Unless we flip the script on “capacity,” even the most well-intentioned economic development strategy will never deliver real equity or inclusion.

Whose community gets to wield economic power? We’ve seen at Seed Commons that “capacity” is used again and again as a way to justify withholding investment dollars from the communities—too often Black and Brown—who have historically lacked access to capital. Even when we are talking about public money deployed with the best intentions to address these historic gaps, we see that the dollars flow to the people who are already wired into our extractive economic system. 

Workers are told they don’t have the financial knowledge it takes to really run their business on their own. A community-based coalition, deeply embedded in their neighborhood, is told that they don’t have the technical skills to manage a development project effectively. This happens over and over again, so that at the end of the day, the big corporations, the well-connected developers, the people with access to family wealth, and the technocrats in both the for and non-profit sectors, get to call the shots, because they have the “capacity” to absorb investment dollars effectively—even when these dollars are supposed to be flowing to the underserved and excluded.

Our model breaks this cycle, because we know that the deep connections to place and community, the deep business knowledge that comes only with being an actual worker, the commitment to shared success in a truly democratic workplace, are a tremendous reservoir of real capacity. It’s just a kind of capacity that the status quo can’t recognize.

That’s why our lending model looks more like popular education and organizing rather than the inside of a bank office. We work with our local loan funds at all stages to make sure their organizations—accountable to the communities and workers they serve—are continually developing their skills as non-extractive lenders. We create spaces for them to learn not just from us, but from each other, as peers. We build the infrastructure—like our community lending software platform Madeline—that puts the tools in their hands that they need to scale up non-extractive investment—and to help their communities understand and master why and how democratic ownership matters. And we bring workers from cooperatives across our network together for cross-cutting opportunities to learn, sharing lessons in sector-wide learning cohorts or facilitating peer-to-peer, worker-to-worker site visits.

Workers from Baltimore cooperatives attend a democratic management training organized by Seed Commons member Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy.

It’s this kind of work that’s needed to make sure the people locked out of the current economy are at the forefront of a new, nonextractive one. Investments in Seed Commons aren’t just funding for individual businesses, they’re a way to support the development of an entire ecosystem of practice, one that’s built from the bottom up to get communities the real capacity they need to take control of their own economic future, rather than continually depending on external experts or interests to manage it for them.