Hanmin Liu and Jennifer Mei of Wildflowers Institute are on a mission to change the way we think about how communities regenerate.  And it doesn't happen when well-intentioned outsiders offer up their money and expertise.
 
From years of careful observation, Hanmin and Jennifer believe that the only way to affect lasting change is to identify and then tap into a community’s “informal capital”— those assets, lying dormant or invisible, that have little or nothing to do with a community’s material wealth.  These are the resources that, with skillful nurturing, can be deployed to support a community's vitality for the long-term.  All those who care about the future of our communities must abandon the old practices that have proven not to work, and learn to perfect that nurturing art, say Hanmin and Jennifer.
 
In a just-released paper, “Sustaining Change in a Market Economy,” Hanmin asks nonprofits and governmental organizations to adopt new, “inside-out” strategies.   The conventional outside-in approaches, he maintains, have never resulted in the changes we want to see because they fail to recognize that communities are living systems—each with their own unique social structures and relationships of trust, and cultural tradition. Take the time to understand a community’s own resources and assets and then find ways to strengthen them, he counsels nonprofits and governments, rather than assume the outside “experts” know best.
 
 “Subject-area experts” and a community’s official hierarchy – it's elected leaders and paid heads of organizations—are certainly worth drawing on, Hanmin acknowledges.  But he maintains, “It’s the street-level knowledge of what is going on in that place that is essential… a secondary web of relationships and power dynamics that is hard to detect from the outside.”
 
This challenge is that this secondary, informal web of capital and leadership is often hiding in plain site. “Unlike officially identified leaders who are the apparent spokespeople—those who gain attention by their titles, their prominence, or their aura—informal leaders are modest and humble in demeanor,” Hanmin says.   But the discerning eye will spot them—they are the ones to whom people are naturally drawn at community meetings because of their quiet but effective organizing skills and their willingness to work collectively with others without the attachment of ego.
 
Informal leaders do not receive financial compensation for their work or seek attention for it. Instead they operate out of love for their community and a natural desire to sustain it.
 
Observing and documenting how these individuals and groups influence their community has become "the guiding light" of Wildflowers Institute. “Instead of entering a neighborhood with a mission, a direction, and a plan, we enter to observe and learn from local residents and to flow with the energy.”  [See this moving New York Times feature about how Wildflowers Institute worked in San Francisco's Tenderloin District.]
 
“The challenge, for all of us, is to see the informal capital—to see what is actually working—and support it as the people in communities strive toward confronting their challenges and achieving their dream,” says Hanmin.
 
Our problem today, he says, is that we really don’t how to do this.  The time to learn is now.
—Susan Arterian Chang
 

We are pleased to cross-post this delightful photojournalism piece by Mark Phillips, inspired by the Field Guide Co-Cycle story. It was originally posted at the Philadelphia Area Cooperative Alliance website. 

Though I’ve been in Philadelphia for about six years now, my interest in its cooperative economy is relatively new. It was only after attending the New Economy Coalition’s Commonbound conference last year that I began to appreciate the value cooperatives bring to their local communities and economy. In addition to their economic benefits, Philadelphia co-ops like W/N W/N Coffee Bar and Mariposa Food Co-op have become portals into local culture and economy, showing me what is possible for a community of individuals looking to make a difference.

And so, given a recent opportunity to visit a friend in San Francisco, I thought it would make for a more interesting trip if I spent my time and tourist dollars exploring the Bay Area’s cooperative economy over the standard tourist hot spots. This post offers a variety of personal photographs with accompanying descriptive captions, presented in a loose narrative of exploration throughout the week.  My hope is to share a piece of my travels with fellow cooperators from the Philadelphia and surrounding areas so that we may better appreciate the national context of our work and, in doing so, be inspired in our efforts locally.

REFLECTIONS ON THE VISIT:

The cooperative economy in the Bay Area represents an impressive array of businesses. The Arizmendi Association of Cooperatives are phenomenal examples of economic cooperation, while the bookstores all provide important meeting spaces in their local communities and cultural circles. The Missing Link Bicycle Cooperative was the first retail co-op I set foot in that didn’t sell food or beverages, leaving me with a tangible appreciation for the applicability of cooperative enterprise models to all business types. Nevertheless, the co-ops visited represented only a small fraction of all businesses in the Bay Area. Why can’t all businesses be like the Cheeseboard — just one big party, every day? What if those companies in the tech sector were responsible for abundance, not scarcity? These are perhaps questions for another visit.

What stood out to me at all of the different co-ops was the sense of community, both among the workers and the patrons. Each co-op was also a reflection of place — honoring local culture, history, and environment. Touring the Bay Area’s cooperative economy left me with a lot to think about for our work in the Philadelphia area. Mainly, what do we have to learn from our fellow cooperators on the west coast? Is there an opportunity for Arizmendi Bakeries here in Philadelphia? Could we turn one of our many bike shops into a worker cooperative?

Maybe it’s the weather, but I’m not so sure there’s any inherent difference between here and there. Philadelphia has an equally robust assortment of cooperatives thanks to years of hard work from local organizers. If anything, an awareness of other co-ops around the country should serve as a source of inspiration for our work here in the Philadelphia area. We can rest assured that while we take care of our communities locally, our partners across the country are equally engaged in the creation of a cooperative economy in service to people and planet.

We like to think of our Field Guide storytelling as the process of weaving a tapestry that, over time, reveals the increasingly rich and intricate patterns of the emerging Regenerative Economy. We've often been fortunate to discover that those patterns clarify themselves as one story spontaneously merges into another. Three recent stories are illustrative. Speaking with Aaron Reser, national director of the P6 Cooperative Trade Movement, for our story about how this growing network of retail and producer food cooperatives works to support a more just and healthier food system, she suggested we talk to a P6 member to understand exactly how that plays out in a real food coop.

She introduced us to Bjorn Bergman, outreach coordinator for the Viroqua Food Cooperative, who described VFC's P6 membership as an ongoing conversation with its customers about ways they can support businesses that represent an alternative to the industrial and corporate food system. Along the way Bjorn talked about how he came to live in the Driftless region of Wisconsin, which he calls "an amazing enigma of a place." He also described how the topography of the Driftless has nurtured a remarkable, cooperative economy. We knew there was a regenerative story to be found there! 

During the course of our research we found the website for Second Cloud on the Left Farm, a recipient of a Viroqua Food Cooperative micro-loan.   Toril Fisher, co-owner of the farm, turned out to be a remarkable artist and painter.  We asked her if we could use the photo below to illustrate our story and she kindly obliged us. 

But that wonderful photo seemed to beg for a musical accompaniment. In our continuing search we came across the band Meagan Saunders and The Driftless, whose music is described by Tom Miller of Don Quixote's International Music Hall as follows: 

"...evocative enough to enchant and warm and soft enough to cling to like sun dried sheets and a faded quilt fresh off a windblown line..."

And so our original story evolved into a tapestry of stories of a unique community of farmers, musicians, artists, and writers who have found both refuge, inspiration, and renewal in this unusually rugged midwestern landscape that mysteriously escaped the glacial drift of the last Ice Age. 

We invite you to immerse yourself in the music, art, and language of the Driftless, and perhaps add it to your summer vacation itinerary.—Susan Arterian Chang

I  met Hendrix Berry virtually last February (I have yet to meet her in the flesh, but someday hope to!) when she was feverishly working on her senior thesis on the cooperative movement, and emailed the Field Guide with questions about our study of Cleveland's Evergreen Cooperatives. She and I spoke a few weeks later, and she happened to mention that she had gone on a bicycle trip visiting cooperatives around the country with a group of friends in the summer of 2013, and that a core organizing group was hoping to embark on a similar trip in the summer of 2014 inviting a new set of riders.  We were both excited about the possibility of the Field Guide documenting the trip in semi-real time —perhaps with some film clips and journaling — in 2014.  Regrettably, that 2014 trip never happened for logistical and other reasons, but a number of former Co-Cyclists were eager to collaborate on a Field Guide story as a way to commemorate their life-changing, shared experiences.

Last summer, as we were planning the Field Guide Co-Cycle story, I had a wonderful email exchange with Hendrix (who did all the organizing to make the story happen). I was on a drive from New York to Chicago and was listening to Simon & Garfunkel's "Bookends" CD, released in 1968, and, in particular, to  "America," a song that is on the playlist of just about anyone who grew up in that intense and heady decade. 

"America" tells the story of a young couple hitchhiking and taking greyhound buses across the country during one of those hopeful summers of love that turned out not to be all that the two had hoped for. They are looking for America, but they never really find it.  The song ends as the young man turns to his sleeping companion and says, as much to himself as to her: 

"Kathy, I'm lost...I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why." 
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike 
They’ve all come to look for America.

I emailed Hendrix to tell her how the song had always resonated with me, a child of the 60s, and how much its underlying sense of unfulfilled promise contrasted with the Co-Cyclists' optimism. Unlike the youth of the 60s, the Co-Cyclists seemed to have so many more guiding lights to lead them along an alternative pathway. Or was it, I wondered, that they were just so much better at searching out those lights? I got my answer from Hendrix? 

Here's what she said:

“That's so amazing! You completely read my mind and I think about that song all the time! Co-Cycle for me was about going "to look for America" after my mother, who was a back-to-the-land hippie, found an America that she hated and couldn't take down despite the love speech. In an America that's both beautiful and damaged, Co-Cycle for me was about learning to bring this country to health by working collectively and democratically to build strength… apart from the extractive economy that tells us that our economy and our lives are out of our own hands (that they're in invisible hands).”

Hoping you enjoy the wonderful story of Co-Cycle, and that it inspires you not to give up, but to look, again, for America.  And please share your own stories of America with us.

[In the same spirit, enjoy this 2012 NPR story about Eric Schantz, a young man who returned to his hometown of Saginow, MI — which figures so prominently in Simon & Garfunkel's "America" — to participate in the regeneration of yet another city that has been the victim of our country's post-industrial decline.]   —Susan Arterian Chang

It was last February, over a cup of tea in downtown Portland’s beautiful Natural Capital building, that Stuart Cowan, cofounder of regenerative design and finance firm Autopoiesis LLC, suggested we consider the Lopez Community Land Trust as a candidate for a Field Guide story.  We have spent the last couple of months speaking with the leaders of Lopez CLT, with its funders, and with the shareholders in its housing cooperatives for our latest Field Guide story.  

We circle back here with Stuart for a deeper discussion about what makes this remarkable project such a robust example of regenerative design.

“The land trust model that Lopez CLT used to create affordable housing is about striking the balance, about giving up some return so that the capitalist system can continue to work and not collapse,” Stuart explains. “It allows people to buy a share in the cooperative for a reasonable price, and when they sell, while they do get a significant piece of equity, it is not like they had bought their house in a hot housing market and sold it 3 years later. The way everything is thought out, the way the flow of money is tied to the people who live there and the surrounding community and land is a very profound example of regenerative place-making.”

Entrepreneurialism is the primary engine of capitalism.  Stuart believes the land trust model is the perfect tool for advancing regenerative capitalism because it applies a brake on the growth of financial capital, without inhibiting entrepreneurialism.  “We want to understand that some things don’t work well in unconstrained markets," he explains. "The land trust model says, ‘Let’s ask the question, should we rethink how we own land or water rights or other ecological attributes, and when do markets around those things have limitations?’ The land trust takes the land appreciation out of the economic model.  It gets at the heart of the complexities of slowing down returns to capital. There is so much capital, how do we provide the needed returns to it on a finite planet? One answer is that some things must be transitioned out from markets and be held in a commons model.”

Because of its remarkable flexibility the land trust framework can be tailored to incubate all sorts of entrepreneurial activities:  it can hold agricultural land that can be leased at a reasonable price to farmers; it can support the restorative harvesting of timber; it can be used to create affordable housing as a springboard for an infinite variety of entrepreneurial risk-taking; and it can be used to lease land at reasonable rates for commercial purposes in dense urban settings.

The coupling of the land trust with the cooperative model has also produced incredibly regenerative outcomes for Lopez CLT, Stuart points out, as the cooperative enterprise provides an early opportunity for individuals to experience business ownership as they come together for a shared economic purpose.  Furthermore, residents who might not otherwise have the credit history to secure individual mortgages have been able to own homes by pooling their credit within this shared, but limited for-profit framework, backed by the not-profit land trust.  

The deeply green design of the last two CLT development projects [Common Ground and Tierra Verde] --clustering a few small homes using a modest amount of resources in developments whose stated mission is to use zero fossil fuels-- is the ecological component that completes the regenerative story of the Lopez CLT. As Stuart explains:  “So you have the economic democracy component, the community building, and the incredible sensitivity to local ecosystems all coming together in Lopez CLT.  There are projects that try to push social innovation around land trust and even some that do it via the cooperative model, but this incredibly deep green design approach is amazing.”

Securing funding for the Lopez CLT development projects has been incredibly time consuming, requiring a complex mix of grant funding, individual donations, and bank financing. Stuart acknowledges that commercial financing for regenerative projects like Lopez CLT will continue to be challenging for some time to come.  “In terms of financial return expectations we are heading into a difficult social adjustment where people begin to realize the new normal is not seven percent plus, it is more like three percent, because that is what a balanced world can sustain,” he maintains.  “People will be fighting for the next generation about this.  But returns that are not carefully calibrated to communities and ecosystems may become degenerative; we know they are likely to eat into social or natural capital.  We know that can’t be sustained, and that there must be a reset of return expectations.”

From Stuart's perspective, the Lopez CLT project is significant because it points the way to a transformative future where similar projects are considered not outliers but the norm. “This is the cultural transformation we will begin to have, where thinking about land trusts and cooperatives is in the front of our minds, not the back of them,” he says. “It is seeing Lopez CLT not as an exceptional project that requires lots of subsidies, but instead seeing that the thinking here is so sound and stable you can apply these ideas to a variety of businesses. We can begin to have that conscious design conversation about the community benefits, alternative ownership models, and what the non-profit needs to do to maintain its solvency and support this.  The talk will be around rebalancing, about everyone needing to give up something in the process but everyone ultimately having a lot more to gain through reciprocity. And we can apply that thinking to any kind of sustainable enterprise.  Those are the key design questions of our time.”

Since we began telling stories in 2010, Capital Institute’s Field Guide project has focused on small, scalable or replicable, projects and businesses that were organized with great intention from inception to be alternatives to the current business paradigm.

With our latest story of the McCarty Family Farms’ strategic partnership with Dannon Inc., the Field Guide departs from that tradition. We do so in recognition that every player operating in the current paradigm must be invited to participate in, and recognized for its authentic contributions to, the rapid transition we must make to a regenerative economy – whether it be a small, local startup, a mid-scale enterprise, or a global corporation.

The McCarty Family Farms is a conventional dairy farm that, after relocating from a small farm in Pennsylvania to rural Kansas, has grown to a 7000-head dairy large enough to forge a direct relationship with a values-driven processor.  According to Ken McCarty, a sixth generation McCarty Farmer, the Dannon relationship has allowed the family to be an equal partner at the price-setting table rather than a price-taker in a commodity market. But just as important, it has allowed the McCartys to focus in that partnership on innovation and longer-term, shared regenerative goals. The family admits it is a work in progress, and that their sustainability bars get raised as they go along, but it is a path to which both the family and Dannon appear to be committed.  Read the story of their collaboration, as Ken McCarty tells it, here.

As Narendra Varma, founder of Our Table Cooperative in Sherwood, Oregon, notes in a recent article in Ecotrust’s Edible Portland,  “If a company can maintain its internal value system, whatever that might be, and maintain that at scale—if it can take care of people, natural resources and the environment, pay people a living a wage—there’s nothing per se wrong with scale.” This signals a direction in the sustainable agriculture movement away from a narrow focus on size and organics, and more on the underlying values and aspirations of the business.

For example, Agriculture of the Middle, a research initiative convened by Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture under the direction of Fred Kirschenmann, is exploring values-based alliances between midsized (often family) farms and the networks they supply. These will be alliances that enable the distribution, in volume, of high-quality, food product tailored to a variety of food-network desires. Most critically, the financial rewards reaped along the way will be shared equitably among all contributing parties.  

The cutting edge of the sustainable agriculture movement, as it acknowledges the need to engage on a truly systems level, is widening its tent to include not only artisanal/biodynamic/organic producers that supply to farmers markets, farm to table restaurants, and CSAs, but also to welcome larger scale farms  that wish to operate more sustainably and the like-minded larger food businesses they supply. The future of sustainable agriculture, like the regenerative economy as a whole, will be characterized by a rich diversity of collaborative relationships, not mechanistic transactional ones between counterparties operating in narrowly defined silos.  We see this complex web of interactions as a manifestation of what ecologists call “the edge effect.”

“The benefits of these interactions are often subtle, but profound,” says Capital Institute’s founder John Fullerton.  “One must experience the richness and abundance generated through the exchanges that occur at these edges. Working across them is transformative for both the individuals involved, as well as the communities where the exchanges are happening.  This is where the vast untapped and unseen potential of regeneration will take place in numerous ‘aha’ moments and subtle shifts, some large, and some very small.”

Ecotrust’s online “matchmaking” platform FoodHub is illustrative of the alchemy of the edge effect, as it brings together more than 5,000 food producers, wholesale buyers, and service providers to communicate and collaborate. “I think it will be incumbent on all of us who care about the food system to reach out and build relationships if we want to drive transformational change in it,” says Amanda Oborne, Vice President of Ecotrust’s Food and Farms Program.  “Food Hub is completely production practice neutral, you can be organic or not, large or small, but we bend over backwards to make it transparent and to give people a way to make their own decisions.”

As Amanda notes, “We are all on a journey and we need to support and encourage one another along the way, and to minimize judgmentalism. I think what is more helpful is to acknowledge there is a whole spectrum of shades of green. People and businesses start in one place and evolve, and that journey should be encouraged.”

We are delighted to cross-post here Alex's provocative exploration of the many ways that we can define enterprise "growth."  He also challenges each of us to ask ourselves, how would we like to grow this year?  This blog was originally posted at Community Sourced Capital.  You can read the Field Guide story of Community Sourced Capital here.

Let’s start by asking a question: do businesses need to grow? I’ll cast my vote to say “Yes.” Actually, I will say “Absolutely.” Yet, there are many kinds of growth. We can grow up, we can grow out, and we can also grow wise. So let’s make sure we are talking about the same thing.

The economy we know today is pretty attached to a classic growth paradigm that demands growth, and mostly growth that manifests itself in growing revenue or profit or, in its largest sense, GDP. At the micro level, I witness this paradigm in action every time I hear the question, “How are you going to grow this business?” It’s a call you can’t ignore: grow or die.

I’m not about to dispute the value of focusing on growth. It has created tons of progress in certain sectors of our society. But I think it’s worth noting that the kind of growth we have collectively experienced has not treated all parties equally. It might be worth exploring other kinds of growth as well.

People grow in many ways. Children focus on physical growth. The strength and capabilities that come with “growing up” are certainly useful. (Me, I topped out at out at about six feet tall and growing out is… we’ll just say, no longer productive.) Physical growth quickly becomes less important and we move on to emotional and intellectual growth. We grow our capacity for empathy. We grow closer to those around us. We grow wise.

Could business (and even our economy?) aspire to recognize similar limits to physical growth and shift aspirations to another kind of growth?

When we talk about the capital we put together at Community Sourced Capital, we often describe the process of connecting businesses directly to their community as “turning an enterprise’s social capital into financial capital.” The social part looks a lot like trust and strong relationships, and the financial part looks a lot like money. Businesses need financial capital for all sorts of things — including physical growth — and those things change as a business faces new challenges and evolves to fit a dynamic environment. Sometimes, we find businesses looking for growth in terms of product lines or financial maturity. Or, perhaps most exciting, growing in terms of connections to their community. That’s when the social capital part (trust and relationships) comes in.

By sharing a company’s story of growth with its community, and most importantly, by sharing with one’s community an intention for a specific kind of growth, pathways open up for the flow of all kinds of capital: intellectual capital, human capital, social capital. A company that realizes its potential to access all sources of capital will find endless growth.

So, what would you like to grow this year?

Alex Mondau, Director, Community Sourced Capital

We have to admit we took a small liberty with the quote of film producer David Jammy featured on our newly redesigned Field Guide website. "We" should instead read "transmedia."  Despite the liberty, we  believe we have preserved Jammy's meaning. We will explain why shortly, but first here are Jammy's exact words in their context:

“By collectivizing ownership of narrative, transmedia breaks down the ‘us’ and ‘them.’ 
It is no longer 'you' supporting  'our' work to help  'them.'  Rather it is all of us working together to meet and overcome a challenge.”

Transmedia, narrowly defined, is a technique for telling a story across a variety of media and media platforms in interactive formats. Transmedia strategies are now a part of the toolkits of every branding agent and corporate marketer of our consumer culture.  But the power of transmedia can also be pressed into the higher service of system transformation, because it enables people to work collectively on new system narratives.  

Indeed, Jammy’s quote is taken from a much-shared slideshare by the founder of Transmedia Activism, Lina Srivastava.  Transmedia Activism is “a framework for strategy to create social impact, influence perception, and build community through fragmented storytelling by decentralized authors who share assets and create entry points into issues and solutions across multiple forms of media,” as Srivastava explains it.  It is not so much focused on the "trans" in "media," but on the collaborative storytelling process, that digital media has so empowered, around a shared value system.

As Srivastava says, this brand of activism is "media agnostic," flowing through whatever vessel of communication it finds its way into.  To paraphrase Lina, the framework is powerful because it allows us to tell a story of a complex system together, with the story itself being one of the elements of system change.

The digital era is unleashing the human desire to collaborate that is embedded in our biological dna at a moment in our human history when we need it most for our very survival on this planet.  As evolution biologist and futurist Elisabet Sahtouris explains in a talk she gave at the San Francisco Presidio in 2000, "Living Systems, the Internet and the Human Future"  (hat tip to our friend and mentor Carol Sanford for sharing this brilliant thought piece with us), "All living systems self-organize and maintain themselves by the same biological principles ... among them the empowered participation of all parts."   

Please consider the Field Guide a shared asset where we can all be contributors to and participants in the narrative design of the living system that is the regenerative economy.

posted by Susan Arterian Chang

One of the qualities we seek out in the projects and businesses we highlight for the Field Guide to Investing in a Regenerative Economy is a striving for right relationship.  In their book Right Relationship, Peter Brown et al. describe this quality as something that underpins all wisdom traditions, encouraging people to “live life according to cherished values built on caring for other people and being stewards of the earth’s gifts.” We’ve been discovering that wherever we see people and projects operating in right relationship we are also seeing all the other qualities of regenerativeness emerging.

This month’s Field Guide “Share your Story” teller Sara Day Evans is the founder of Accelerating Appalachia. She has been fortunate to have had many opportunities to experience right relationship and it has informed her life’s work.  A sixth generation Kentuckian she grew up in a family that loved the outdoors and spent her childhood in it “from sunup to sundown.”  She also counts Wendell Berry and his daughter, Mary, as lifelong friends and mentors.   Sara Day founded the accelerator to nurture nature-based businesses, and has been supported and guided in that effort by the collective wisdom of people like Kevin Jones and Rosa Lee Harden of SOCAP and Good Capital, and Ross Baird of Village Capital. 

Like all regenerative projects we have studied, Accelerating Appalachia does not take a needs-based approach to healing the regional economy in which it operates.  Instead it tunes into the region’s abundance of human and natural capital, but always in right relationship.  “Even though we know there is plenty that is broken,” says Sara Day, “we are working to support a post-extractive, post-coal economy for Appalachia and beyond, by building on our region’s assets.”

Read Sara Day’s story here.

To paraphrase Tim MacDonald, Capital Institute Senior Fellow and the architect of Evergreen Direct Investing, if you want people to experience a shift in consciousness you need to offer them the tools to activate it.   

Our partners of the Field Guide to Investing in a Regenerative Economy project, all impatient Regenerative Capitalists, know that intuitively. They are creating the fertile ground, today, for those critical consciousness shifts that precede all great societal transformations. They aren’t waiting for our economic and financial systems to reform or transform themselves; they are reinventing those systems from the ground up, in their own communities.

One of the critical, enabling consciousness shifts that will usher in the era of Regenerative Capitalism, and in fact one of the principle themes we see embedded in all regenerative economy enterprises, will be a more holistic way of viewing wealth. Community Sourced Capital, the subject of our most recent Regenerative Story, is giving everyday people a way to tap into this new understanding of wealth by offering them an extraordinary opportunity: to lend money, as little as 50 dollars, to the businesses that enhance life in their own communities, with no expectation of a financial return beyond the repayment of their original loan. Repayment rates are tied to revenues generated by the borrowing enterprise. 

Rachel Maxwell, CEO of Community Sourced Capital, hopes that Squareholders (as these lenders are called) will begin to see that  “money does not have to be about creating more money, it can be a tool we can use to create a world we want.”  As it turns out Community Sourced Capital is finding that their model is achieving success beyond their expectations for the very reason that it is not offering financial incentives to Squareholders.  Instead Community Sourced Capital offers them something of much greater value… a space to reflect on why they are enjoying the experience of giving with no expectation of financial gain. 

Squareholders are beginning to connect with this more expansive experience of wealth in very powerful ways.  As Rachel says: “We have heard reflections like, ‘I never felt so connected to a business,’  and ‘I feel I am a part of something that is important and I care about this in a way that I didn’t care before.’”  Community Sourced Capital’s President Casey Dilloway explains it this way: “We see people moving from a mechanical focus on money to a regenerative focus, a deeper understanding of what their money can do.”

Given the constraints and insecurities imposed by today's economy, most Squareholders are unlikely to lend out more than the small portion of their savings that they consider discretionary to the businesses funded by Community Sourced Capital. Yet Rachel poses an intriguing what-if question.  If a regenerative economy turns out to be one where the economy might not grow or might even shrink, is a zero interest rate loan the wave of the future?  She doesn't pretend to know the answer but is excited by the possibilities.

The Field Guide will continue to explore these uncharted territories, along with these pathfinders of the emergent Regenerative Economy.  Please take a tour of our stories if you are ready to enter this altered state.