initiative runs a Digital Stewards program for whom the main activity is to plan, build, and maintain a community wireless network. 

The wireless network serves multiple purposes for different people. For young adults it is a job training program, funded through workforce development funds from the New York City government. For many residents, it provides open internet access.  Local businesses use it to participate as active community members and offer local deals. 

On the local wireless network (before messages reach the internet), there is an information hub where residents can find out when the next bus is, upcoming community events, jobs available at local businesses, and talk to each other about resource and skill sharing. 

By building technical infrastructure that matches the social infrastructure, communities can support themselves and develop healthy digital and community ecosystems.

These three strategies are but a few examples of how cities can effectively wield community-centric approaches to invigorate local economies. 

True economic resilience isn’t about just weathering tough times or capitalizing on new technologies for external investment - it’s about building community capacity. Innovations that incentivize the kind of local pride that keeps dollars local, turn community leaders into business leaders, and increase access to information and communication are critical practices that help communities find their own power. 

Sustainable cities use innovation to steward this power, working bottom-up and cross-sector to channel hyper-local strength into city-wide opportunity.

SEE ALSO

• How Could Cities Better Connect All Their Residents to Economic Opportunity? - Meeting of the Minds and Living Cities invite civic-minded leaders across sectors to participate in a group blogging event focused on the question: How could cities better connect all their residents to economic opportunity? Bloggers are asked to write their response to the prompt question and publish it today, May 12th. A list of dozens of participating bloggers, and links to their responses, is provided. The above post by Russon-Gilman, McCann, and Bullen is included in the list.
• ‘Buy Local’ Campaigns Produce Results February 18, 2014
• Building Local Economies February 27, 2014

Mapping a New Economy

David Harvey (Roger Cremers, Hollandse Hoogte, Redux)

by Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education: https://chronicle.com/article/Mapping-a-New-Economy/146433/

David Harvey would implore you to imagine life without capitalism - that is, if you can.

Chances are, even if you’re puzzled by the manipulation of phantom money on Wall Street, troubled by society’s growing inequality, or disgusted with the platinum parachutes of corporate executives, you probably still conceive the world in terms of profits, private property, and free markets, the invisible hand always on the tiller.

To Harvey, a professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, that world is coming to an end.

In Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (Oxford University Press), Harvey examines what he sees as the untenable elements of capital, and he analyzes how they can produce an unequal, destructive, crisis-prone system.

The book represents a distillation of Harvey’s 40-year study of Karl Marx, and in its own way a bid to change the conversation about what’s not working and what’s possible - especially when many have consigned Marx to history’s dustbin.

"I was tired of hearing Marx quoted in ways that struck me as completely wrong," Harvey says in his office at CUNY, around the corner from the Empire State Building.

"Who I am writing for is, in a sense, anybody who says, Who is this guy Marx? I wanted to make it simple enough so that people could get into it, without being simplistic."

The new book follows a career of scholarship that has not only helped define the study of geography but ranged across other disciplines as well.

J. Richard Peet, a professor of geography at Clark University, says Harvey played a central role in enlivening a "decrepit" discipline in the 1960s and 70s, and helped establish geography as one of the most left-leaning fields in academe.

His Explanation in Geography (St. Martin’s Press, 1969) was the "main positivist textbook" of the field, Peet says.

He followed with The Limits to Capital (University of Chicago Press, 1982), an analysis that has been widely translated and reprinted, and The Condition of Postmodernity (Blackwell, 1989), a multidisciplinary examination of contemporary sensibilities and practices that propelled him to international prominence.

Trained in geography at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s and early 60s, Harvey discovered Marx in 1970, after landing in Baltimore, at the Johns Hopkins University.

He already felt confined by the traditional social-science theory in which he had been trained, and Charm City - a racially segregated, impoverished factory town, still recovering from the 1968 riots - proved to be the environment for an awakening.

"When I came to Baltimore from Britain, it was a bit of a shock to be plunged into what was going on in that city," he says. "I looked at it and thought, ‘I can’t see how I am going to understand all of this, given the techniques that are available to me, and maybe I should look for something else.’ That is when I started to read Marx, just to see if something was there."

He sat on a university commission analyzing housing problems in the city, and in writing the report for city leaders, borrowed ideas from Das Kapital.

He found resonance in Marx’s analysis of the conflict between use values (the value of, say, a home as shelter) and exchange values (its value as a property to buy and flip), and in the notion that capital moves problems around (as when blight and gentrification drift through neighborhoods) but never solves them.

Harvey says the city leaders - no matter their politics - thought the report was perceptive. "I didn’t tell them I was getting it out of Marx," he says. "The more it worked for me and worked for other people, the more confidence I got that this was not a crazy system, but was actually quite interesting."

In the years since, his work has focused on urban issues, politics, economics, and capitalism.

Robert Pollin, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has assigned his students Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, 2005), which recounts the 40-year political project to replace Keynesian economics and its notion of public-sector limits on private enterprise with the free-market ideologies that prevail today.

"From my perspective, he is a giant," Pollin says. But his regard for Harvey is unusual in the more conservative discipline of economics. Most economists I contacted gave one of two responses when asked about Harvey’s work: they knew he was important but had never read him, or they had never heard of him at all.

That’s a sign of the inward focus of economists, not a condemnation of Harvey’s work, says Pollin: "There is no question that Harvey is a major thinker."

But in the supercharged capitalist culture of the United States, being a Marxist intellectual - even, according to Thomson Reuters, as one of the most frequently cited academics in the world - means often being overlooked in the public square.

While Harvey draws big crowds and mainstream news media during appearances in Europe and South America, in this country his name appears mainly in small leftist outlets.

"I get on the BBC, but I don’t get on NPR," he says. "There is a kind of taboo in the mainstream media of taking any of this seriously."

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism may be the book that introduces Harvey to a wider audience.

After all, it lands at an auspicious moment. Dealing with income inequality is at the top of President Obama’s agenda for the year.

Since the Occupy movement’s stand in New York’s Zuccotti Park, the public has had more awareness of the consolidation of power among the "1 percent" - a term the protesters popularized.

Marx has made a comeback among young intellectuals, who came of age during the economic meltdown; Benjamin Kunkel, in Utopia or Bust (Verso Books), his new exploration of contemporary Marxism, spends his first chapter discussing Harvey.

"If you had to pick one person who is the expositor of Marx for this generation, it would be David Harvey," says Timothy Shenk, a doctoral student in history at Columbia University who has studied prominent Marxists and recently wrote about "millennial Marxists" for The Nation.

"It’s his gift for lucid prose that distinguishes him. I can’t think of anyone who is better at laying out, clearly and crisply, a distinctive interpretation of Marx."

The American stage has recently been set for questioning capitalism, with the U.S. tour of academe’s rock star of the moment, Thomas Piketty. The French economist’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century has highlighted capitalism’s drift toward inequality and criticized economists’ focus on pure theory.

While Harvey appreciates the way that Piketty has "brought back some of that humanistic tradition" in economics, he believes the book focuses too much on the social inequities that capital produces, not the complicated root causes of its problems.

"Piketty has a fantastic source of information in terms of the history of inequality of wealth and income, and that is very useful, but you could read that book and have no idea what happened in 2007 and 2008 - why Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, where crises come from," he says.

"What I tried to show in Seventeen Contradictions is that capital is a multifaceted system, with interlocking contradictions that are very rich."

The book begins with the very thing that sparked the 2008 crisis: the conflict between use values and exchange values, particularly in housing, and the way that people have been deprived of homes because real estate has become a speculative investment.

Increasingly, he points out, more necessities are defined and dominated by their exchange value, as capital looks for new fields in which to play.

"For this reason, many categories of use values that were hitherto supplied free of charge by the state have been privatized and commodified - housing, education, health care and public utilities have all gone in this direction in many parts of the world," he writes.

"The political choice is between a commodified system that serves the rich well enough and a system that focuses on the production and democratic provision of use values for all without any mediations of the market."

The rest of the contradictions unfurl from there: For example, the value of money, especially when it is not tied to any tangible metal standard; the relationship between capital and labor, in which capital is trying to increase profits and productivity while labor seeks to increase its standard of living; capital’s rhetoric of freedom versus reality, in which it dominates labor and the poor.

Toward the end, Harvey explores the "dangerous contradictions": capital’s requirement of endless compound growth, the ecological destruction it wreaks, and, in the last chapter, "universal alienation," in which he explores the forces that hamper meaningful work and promote vapid consumerism.

Capital can survive its contradictions, he writes, as long as it heaps more burdens - in the form of class inequality, degradation of the environment, and curtailing of human freedom - on the people and institutions already holding it up.

The key question is, where do things go from here? Harvey calls for a "revolutionary humanism that can ally with those religious-based humanisms … to counter alienation in its many forms and to radically change the world from its capitalist ways."

He asks readers to imagine an economy in which the necessities of food, housing, and education don’t go through a profit-maximizing market system; in which money "rots," so it can’t be hoarded; in which the pace of work slows down to accommodate creative endeavors and social life; and in which a "zero growth" economy is a desirable stasis, not a national emergency.

It might sound far-fetched, and Harvey does not offer a road map for setting up such a world.

Pollin, the UMass economist, says this is one of his main frustrations with Harvey’s work: "He is much like Karl Marx in that he is much stronger on the critique than he is on thinking through viable paths forward. If you truly care about solutions, you should not just write your treatise and not think seriously about what is to be done."

Harvey, for his part, says that any revolution would have to start by "changing mental conceptions of what the good life is," and that you do so in part by changing the language. Occupy started this work by defining the "1 percent."

"We saw it in the civil-rights movement and in the gay-and-lesbian movement," he says. "When you change the language, you can change the way people think and their mental conceptions. And when that changes, you can start to push in new politics."

But he acknowledges myriad challenges. Most of us, he says, have been "neoliberalized" - we have come to believe the tenets of a well-funded campaign that exalts the individual, privatizes social services and public institutions, and scorns the potential of government.

The left, he says, deals in "a politics that rests on narratives of victimization," which doesn’t inspire solidarity. Nongovernmental organizations, a main tool now used to address inequities, are supported by the rich and therefore cannot criticize the wealth and accumulation of wealth that feeds them.

Personal debt, which has emerged as a major burden in recent decades, may be the most crucial challenge. "One of the things about debt is that it tends to foreclose the future - you have already spent the future," Harvey says. "It is very difficult to have an imagination of something radically different when your future is already pinned to some continuation of capital."

At some point, he believes, the system can’t continue.

In the final pages of Seventeen Contradictions, he raises the specter of violence as a potential response to the inequities of capital - the riots and protests in Turkey, Egypt, Brazil, and Sweden last year "look more and more like the prior tremors for a coming earthquake that will make the postcolonial revolutionary struggles of the 1960s look like child’s play."

"The longer it goes on," Harvey says quietly in his New York office, "the less I think that there is a possibility that it will be a peaceful transition."

Scott Carlson is a senior writer at The Chronicle.

INTERVIEW - Resilience, Unity, Transformation, Hope: How One School Is Helping Vulnerable Students Succeed

On the way to a YouthBuild rally at Los Angeles City Hall

by Julia Wasson, National Board Certified Teacher in Laurel Canyon, Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julia-wasson/post_7558_b_5306916.html

YouthBuild is an innovative chain of leadership development, education and job training schools for young people aged 16-24 who have left high school without diplomas.

Michelle Miranda, founder of R.U.T.H. (Resilience Unity Transformation Hope), the Canoga Park site, is fiercely committed to her students' success.

Miranda's students are those often considered the most challenging to serve and least likely to graduate: approximately 90 percent Latino, 20 percent undocumented, 30 percent teen parents.

More than half of them have been involved with the law, and Miranda works regularly with her students' parole officers.

Miranda runs a tight ship. On my first visit, the only thing out of place in the impeccably kept storefront facility is a fruit roll-up wrapper on the hall floor. Ms. Miranda whisks it up saying, "We'll have to find out who's responsible!"

As we walk past an open classroom door, she brandishes the wrapper demanding politely, "Who was eating pink fruit roll-ups?" "Don't trip, Ms. Miranda," says a young man seriously, taking it from her. "We'll figure it out."

Miranda talks about her her vision for young people below.

Why were you drawn to YouthBuild?

I love the holistic approach to young people. Before YouthBuild I worked for an organization doing after-school tutoring. We went into homes, and I noticed so many young people over 18 who hadn't finished school, couldn't get jobs, and were living off their parents. The parents would ask us over and over, "Can you help us? Can you help our kids?" I researched options and liked the YouthBuild approach.

Why does YouthBuild succeed?

Our students are used to throwing in the towel. We get a lot of students coming in, making great progress, until a situation may come up in their lives. We try to look at our students the same way I look at my son. I care about his education, but I'm also asking about a roof over his head, noticing if his cough lasts longer than two weeks, the look on his face when walks in the door. When I'm looking to hire a math teacher, teaching math is only half the skill set. I need to know he believes young people are capable of wonderful things; that he can look past negative behavior while still addressing it. 

Can you give us an example?

One student had dropped out of traditional high school. When we sat down and talked, he mentioned that when he was in elementary school his dad left, and his uncle started molesting him. This young man said, "Miss, I remember my teacher saying, 'Why don't you care about math, you didn't do your math homework,' and as a kid I was just worried about surviving." Many people believe that dropouts are bad kids or lazy, but some of these young people have gone through difficult things in life they didn't bring on themselves. The public school system is cutting back on counseling, and these young people show up, but don't always have the support they need. What was more important in that young man's life? Every young person has a story. I am constantly blown away. I've been through so much, but I still had it good. Sometimes young people don't realize how resilient they are, they just see what they're not. They begin to believe what they hear from people in the community - that they're never going to amount to anything. These students are smart; they'll even mention that they know when adults have given up on them. The adults quit scolding, and just let them do whatever they want. The students know what that means.

Can you describe a moment with a student that sticks with you?

One of our students came in at 23-years-old and undocumented. He had two children already, and he struggled with having to balance work, school, full custody of his children, keeping them housed. YouthBuild was the only program that could support him. He shared his life with us and allowed us to be that support. On graduation day he called and said, "I can't make it, my aunt won't babysit because I didn't give her money." Staff held up the graduation, held the music, and said, "Just get here, don't worry, we'll sit with your kids." When he graduated he had no family in the audience except his two kids, one in diapers and one maybe four years old. When he walked the stage everybody knew his story. He got the loudest applause, and the look on his face ... I will never forget.

Tell us about the Ruth, the inspiration for the name of your site

My grandmother, Ruth Rodriguez, came to the United States in the 1917 with my great grandparents to avoid religious persecution in Mexico. While my grandmother was a teen working the fields of Santa Paula, she met and married my grandfather. Life as a migrant farm laborer was difficult, as they moved to follow the crops. My grandmother fed the farm laborers out of my grandfather's truck. She got an oil drum and bent the top to make a burner for cooking tortillas. She used the drums that were dented even more for cooking beans, and frying up carnitas. We would tell her that she probably had the first taco truck. Through hard work and perseverance, they raised four children, looking at every obstacle as a steppingstone. From working the fields they went on to own a grocery store, a hot dog stand, a shoe store and a flower shop. With only a third grade education, my grandmother worked hard in order to provide a beautiful life and a better future for her family.

Ruth Rodriguez, whose unstoppable determination to make a better life for her family inspired Miranda.
I remember the lessons my grandmother taught my cousins and me about God, morals and values, manners, compassion, and giving. One year when I was about five, my grandmother picked me up days before Christmas and told me to choose one of my presents from under the Christmas tree and bring it with us. She took me to a garage where a family lived. That's right, a garage. I remember one of the windows was broken and they had covered it with foil. It was very cold. There must have been seven people living in that garage. My grandmother leaned down and whispered into my ear, "Go give your gift to the little girl." I was so upset, because I thought I was going to open MY present, that's why I picked the biggest box. I walked across the room and gave it to the girl. As I watched her open the only gift she was going to get for Christmas, I received a love for giving and doing for others. When my grandmother passed in 2002, they had to close the streets in Bakersfield because so many came to honor her life.

Do you see young people today with that kind of determination?

Irvin came into our program deeply involved with a local gang in a high-up position. He was always more part of a problem in the community. He showed up for class with one piece of paper and a pencil behind his ear. Staff wondered if he would stay. He was checking us out, not sure if this was what he wanted. But he kept showing up. Students were a little fearful, they said, "Don't mess with him because after school, away from YouthBuild, something could go down." But he started taking classes, building his credits, opening up to staff - this hard young man became the young boy that he was. He ran for our Youth Policy Council and was elected. In April we have Government Education Days, and students go to Sacramento and meet other YouthBuild students. They visit Senator Padilla's office and share about their experience, and let the senator know how his office can help support young people who are stepping into leadership and flipping the script. One student had prepared the initial presentation and first introduction, and Ervin said, "Let me, let me." No one messes with him, so the others said, "Go ahead." He walked in and said, "My name is Ervin, I'm from YouthBuild, and I'm not here for myself, I'm here representing my community." At that moment I sat out of spotlight to the side, and I thought about a young man who at one point had thought it was all about him. This was such a beautiful growth. That's what YouthBuild is about, that's leadership, rebuilding our life in our community. I will never forget that moment. I'm tearing up now. Students come back and say, "Miss, YouthBuild saved me."

When did you know you were at the right place doing the right work?

Before finding our building and opening our program, I ran into every obstacle. I drained my savings account, I poured in every penny. When we opened on the first day of mental toughness class, students came in with their eyes wide open. We weren't quite a school; I didn't know what leadership was, but I felt the staff's excitement. We managed. Then students left, the staff left and the last set of fluorescent lights were on in my office. I put my hands down and breathed and realized, "I did it. I got the doors open, and the students who came in had hope. These students have been hanging out in the community not doing anything, and now they have direction and virtue and they're part of something. They're part of a program where people care." It was a great moment. The sounds, the fresh carpet smell, everything in that moment I hope I never forget.

R.U.T.H. YouthBuild assembling at the rally. Photo: Melissa O'Connell.
What is your favorite part of the day at YouthBuild?

Lunchtime, because I enjoy catching up with the young people. Now our students get the federal lunch program, but before that started, our staff made food. We took money out of our own pockets to make a big old pot of spaghetti, or we brought a grill and barbecued hot dogs so our students could eat.

What do you hope you offer your students?

Some of our students come in with their academic skills so deficient. I hope they walk away empowered, that they see their own worth and know that whatever happens in life, they have what it takes to overcome. YouthBuild and the relationships they've formed will always be here for them.

What keeps you up at night?

You didn't ask me about my least favorite part of the day. The worst time of day for me is at 3:40, when we dismiss. I know there are a few young people still struggling with their leadership, and I know the temptations out on the streets. In just one moment they can lose track of the ground they've gained.

What you hope your students believe about you?

That I care. The students told me, "You're behind the scenes, but we see you, Miss, pulling so many different projects for us." They have my back 100 percent. They come in my office to hang out, and the next thing you know, they are handling business. Those young people have taken a load off me. On my wipe-off board I list the agendas for staff and Youth Policy Council meetings. The staff agenda listed attendance, and one student said, "Look Miss, we see you wrote attendance." I said, "Yeah, it's dropping," so he added it to the Youth Policy Council agenda, saying, "It's not just your problem, it's our problem."

YouthBuild pride! Young people rebuilding their lives and communities. Photo: Melissa O'Connell
What are the rewards for you?

I feel fulfilled. Now my goal is for the future - I would love that on the day I retire, I can pass the torch to one of our students, and have an alumnus lead this beautiful work. YouthBuild has saved me, too. I've had a couple of failed marriages. Life's going to throw things at us. One guarantee is, you'll hit obstacles! Watching students come in and beat the odds, when we see them cross the stage at graduation, those are little miracles. When I go through challenges in my life, I look back at our students and tell myself, "Quit crying, you can do this." They give me virtue. They are my heroes.

Job Creation and the Sharing Economy

Pic: Zach Klein. Policies for Shareable Cities

by Stacco Troncoso, originally published by P2P Foundation Blog, Resilience.org: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-05-09/job-creation-and-the-sharing-economy

The sharing economy offers enormous potential to create jobs. Sharing leverages a wide variety of resources and lowers barriers to starting small businesses. Cities can lower the cost of starting businesses by supporting innovations like shared workspaces, shared commercial kitchens, community-financed start-ups, community-owned commercial centers, and spaces for “pop-up” businesses. Cities can also lower permitting barriers for home-based micro-enterprises. Sharing is also at the heart of the employment model that is designed to keep wealth and jobs in the community: cooperatives. In the age of global economics, where even money spent locally can quickly slip from local communities, fostering cooperative enterprise creates local jobs that are rooted securely in the community. Just as important, cooperative jobs are likely to be good jobs that value dignity, creativity, democracy, and fair pay. These qualities are among the reasons co-ops are widely acknowledged as being more viable, more resilient, and healthier for their communities than conventional businesses. Supporting the growth of cooperatively owned enterprises may be one of the most important things that a city can do to support stable, fair paying, local job creation. On the surface, cooperatives may look like conventional businesses, but co-operatives stand apart from traditional enterprise on two major counts:

• Accountability to Members, not to Absentee Shareholders: A cooperative’s Board of Directors is elected - on a one-member, one-vote basis - by the members of that cooperative, who are typically either the workers or customers (or both) of the business. Unlike conventional businesses that gravitate toward deci- sions that benefit absentee shareholders, cooperatives are nearly guaranteed to make decisions that serve the interests of local workers and customers.
• Profits are Shared on the Basis of Patronage, not Capital Ownership: Unlike traditional businesses, which distribute profits to shareholders on the basis of the relative size of shareholders’ capital ownership, cooperatives distribute profits to members on the basis of each member’s contribution to the cooperative’s work or business - also known as “patronage.” In a worker cooperative, patronage is measured by the value of work contributed by the member or by the number of hours worked. In a consumer cooperative, patronage is measured by the value or quantity of purchases made by the customers. In this way, wealth spreads within the community instead of leaking to shareholders outside of the community.

HOW CAN A CITY HARNESS THE SHARING ECONOMY IN ORDER TO CREATE JOBS AND DEVELOP ENTERPRISE?

1. EXPAND ALLOWABLE HOME OCCUPATIONS TO INCLUDE SHARING ECONOMY ENTERPRISE

We recommend that cities expand allowable home occupations to include “nano-enterprises” characteristic of the sharing economy, or define such “nano-enterprises” as accessory uses of residences. The sharing economy has enabled an explosion of home-based “nano-enterprises,” which are income generating activities made possible by communities and technologies that connect people to provide for each other in new ways - allowing one person to rent household goods to another, to rent a room to a traveler, to rent a car to a neighbor, to charge for the use of a parking space, or to exchange goods and services at the neighborhood level. Unfortunately, many zoning codes are designed to separate home life from commercial life, making it illegal for many people to benefit from the sharing economy and generate income at home. We recommend that cities begin to survey the many ways in which residents are able to supplement their incomes in the sharing economy¹⁰¹ and adopt policies that ensure that the zoning code either allows the activity as an accessory use of a residence, or that business licenses and zoning approval will be granted when such activities are at a scale unlikely to impact the intended quality of the neighborhood. See the Food and Housing sections of this publication for examples of ways that cities have granted citizens the ability to operate small-scale home businesses in the sharing economy.

2. REDUCE PERMITTING BARRIERS TO ENTERPRISES THAT CREATE LOCALLY CONTROLLED JOBS AND WEALTH

We recommend that cities reduce permitting barriers and fees, and prioritize conditional use permitting for shared workspaces, cooperatives, community-owned businesses, and other projects that create locally controlled jobs and local wealth. Cities can create locally controlled jobs and local wealth retention by lowering permitting fees and granting priority business licenses and zoning approval to projects that a) demonstrate that they will create opportunities for a large number of start-up enterprises, b) are cooperatively owned, or c) will be predominantly owned by a broad range of local community members. Any business that is owned by a broad range of local community members - either through a cooperative model or through local crowdfunding and direct public offerings - guarantees that the profits of the business will spread throughout the city and re-circulate locally. Shared workspaces, kitchens, and machine shops enrich a city by giving residents low-cost access to space and equipment for prototyping new products or services, short-term projects, or ongoing day-to-day work.

Example:

San Diego, CA - Market Creek Plaza is a model for community-owned commercial spaces. On the surface, Market Creek Plaza may look like most shopping malls; yet, the primary shareholders of the mall are a local non-profit and individual members of the local community. When the mall was developed, 50,000 shares were offered to local community members at $10 per share.¹⁰² It is not clear whether the city of San Diego took into account community-ownership when granting approvals for this development; however, we recommend that cities prioritize permitting for similar community-owned and locally crowdfunded developments.

Photo credit: Allan Ferguson / Foter.com / CC BY.

3. USE IDLE COMMERCIAL SPACES FOR COMMUNITY BENEFIT

We recommend that cities facilitate the temporary use of empty commercial spaces by offering incentives for temporary leases and by penalizing property owners and banks for allowing spaces to remain vacant. Lowering barriers to temporary uses allows small and start-up businesses to test their products and services without assuming the large financial burden of a long-term lease.

Examples:

Newcastle, Australia - A community group has helped breathe new life into this Australian city’s downtown, which had been left largely vacant after big employers left town. The group negotiates flexible arrangements between property owners with vacant spaces and community members and artists who have ideas for these spaces, but no financial resources to rent them in a formal sense. The result has fostered economic opportunity, creativity, and collaboration for the city’s businesses, artists, entrepreneurs, and property owners.¹⁰³ We recommend that city governments take on similar intermediary roles in negotiating and incentivizing such leases.

Richmond, CA - In 2008, the City Council passed the Foreclosure Fine Ordinance, which fines banks $1,000 a day for vacant properties with code violations. The law, which aims to reduce the blight from foreclosed properties, also brought in about $780,000 for the city last fiscal year.¹⁰⁴ Similarly, we recommend that cities impose fines on banks or other property owners that allow commercial spaces to sit empty. By creating a disincentive for waste, cities thereby create an incentive for property owners to share their spaces with community groups or small enterprises.

4. ASSIST COOPERATIVES THROUGH CITY ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT DEPARTMENTS

We recommend that cities equip economic development departments with the knowledge and resources to support cooperatives and other community enterprises. Like all new businesses, cooperatives and community enterprises need considerable technical assistance before they begin, particularly during their infancy. Unfortunately, most economic and small business development departments are largely uninformed about cooperatives and can offer little assistance. City staff should be able to identify the appropriate type of cooperative model (worker, producer, or consumer cooperatives) for various enterprise concepts, and then be prepared to provide advice about structure and assistance in identifying and securing funding. At a minimum, staff should be prepared to connect aspiring entrepreneurs to outside organizations that provide technical assistance to new co-ops.¹⁰⁵ In addition, economic development departments can be particularly helpful with “conversions,” the process by which retiring small business owners can pass their businesses on to employees.

Examples:

Cleveland, Ohio - The Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland’s low-income neighborhoods are models in urban wealth building. They provide services to anchor institutions, like local hospitals and universities, and include a green industrial laundry, a solar installation firm, and the largest urban greenhouse in the US. The Mayor’s Office connected the Cleveland Foundation and other Evergreen partners to Cleveland’s Department of Economic Development for help finding innovative sources of funding. The city’s Sustainability Office helped identify energy incentives like Solar Tax Credits. The support of these departments was key to accessing the financing necessary to launch Evergreen.

Richmond, California - In 2011, the City of Richmond hired a consultant to create, support and expand worker cooperatives. Inspired by a visit to the large and successful Spanish network of Mondragon cooperatives (which similarly inspired the Evergreen Cooperatives), Richmond’s Mayor decided that a small-scale version of that network could create meaningful economic opportunity in her city, which suffers from high unemployment.¹⁰⁶ The consultant, a co-founder of the worker cooperative Arizmendi Bakery Lakeshore,¹⁰⁷ has worked with Richmond residents to form a health food co-op, an electric bicycle co-op, and a hydroponically grown organic food co-op.

Madison, Wisconsin - In June 2012, the City of Madison’s Office of Business Resources partnered with the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Cooperatives to host the Madison Cooperative Business Conference. The conference focused on business conversions to employee ownership, co-op best practices, and a census of local cooperatives. It drew economic development professionals, entrepreneurs, and members of existing cooperatives.¹⁰⁸

5. MAKE GRANTS TO INCUBATE NEW COOPERATIVES

We recommend that cities work with existing non-profits that have the knowledge of and connection to communities where cooperatives are likely to be successful. By partnering with private foundations or by granting public funds for cooperative workforce development, cities can capitalize on the knowledge and expertise of organizations well situated to incubate new cooperatives, particularly when they have a track record of working in economically marginalized neighborhoods.

Example:

New York, NY - For several years, the Center for Family Life (CFL), a non-profit social service organization, had been incubating new worker cooperatives in its largely immigrant Sunset Park, Brooklyn neighborhood.¹⁰⁹ In 2012, the New York City Council awarded CFL a $147,000 grant to train two additional non-profits in other New York City neighborhoods to become co-op incubators themselves.¹¹⁰

Photo credit: kevin dooley / Foter.com / CC BY.

6. PROVIDE FINANCIAL AND IN-KIND RESOURCES TO COOPERATIVES

We recommend that cities provide grants, loans, and in-kind support to cooperatives, and facilitate or act as intermediaries to secure other financing opportunities for cooperatives. Cities can support the financing of cooperatives in a variety of ways, by: 1) giving grants, 2) providing loans, 3) utilizing federal funds from Community Development Block Grants and economic recovery funding to support cooperatives, 4) creating loan guaranty programs, 5) supporting the development of revolving loan funds,¹¹¹ 6) acting as an intermediary between cooperatives and lending institutions, and 7) offering city-owned land to cooperatives.

Examples:

Cleveland, OH - The city of Cleveland was instrumental in assisting the Evergreen Cooperatives to secure financing to develop its ambitious network of worker-owned cooperatives. The Evergreen Cooperatives provide goods and services to local anchor institutions like hospitals and universities. They relied on a series of investments from private foundations to get off the ground. Cleveland’s Economic Development Department acted as an intermediary for lending institutions securing New Markets Tax Credits, and the city also dedicated its own funds through the Federal Section 108 Loan Guarantee Program.¹¹² Cleveland also played a major role in providing and securing land that became the Green City Growers, a 3.25-acre hydroponic greenhouse and worker cooperative that is part of the Evergreen Cooperatives network.

San Francisco, CA - In 2012, the city and County of San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development provided People Organized to Demand Environmental and Economic Rights (¡PODER!), a non-profit organization, a $76,000 grant to invest in its co-op development project in the low-income Latino neighborhoods of South Mission and Excelsior.¹¹³

Richmond, CA - After reading a press account of the city’s commitment to fostering worker cooperatives, a member of the public made an anonymous $50,000 donation to establish the Richmond Worker Cooperative Revolving Loan Fund. The city established an independent non-profit to administer the fund in collaboration with the city’s economic development department.¹¹⁴ The purpose of the fund is to increase support for a growing network of Richmond-based cooperatives through a regenerating pool of funding.¹¹⁵

7. PROCURE GOODS AND SERVICES FROM COOPERATIVES

We recommend that cities prioritize worker cooperatives whenever the city contracts with private businesses for procurement of goods and services. Where cooperatives exist, we recommend that cities - and city institutions like schools, public hospitals, and public housing - make an effort to prioritize procurement agreements with cooperative businesses in an effort to support local jobs. Such preferences can be formalized in procurement ordinances and policies.

Example:

New York, NY - Since 1985, Cooperative Home Care Associates has provided home care services to chronically ill, disabled, and elderly New Yorkers while creating good jobs in a sector known for its low wages, instability, and lack of career mobility.¹¹⁶ The cooperative employs nearly 2,000 workers, about half of whom are worker-owners, and the cooperative has contracts to provide services to several New York City agencies. Workers earn wages about 10 to 20 percent higher than the market rate, have 401(k) plans, and are unionized.¹¹⁷

8. INTEGRATE COOPERATIVE EDUCATION INTO PUBLIC EDUCATION PROGRAMS

We recommend that cities integrate topics related to cooperative enterprise into local high schools, vocational schools, and other public education programs. The advantages of successful cooperatives are significant for workers and communities, but cooperative principles and structures are not always intuitive to U.S. workers accustomed to hierarchical business structures. Thus, schools can play a valuable role in supporting cooperatives.

Examples:

NY, New York - The Bronx Compass High School is partnering with Green Worker Cooperatives to bring a version of the organization’s Co-op Academy to high school students. Students in the cooperative development class develop and present ideas for cooperative businesses to the school community, which can choose to incubate the cooperative.¹¹⁸

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100 In Quebec, the survival rate for new cooperatives after five years is 62 percent, as compared with 35 percent for all businesses. Even after ten years, cooperatives show more resilience, with a survival rate of 44 percent compared with 20 for all businesses. “Survival Rate of Co-Operatives in Quebec,” Ministry of Economic Development, Innovation, and Export in Quebec (2008), ccednet-rcdec.ca/files/ccednet/pdfs/2008-Quebec_Co-op_Survival_Re…. There is also evidence that co-ops - food co-ops in particular - contribute to a stronger local economy. They do so by supporting other local businesses (“for every dollar spent at a food co-op, $0.38 is reinvested in the local economy compared to $0.24 at conventional grocers”) and providing higher wages (“[c]o-op employees earn an average of nearly $1.00 more per hour than conventional grocery workers when bonuses and profit sharing are taken into account”). “Healthy Foods, Healthy Communities: Measuring the Social and Economic Impact of Food Co-Ops,” National Cooperative Grocers Association (2012), www.ncga.coop/ node/5176.

101 See the Economist’s March 9, 2013 cover story “The Rise of the Sharing Economy,” summarizing ways in which technology has created an enormous market for peer-to-peer rentals.

102 “Community Ownership,” Market Street Plaza, www.marketcreekplaza.com/mcp_our-story.html.

103 Goodyear, Sarah, “Cities as Software, and Hacking the Urban Landscape,” Grist (24 May 2011), www.grist.org/cities/2011-05-23-cities-as-software-and-hacking-th… See also: Renew Newcastle, www.renewnewcastle.org.

104 “City versus banks on foreclosed homes in Richmond, Calif.,” What Went Wrong: Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University School of Communication (8 Sep. 2011), www.americawhatwentwrong.org/blog/what-went-wrong-blog/city-versus-banks-foreclosed-homes-richmond-calif.

105 Organizations engaged in cooperative development in the United States include the California Center for Cooperative Development, Cooperative Development Institute, Northwest Cooperative Development Center, Cooperation Texas, the Democracy at Work Network (DAWN), Green Worker Co- operatives’ Co-op Academy, Women’s Action to Gain Economies Equality (WAGES), the Green Collar Communities Clinic (GC3), TeamWorks, Cooperative Homecare Associates, the Center for Family Life, and the Cooperative Development Foundation.

106 Mondragon is a system of more than 260 cooperative enterprises located in Basque country, Spain, employing approximately 85,000 people and generating annual revenue of nearly $20 billion. Zuckerman, Dave, “USW and Mongragon Unveil Union Co-op,” Community Wealth (13 Apr. 2012), http://www.community-wealth.org/content/usw-and-mondragon-unveil-union-co-op. For a critical analysis of Mondragon’s strengths and limitations in the contemporary global economy, see Marszalek, Bernard, “The Meaning of Mondragon,” Counterpunch (13-15 Jul. 2012), www.counterpunch.org/2012/07/13/the-meaning-of-mondragon.

107 The Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives is itself a cooperative made up of seven member businesses: six cooperative bakeries and a development and support collective. Members share a common mission; share ongoing accounting; legal, educational and other support services; and support the development of new member cooperatives through the Association: www.arizmendi.coop/about.

108 “City to Host Madison Cooperative Business Conference,” City of Madison Press Release (23 Apr. 2012), www.cityofmadison.com/news/view.cfm?news_id=3171.

109 Not all of the cooperatives have survived, but several did, including a babysitting cooperative (www.beyondcare.coop), an eldercare cooperative (www.goldensteps.coop), and a home care cooperative (www.wecandoit.coop/).

110 The Urban Justice Center, which provides legal support to cooperatives, also shared in this grant.

111 “CDFA Spotlight: Revolving Loan Funds (RLFs),”Council of Development Financing Agencies,

www.cdfa.net/cdfa/cdfaweb.nsf/ordredirect.html?open&id=rlffactshe….

112 “Chapter 1: Financing the Evergreen Cooperatives,” Evergreen Cooperatives Toolkit (2011), evergreencooperatives.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Evergreen-1…..

113 C. Sciammas, Personal Interview, 7 Mar. 2013. See also: www.podersf.org.

114 See: Richmond Main Street, www.richmondmainstreet.org.

115 See: Richmond Worker Cooperative Revolving Loan Fund, www.richmondcooploans.net.

116 See: Cooperative Home Care Associates, www.chcany.org.

117 For an informative history of the Cooperative Home Care Associates, see “A Brief History of Cooperative Home Care Associates,” American Worker Cooperative (8 March 2011), www.american.coop/content/brief-history-cooperative-home-care-associates.

118 “First Ever Co-op Academy for Kids,” Green Worker Cooperatives (4 March 2012), www.greenworker.coop/home/2013/3/4/first-ever-coop-academy-for-kids.html.

Note: This is the final installment of a serialization of Shareable’s Policies for Sharing Cities Report, we look at jobs and jobs creation in the context of the Sharing Economy.

Will Co-ops Spark a New Civil Rights Movement?

by Steve Dubb, originally published by Community Wealth, Crossposted from Rooflines: The Shelterforce Blog, Resilience.org: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-05-07/will-co-ops-spark-a-new-civil-rights-movement

While the words “co-op” and “civil rights” do not commonly appear in the same sentence, with more than 300 cooperative and social justice activists gathered in Jackson, Mississippi, last weekend, the question was hard to avoid.

Mississippi, of course, has long played a central role in civil rights history.

In 1963, the NAACP (National Association for Advancement of Colored People) leader Medgar Evers was assassinated, as he pulled his car into his driveway outside his Jackson home.

Many key moments in the civil rights movement from the Freedom Riders to the state’s Freedom Democratic Party delegation of 1964 took place in Mississippi.

Now, 50 years later, a new movement had emerged in Jackson, a city that is 80 percent African American and which suffers from a 28.3 poverty rate. 

In June 2013, running on a platform to create jobs by rebuilding infrastructure through the development of a network of community-owned cooperatives, Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor of Jackson. 

Tragically, Lumumba died suddenly after complaining of chest pains in February, only eight months into his term. Lumumba’s son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, ran for the vacated mayoral seat. While he made it into the runoff, he did not prevail, ending up with 46 percent of the votes cast in last month’s special election.

The Jackson Rising: New Economies Conference was planned before Mayor Lumumba died. Activists in Jackson quickly determined that while the charismatic leader had passed away, it was important for his vision to live on - and so the conference went on as planned.

At the conference, Kali Akuno, who had been coordinator of Special Projects and External Funding in the Lumumba administration, outlined the vision: “What I know that we were planning on doing … was to transform how contracts were structured, what they prioritized, what they incentivized, who was incentivized and what they could do. Change the procurement: who we bought from and why. Those were two immediate things we were working on. Another piece was setting up an incubator to foster the development of cooperatives; the government can’t run the co-ops. It won’t build them, but it can set the table … for most of the past 20 years, even though there has been a succession of black mayors, 90-95 percent of contracts to people who don’t live in Jackson. It was all about hiring people in Jackson.”

The notion of cooperatives in African American communities is an old one, dating back to the efforts of W.E.B. DuBois, who also helped found the NAACP. 

As Jessica Gordon Nembhard notes in her recently published study Collective Courage, one of the research conferences of Du Bois’ famous Atlanta Conferences at the turn of the 20th century was devoted to discussing cooperative businesses among African Americans.  

During the Great Depression, co-op development activity became a major focus in many African American communities, just as it was in many white working class communities. 

Some organizations, notably the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, which organizes cooperatives mainly in the South’s rural “black belt,” continue to support cooperative development in African American communities. But, by and large, cooperatives have not been a major part of community development strategies.

Of course, much of the community development movement - sometimes consciously, sometimes not - can be considered part of a long civil rights movement that fights for both racial and economic justice. For example, Dr. Martin Luther King in the last year of his life helped launch the Poor People’s Campaign for an Economic Bill of Rights.

The return of cooperatives to the movement, as illustrated by the conference in Jackson, is a welcome development.  

One group that has helped foster this shift is the Southern Grassroots Economics Project, which brings together a number of partners, including the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, the North Carolina-based Fund for Democratic Communities, the Highlander Research and Education Center (also of civil rights movement fame) and the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives, among others.

Meanwhile, in Jackson, Mississippi, the co-op effort is changing gears, but moving forward. While the loss of the mayor’s office makes leveraging city procurement much less likely, grassroots work to develop co-ops in such areas as recycling, construction, urban farming, and childcare continues. 

Activists also seek to develop institutions - incubators, training programs, and credit facilities - to support community building for the long haul.

Elondria Williams, a member of the education team at Highlander, noted that founder Miles Horton had observed that there is a difference between organization-building time and movement-building time. “We are still in organizational building time,” Williams added. “That’s what we have to do.”

Resilience and social capital - 2020 Resilience Conference Paper 4

Report from International Food Policy Research Institute, Relief Web: http://reliefweb.int/report/world/resilience-and-social-capital-2020-resilience-conference-paper-4

 

Increasingly, resilience is being incorporated into planning and social protection policy.

People have been facing shocks, both natural and anthropogenic, forever, devising and innovating a variety of institutional responses to cope with, recover from, and prevent future impacts.

Central to these shocks and this coping capacity, but often underexplored, is the role of social capital.

This paper, using the case studies of iddirs (funeral societies) in Ethiopia and migrant networks in the Philippines, explores the contribution of local forms of social capital to building and strengthening the resilience of individuals and communities, focusing on their contributions to coping, adaptive, and transformative capacities.

This paper argues that understanding clearly the role that existing social capital can play in building resilience is a necessary first step for policymakers. The authors suggest policy interventions to fill gaps where and when necessary while supporting and deepening existing social capital.

 

International Food Policy Research Institute:

Copyright © International Food Policy Research Institute

Published on 05 May 2014 — View Original

 

Download PDF (741.45 KB)Conference Paper

 

Download PDF (567.18 KB)Conference Brief

Community Resilience Manual

by Rural Resilience: http://ruralresilience.com/community-resilience-manual/

The Canadian Centre for Community Renewal have been at the forefront of supporting Communities becoming mew Resilient.

In 2000 they published the Community Resilience Manual.

The Community Resilience Manual is for Rural Communities who want to make better decisions on how to mobilise and invest community resources.

The manual aims to help rural communities cost effectively assess their own state of resilience and establish priorities for strengthening it.

It also provides a set of resources by means of which communities can strengthen their ability to respond to, and influence the course of, social and economic change.

Find out more about the CCCR

DOWNLOAD the Community Resilience Manual

While the Manual has been designed with Canadian Communities in Mind, it has, since it’s publication been adapted by several other countries.

The Manual would be of particular use for rural communities in Ireland. If you are interested in using this approach with your community in Ireland, we’d like to hear from you. Please give me a call, Bernard Joyce (094)9067080 / (087)2254698 or email info@ruralresilience.com