The Mindful Marketplace with Joel Skene

Neighborhood Economics: Camaraderie in the Commons Unlocking Prosperity and Happiness

• Joel Skene / Seth Kaplan

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Discover the heartbeat of community transformation as Seth Kaplan, a seasoned veteran from pivotal international organizations like the UN and the World Bank, joins us to share the power of nurturing relationships for societal well-being. Unpacking themes from his latest book, Seth offers an invaluable perspective on revitalizing neighborhoods and the importance of fostering deep connections within local institutions. Our conversation journeys through the crucial role of local neighborhoods in stitching together the fabric of a healthy society, highlighting the potential for groundbreaking community progress.

In today's episode, we wade into the essence of happiness found in the closeness of our local communities. As we reminisce about the charm of town squares and the camaraderie of main streets, we confront the isolation that modern suburbia often fosters. I draw from my own life story, contrasting my upbringing in a tight-knit town with the detached suburban experience and my eye-opening time in Eastern Europe. We explore how societal shifts have influenced our sense of belonging and community participation, advocating for a redesign of our physical and institutional spaces to rekindle organic interactions and a renewed sense of place.

Wrapping up, we turn our focus to the engine driving neighborhood evolution: local networks. We delve into the concept of Neighbor Economics, where partnerships between entrepreneurs, social institutions, and socially-minded investors ignite wealth creation and foster trust within communities. I share strategies for the collaborative upliftment of neighborhoods, emphasizing the pivotal role of 'neighborhood quarterbacks' in orchestrating cross-sector efforts. From leveraging unique neighborhood identities to securing incremental victories, we reveal how small successes can snowball into profound, long-lasting change. Join us as we dissect these insights, all aimed at inspiring you to be a catalyst in the collective movement for community betterment.

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Joel :

What if investing in each other could change the world? I'm Joel Skeen with bizradious, and this is the Mindful Marketplace. Welcome, seth.

Seth:

Thank you, Joe.

Joel :

Yeah, so happy to have you on today.

Joel :

There's so much that I feel like I want to talk with you about, to dig in with you about. You are have become most famous, I guess, or you've, you've developed your expertise Really in the study of what you call kind of fragile neighborhoods, fragile systems, and you've done that through traveling all over the world, working with the UN, with the World Bank, to produce reports, and you have several books out about this concept of fragile, fragile neighborhoods. You know, I guess the first thing I wanted to just ask you because we are talking about neighborhood economics, we're talking about one of the solutions, and that's one of the things I really liked about your work is just how Solution-based it is. It seems to be kind of a flip-flop of what most of you see, where it's mostly here's all the problems and then there might be a throw to a solution at the end. But in your work it seems like there's a lot more focus on how are things actually working, how can we spread what works even better? Yeah, I guess what got you first fascinated in this idea of fragility when you look at our neighborhoods and at our societies?

Joel :

Okay, thank you.

Seth:

I would say there's, in terms of what you just said. I think there's two points that are really important that Shaped how I approach this problem. First, as you say, I've worked in lots of countries. I mean I've worked in over 30 countries. I've been in over 70 countries, 75 or something lived in many places. In just in the last few weeks I've been in Ukraine and I've been in Tunisia for work on Libya. It's, libya is not safe enough to have a meeting, so we do it in Tunis and I work in lots of places.

Seth:

And in all of these places, the idea that that I most interested in is what is the nature of relationships, what is the nature of social dynamics and how does that the social system, the relationships to Institutions, how does that affect everything else? We mostly look at outcomes and try to figure out how to get to some outcomes, and we're mostly thinking about it technically I tend to think about it in a very social system manner and how Relationships between individuals or parts of society affects everything else. That's one thing, and the second thing is I mean, even though I am based at Johns Hopkins, I spend most of my time co-managing a nonprofit that works in many of these countries and and my, and Because we're practical, because we're we're in the peace keeping or peace making field or Prevention field, our focus is always on solutions. It's not it's not on diagnosis, it's not on lamenting how we got here, it's what can we actually do about it. So if you think that I am interested in relationships, and I think if you're looking at a system and the system is fragile by my definition, by many people's definition, they're looking for what's wrong with it. Is it missing this, is it missing that? Or it's missing the other thing? Whatever it is for me, I think at the heart I'm looking at how is that community, place, society equipped in terms of its social Dynamics, its institutions, how equipped is it to manage or address its challenges? So there's always going to be something good there and there's always going to be something bad there. And you got to try to figure that out. And and then you're thinking what can I do in a solutions manner to try to catalyze Progress in the system?

Seth:

So if you think of that as my framing, and then you think that this book I wrote recently, based on many years of research, came about because people kept asking me you work in all these countries. Well, what's wrong with America? Things are not doing well here and that when I got asked that question for the sixth or seventh time I said I better figure this out. And Unlike most countries with where I think locally people have strong relations but on the national level they don't. I Look at our country and I find that locally we're isolated from each other. We don't have strong social ties and many particular neighborhoods. They lack good institutions and that holds the whole place back. So if you think about that framing and then you think about the questions that I were at, I was asked this is where I landed in terms of neighborhoods has to be the focus. Relationships has to be the entry point. What can we practically do to improve the social system in a place so that people there will thrive? Those are sort of the guiding questions and approach that I took.

Joel :

Yeah, and what I really love about that is kind of just, you know, by changing the paradigm a little bit of what is the central focus of how we design our systems, we can see completely and totally different results. I think you know. I really like what you said where you said it's about the nature of relationships. I'm curious for you like what, when it comes to that nature of relationships, when you look at the types of relationships in a given place, whether that's here, whether that's abroad, how can you differentiate between what you may call positive relationships versus negative relationships? Is it sort of a, you know, martin-buber I-and-Thou idea? Is it a kind of the what you see as the outcomes, the fruits of that spirit? I guess what you know? How do you tell the difference between the kinds of relationships you want versus the kind of relationships you don't want?

Seth:

There's many things I do. First of all, of course, I read a lot. I mean, especially if you're thinking about a country level, you want to study history, you want to study contemporary affairs, you want to know what are cleavages, what are divisions? How do, in terms of my particular work, how do we leach act? How do different ethnic, religious, clan, regional groups act in terms of the dynamic between them? Are they cooperating? Is there cohesion? Is there a common identity, or are people being divided by different identities? These are all things that matter tremendously in my, in my countries, in terms of, but that's only point. One Another thing is, of course, you want to walk around and you want to talk to people. You want to see what's how people are behaving.

Seth:

I can recall when I was out of college, one of the first things I did was I went to Lagos, nigeria, and I lived in Lagos. I lived with a Nigerian family remember this very well worked in the Nigerian company. This is at a time when it was still authoritarian and basically I would go months and never see a white person and I had. I had a tremendous experience. It was very difficult just going back and forth between home and the office every day. That was a challenge, because public transportation was not not, let's say not very good that's an understatement. And taxis if you took taxis, they mostly they didn't. Sometimes they didn't have windows, sometimes they didn't have I mean the doors barely function. I mean you're having things that were. This was not a good time period in that country, so things didn't really work well on so many levels. Nighttime wasn't safe and and I but up to by doing this, you got a real experience for how businesses had to work. You had a real experience of how people had to live. You had a real experience about what people could, who they could trust, how they solve problems. It just gives, it gave you me a particular insight into what was going on in a way that, of course, you could never learn in a fancy hotel. You could never learn from up here. I was down here with people and so I would say it's reading a lot, it's talking to a lot of people, it's walking around, it's seeing what you can see with your visual eye.

Seth:

In terms of the United States, I think, I think one of the bigger questions is that things have changed a lot in our relationships and yet we we, our government hasn't changed tremendously. Our policies have changed to some extent. There might be some legislation, court rulings, but for the most part things haven't changed that much over many decades. There's a little bit here, a little bit there, and yet our relationships have deteriorated so tremendously on so many levels. There are improvements, there are more freedoms, our society has a lot more opportunity, we're much wealthier, so there's a lot of good things going on in our society, but something about our relationships has deteriorated quite substantially.

Seth:

So if you're thinking about this question, think about the United States. You're not only reading a lot, you're not only walking around. You're asking yourself this question over and over again is what has changed that has led us to where we are? And I think that's the really big question that people have to answer. If they're worried about everything from declining health to inequality, to polarization, to mistrust, whatever the big social question, if it involves relationships and the relationships have gotten much worse you have to ask yourself why is that and what can we do to change that?

Joel :

Yeah, because it seems to me that everything has its causes and its conditions and everything that happens is going to be a cause and condition of the next thing. And so if we think about that sort of because I know one thing I like too about what I heard you talk about, you mentioned kind of getting out of the siloed way of thinking.

Seth:

So much so.

Joel :

And I think that's one of the things that I think is really important to this, to these issues, is, a lot of times we think of them as okay, mental health is over here, physical health is over here, kind of neighborhoods is over here, the economy is over here, the power structure is over here. But having actually looking at a systematic kind of stepping back and seeing what's the bigger picture, that holds all of these other things To why you think we are in a situation where our mental health crisis is kind of out of control and our addictions are getting more and more serious and the isolation that you talked about, yeah, what's your take on those causes and conditions?

Seth:

Okay, I think you actually have two questions there. I think you have one about our approach to addressing them and why do we have these conditions in the first place? So I think one of the challenges we have is that, because we are so professionalized as a society, everything gets put into different silos and we tend to look at problems in isolation. And the way government works and the way philanthropy and nonprofit world mostly works is that they are focused on specific issues and they're trying to address those specific issues. And what happens to what I might call the horizontal I very much want people and this is a key message in terms of my work is we have to think horizontal. When we're thinking in terms of these silos, we're trying to address these problems in isolation. We're never thinking what are these problems have in common? And you talked about causes. What happens if all of the issues depression, deaths of despair, mental illness problems and so on and so forth what if all of these problems because they're getting worse at the same time they are getting worse at the same time? What happens if they come from some common? There's something upstream that's happening in our society that's affecting them all and yet we're looking at them one by one trying to come up with an answer, and it's almost like we've been programmed in our education system and in our way. Our institution's work is that we're thinking one by one, but no one is thinking what about the holistic? What about the society, the community that might be causing that? So I think one of our main problems is how we've structured everything in our society to address these problems. Which leads me to the question is why are these things getting worse?

Seth:

Let me just put one statistic out there for you. The number of people who die from drug overdose in a single year in the United States is over 100,000, and it's been over 100,000 for several years. And that number is twice as many people as died in the whole Vietnam War over 20 years, from the mid 50s to the mid 70s. If you look at the whole range of the Vietnam War, something like 53,000, 45,000 people don't quote me on the exact number, but it's around that number and we've had roughly 105,000, 110,000 people dying every year. And yet this is not a newsworthy item. It's hard to find except when they announced the statistic every year anything on it in the newspapers.

Seth:

And it's a tragedy for so many families, so many places and I think my main argument is something in the deterioration of our relationships, our institutions and, most importantly, our neighborhoods. We used to live in thriving neighborhoods with lots of relationships, institutions. People had a stake, people had something they could do to improve their lives. They felt like they had ownership and agency in their community and they were active to improve it. Now you're basically alone, you have fewer relationships, you have no opportunity to do anything to improve your place or your country and mostly everything is happening to you Economics is happening to you, society is happening to you and, of course, that's disempowering, that's frustrating, that's depressing, that's isolating. So I think where we've got to is a natural result of the type of country we've created and how we need to address it is not through silos. We need to think very differently. This is why the neighborhood or our place-based approach is so important.

Joel :

Yeah, I absolutely love that. I think that that's so key it reminds me of. I remember maybe 10, 15 years ago there was a documentary called Happy and it was about positive psychology and about the things that people or communities do who report the highest levels of health and well-being and happiness, and they interviewed people in certain neighborhoods in the US, but also people who lived to be 100 in an island off of Japan, and they went to Bhutan and they talked about how, in Bhutan, they actually have not just a gross national product that they measure, but a gross national happiness index that they measure.

Joel :

And it kind of sounds like what you're saying is a little bit of a similar idea that we need to think about what our ultimate incentive and what our ultimate goal is and how we structure our incentives I guess more towards that goal, I don't know. I'm curious your thoughts on that.

Seth:

So, first of all, when we talk about happiness, too often it's like the American dream. We believe that it means more material goods, we believe it means more focus on getting ahead or a career and I don't want to deter people because I mean, we're all ambitious, we all want to achieve something to make ourselves believe our life was important, contributing, helping others, helping society, helping the world, and I think those are great motivations. But we need to remember that happiness is very much a product of relationships. Relationships are very much a product of the institutions that were. I like the word embedded, I like the word embodied, if you know what, forgive me for using these terms to be embedded in institutions and to have embodied relationships, in-person relationships, and mostly through some sort of long-term connection to an institution.

Seth:

That could be marriage, family, that could be some local organization you belong to, it could be something to do with your work. There's lots of things that you can be embedded in, but the more you have these strong relationships and you have a sense that you have a purpose and your purpose is, I think, most important for us today is not helping things that are far away. We tend to think that we can improve the world by marching for a cause or sending a check in the mail or making ourselves heard. I think much better to think about how do we roll up our sleeves, how do we get involved with people locally, in our neighborhood or near our neighborhood, and how can we get real relationships, doing things to help real people. I think happiness for me is about those close relationships and those institutions, and belonging to it may not be for everybody, but for many people. Belonging to a place that you can feel, that you walk down the street and I know the people.

Seth:

I feel like I belong here. I feel like I can knock on someone's door, or they can knock on my door and I'm ready, or they're ready. I feel that way in my neighborhood and I wish for everyone listening that they will feel that way in their neighborhoods as well.

Joel :

Yeah, you know, growing up I actually grew up in a town the size of 600 people. It was a dairy farming community in Western New York outside of Buffalo. Then, when I was 15, my family moved to Michigan where my parents were from, and we ended up in kind of a suburban sprawling area. Most of South Michigan is a big suburban sprawl. I did notice just how the place itself can change the relationship that you have to other people and to other communities. I definitely experienced that when I served in the Peace Corps in Eastern Europe and lived in a city. I think I saw one parking lot the whole time.

Seth:

that I was in that country. What city Can I ask what?

Joel :

city. It was a Boat, of Grad, which is about an hour outside of the capital, sophia.

Joel :

But yeah everywhere has a town square, everywhere has all of the. There's a main kind of public area where people can come and gather and they can shop and they can eat and there can be festivals and there can be celebrations. The center of town was they called it the center that was every single town had. It was a must have in every town. There was a mayor's office, there was a church and there was a center. Now I'm in a situation where I close my garage door before I you have the clicker, you go into your own room where you have your own device. It does seem like the way that things are structured is to push us more into an isolated space rather than into a communal space. I'm curious how you feel like we can fight back against that.

Seth:

I think you've hit the nail on the head in terms of how we got to where we are. I think the physical and the institutional. Physical shapes. For me, institution shapes our relationships and we have designed the country physically and institutionally in ways that isolate ourselves.

Seth:

You mentioned the sprawl. I'm thinking of, not my neighborhood. My neighborhood is somewhat special, but if I was to go five minute drive or ten minute drive from here, what do you have? You have lots of beautiful houses. You have some green area. I'm outside of Washington.

Seth:

Maryland has done a very good job with green areas but there's no main street. Talked about center in America, mostly towns had a main street. There's no main street. There's no local place to meet. There's no coffee shop. There might be a library someplace, but they're not neighborhood based, so they're not really bringing people together and so there's nothing that brings.

Seth:

The schools are not local. If you go to church, the churches are not local. If you shop, you don't shop local, so if you're taken away, and then in terms of institutions, that was business, that was faith, associational, but even if you're thinking about how everything from government to basically shopping, to business, to associational life, all these things were very local and now they're regional, national. They've been professionalized. They've been for the sake of efficiency. They've grown up and become much larger. They may work well for the purpose that they've resigned to work, but they're not serving the same purpose for us that they served when we were local, as you talked about, where you grew up, or in Bulgaria. I really hope you like yogurt, because I hear dairy and I hear Bulgaria. I'm thinking there must be a lot of yogurts in your life, because those are sour.

Joel :

It's the sourest yogurt and I love it.

Seth:

Yeah, bulgaria is very famous, and so you must be eating it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But I would just say that just think about how much society brought us together without us thinking about it, versus now it divides us, and so, for me, the real point of my book is we need to be intentional. Where we used to, this all would happen without thinking about it. The development pattern that we have adopted, especially in the United States, it's true elsewhere, but the United States is an extreme version because of our landscape and, I think, something to do with how we've thought about the American dream. This means rethinking physical and rethinking institutions so that people are, so that you actually belong to a place and you have a lot of organic interaction with your neighbors and that you have a reason to be together.

Seth:

Community schools, for example, really important for incubating relationships. Churches I speak to leaders of different religious faiths and I constantly tell them it's not just about the sermon and showing up one day a week. They need to be in the neighborhood and actually build community. So religion could be done differently, urban planning could be done differently, nonprofits could work differently, governments could work differently, and you literally can go across the board and rethink about everything from the physical to the institutional, and say how would we work differently if we put relationships, and especially neighborhood-based relationships, center stage? Everything would be different. And that's really the if I had one message people should take away, that is the message.

Joel :

Yeah, and I know you've talked a lot about incentives too. You've talked about I think you said something to the line of, like you're not much more. You're not much for opinions so much as you are for looking at the structures and the incentives instead of kind of being judgmental about things, just actually looking at things as they are. I guess what kind of incentives would have to change in order for things to move in a way that does support the local communities, the local institutions? I love what we're doing with neighborhood economics. I love what Michael Schuman is doing with his local investing information. I think there's a lot of interesting things there. But on a bigger level, would some incentives need to change?

Joel :

Because and I'll just explain kind of where I'm thinking when I'm thinking about whether it's the transportation issues and the space issues that we face or it's the mental health issues that we talked about before usually the solutions that are presented to us as possible solutions end up being consumer choices. If we want transportation that doesn't pollute the earth as much, the only solution that we're typically talking about is electric cars, not railways like publicly, where there's public transportation. If we're talking about mental health, we're usually not talking about developing better community centers, better social interactions, better social places and third places and networks. We're usually told well, buy this pill and take this pill, and that will be the solve to your problem. And so I'm wondering like do the incentives have to change on some fundamental level to get us there?

Seth:

I think that's a key question. If you talk about America, I would say the thing that describes America almost more than anything else is its choice, consumer choice. Everything is sort of designed. I can recall several times in my life having a guest from some pretty poor country. They've never been in America and then one of the first things you do is you take them to the supermarket to try to find something that they can eat and just the shock of them going down the aisles and I want to particularly mention the cereal section and you have 300 different cereals, and they come from places that they're likely not super poor, because otherwise they wouldn't be visiting me, but they're used to having three or four choices. I mean, I can remember I lived in Nigeria. This is years ago. We had one TV station and it mostly didn't work because electricity was off half the time. And you come to America and you have not only material wealth, you have a billion choices and if anything, it's confusing. What do I choose? And so my argument is that we don't need more choices, is that we need you use the word incentives.

Seth:

I talk about shaping our physical and institutional landscape, basically shaping our landscape so that people will more or will organically develop thicker relationships. That, to me, is very important. And so if you go back a step and say what are the incentives to change that, well, one of the challenges the incentives are there, but they're not short or medium term, they're long term. But I can certainly think of a few things. If government, for example, was not structured around silos, that when you're structured around housing or healthcare or education, you're mostly thinking in those specific units. So the housing department is successful if it builds more units. What would happen if those functional silos reported to neighborhood based teams and those teams were judged on some scorecard of results for neighborhoods? Those teams would have an incentive. In fact they would be held accountable for how well places were doing. And we need to understand schools and housing and all those other things. They're only designed to make people's lives better. But what happens if they can't improve lives, if the places themselves aren't getting better? So if government was structured more around place based teams, that would change the incentives.

Seth:

I'm thinking, and you could go, I think we could go one by one in terms of thinking about this. If we're thinking about government spending, for example, we just talked about how government was organized, but let's suppose that more money was distributed not tied to transportation or not tied to so and so I mean and then local people, those local teams had more responsibility and more, so you could go and think about that. You could also think about churches. I've tried to convince my or religious leaders. I've tried to convince them that it's in the long term interests that they focus more on community building. I think they don't see it in the short term, but I believe that one of the reasons for the great decline in religion in our society is that it's a very silo. We basically serve this very silo need and then we've branched off and done lots of other things when really our core purpose should be belief and community and nothing else. If we only focus out, if we only focus on belief in community in terms of religion, I think our one, I think faith, would be more successful and two, I think it would have a much larger impact. So I mean we could go and we could talk about nonprofits or philanthropy. I mean philanthropy tends to think about very big goals. I mean one of the key drivers of change here is you have to convince philanthropy that philanthropy's main accomplishments should be on specific places and not on the silos.

Seth:

I'll just give one more example, I would say, because philanthropy drives so many nonprofit systems of what they do. But one other example I would give is healthcare. Our healthcare system is all driven by individuals. What would happen if, for example, insurance companies basically had a high number of patients in specific areas, what some of them do without actually paying attention? What would happen if the insurance companies in the health system, the incentives, would have to rethink about how this would work? But what happened if the insurance companies or the healthcare providers had incentives that were based on how well places did as opposed to how well individuals did? It might make them much more prevention oriented. So I think you have to really go sector by sector or these different things, and we have to think about what would change the incentives, because right now the incentives are working against neighborhood success. We could change them if we thought about restructuring or thought about tweaking some of the numbers. That's really what we're trying to accomplish here.

Joel :

Yeah, I mean, because ultimately you have to, like you said, keep it in. There has to be a container. We had on a container.

Seth:

It's a great word.

Joel :

Melissa Devereaux from Purpose Bill Communities and she said that the boundaries of the neighborhood are a gift because they give you a space to sort of operate in and to work around. I know that when it comes to this upcoming conference with neighborhood economics here in San Antonio, as someone who has studied the neighborhood and what makes the neighborhood flourish, what makes the neighborhood fragile, I got a few questions for you about all this stuff. But I guess first, what is it about neighborhood economics that you are encouraged and excited by?

Seth:

Well, first of all, I think neighborhood economics has done a great job of focusing on neighborhoods. I mean purpose-built is another. There's a few players that have elevated the neighborhood and I think currently the neighborhood field is punchy below its weight, it's not part of the larger conversation. I mean, there's certainly lots of data coming out that neighborhoods matter for the health and social mobility and well-being of people, but there's not many that put neighborhood right, smack in the organization name and then really focus on it, and so that's certainly important. I think, again, I'm very focused on the social, but I'm a very big believer that the economic and social they're interrelated. Better economics will make better social, better social will make better economics, and so I mean neighborhood economics is especially good at being very I mean the organization especially good at being very practical, especially good at bringing in real practitioners.

Seth:

Again, we have a huge problem that too much of the conversation I mean I live in Washington, washington is a bubble and much of the conversation is a lot of smart people, but a lot of it's very abstract, very up in the sky, very focused on what government, especially the federal government, should do. And I believe real change is going to happen horizontally. Horizontally means relationships within a neighborhood, but also horizontally, across the country, driven neighborhood or place by place, by place. And to the extent that an organization like Neighbor Economics focuses on neighborhoods and thinks horizontal, brings in practitioners, focuses on very, very practical outcomes, I mean that's where you want to be and there's not a lot of. There's too much that's abstract, too much that's big picture policy, too much that's distant and there's not enough about what Neighbor Economics is. I wish there was a similar neighborhood society. I mean that's a little bit less concrete, harder to do, but I mean, I believe that both are important and Neighbor Economics does an incredible job in terms of what they focus on, led by some great people, as you know.

Joel :

Yeah, well, one thing that I'm finding really unique and exciting for me about it is the kind of partnerships that are being created between the entrepreneurs and the business owners that come from the disadvantage and red line communities, along with the social support institutions that you talk about, that are so important, like the churches, like the nonprofits, like the other faith-based institutions, along with catalytic capital and people who are looking to make not just a financial return on their money but a social return on that as well. I'm curious what you might expect coming out of that type of partnership.

Seth:

I think the key word here you're talking about is collective action or coalition building. I mean, this is right out of the type of work that I do. If you wanna make change happen, it's very important that you work on change from multiple avenues. So I mean I would say that to the extent that these different dimensions of the problem, the problem is just one thing. The problem is multiple things local wealth, the ability to either have or create wealth which is close to what Neighborhood Economics does. It's part of what Neighborhood Economics does, is part of the problem. I would say this idea of belonging and cooperation and trust and institutions that bring people together. And you could go a little further up.

Seth:

Schumann talked about strong family and strong inter-family dynamics. That's like a whole different part of the problem. You could also talk about the physical. There could be something about transportation or the built environment. That's a different dimension. And so to the extent that we look at at a neighborhood level and that we're able to say that these are these three, four, five dimensions of the challenges and that we are gonna bring around the big table the different actors and we're gonna try to work on these problems in parallel from multiple dimensions or multiple avenues, multiple entry points, I mean that's much more likely to have.

Seth:

The type of what we're seeking here is a cascading effect that changes the system system locally and then between this local and other parts, because it's hard for a local by itself to thrive without better connectivity with the larger system.

Seth:

And so the extent that you're able to bring these multiple players together and you're able to, money's one of them local institutions, houses of worship, there's a role for different parts of the government and so on and so forth.

Seth:

I mean we also you mentioned purpose built before, one of purpose built they work with a neighborhood, they build out neighborhood quarterbacks or their network does, and the neighborhood quarterback, one of the main goals, is to bring all these pieces together and integrate it In terms of what neighborhood economics might do or something similar. It's not as structured, but it's the same ideas that we bring these multiple players together and that each of them works on a different part of the challenge and that there's some cascading effect, because what you're trying to do is go from economic and social disinvestment to economic and social investment, and we need to understand there's a vicious cycle that we wanna convert to a virtuous cycle and we need all these different aspects, ideally working together or at least in parallel, to lead to that better outcome. We need a tipping point where the virtuous cycle begins to kick in.

Joel :

Right, right, because you have people who are already disenfranchised, already redlined, and then, in order to start a business, they need to take out a loan. That you know, because there's no relationship between the two. They may not have access to finance.

Seth:

Yes, I mean it's a challenge of not only the relationship. It's also could be skills, relationships, it also could be the whole place somehow has been marked as not favorable. But again, to do that, that business owner is more likely to be successful if there's other things going on that make the. If you're lifting up the neighborhood from multiple levels and it doesn't always have to be this way, but I do believe if multiple things are happening simultaneously, the neighborhood itself will become more attractive. Therefore, the loan actually becomes easier to make because it looks less risky, because expectation well, there's the relationship, but there's also the expectations on that neighborhood may change. If the neighborhood, if the expectations that this place is going in a positive direction and you have the relationship and you have some skill and you and you're possibly there's other things happening that are complimenting you in the neighborhood, so you got all this stuff going on, it's much more likely not only would the loan take place, but several things will happen that will make it more likely the loan will be a good investment.

Joel :

From your perspective, what kind of what advice would you give to people who are thinking about this work and doing this work at this conference, who are really kind of putting in that grunt work day to day? I wonder if there's anything that you could share with them, that you would advise them to either look out for, or an example to follow that you would wanna share with the people who are interested in this conference and who actually do attend it.

Seth:

I would say the first thing that always comes to mind is you are not alone. Wherever you are I mean assuming that your purpose is your neighborhood or a nearby neighborhood and you have ambitions you are not alone. You need to seek out other people who have a similar aspiration and find ways to collaborate, this coalition building, whatever form it might take. It is much easier to make change, even if the change is small. If you're gonna have a block party, let's just think very simple Well, you could have a block party, but if you had two or three neighbors and you're working together, it's much more likely the block party will gain traction and take off because you're gonna bring in each of your different networks and you're gonna work together. Well, if you're gonna have some sort of neighborhood change process, who are those three or four collaborators that you could work with? Are there existing institutions or associations or investors or whatever that you can join with? That you can possibly join that organization, possibly play a role working with that organization. Look for allies, look for partners. That's, I always think, where we should start. A second thing is what are the strengths? Is there something? Is this neighborhood have? I mean, we talked before about boundaries. I think boundaries to neighborhoods are very important, but neighborhoods that have identity, they might have history, they might have nature, they might have some good institutions in it, what are positive things that we can build upon? So we're looking for allies, we're looking for assets or strengths that we can build upon. Then we're looking for, I would say, incremental quick wins. We're not gonna change this place overnight. Let's look for incremental quick wins.

Seth:

I could just think of my neighborhood. My neighborhood is certainly. I could say all the great things about my neighborhood, but I could just give you one example. People did not like we have a red light. We have a small shopping center, not beautiful, but we do have a center. We do have restaurants, we do have places to meet, which is great. So I'm happy we have it, no matter how not pretty it is. But there's a red light to cross that street because it's a little bit, not a big street, but some street there with a light.

Seth:

Neighbors got together and says we're gonna get the county government to change that signal because that signal, the way it was going, was too oriented towards the cars and not oriented enough towards the walkers and they changed the signal to whatever make it faster, whatever it was. And very small thing that simply you, I feel it every time I cross it because it's less weight, and or whatever it is you do, in your neighborhood they petition that they have now make it easier to cross other streets, whatever they have these little islands in the center. So the point is whether it's lights, whether it's something with the streetscape, planting trees. You know there's all these little things you can do. And so, if you're talking about finance, what can we do to get an existing institution of finance that maybe make one incremental, two incremental steps to enable more people in the neighborhood to access it?

Seth:

If you're thinking very narrowly about finance, or what can we do to bring in some training to help people here understand about the language, the way of thinking, the type of presentation that they might need? You know there's all these little things that we can do. Let's find collaborators, build allies, find organizations that we can work with and look for incremental gains, because you wanna start momentum. A lot of this is about momentum and expectations. You're not gonna transform, especially the physical. The physical takes a long time, but if you can begin to build trust and bring people together and bring organizations together and you can make steps, then you begin to have a process that can move forward on a larger and larger scale over time.

Joel :

Yeah, no, I think you're hitting the nail on the head on all that, because at the end of the day, when we're talking about big problems that require, it's not gonna happen overnight to change a lot of these things, and it also isn't gonna happen individually. You know, no one person is gonna change that entire structure and alone we might be begging, but together we can at least bargain, you know.

Seth:

We can become a force. Collective action is very important, and the more you have institutions that bring people together, the more likely you will hit above as opposed to below your weight. Be below your weight.

Joel :

Love it. That's great man. Thank you so much for your time today. No, thank you, Joe, I'm looking forward to the continued connection and the continued conversation and being in dialogue with you. If you're able to be at the conference, I'm looking forward to meet you there in person.

Seth:

I'm looking forward to meeting you there. Yes bring some Bulgarian yogurt with you. Oh man, if I could find it.

Joel :

If I could find it, I would.

Seth:

I'll just tell you one anecdote before I go. I lived in Japan at one point and the most famous yogurt there I don't know how it came about was there was a brand called Bulgarian yogurt. I think that was actually the name. I remember this so that's why I know a little bit about it. So anyway, I don't know if that exists here, but I can tell you it does exist anyway. But anyway, thank you so much, joe, pleasure to meet you. I hope to meet you in person.

Joel :

Yeah, looking forward to it. Seth, you take care of yourself and for everyone else and reach out if I can do anything for you and enjoy Asheville.

Seth:

Take care.

Joel :

Absolutely, will do it for everyone.

Seth:

Take care, Be well cheers. Yeah, it's hope. Bye-bye, cheers. We are each other.