Reginald Danner was living in the High Oaks mobile home park right outside of Asheville, in the Emma-Erwin neighborhood of Buncombe County, North Carolina, when he was diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually take his life. The park’s owner tended to pocket the rent tenants like Reggie paid without doing any of the maintenance their units desperately needed, which meant Reggie would be suffering through bouts of chemo in a hot, humid, and dilapidated unit, fighting for his life in a home that was—due solely to his landlord’s years of neglect—unsafe and undignified. This home was also precarious: shortly before his diagnosis, that same landlord had put the entire park up for sale.

When organizers from PODER Emma had knocked on their first couple of front doors in the park, the residents that answered were more or less resigned to the impending sale, and to the very real threat of displacement it represented. But, as co-founder Andrea Golden tells it, when they tried in these initial conversations to suggest that an alternative was possible—that PODER Emma could support the residents to buy and run the park themselves as a cooperative—that resignation for some quickly gave way to suspicion, rather than hope. It was simply too good to be true. But Reggie listened, and he was all in, ready to sign on and fight for a chance to keep his home.  Andrea credits Reggie with helping turn the initial organizing around, being the first person who would introduce the PODER Emma team to his neighbors and vouch for them. This in turn helped build the crucial bonds of trust that would eventually allow these residents to collectively mount a successful bid for the purchase of their mobile home park, creating the 24-unit Sourwood Cooperative with the help of a nearly a million dollars in non-extractive financing from PODER Emma, through its membership in Seed Commons. 

This story would be a less bittersweet one to tell if Reggie were still here today to share his insights and knowledge about this victory, and what it meant.  Reggie’s death was a devastating loss for his community. Even through his own battle with cancer, he provided solace and support to other neighbors facing their own battles with cancer. And it is clear what the cooperative was able to do for, with, and because of him in his last years. After the property acquisition eliminated the threat of displacement, a subsequent Seed Commons loan allowed for some much needed repairs and upgrades that had been neglected under the previous owner. In Reggie’s case, that meant a new unit in much better condition to live in, financed by the cooperative. As his health continued to wane, the cooperative was able to build the accommodations—a ramp, accessible bathrooms—that allowed him to continue to live at home with dignity. And in the last months of his life, his community of neighbors was there for him, mobilized in a 24/7 WhatsApp group to make sure he had the support he needed. As Andrea tells it, “throughout it all he just kept saying: this cooperative changed my life. And Reggie certainly changed our lives forever.” She emphasizes that all this was possible, not just because of non-extractive finance, but because that non-extractive finance was used to shift power to Reggie and his neighbors and build community: “There’s what the capital can do, and then there’s what humans can do once they have the material conditions to show up for each other. And that is what is truly life-changing.”  PODER Emma continues to work to honor Reggie’s memory, legacy, leadership, contagious laugh, and vision that transformed a community.

PODER Emma was founded in 2017, but has its roots in years of rapid response organizing by immigrant communities in western North Carolina fighting back against the surge in raids and deportations beginning under George W. Bush and continuing under Barack Obama. This was the post 9/11-era, with the early years of the newly-formed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), the explosion of 287(g) agreements—where local law enforcement, including in Western North Carolina, were deputized to run checkpoints and round people up for deportation—and the passage in the US House of the draconian HR 4437, opposition to which brought millions of people into the streets on May Day of 2006. 

Many community members and leaders in the Emma community were a part of the networks of people organizing against these threats, building the organizations, structures, and culture of solidarity that could help the growing immigrant communities in the region push back against raids and deportation. Andrea notes that these essential capacities for defensive action depended, however, on the stability of communities that were being threatened on another front: economic displacement, especially as Asheville’s reputation as the Bohemian enclave of the Blue Ridge Mountains fueled accelerating speculation in real estate:

We were starting to feel the market pressures around housing. Because we had been doing rapid response organizing for a long time, we knew enough to know that conditions can change in what feels like overnight. We had put all these years into building this infrastructure, and we needed to protect it by keeping people in place—because if people started to get pushed out, those organizing relationships and that infrastructure would fall apart.

This realization that the safety of all of Asheville’s working class and low income residents, including immigrants, depended on their ability to afford to stay in community together was transformative. As Andrea explains:

[It] opened us up to this bigger idea around the right to stay. For so many reasons, people of all identities in our community were feeling the fear that they wouldn’t be able to stay, and that meant there was a kind of organizing that would allow us to bring people together across like tremendous lines of difference, because everyone wants housing, and everyone wants the right to stay.

This recognition of the potential power of a broad anti-displacement agenda, and  the need to build an organization that could specifically hold this kind of economic organizing, led to the birth of PODER Emma.

The “Emma” neighborhood gets its name from a railroad station built in the 1890s, itself named after the daughter of an original white settler family. It’s a community of around 6,500 people, straddling the city/county line on the west side of Asheville, and a diverse one—in particular, it has a much higher concentration of Latino residents than the rest of the city. It’s also a predominantly low-income community. But Alan Ramirez, an organizer on PODER Emma’s Cooperative Development Team and a resident-owner of Sourwood who grew up in western North Carolina, emphasizes “that we don't need to see all the luxury places that are downtown or in other parts of Asheville. I feel like—especially because of our cooperatives—we'd love to just be in our area. We are a poor community, but we love it here. And we’re trying to fight for it.”

One-third of the housing units in the neighborhood are mobile homes—providing a much-needed supply of “naturally occurring affordable housing,” but also exposing the community to significant displacement risks—in the communities PODER Emma is organizing in, only 9% of people reported owning both their trailer and the land on which it rests. Now, the gentrification of the city is accelerating—Alan notes that due to market pressures and the tourist-driven economy, the ‘quirky’ or ‘Bohemian’ character of Ashville is something that’s been hollowed out in recent years. Rents have risen, and mobile home parks like those in Emma have become more and more attractive as sites for speculative redevelopment, especially with the designation of the neighborhood as an ‘opportunity zone’ tax shelter for investors (alongside Asheville’s historically Black neighborhoods across the city.)

This detailed understanding of the intersections of community, race/ethnicity, and housing in the Emma neighborhood exists only because of the work of PODER Emma itself, which has grounded its organizing in two major multi-year participatory action research and popular planning processes, published, respectively, in 2019 and 2023, in which dozens of community members have been trained to interview hundreds of their neighbors about their lives, their connections to their community, the condition of their housing, and the threats of displacement. Threading together the history of the neighborhood, detailed statistics, and identification of key grassroots priorities, these reports offer a comprehensive view, from below, of the state of the neighborhood. 

PODER Emma’s agenda has been driven by the results of this bottom-up community research. This includes its non-extractive lending work: one of the solutions identified through the first neighborhood plan was “form a neighborhood based loan fund to support cooperatives and community ownership.” This was easier said than done, however. While an attempt to purchase a six-unit mobile home park to create the Dulce Lomita Cooperative was ultimately successful, it revealed the paucity of local capital available to community organizers in Western North Carolina looking to fight displacement. The capital stack for the purchase was ultimately cobbled together out of relatively tiny contributions, some with onerous requirements. One, as Andrea tells it, included organizers required to make a 400 mile journey with a number of feral cats that had to be successfully rehomed as a part of the deal.

As a member of Seed Commons, PODER Emma has been able to scale this vision, with significantly fewer feral cats. More importantly, they’ve been able to get the non-extractive capital their community needs without having to shift their focus away from organizing and popular education. Instead, they have leveraged the infrastructure of the national network to deliver the necessary technical and regulatory capacity they would have otherwise needed to build from scratch locally.  Starting with a $200K loan for a first mobile home park purchase and cooperative conversion in 2018, today Seed Commons has worked through PODER Emma to deploy over $6 million in community controlled investment in the Emma neighborhood.

As Andrea relates, however, this relationship wasn’t an immediate fit. PODER Emma was initially connected with Seed Commons via discussions around the Southern Reparations Loan Fund convened through the legendary Highlander School and the Southern Grassroots Economy Project. But it took some doing for PODER Emma to ultimately become an affiliate and network member, and in the process this helped Seed Commons learn from PODER Emma as it refined and expanded its vision for a democratic economy. The major sticking point: Seed Commons had been thinking of its work primarily in terms of worker cooperatives, and financing housing was new territory. Shifting land and housing into community control takes a lot of financial resources, and while housing is certainly a human right, not all investments in affordable and stable housing build collective power. But seeing the degree to which PODER Emma was connecting the question of housing to deep, long-term organizing and an ambitious vision for community control of the economy, helped seal the deal, and in turn helped Seed Commons sharpen its analysis of the kinds of investments in land and housing that could align with worker and community power.

This focus on displacement as a primary threat doesn’t mean that PODER Emma isn’t interested in worker cooperatives, however. With an increasing number of resident-owned housing cooperatives now on the ground in Emma, the organization is working to intentionally fill in the gaps in the community’s economic ecosystem with democratic workplaces. Initially, they started by supporting low-capital cooperatives filling emergent needs within the community. The Power in Numbers Bookkeeping cooperative is building back-office capacity for local social movements. The Cenzontle Language Justice Cooperative drives the interpretation and translation work essential to organizing across language barriers. La Bugambilia provides Spanish language programming for children of preschool age, as well as affordable afterschool and summer camp programs, making it possible for parents in the community—including many members of the other worker cooperatives—to work. And the Quetzal Community Real Estate and Chispas Property Maintenance cooperative brings much of the necessary work to run and maintain the mobile home cooperatives inside the PODER Emma network, keeping dollars circulating within the cooperative economy. As Alan explains, “We don't see ourselves incubating new worker co-ops unless they are directly necessary. They need to make sense. This is something that makes us different from a lot of cooperative developers—we focus on the cooperatives our communities need, we aren’t trying to incubate all kinds of co-ops across different industries that we then have to try to be experts in.”

One industry that does make sense is the textile industry, which has deep roots in Western North Carolina and in the area’s immigrant communities. Recently, PODER Emma used financing through Seed Commons to acquire a major new community asset, in the form of a 20,000 sq. ft, compound of three mixed-use commercial buildings spread over an acre and a half of land in the Emma community along Westside drive. One of the first projects moving in is a new worker-owned sewing cooperative. The idea, inspired in part by the incredible work being done around high-road textile industry revitalization by Industrial Commons down the road in nearby Morganton, is to start trying to deploy capital to create a cooperative industrial base that leverages the skills of the community’s residents.

PODER Emma’s laser-focus on the needs of their organizing base and its commitment to an intentional and integrated process of community-governed economic development means that sometimes they say no to projects that might make sense in a broader sense. For instance, when local worker cooperative Firestorm Books approached PODER Emma about a loan to acquire a permanent home for their radical bookstore, PODER Emma ultimately had to decline. This wasn’t because they didn’t see Firestorm as important allies. But supporting Firestorm, located outside the Emma neighborhood and serving a broader Asheville community, would not have been a natural fit for PODER Emma’s lending strategy, which focuses tightly on financing for the cooperatives that are members of an emerging neighborhood-level ecosystem, in order to develop real place-based capacity and amplify impact for the community it serves. Here, the connection to a national network made a solution possible: Seed Commons’ Baltimore peer, based on a decade and half connection between the radical worker coop bookstores in the two cities, would formally make the loan for Firestorm’s building acquisition, while PODER Emma would provide some on-the-ground oversight and assistance.

The kind of care and intention PODER Emma brings to the work of non-extractive finance is necessary because what they are doing is fundamentally very different from traditional lending, where lender and loan recipient are engaged in a transactional and potentially antagonistic relationship, where the burden of mitigating the lender’s risk is put on the loan recipient. Seed Commons works differently, using bonds of trust and collaboration to turn this relationship on its head, with cooperation between lender and loan recipient key to non-extractive investment. At PODER Emma, the tight integration of each cooperative  within the overall framework for organizing and community controlled development takes this to the next level. Andrea explains how this shows up in the diligence process for PODER Emma’s worker cooperative loans:  

The worker co-ops each have what would be equivalent to a supervisor—we call them a steward. We meet with those stewards really, really, regularly as their ongoing technical assistance and accompaniment team, so that need for capital, we see it coming. We don't have businesses approach us and say, “Hey, we're thinking we need a loan!” and then we're like, “Okay, let's start a diligence process!” Instead, we are meeting with the stewards constantly, and with the entire cooperative for their quarterly governance meetings. We provide the technical assistance on establishing their long term financial goals and then backing that up into a twelve month plan and accompanying them on that path. So because we do all of that work, the capital to our co-ops feels like a small but significant piece of what we do. I don't think our primary identity is as a lender. The need for capital is a part of what we're assessing continuously throughout, so then the diligence process is not such a heavy lift, because we're doing diligence every day around the health of the cooperative as a whole.

It’s possible, listening to PODER Emma, to hear the future calling.

They are stewarding millions in non-extractive capital to help their community secure the cooperatively-owned housing needed to beat back a looming tidal wave of gentrification-induced displacement. They are threading interconnected worker-owned business through that community fabric to further reinforce it, and create the opportunities for residents to thrive. And they are doing all of this economic development as an organic part of a long-term strategy grounded in a deep commitment to bottom-up, participatory organizing. The picture of the future that comes into focus here is, for once, one in which a community forced onto the margins by racialized poverty nevertheless gets to win. 

When PODER Emma started organizing, local county officials had one policy priority when it came to the mobile home parks in Asheville—removing them. Now, together with the city’s other legacy neighborhoods, they’ve fought for and won the recognition of the essential role played by ‘naturally occurring affordable housing’—and they are, as Andrea puts it, working “to build the structural mechanisms that ensure that our community always has a seat at the table.”  They are thinking big, and thinking in terms of decades of non-extractive investment in their community as a part of Seed Commons. Their emerging 25-year goal? Decommodifying, at minimum, one-fourth of the housing stock in the Emma neighborhood through permanently affordable cooperative ownership, and scaling up the rest of the cooperative economy to match. It’s an ambitious target—but one that, given the right resources, and the institutions of community power they are building today, completely and totally achievable, even though it might take a few decades. As Andrea says, “I'm proud of what we've done, and there's still a ton of work to be done.”