Why congregations may be one of our best answers to the convenience trap. Julie Beck has a new piece in The Atlantic, “One Reason People Are Spending So Much Time Alone”, that puts a name to something I see in almost every community we work with. Beck is reviewing Gabe Bullard’s new book, Against Convenience. She takes a phrase that has been going around social media, “inconvenience is the cost of community,” and flips it: community is often the cost of convenience. Convenien

Joe Minicozzi, who runs the property-data firm Urban3 out of Asheville, stood in front of a ballroom in Galveston with a parcel map of Buncombe County, North Carolina, walking the room through what his own county’s tax assessor had quietly done to his neighbors. Four point four million dollars redirected away from public schools in a single year, enough to cover more than a hundred teachers’ salaries, and none of it required a vote or a scandal. It required a property tax for

We live in a culture mesmerized by technology. Early days with the wheel or the printing press. Today it is robots, artificial intelligence, online everything. We were forewarned by 1950’s folklore that President Eisenhower, invited to ask a question of an early Univac mainframe computer, asked, “Is there a God?” After some reflection, the computer answered, “There is now.” Today’s attention goes to artificial intelligence (AI), which is beyond anything we might have imagined

When people talk about democracy failing, they mean it the way you’d talk about a roof failing. Something up above, something structural, something that’s supposed to keep the weather out and doesn’t anymore. Congress gridlocked. Courts politicized. Agencies gutted or captured. The conversation stays up there, at the level of the roof, because that’s where the cameras are. But nobody waits for the roof to get fixed before they figure out where to put a bucket. That’s what’s a

In 2019, MacArthur, Rockefeller and Omidyar launched the Catalytic Capital Consortium and gave our field a working definition. Catalytic capital is investment capital that is patient, risk-tolerant, concessionary, and flexible in ways that differ from conventional investment. Money that goes in early, stays in long, takes the first loss, and bends its terms to fit the deal. It was a gift to everyone doing economic justice work. We finally had language and the process for what

Much of my work has been on creating ways to build human connection, also called social capital, in the midst of traditionally patriarchal settings. The dominant context surrounding this work was made vivid in my first real job, working in human resources for an oil company. A kind, experienced manager, named Curly Jones (he was bald), saw the blank look constantly on my face and explained the essential nature of the culture we lived in. He said the essence of management and l

The failure of a project can begin long before the money runs out. It can begin when people arrive in a community with a solution, a budget and a set of outcomes, but no relationship with the people whose lives the project is meant to change. For Ina Walter, it began years ago at a coffee-farming training meant to improve livelihoods. The room was filled with older male landowners. But Walter had already noticed that women and younger people were doing much of the work in the