Image credit: Min An on Pexels This is the second article in NPQ’s series, Just Transition: Liberating Finance to Build a Better World. Coproduced with Justice Funders, a group that organizes philanthropy to advance a just transition to an equitable and sustainable economy and planet, this series highlights case studies of emerging funding networks facilitating investment in liberatory economic practices in frontline BIPOC communities. What happens when we make mistakes in a world that is ready for us to fail? Venture capitalists fail all the time, but those working on a regenerative or solida ..read more

Image credit: Darlene Alderson on Pexels In June, over 200 co-op members, co-op developers, supporters, and community organizers from across the country gathered in St. Paul, MN, for the Network for Developing Conscious Communities (NDCC)’s third annual national conference on the Black cooperative agenda. Addressing the conference, Melvin Carter, St. Paul’s first African American mayor, said the city wanted to become “the co-op capital of the world.” The fact that St. Paul’s mayor would keynote a co-op conference and call for a co-op-centered economy speaks to the increased prominence of ..read more

Image credit: Rudzhan Nagiev on istock.com At the New Growth Innovation Network’s Cityscapes Summit, held in May in Durham, NC, the commitment to igniting inclusive economies—the conference’s theme—was palpable. Inspiring projects ranged from supporting Black communities to access credit in Arkansas to designing a community-controlled investment fund in the Hudson Valley. Yet something was missing. The current paradigm of economic development traps professionals into believing that economic growth is synonymous with big business attraction and retention. Even many who share a more gr ..read more

  The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar “Remaking the Economy: How Policy Can Help Tenants Purchase Their Homes.” View the full webinar here. José García: So, for COPA [Community Opportunity to Purchase Act], on the rental side, once you access any of these funds from the city of San Francisco, the property is deed-restricted for the next 75 years. “What the program does offer is to make sure that the tenants don’t ever have to pay any capital needs.” What does that mean for the tenants? It is usually, when we acquire the property, the program wants folks to b ..read more

Truth to Power is a regular series of conversations with writers about the promises and pitfalls of movements for social justice. From the roots of racial capitalism to the psychic toll of poverty, from resource wars to popular uprisings, the interviews in this column focus on how to write about the myriad causes of oppression and the organized desire for a better world. This is part one of a two-part interview, and has been edited for length and clarity. Read the second part here. Steve Dubb: So, your book is called Belonging without Othering: How We Save Ourselves and the World. That’s a pr ..read more

Truth to Power is a regular series of conversations with writers about the promises and pitfalls of movements for social justice. From the roots of racial capitalism to the psychic toll of poverty, from resource wars to popular uprisings, the interviews in this column focus on how to write about the myriad causes of oppression and the organized desire for a better world. This is part two of a two-part interview, and has been edited for length and clarity. Read the first part here. SD: You differentiate belonging from inclusion and offer a four-part definition rooted in inclusion, recognition ..read more

Image credit: Ron Lach on Pexels.com When it comes to identity, ideas about leadership generally reflect existing social hierarchies and binaries. There is plentiful scholarship on White leadership or traditional CEO leadership; the literature considers Black male leaders, female leaders, and Black female leaders to a lesser extent; and Indigenous people’s leadership is vastly underrepresented, typically explained as “minority leadership”. Unsurprisingly, the dominant narratives favor models that overlook multi-value-based identities (including age, class, ability, and so on), and rarely ..read more

Image credit: SeventyFour on iStock Maternal and reproductive health innovation ecosystems—which have emerged as a small but potentially impactful space within broader health innovation ecosystems—could expand women’s and girl’s options for managing their sexual, reproductive, and maternal health. If such technologies are widely accessible and adopted, they could help the United States combat its maternal and reproductive health crises while also addressing global health disparities for women. Historically and contemporarily, the needs of women have gone neglected within health research a ..read more

Image credit: Brocken Inaglory on Wikimedia “I wish it was someone else that was here talking about my contact burn and not myself,” 71-year-old Robert Woolley, a retired teacher and Navy fighter pilot told a news channel in Arizona. Woolley was recovering from second-degree burns he received in early July when he lost his balance and fell in his backyard. The ground was hot enough to burn Woolley on over 15 percent of his body. While Woolley’s accident may seem rare, Valleywise Health’s Arizona Burn Center, where Woolley received care, said it has treated more than three dozen victims of simi ..read more

A few years ago, I walked into Mil Mundos, a quaint and intimate indie bookstore in Brooklyn dedicated to Spanish and English literature. On the wall below their small cafe area, there was a poster that said, “We are collecting Puerto Rican pesos.” This was the first time I learned that Puerto Rico once had their own currency. It’s taken me a few years to understand that the loss of the currency was only the beginning of the United States’s control of Puerto Rico’s finances up until today. In seeking to decolonize, Puerto Ricans are creating local projects that experiment with alternative econ ..read more