Give2Invest Is a Major Hit
Author: Kevin Jones Issue: 2024-03-20
Give2Invest Is a Major Hit
by Kevin Jones
Our Give2Invest tool is a major hit, and we have put a lot of our collective near-term focus on keeping up with the inbound demand of nonprofits who know just what to do with it and are jumping to sign up to our mashup that gets philanthropic patient capital investment dollars out on the street at the smallest easily institutional bite size of $5,000.
We have hired someone to do market research with these early adopters and to explain it to people who don’t have a nonprofit but can use this as a better experience than GoFundMe. Better for the people in their network who would have given to a GoFundMe.
So the innovation is targeted at people without the economic power of much money. The justice-focused nonprofits in the orbit of the host for our Act Local School class I am starting with my daughter B.J. Harden Jones this week seem to be eager for it and plan to attend our class on the Give2Invest Tool on March 20. You can zoom in, but it’s in person at our hosts, the Asheville Poverty Initiative.
She is like my handler, she says. She reminds me to listen and makes it interactive instead of me sort of pushing my vision all the time and sometimes getting frustrated when it takes people longer to get it than I like. She explains and facilitates people getting on board.
This is a family business and she’s good at guiding conversations toward goals and that’s a lot of how the market around Neighborhood Economics is growing; through helping people set up complex partnerships that are modular and easily adaptable; low friction coordination when needed is the goal. Or sometimes we just bring the innovation into the room and let people jump in to be engaged on their own; you provide time and space for that.
We see the Give2Invest tool as an important means to create what we really want; community engagement around economic principles that create healthy interdependence in a community across race, class, and zip code. We want these new tools we showcase to help local people, new alliances, focus on repairing some of the structural and systemic damage done, like subverting redlining following Joe Minicozi’s plan at Urban3.
We want to see G2I spread through uncoordinated innovation, propagated like dandelions, creating small, smart giving circles focused on a cause that matters. And then those circles overlap and build new emergent layers. That’s the plan.
Hired a couple of people. One to focus on biomedicinals in our bioregion using the Give2Invest tool. We have a propagation method of biomedicinals safely from seed or rhizome as opposed to the wild harvest that ravages the countryside as they hunt for ginseng and also damage the land where golden seal and black cohosh grow. A college here, Warren Wilson, can propagate them in their 3,000 sf forestry nursery and understory production acres. We are increasingly deep partners with the college, which is directly across the river from our farm, like 30 yards away.
We can transform the biomedicinals industry into something healthier, and we can create a niche in the market for that standard that increases demand so that the producers, just inching by, can thrive on increased demand. We use that to get access to Gaia, the big dog company that buys from us, with that standard added to their product line.
We use that further leverage, once we get there, to do more of our plan to make the smallholders, the healers who are also gig workers, more economically resilient. We need to raise money for that standard; Guaranteed from Seed, to be seen as an important, incremental but timely step above the rest of the market that it is.
We use that small window of brand premium as a lever to transform the market into something that works better for small producers in our bioregion. We sell to tourists who see the value of it, which grows the demand that gets Gaia on board.
Related:
- Kevin Jones (author)
- 2024 (year)
- Topics: Bioregionalism and Place-Based Practice