In early 2019, One-Community Consulting partnered with the City of Adrian, National Coalition for Community Capital and Cutting Edge Capital to take a closer look at 2017’s investment legislation: the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Across all of our work, each of our organizations regularly support communities and collective impact programming or initiatives. This legislation provides a tax incentive for the wealthy to invest in historically distressed and underserved areas. Rather than wealthy folks putting their money in mutual funds or the stock market, the Act helped direct it back to those who need it most. We were intrigued by this as a kickstarter for additional collective impact resources.
However, initial research has documented gentrification of neighborhoods and those this legislation is designed to serve have also been excluded from the table in various other ways. So, we had to ask: why are those community members left out of investment opportunity when it is time to implement the ideas their community defined? This paper seeks to offer suggestion and solution as well as practical application of regional fertilization versus historical extractive processes for local economy with focus on community capital.
You can view the paper here: https://reicenter.org/upload/
This work was made possible by the Michigan State University Center for Regional Economic Innovation with funding provided by the US Department of Commerce – Economic Development Administration. We sincerely thank the University as well as the Economic Development Administration for their support in this research and later this year will unveil a “toolkit” working with design firm, Hoyden Creative, to offer a “choose your own community adventure” map for those communities wishing to implement similar investment practices utilizing the Act.
Citation: ZumBrunnen, M., Miller, C., Beckon, B. & Arnone, K. Bring Opportunity Zones and Local Investors Together in Your Community: City of Adrian Co-Learning Plan. Michigan State University, January, 2020.
