ShaulaBlog - clear-eyed capitalism

Land, Capital & Gentrification

I’m back to reading a book called Manhattan For Rent, 1785-1850, by Elizabeth Blackmar. I overheard intellectual greats Peter Kinder and Joy Anderson discussing their favorite books at a conference a year ago and made notes. This book helps shed important light on gentrification. “Far from fulfilling the egalitarian potential of abundant land distributed to independent proprietors, the neutral market had carried a new class dynamic into the process of residential neighborhood formation, and it persisted throughout the rest of the century. This dynamic rested on three conditions: the artificial scarcity created by concentrated ownership of vast stretches of vacant land; the structure of the competitive housing market and particularly the purchasing power that permitted elite New Yorkers to claim particular blocks for their exclusive use; and the diminishing power of mechanic families to acquire property –in other words, the power of property to reduce the value of labor.” … “Propertied New Yorkers’ control of the land supply and ability to determine effective demand raised the price of proprietary independence for the city’s artisans.” like us still today, they “seldom directly confronted the question of what these housing issues had to do with the larger structures of social power.” And instead, over time, we’ve made poverty synonymous with immorality and thus conveniently and circularly deserved.

This first section really got me thinking about land and capital. I really don’t believe in classic supply and demand and “fair” pricing – there’s just too much friction. The first concrete example I found prior to this book was apartment pricing – when the market is overbuilt, rents don’t go down in clean response to the market, because it turns out the rent pricing is built into the financing when the building is built. Instead, owners offer “concessions” like free services or discounted move in costs. With both land and capital, there’s not the same supplier pressure to negotiate as there is with a product that can lose value like technology, fashion, food or events, all of which have a time-value. People talk about the “time value of money” and certainly inflation creates some pressure, but once you have an excess of capital (or land) beyond that which you need to live, you have a negotiating power that can alter the market rather than merely participate in it. That’s what was happening on Manhattan in around 1800, that landowners who controlled vast stretches of usable land, sat on it while prices drove up on what land was available in the marketplace, and then parceled it out at high prices. I also see a dynamic of a dysfunctional market because of capital that doesn’t “need to work” in angel investing.

I got busy with school, but I picked the book back up again recently, and hit the phrase where she refers to the shift of land being allowed to circulate as capital. It seems like this is a key to gentrification – that government became funded by property taxes and thus property owners gained greater say in government, and then amenities like water, sewer & parks became funded via property taxes, so they would only be put in if a corresponding increase in property values justified their cost. The book talks about a period of park establishment, and how landowners in low-rent neighborhoods resisted creation of a park because it would have required taking some of their property, and they didn’t think they could raise rents enough to justify it. Where they could raise rents, the poor were left with nowhere to go.

It makes me think about Hernando De Soto and his book (The Mystery of Capital) on how lack of clear land titling prevents folks in Latin America from building fortunes because they can’t effectively use land as capital. He advocates for fixing that, and many people (both right & left) think he’s a genius. But it suddenly strikes me as the perfect example of how a few will gain significantly financially – those who establish clear titles and take control, at the expense of the current proprietors & residents (who will be recategorized as squatters or forced to pay new rents). I wonder if there’s a “homelessness” problem in Peru – one of the countries Hernando De Soto talks about. Contrast that lack of clear title and people setting up shops & homes where they can, with privatized public space like 2200 Westlake (not that I have a particular issue with them, but it was recently built and is close to me). I suppose there would be (and have been) homes and small businesses in odd lots in Seattle if we were not now doing regular shakedowns of this clearly titled property in the name of its owner “The Public”.

In the first paragraph where I quote from the book, there was one more point that I’ve been chewing on, and that is the point that property owners could keep renting proprietors from making the leap to being owners themselves by keeping rents sufficiently high. Sometimes there’s market pressure to compete on rents, but the overall goal to maximize return leads most property owners to effectively work together because keeping the property market tight benefits both eventual sellers and current landlords. So as long as there’s no pressure to make land be economically productive, very wealthy owners can continue to hoard it as a resource, benefiting property owners as a class at the expense of non-property owners as a class. My next thought, is that market pressure to compete comes from a hungry rising class, which is disappearing in our hourglass economy and thus making it easier for the wealthy segments to use capital as negotiating power and not need to compete.

Participatory Democracy

The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance — and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same by Matt Leighninger (Author)

I attended a lecture at Portland city hall, basically book tour for this book, Wed April 30th 6pm. It was great!

Matt is the executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and has been a consultant to the CDC, the Study Circles Resource Center, the National League of Cities. He also wrote: The Seven Deadly Citizens: Moving From Civic Stereotypes to Well-Rounded Citizenship
The Good Society - Volume 13, Number 2, 2004, pp. 33-38

Matt started with the quote: “an expert = someone from out of town”. He started out working for a foundation on community engagement issues, began working across communities and sharing lessons across communities. He sees the same problems over and over again. One of those problems is the relationship between citizens and their government.

• Past to current: there’s a parent-child relationship (attitude?) between government and citizens
• Future: citizens want an adult-adult relationship

He sees that government representatives experience citizens as either absent or angry. Officials want to be respected & trusted, and citizens want to be heard. Citizens are also seeking social connection. Non-profits often work to fill the gap, but are many single-issue/focus groups competing for community involvement and attention, resulting in a very fragmented effort which is overwhelming to citizens. His phrase: we need “mixed-use public involvement” (like mixed-use land development). How he sees engagement happen now:

• Temporary projects - last 6-12 months, people get engaged and then disband.
• Permanant structures - neighborhood councils etc, but these can fail to provide true recruitment/engagement [enrollment is the word I'd use - SM]

Matt believes we need to combine the two.

He identifies 4 key principles for success:

• 1) recruitment [enrollment] - reach out and engage people where they are and through what they’re already involved in.
• 2) combine small-group (dialog, action planning, real work) with large-group (inspiration, amplification, reinforcement of collaboration) work.
• 3) build relationships: folks need time to compare values & experiences, and then need to consider a range of views & options for solutions to identified issues.
• 4) combine different levels of change - immediate volunteer participation, organizational change, policy change.

He then reviewed a few Mini Cases
problem: land use - people are looking for control over their surroundings, issues are contentious and difficult
solution: “neighbors building neighborhoods” in Rochester, NY.
NBN uses NeighborLink Online to let neighbors see benchmarks & current measurements, GRUB - greater rochester urban bounty is a urban farm project. Is it successful? rochester keeps losing tax base to neighboring areas and has had to cut funding so maybe not?

problem: race & segregation
solution: “Lee County Pulling Together”
Started from a church having community dialogues. Ended up identifying a need for more services in a low income neighborhood and getting a shopping center built. Key Lesson: sharing the responsibility of governance means sharing our differences.

problem: citizens becoming anti-vaccine and not trusting government
solution: “what to do about the flu?”
study circles of citizens examine vaccination challenges in pandemic situations and make recommendations to local government for emergency planning. gets people educated about the issues.

solution: “community chat” became “village foundation”
Neighbors coming together to talk about shared issues eventually began developing ways to meet those needs from within the neighborhood: neighborhood watch, got a neighborhood school established.

The Future
-We need to update legal frameworks, open meeting laws and advisory requirements have become barriers to meaningful commmunity involvement though their goals were open-ness and transparency. In the LA area in particular things have gotten problematic
-Engagement needs to combine the social and cultural with the political to be meaningful for people.
-Need to follow the 4 key principles

the goal: community engagement that is equitable, egalitarian, efficient, deliberate and decisive

There were a number of Q&As, most specific to Portland, but one answer he gave particularly caught my attention as matching a feeling I’ve had:
Q- youth engagement?
A - Sometimes youth projects have a flavor of passing the buck: “We can’t solve racism in our generation so let’s get the next generation to do it”. Cross-generational projects are great, but you’ve got to have youth leadership if you want to have youth engagement.

I also found this answer intriguing:

Q - what about government & race issues?
A - there’s an unintended legacy of the “I have a Dream” speech which is the idea that questions of difference can be resolved and there’s a promised land where we no longer have issues and we just all live happily together. The reality is that differences are always going to be there as both an opportunity and challenge; the role of government needs to be that of continually facilitating constructive engagement around differences and helping us move forward.

and these are all very sensible advice

Q - facilitation & meeting planning
A - definitely facilitation is a needed skill, people need training. the Rochester project has a training academy that trains citizens & civic servants together, so they build relationships as well as skills. Robert’s Rules are a pain, Robert can get lost. What matters: ground rules, safe space, experience & story sharing, ranges of options to choose from.

Q- how to engage the working class?
A - you need to reach out to them, be flexible on times & locations (church basements, hair salons). emphasize content that is meaningful and relevant, ensure their participation is genuine and not token, make sure they’re heard. Shorter meetings aren’t the answer, everyone is busy, it’s about making it worthwhile, so longer might be better.

Q - Donna Beagle, local expert on poverty, says to emphasize relational connections and avoid being place-based because populations are too mobile. how to deal?
A - Focus on what people belong to, what networks or groups. Have meeting structure but don’t be rigid - facilitate & follow what they want.

Q - meeting structure advice?
A - tie back again to “must include social & cultural with political”. Meet at local schools where people can see the kids school projects hung up, catch up with their neighbors and eat. Mix up the content, so have working monthly meetings but every 6 months its a big celebration with minor report-out, to have broader appeal. attach to a social event like the weekly football tailgate party - have 30 minutes of neighborhood meeting beforehand. Small group work, large group punctuation

Q - running government as a business
A - Runs government into the ground. simply can’t make everything into a fee-for-service. need to confer legitimacy on citizen participation. this is where open meeting laws get tricky, citizens don’t feel valued, but personal process isn’t super open & transparent. Challenge!

I definately recommend his book, there’s more there. He has an interesting chapter where he talks about Saul Alinsky and how classic community organizing focuses on building a power base outside of government and holding negotiations, very much a “government is them” approach as opposed to the participatory approach he believes we are capable of today, particularly supported by technology. It’s easy to dismiss that as unfair because of a “digital divide”, but I’ve seen interesting programs for serving the disadvantaged that used technology as infrastructure to support local human beings who provided the ultimate interface, and that struck me as a smart way to combine technology and touch.

too many cool things

Here’s my problem. I need to be “working”, but unfortunately a wide swath of topics fall under my current definition of “work”. I’ve got my school project which is trying to focus on community economic development that makes enough money to be self-sustaining. I’ve got a grant-making agenda that’s shifting towards community economic development but not wanting to lose social justice advocacy. I’m working on socially responsible investing and trying to make sense (and a fund!) out of that messy blur between investing and philanthropy. So “working” all too easily turns into web surfing, but I have days like this one where I learn about so many amazing things I feel like my head will explode. I know my challenge is in narrowing focus and that time is coming: I’ve got my eye on an executive coach and a pair of superstar organizers and sooner or later I’ll rope enough of you into some kind of cohesive group with a unifying goal. I also have a couple projects that will actually end and free up some time by mid-summer.

Onto the coolness! First, many fascinating sites about community economic development. My goal for class is to write some slides on our Social Return On Investment and I’m leaning towards health and safety measurements – improving community ties reduces social isolation, improving activity reduces crime. I dug up some studies that support that, but really, successful community engagement means letting the community set goals and meet them, so measuring success is less about the health and safety and more about how people feel. I went to a great talk in Portland (I should post those notes!) and the speaker, Matt Leighninger, commented that most impact research measures community satisfaction. So I’m mostly finding community assessment toolboxes, which we really don’t need for this level of our business plan and we have a bunch. But a couple of the resources were irresistible, including this one:

http://www.enterweb.org/communty.htm a site of many annotated links

That site had a number of great pages with annotated bookmarks on financial topics, and wandering around there I found two fascinating orgs focused on social investment, from more of a banking perspective:
The Institute for Social Banking, which is hosting its 2nd biennial summer session, which seems to be a week of talking about all the top issues in social finance:

Main Themes of the International Summer School 2008 are:
• “Global Challenges & Social Banking”
Social, ecological and developmental challenges of the 21st century and their intersection with the banking and finance sector.
• “Clients´ Initiatives and Needs for Social Banking”
Innovative projects that offer answers to the challenges, but depend on socially oriented financing sources, for this purpose.
• “Established Social Banking Products & Services”
Proven services, such as microfinance in developing countries, ethical and ecological investments, or the support of integrated housing projects.
• “New Social Banking Products & Services”
Novel services, such as microfinance in developed countries and “green“ credit cards, but also more disputed topics such as emission trading.
• “Organisational and Individual Challenges & Changes in Social Banking”
Requirements towards the competences of socially oriented financial service provider and “social bankers”.
• “Developments & Prospects in Social Banking”
Future trends and scenarios in the socially oriented banking and financial sector.
• Optional Session: “Presentation of Social Banks and Qualifications for/in Social Banking”
Presentation by various European, socially oriented banks, as well as by the Institute for Social Banking on offers for education and training in Social Banking.

Anybody want to go to Denmark for a week this summer? Ooo I so want to go, and I’m so tempted, but it ends August 1st and I’m supposed to be in DC for my 20-year HS reunion on August 2nd. There’s probably a direct flight… at least I didn’t grow up in Middleburg PA or something.

I also found these folks:
International Association of Investors in the Social Economy
They connect to a working group of the World Social Forum and it all begins to tie together – many of the social justice folks in the community my foundation grants to have been connecting to the World Social Forums.

I also had a phone call today with one Elliott Brown, who after time in workforce development frustrated with his own job helping people get work that didn’t always work for them, decided to start his own model of working with employers to help employees become engaged managers of their own futures, and surprise, they become engaged employees as well! His organization is Springboard Forward and they have a dedication to metrics that satisfies the most business minded among us. He suggested that if I’m such a fan, I might also want to look at The Tipping Point, a bay-area philanthropy organization focused on effective organizations working on poverty and economic self sufficiency.

And, day-end, I’ve filtered my email, I’ve added more amazing things I don’t fully know how to process into my knowledge base, and I still don’t have a clear metric for my economic development project. Need to figure out how to stop being a generalist and get back to being a specialist.

Book Review - Killing the White Man’s Indian

Bordewich, F.M. (1996). Killing the White Man’s Indian: Reinventing Native Americans as the end of the twentieth century. New York: Doubleday.

The “white man’s Indian” in the title of the book refers to archetypes such as “drunk Indian”, “noble savage” and “selfless caretaker of the earth” that obscure the real complexity of Indian identity and complicate relations to the rest of the United States. This book is a history of those relations organized around various themes: the changing attitude of majority government towards Indians, the legal conflicts over defining who counts, the history of land relations, Indians and their identity as environmentalists, conflicts over Indian remains and artifacts, alcoholism, and education. The book is written in a casual register in that it uses an episodic style: each theme is separated into a chapter and introduced with a story opener. Once the story opener lays the outline of the conflict, the chapter goes into more depth about relevant history, describing significant persons in personal detail, mentioning relevant legal acts, and including related stories about experiences of other individual Indians in other tribes. The chapters generally close with a conclusion of the opening story.

In the introduction the author explains his choice of the term “Indian”, as opposed to Native or Aboriginal, as the term most currently used in institutions and by tribes themselves. Indians differ significantly from other minority groups in that they have reservations and tribal status. The theme of the book is that clarity around our shared history is necessary for us to move forward.

Our shared history starts out in conflict for land. Although the colonies and the early U.S. Government made various efforts to restrict settlement and reserve land for Indians, invariably those agreements were not respected by settlers in search of land, and often treaties and agreements were simply betrayed by the government. The key story in this section is one of lost opportunity: the Cherokee Nation in the southeast made an effort at assimilation: they adopted a constitutional government and they adapted many American ways. The new US Government essentially sold them out to the state of Georgia in 1802 by agreeing to evict the Cherokees in return for Georgia relinquishing claims to modern-day Alabama and Mississippi. The author notes that precedent dates back to the Scots being evicted from the highlands with a change in rule, and the Acadians being booted to Louisiana from Canada. In 1828 gold is discovered in the heart of Cherokee land and Georgia formally annexes the land and begins revoking Indian rights. The Cherokees sued and lost in court, then supporting missionaries sued and won but to no avail, in 1828 federal troops hearded the Indians into camps and begin the Trail of Tears, marching them off to Oaklahoma. This process marked a clear shift in relations from ambiguity and sometime equality to clear subjugation by the U.S. government. During the 1800s Indians were simply regarded as a barrier to Manifest Destiny in need of extermination. Ranchers could actually get government funded off-season work killing Indians. This history is largely overlooked but the effects carry through to today. The Cherokees did eventually recover as a tribe and the author interprets this as a parable of persistence, renewal and adaptation.

The question of identity has long been a tricky one: whites have both romanticized and demonized the Indian image, and the federal government has wanted simple tests for benefit determination once they committed funds in a shift from extermination to management. Who is an Indian? Possibilities include: someone who wears feathers and beads, someone who lives on a reservation, someone who is enrolled in a tribe, someone who self-declares on the census, someone who matches the Hollywood ideal, someone who obeys tradition, or someone who can prove descent or a blood quantum level. Current laws are actually contradictory – the definition of an Indian for the purpose of distributing benefits is not the same as the definition of an Indian to get product artisan labeling in some states. Tribes at the time of colonization actually varied considerably in size and structure, and over time they’ve been decimated, scattered and formed into new alliances. The government has recognized tribes and dropped recognition over time.

Relations with tribes finally begin to shift significantly in the 1970s, in a way that impacts all the issue areas covered in the book. In 1975 the Indian Self Determination Act formally shifts administration of Indian benefits from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the tribes themselves, and in 1977 a review commission asserts that Indian tribes are sovereign political bodies and relations should be founded on principles of international law. While this has been the basis of much forward movement, most importantly allowing Indian Tribes to finally control their land and resources, the transition from wards to self-determination is a rough and still evolving story. Like any local government, tribal governments have been vulnerable to corruption and mismanagement, but tribal members have had little success appealing to the federal government for intervention. Details of legal jurisdiction have dragged on through multi-year legal disputes: do Indians have jurisdiction over other Indians on their land?; do Indians have jurisdiction over white property owners within reservation boundaries? (such private property was created during a period in the 1930s when the government attempted to convert Indians away from communal property ownership); can Indians enforce old treaty rights?; do Indians have legal claim to their own artifacts that were essentially looted in the 1800s? The 1970s through the 1990s have been a period of fairly steadily strengthening Indian rights and claims, to the point where tribes now exercise real power over water and land, and whites are beginning to lose out in conflicts. But without a shared understanding of history, it’s difficult to come to a shared understanding of current settlements and many whites feel bitterly wronged.

Two challenging aspects of Indian identity stand out as part of their struggle today: the definition of Indians as the original caretakers of the environment, and a historically molded pattern of defining their identity in opposition to whites. These two frameworks create challenges for maintaining Indian identity while building economic power based on the natural resources Indians now control such as water, fishing rights, land and forests. Building that economic power also requires education, political negotiation, and using white-developed expertise—tools with a long history of ultimately being used to the detriment of Indians. A mix of history and environmental ideology leads many individual Indians to take isolationist positions and creates barriers to the negotiation necessary for economic integration that can alleviate poverty and underdevelopment. The challenge is to align that development with “the resanctification of the earth that has become for a great many Indians a medium of salvation that far outweighs its economic cost, a way to reconnect with the tribal past and with the lives of ancestors who, during generations of systematic cultural repression, seemed beyond reach across a vast divide.”

This book was recommended to me by an associate of the Squaxin Island Tribe. Unfortunately it’s no longer in print, www.bookfinder.com is my favorite used book search engine.

Green Community Development Venture Capital?

Good lending practice caps how much money can be loaned to a small business based on their cash flow, as well as debt-to-asset ratios. Growing simply based on cash flow can result in very slow growth. Some communities have taken the next step and created Community Development Venture Capital Funds, funds organized to provide an equity investment component to enterprises whose growth will benefit the community with increased jobs and tax revenue. Investors are often local governments and banks motivated by CRA credit. Returns are anticipated to be higher than for loan funds, but the lifetime of CDVCA funds is usually 10 years and very few of them have closed yet as this is a somewhat new opportunity. The Community Development Venture Capital Association did a model portfolio study and concluded that returns of the oldest funds are likely to be around 15%. (Community Developments: Investments, Spring 2007). The struggle for all these types of investments is that in an arena of profit maximization, they are easily overlooked as “not market-rate” for their class.

A challenge for CDVC funds is finding enough opportunities to place capital when the pool of potential investments has been narrowed to explicitly avoid the kinds of deals that easily attract funds from traditional investors. The costs of finding these deals can be higher but is usually offset by partnering with a community development loan institution that can act as a screening/referring body and reduce the cost of due diligence.

The premise of working with lenders is that risk can be mitigated through relationship, and thus the CDVC firms can tolerate making investments where the winners don’t need to provide all the return from only 10% of the portfolio, because the potential for losing is reduced. Partnering with loan funds can also reduce costs through careful sharing of staff and office resources. This is necessary because the smaller size of community development VC funds (often 10 million or less) means lower potential for operating revenue – 3% on a $5 million fund is an annual revenue of 150,000, not much to pay staff or have an office. Like Venture Capital funds, these funds also take a percentage of profits at the back end, usually this is how fund principals are compensated in a traditional model, but they’re usually also wealthy capitalists who can afford to take payment on the back end. CDVC staff is more commonly salaried.

Leaning on the loan funds to do first-level due diligence saves resources, though likely the fund would want to identify other sources of deal flow, perhaps local universities. Going to traditional angel groups would defeat the purpose of working to place capital in underserved communities and industries. Having a clear definition of targeted social return will be important to aid in investment selection and avoid falling into “investments nobody else wants” as a primary target, which seems a recipe for failure. The measure most successful CDVC funds have in common is targeting job creation for low-income workers that leads them out of being low-income. Having a non-profit advisory service partner that can help the growing enterprise design career paths, provide employee training, help with recruiting and other challenges of growing an enterprise can improve the chances of success at minimal cost, as well as save the investee companies from the burden of doing the additional research and trial-and-error associated with implementing new internal systems.

What have other funds done? SJF Ventures in North Carolina capitalized its first fund in 1999 at 17 million and its second fund closed in 2007 at 28 million. They have a partner non-profit that offers technical assistance, including a “getting ready for equity” class. Their criteria: “Require $1 million to $5 million in equity financing to produce rapid expansion; Offer compelling solutions to urgent problems in large markets; Generate rapidly growing sales, typically already greater than $1 million per year; Represent management teams with deep domain expertise in their respective industries and a commitment to positively impact the world.” (SJF website) SJF works in social value on a deal-by-deal basis. In one case, for a company to receive funding they required the company provide health insurance for their existing and future employees – AND they were able to provide free assistance for doing that with their technical assistance partner. (Personal conversation with Bonny Mollenbrock). SJF Advisory Services, the technical assistance partner, does not appear to operate a loan fund.

CEI Community Ventures in Maine is organized as a wholly-owned subsidiary of their technical assistance non-profit. Their first fund closed in 1996 with a total of 5.5 million. Their second fund closed in 2001 with a total of 20 million. Their target investments: “$750,000 in a range from $500,000 to $2 million. We anticipate exiting each portfolio company at appreciated multiples within 5 to 7 years. Each fund portfolio is diversified by business stage, industry, geography and social benefit.” (CEI Ventures website). Their criteria: “Quality Management Team with relevant experience, visionary leadership, deep commitment and cohesive approach; Prospects for Attractive Return with an appealing market opportunity, realistic projections, appropriate valuation and pragmatic exit plan; Competitive Advantage through proprietary interest in technology, intellectual property, distribution system or other unique situation; Social Benefit including quality employment opportunities. Each portfolio company is required to sign an Employment and Training Agreement (”ETAG”), securing a commitment to hire individuals with low income backgrounds.”

Pacific Community Ventures closed their third fund, PCV III, in 2007 with $40 million, after a very well publicized successful exit for a prior portfolio company: Timbuk2. PCV II raised 13.2 million in 2003 and their first fund was 6.25 million, closed in 2001. They look to invest 1 to 5 million in a company in the southern California region. Their areas of focus are food products & distribution, non capital-intensive manufacturing, and green growth sectors of alternative energy, health & wellness. They also invest in education. Like the other funds, they look for traditional opportunities for growth: proven management, strong revenue growth, substantial margins and defensible competitive advantages. They have very well developed internal social metrics and they also look to develop a low-income workforce with opportunities for employee growth, both in on-job skills and life financial skills. And unlike a traditional VC, when they negotiated their investment in Timbuk2, they negotiated a stake for employees as well, resulting in over $1 million being distributed across 40 line workers when the company got bought.

A cleantech CDVC fund, partnered with a Green For All focused non-profit, is something I could really get excited about.

A visit to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

For Christmas my Mother gave me an interesting book of women’s literary criticism. I flipped through somewhat at random and found fascinating reading about the lives and writings of both Margaret Mitchell (author of Gone with the Wind, published in 1936) and Zora Neale Hurston (who wrote Their Eyes were Watching God, published in 1937.) Both critiques referenced Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. From those, I discovered that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the bestselling book of the 19th Century after the Bible. And yet, as I finish my 2nd graduate degree, I have never read it, it has never been on any suggested reading list of mine, but I certainly have heard many references to it, and I am of course acquainted with the use of the phrase “Uncle Tom” as an insult. It seemed time to fill this gap in my education.

The Seattle Public Library has The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, annotations by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and Hollis Robbins. At times, the annotations get a little tedious, for example when they note that such and such behavior or phrase would “be racist to any modern reader.” Yes, thank you, I can see that it is, I’m sorry you were worried I might not. Sometimes the annotations are unwelcome foreshadowing when they say things like “this is the first indication that character such-and-such is going to die.” What? It wasn’t obvious to me! I didn’t want to know that! But overall the annotations are very valuable, particularly for those of us not well versed in quoting scripture. Many of the characters, particularly Tom himself, quote scripture, and the annotations help the reader along in knowing what the next, unquoted but clearly implied, line of scripture would be, or illuminating the larger biblical story that is being referenced for its parallels to the current situation.

The book was written to incite abolitionist passion in the heart of every legally white American, particularly women who comprised the bulk of the novel-reading public. Prior to writing for the anti-slavery National Era newspaper (where Uncle Tom’s Cabin was originally published as a serial), Stowe wrote for Godey’s Lady’s Book. The book is alternately gripping, melodramatic, and a bit preachy, as one might expect from a novel with a political aim. During one particularly long character monologue I found myself briefly reminded of Robert Heinlein. Supposedly when Abraham Lincoln welcomed Harriet Stowe to the White House for a visit in 1862 he said “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war”!

Published in 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the US in its first year, 2 million world-wide in its first two years and was translated into 37 languages. In more than one debate between characters, Stowe draws parallels between capitalists/laborers and slaveholders & slaves. This perhaps led to the book’s popularity in countries like Russia, where even Tolstoy read it. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom is a Christian martyr – hardworking, positive attitude and obedient – until ordered to do something more actively immoral than simply make the best of his role in the system of slavery, at which point he is clear that while his human master may own his body & its labors, God owns his soul and is to whom he is ultimately accountable. After two such occasions, he is whipped near to death, at which point he forgives his tormentors, has his wounds washed by caring supporters and at last he rests in a shed for two days and dies on the 3rd. Even I can recognize that biblical reference to the death of Christ. Tom of the book is no “Uncle Tom”.

So how did this character’s name become synonymous with sellout? It seems worth some pondering to me that Uncle Tom seems to have “sold out” by being co-opted. My first clue was a picture caption explaining that “By the turn of the twentieth century, Uncle Tom had become such an icon that he even appeared on whiskey bottles, like this one from the United Distilling Company of Cincinnati.” Seeking validation that this was the source of the sell-out, I did a little websurfing and discovered The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia.

The “why” of the museum is long, involved, and worth reading, and I will pull this excerpt: “The mission of the Jim Crow Museum is straightforward: use items of intolerance to teach tolerance. We examine the historical patterns of race relations and the origins and consequences of racist depictions. The aim is to engage visitors in open and honest dialogues about this country’s racial history. We are not afraid to talk about race and racism; we are afraid not to.” It is Dr. David Pilgrim’s thorough writing on The Tom Caricature that explains that the many derivative works, significantly stage performances and later film, quickly degraded Uncle Tom into variations of weak, old, passive, happy, childlike servants. These are the Uncle Toms that made it to the sixties and became the source of intra-racial taunts. Dr. Pilgrim breaks down some of the usage and documents examples. He also has some interesting analysis of “Tom” roles in films over the decades and their evolution.

The book still fresh in my mind, I went to see The Waters of Babylon at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. At one point the Cuban character, Arturo, tells the legend of the death of Chief Hatuey, leader of the indigenous peoples of Cuba. To my astonishment, it nearly mirrors the story of Prue from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. There’s a version of Chief Hatuey’s death here. Another webpage traces the story to the “History of the Indies” written by Father Bartolomé de las Casas. Researching him leads me to the following :

“Historia apologética de las Indias”, for instance, has been only partly printed in the “Documentos para la Historia de España” (Madrid, 1876). The “Historia de las Indias”, the manuscript of which he completed in 1561, appeared in the same collection (1875 and 1876). His best-known work is the “Brevísima Relacion de la Destruycion de las Indias” (Seville, 1552). There are at least five Spanish editions of it. It circulated very quickly outside of Spain and in a number of European languages.

Fascinating. It makes sense to me that American abolitionists would have familiarized themselves with prior writings on the subject. So did Harriet Beecher Stowe copy the story from Father Bartolomé’s 1552 publication, or did the 1875 editors use Prue’s story from Uncle Tom to embellish the story of Chief Hatuey? Only going to the source will tell, but either way, anti-oppression movements have deep global roots.

Accountable Compassion

I’ve been thinking of calling my collection of activities “full spectrum capital” (but the domain name is already camped on). Good Capital and Tim Freundlich were really key inspirations for me in their emphasis that it’s a continuum between philanthropy and investing, not buckets. The Heron Foundation also looks at their activities this way. I think it was in a break time discussion at SRI in the Rockies that someone suggested that one could regard a charitable gift simply as an investment with a -100% return. On that scale, a community investment note at 3% is meaningful.

Community Economic Development appeals to me because I’m attached to measurable results, and managing my foundation has at times been a struggle for me. I believe in accountability – down to how I spend my own personal time, I see how a lack of accountability leads to a lack of focus. Tim talks about how doing investing with non-profits instead of just gifting can give them an accountability that can be helpful. With my grant making, I’ve been trying to figure out what appropriate accountability is. One limitation is that I have to invest some of myself and my time to hold someone accountable, and there’s been a limit to that. A second challenge is trying to figure out how to be compassionate but still have some kind of standards.

I found an example in coffee growing. In the December 2007 issue of Tea & Coffee, there’s an article about work illycaffé is doing in Brazil. They’re doing it outside the Fair Trade system so it’s not exactly Fair Trade but it’s similar. Most people have only a vague idea that Fair Trade means workers get fair wages. It’s actually a complicated setup where specific Fair Trade price mark-ups are paid into specific funds that are then allocated by worker cooperatives. It’s also more than that – Fair Trade means working to help supplier-partners develop their own businesses, growing capacity and quality. What illycaffé is doing mirrors that.

The key components of what they’re doing are: 1) they have a clear standard of success – they are able to set a quality bar for coffee and measure whether or not a bag of coffee meets that bar. 2) there’s a clear reward for meeting that standard – they will buy at a premium every bag of coffee that meets their standard. 3) The provide opportunities for local farmers to learn how to meet their standard, via the illy University of Coffee and the illy Coffee Club, which teach management, environmental stewardship and technical training. Finally, They achieve visibility for these programs via an annual competition (Prêmio Brasil De Qualidade Do Café Para Espresso) where the winners receive prizes and illy gets preferential rights to buy the coffees submitted. Another nice summary of their work is here.

This to me seems like an excellent model – it establishes a well-understood, transparent system that the farmers can choose to participate in or not. Should farmers choose to participate at least some of the costs and rewards are clear, and a path to successful participation is provided. This is community economic development – here’s what success looks like, here are the tools, though in the US we tend to fall down on the “and here’s some(ideally free) help in understanding and using the tools” for true accessibility. That first step in the ladder is what Washington CASH provides locally.

The whole chain is what I would like to provide with my foundation, but it takes a well resourced leader to set all that up and manage it, and I have to admit The Massena Foundation is not that. Larger organizations, and particularly corporations like illy, DO have that kind of capacity, which leads me to believe that this kind of work is what corporate philanthropy should be. At the Corporation 20/20 conference last November in Boston, one of the speakers focused on the need to get corporate money out of politics, and for him also out of communities. It’s too easy with their relatively more significant resources for corporations to drive community decision-making. I thought that was interesting and I agree there’s a fuzzy line between corporate grant-making and marketing. But in Community Economic Development – large, stable, well organized corporations have a completely unique value to offer – access to markets and access to well-developed systems and training. Sharing that access would be worth more than any dollar grant they could make.

Case Studies on Sustainable Business

We read a series of mini-case-studies (UVA-ENT-0100) put together by Andrea Larson of The Darden School at UVA, guest professor at BGI this quarter. As I read through the cases a few themes emerged for me: First, in product reformulation, supply chain collaboration is key. Several cases are about premium products standing out in commodity categories. Branding matters, and creating a technical metabolism (wherein materials are truly recycled to become new of what they were old, instead of being downcycled to a different, less recyclable product) is key to true sustainability. Another theme that emerged is that goal setting is everything – if you believe that it’s not possible to be both cost efficient and green then you won’t get there – you have to set it as a goal. Finally, when working to be green – don’t just think about the product, think about the whole product lifecycle.

Supply Chain collaboration is key – several of the cases talked about the need to work with all members of the supply chain to design a new product. Climatex Fabric was an example of a company needing to find mill partners and yarn twisters that would work with a new process. NatureWorks PLA plastics a product that is challenged by as-yet not having deep enough supply chain relationships and control to allow it to ensure GMO-free product. Without control of the supply chain, they have limited control of the product. In the Nike case, they are described as essentially a “complex global supply chain” management company. To protect their brand, they had to develop “a new dimension to supply chain management.” Not only are they setting standards for their suppliers to meet, they’re supporting NGOs to develop the organic cotton industry – investing to create supply chain partners for the future.

Standing out in a commodity category – interestingly from the case studies I see two slants on this – Method (household cleaners – available at Target) is an example of a company that used their sustainability plus sexy branding to stand out from a commodity category and be visible to the customer. They used brand identity to create a premium product, so they could command a premium price, so they could be environmental without making their environmentalism their primary selling point. This way they could reach out to mass market instead of just the environmental niche. Coastwide Labs, making cleaners for commercial janitorial settings, is an example of an environmental product that stands out from a commodity market, but it seems slightly reversed in that they designed to be an environmental product and their sales are driven by customer demand (one example: municipalities passing Precautionary Principle purchasing ordinances), thus allowing them to command a premium. So in one case, they’re using sexy branding to drive demand to pay for sustainability, in the latter case demand is driving sales and allowing them to command a premium for sustainability. I wonder what their relative volumes and margins are, I’d guess Method is higher volume/lower margin than Coastwide, compensating for age of the company. EcoWorx carpeting is described as breaking out in a commodity category, but their case is almost one of being forced to play catch up when a competitor (Interface) takes a successful lead with sustainable product, as well as being driven from behind by the kinds of industry voluntary agreements that form to avoid regulation.

Goal Setting – Shaw Industries, makers of EcoWorx, is an example of setting a goal to become infinitely recyclable and getting there because of the set objective, though it took them many years and almost a million dollars in research. The Coastwide labs example is a particularly good one – they lowered costs overall not by making the product itself (cleaning solutions) cheaper as they made it less toxic, but by making the packaging cheaper & the dispensing more efficient. Those two improvements were most likely available to them independent of making the product environmentally friendly. Business is all about priorities, and those priorities stayed low on the list until the goal of making environmentally friendly products raised the need for lowering costs which raised the priority of those cost reduction options. It was the setting of the goal that made the difference. NatureWorks PLA is another product that was created by first setting a goal to create it.
Nike has also set long term goals and developed metrics that lead them to explore all areas of their product supply chain and internal corporate operations.

The whole lifecycle – Method standing out in their commodity category with sexy packaging, Coastwide cutting packing costs as part of cutting overall costs to support their price point – both are examples of how the packaging is just as important as the product in forming the whole proposition. The textile examples of EcoWorx and Climatex are cases where the end-of-life for the product was a key part of the proposition, and the supply chain examples show how the pre-life of the product is a key part. When going sustainable, taking a total lifecycle approach is essential.

Start as you mean to go on…

…but savor what you have today. I recently checked out the website for a new local company, Julep Nail Parlor, and followed along to the blog by its entrepreneur founder, Jane Park. She had recently written a post about about the tensions between working to put good process in place from the beginning, but also wanting to personalize and enjoy things while they’re small. Someting about that value she was seeking to hold resonated for me.

Interestingly, the phrase of my own that first came to mind was: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. For me that touchphrase is a reminder that one can analyze forever, but to accomplish something you need to get out and do it well enough. On the face, that’s seems the opposite of what she is talking about – she’s out there doing it, and hanging onto some perfect even when she knows she’ll have to relinquish it eventually for good. So why do those two mantras connect for me? After some feeling about it, I think it’s because both are ultimately saying it’s about the journey, not about the end. That concept for me has been a big shift that BGI is helping me internalize rather than merely intellectualize. Who We Are and How We Work Together is more important that what we actually do.

In entrepreneurship we’re now reading Built To Last, and that seems to be what they’re saying as well. They talk about being clock-builders rather than time-tellers: To build a truly great company, your product goal has to be the company itself more than any particular product. The company can then stand on its own, independent of the founders.

Collins and Porras also talk about core values vs practices. In the ParlorGames blog, Jane mentions a friend questioning her commitment to handwritten notes when it’s something she won’t be able to continue. It’s not consistent with “start as you mean to go on”. When talking with Darrin that catches his attention – he particularly dislikes when people justify a decision primarily on consistency. Consistency, perhaps, is a practice, not a value. And so for Julep, “start as you mean to go on” may be a practice they work to follow,but the core value seems to be something deeper.

“Begin as you intend to go on” (what it evolved to in my brain) also reminds me of another cherished guide-phrase: “Every step you take towards justice must have justice in it.”, I can still remember the visiting interim director of the Highlander Center saying it, with a smile. There is an end, but how we get there matters. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” And now I have Colins and Porras, saying we should be clock-builders, not time-tellers.

Additional Info on Board conflicts of interest…

I was forwarded a paper (thanks Jorji!) on how more diverse boards tend also to do a better job with basic board responsbilities. This paper has an excellent section on board conflicts of interest (a topic just a few posts ago) that covers the topic better than I did, so I’m including it wholesale.

from Nonprofit Governance in the United States by Francie Ostrower for The Urban Institute.

Financial Transactions between Nonprofits and Board Members Under the law, board members owe the nonprofit a duty of loyalty, which requires them to act in the nonprofit’s best interest rather than in their own or anyone else’s interest (Brody 2006). The IRS Good Governance guidelines caution that “in particular, the duty of loyalty requires a director to avoid conflicts of interest that are detrimental to the charity.” 10 Against this background, the purchase of goods or services by nonprofits from board members or their companies raise special concerns about who such transactions really benefit. In a guide for board members, one state attorney general’s office warns that “caution should be exercised in entering into any business relationship between the organization and a board member, and should be avoided entirely unless the board determines
that the transaction is clearly in the charity’s best interest.”11
In 2004, a proposal to restrict nonprofits’ ability to engage in these transactions was included in the Senate Finance Committee’s draft white paper but met with considerable opposition from some nonprofit representatives. The president and CEO of Independent Sector, for instance, warned that prohibiting economic transactions “could be extremely detrimental to a number of charities. . . . Public charities, particularly smaller charities, frequently receive from board members and other disqualified parties goods, services, or the use of property at substantially below market rates.” A similar objection was voiced by the executive director of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations, which is composed primarily of smaller and mid-size nonprofits.12 There has also been concern over the impact on nonprofits in rural and smaller communities, where a trustee’s law firm or bank may be the only one in the area.13 Regardless of disagreement over whether public charities should be allowed to engage in financial transactions with board members, there is agreement on the fact that any such transactions should be transparent to the board, and that policies are in place to ensure that such transactions are in the nonprofit’s best interest. Recent IRS draft guidelines are emphatic on this point. They call on boards to require members to disclose annually any financial interest that they or a family member has in a business that transacts with the charity, and to “adopt and regularly evaluate an effective conflict of interest policy” that, among other things, includes “written procedures for determining whether a relationship, financial interest, or business affiliation results in a conflict of interest” and Nonprofit Governance in the United States 7 specifies what is to be done when it does.14 Furthermore, as noted earlier, the IRS has instituted a question on the Form 990 asking nonprofits whether they have a conflict of
interest policy in place.