A month or so after Hurricane Helene roared through Asheville, many are still without water or power, and almost no one has clean drinking water. In this environment, we are finding that the work of connecting the dots that we do at Neighborhood Economics is more valuable than ever.
Most immediately, that means doing local, small scale convening around pressing challenges like access to water, electricity, Internet connectivity and community free food. Gathering the people making a difference works in a disaster. What we have discovered here is something we are calling “neighborhood scale resilience.” The key to this local resilience is the social capital ties that create an interdependent economy, one functions with an assumption of abundance to be shared, and where relationships are about reciprocity rather than commodification.
In the aftermath of a disaster, the distribution of aid — like the distribution of finance in normal times — can be uneven. alexandria ravanel of the Noir Collective, a hub in downtown Asheville for Black entrepreneurs and creatives, gave us a lens to identify entrepreneurs who may be overlooked.
“The restaurants have an association, and so they become a line item” in how the government distributes aid money and grants to help businesses get back on their feet, ravanel, who’s attended our conferences, explained. The local restaurant association has already created a dedicated fund. Caterers, on the other hand, don’t have an association, organized cooperative or other umbrella group, so they are invisible on those spreadsheets.
Caterers often come from homes without the friends and family funding to open a restaurant, so they don’t create a real estate asset with a brandable business on the street. They are vital to our tourism industry, but are on fragile ground even before an unprecedented disaster hits.
The goal is to make visible the groups one step down the organizational hierarchy of visibility to funders, and enable them to form their own association to safeguard their collective survival as a niche that is thriving. This spreads risk, expands opportunity, makes the money smarter faster, with a point of view focused on recognizable groups with no seat at the table or voice in how resources flow.
Mutual aid
The Noir Collective is deeply involved in the mutual aid community engagement that’s arisen everywhere here as we help each other get our lives back. We at Neighborhood Economics, the initiative Rosa Lee Harden and I started after selling SOCAP and moving to Asheville 14 years ago, are as well, even as we are displaced after the epic flooding.
Ravanel’s framing has been helpful in these mutual aid efforts. Stephanie Swepson Twitty of Eagle Market Streets Development Corp. is identifying groups who lack an association-like structure to receive the aid money, working with a coalition she has formed with several nimble community development financial institutions, or CDFIs, the North Carolina-based Self Help Credit Union, technical assistance providers, business students from Warren Wilson College and Neighborhood Economics. The coalition is looking for businesses, like the caterers, that are invisible to the agencies, foundations and nonprofits handing out aid.
That lens will also be used when the development money to rebuild comes in from the government and foundations, to help businesses become reliable job creators again. Right now, most of their employees are without income.
Our Neighborhood Economics colleague Jeremiah Robinson, who also leads the Catalyst fund at Mountain BizWorks, a local CDFI that invests in under-represented entrepreneurs, is gathering a pipeline of worthy entrepreneurs who are not in line to get aid checks to restore business operations. Working with Noir, Robinson created a directory of local Black-owned businesses to ensure they are not left out.
We have added a theme of Neighborhood Scale Resilience to our work as we see first hand how people are making the concept of mutual aid an everyday reality we all rely on together. Warren Wilson College is mapping all the aid funds that are coming. Many of these local mutual aid organizers don’t know about the others and can cooperate much more clearly once that research helps them discover their peers and potential partners.
Our capital stack went from community development to system change. Now, relief is front and center here. Entrepreneurs need grants to get their offices and stores back in business. After that they will need help with patient capital and long term loans. The funds that arise will need to look for payment over 60 months or more, given how much was lost, Twitty believes.
Repair Asheville
The Neighborhood Economics office in our family home has been a total loss. When the Swannanoa River I once strolled along ran through our house for six hours on September 27, we lost filing cabinets, office furniture, printers, and the banners and pop ups we use at our conferences, totalling about $25,000.
Our colleague Leroy Barber has started a Repair Asheville fundraiser and we are splitting evenly every dollar that comes in up to $50,000 with local, underrepresented entrepreneurs in the community — including the ones invisible to the aid funders. After $50,000, every dollar donated will go directly to those under-represented entrepreneurs.
Please help us get back on our feet. Hurricane Helene hit just weeks before we were scheduled to hold our latest Neighborhood Economics conference here in Asheville. We are now planning to hold it here this spring.
With your help, Asheville and its overlooked entrepreneurs can be back on their feet again and on their way towards rebuilding by then.
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Kevin Jones founded and sold the SOCAP conference with his wife Rosa LeeHarden. They run the Neighborhood Economics conference from their farm on the Swannanoa River outside of Asheville, NC. Jones co-teaches the Act Local school with his daughter B.J. Harden Jones.
