For the Watershed Fund, I am proposing that we can only lend to farmers who have $10,ooo of stored gratitude in the system we could harvest through a benefit dinner. So we are starting to think about how to map the relationships of reciprocity in the local economic bioregion as…

With the Watershed Fund, what we are finding as we connect the social and economic networks in our food system, that mutuality is what will make this work, if it does. We are looking at an emergency fund. And when you launch into pooling and sharing risk, as seems to make sense here, for the farmers and their social ecosystem, a mutual insurance like structure seems to come into focus as being needed.

We’ve raised a year of operating capital to launch The Watershed Fund, which offers zero interest loans to local farmers serving our farm to table sector in Asheville. The connections and reciprocity within our food systems are already proving to be one of the surprising benefits. This initiative relies on…

Tourism leaders are not manning the barricades before next Wednesday’s meeting. The tourism development folks have responded to my article about them. Their only quibble was with the picture of their members from two years ago in a slide by the organizers at Buncombe Decides, who is the one pushing…

The following is theologian Willie James Jennings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_James_Jennings. on why people of faith should show up at zoning meetings. It was delivered at Fuller Seminary, an evangelical seminary, when the overall topic was how do we get diverse people to come to church. Jennings said, people of faith need to…

My statement at the Buncombe County Tourism Development Board on why they need to fund affordable housing for service workers This is action I am taking next week to get involved with the story I wrote https://kevindoylejones.medium.com/making-ashevilles-tourism-millions-work-for-the-people-who-are-doing-the-work-6d0e7100ea94 last week Good morning ladies and gentlemen of the Tourism Development Authority. My…

Ben Williamson, like a lot of people in Asheville, was not happy with how tourists and the tourism industry had taken over the city, thanks in large part to a tax on hotel occupancy which results in tens of millions of dollars being spent annually on advertising to get people…

I’m meeting today with two top researchers, thought leaders in the impact dao space. I want to know if you can use impactdaos as the backbone of a network connecting several different community commercial real estate projects that create community ownership in BIPOC neighborhoods. The four funds are already sharing and pooling a new funding vehicle that gets them the catalytic, patient, risk taking, flexible, capital their projects are missing.

Pandemic causing a Darwinian shift in adaptability. The new Messenger RNA vaccines are a major step forward in responding to viruses; they use the body’s own machinery, the RNA that carries messages, to teach a cell to make a protein that’s like the virus and start the body’s immune response. It’s much faster and with the prospect of more pandemics pretty clear means we can react faster, collectively than we could before.