For the Love of a Small Tourist Town

I've had friends marvel that even when we lived in a Classic Six apartment on NYC's Upper West Side, two blocks from Riverside Park, and zoned to one of NYC's best public schools, my heart longed for a little faux Bavarian town in the Eastern Cascades.

Today, on The Last Day of Summer (unofficial), I was reminded of the wisdom of choosing to come Home, of admitting that the Upper Valley is Home, not because I was born and bred here (I wasn't) but because the cadence at the river's edge and the casting magic of the undulating light on the mountains tune the resonance of my heart and soul.

We strolled from home around midday, dropped our books off at the library, and made a little pit stop at the tasting room of one my favorite wineries. Then we meandered through the waning throngs of tourists and made our way to the river. 

On its sandy banks, Z swam, I read, and others floated, swam, napped and generally enjoyed the perfect day. 

I looked up from my book to find my daughter building a volcano at the water's edge. A little girl, with a sweet Spanish lilt to her voice asked if she could help. Z said yes. A Somali family frolicked with their toddler nearby, even as she looked over at The Big Girls and clearly set some personal goals. A boy - a bit younger than Z and the brother of her new helper-friend - asked if he could help too. 

As The Trio dug and chatted, other voices from other corners of the world passed by, like starling murmurations at twilight. Some Russian, Japanese, English, and a couple languages I could not place. And laughter - sometimes raucous, sometimes giggly, all of it pure.

All of us - most of us with our children -  simply enjoying the day. And respecting each other's right to Be and Enjoy and Savor the gift of this place and time. It was remarkable in its unremarkableness. 

Some fifty years ago or so, this community was a struggling logging town staring down the prospect of its own decline. But in recognizing the community's topographic similarity to communities in Bavaria, residents saw Hospitality as a path to renewed prosperity. 

Welcoming strangers to experience the Beauty of this place meant inviting strangers to weave this landscape and community into the fabric of their families and their lives. Some of those strangers became neighbors, friends and family. Some of those strangers never returned. And over the years, the community stabilized and grew and evolved.

To be fair, not all of the growth or evolution has been well or equitably managed. Many of the descendants of that first generation of re-inventors cannot afford to return or stay. The economy traded one primary industry for another, with little diversification. And the housing prices and vacancy rates have no correlation to local median income or need.

But the community has persisted as it has evolved. And Hospitality has made this small hamlet of less than 2,000 year-round residents, a home away from home for over 2 million visitors from around the world, annually.

At times, it can feel a bit like the utopia of the Tao Te Ching: small with neighbors nearby but not in your face; a place for community and cultural experiences; and a respite for peaceful reading and writing and creating. At other times, it can feel like a case study in Overtourism.

Today, it felt like what it has become - from my first rafting trip over ten years ago, to today as my daughter made impromptu play friends on the banks of the river - Home.

March Madness

It's remarkable how tempting it is to over-stuff the weekend when so many opportunities and priorities compete for the limited waking hours. There's so much life to cram in.

I had hoped to help register voters at the March today but I have A LOT of cleaning to do ahead of my kid's 8th birthday costume dance party tomorrow: my costume to layout, her costume to mend (thanks to Cocoa, our Rabbit with Bad Habits), baking, shopping, my first jog after three days of crud, cleaning and more cleaning still.

I wanted to march in remembrance. But as I ease into gear today, I'm going to try to exorcise my memories of pulling the van over on the way to my kid's preschool, on my Mom's birthday, to ugly cry at the news of Sandy Hook. I'm going to try to exorcise my memories of the gallows humor I began to develop in the early Nineties when "going postal" entered the national vocabulary and I had already attempted to bury memories of the shooting at my Mom's work a few years before, under layers of other drama (mostly involving Butthead, my stepfather, who thankfully never had a gun). 

As I bake Z's favorite sheet cake and scatter rainbow sprinkles over the buttercream frosting she loves, I will rehearse how to ask family and friends - without judgment, just due diligence - whether their kids know the combination to the family gun safe, or know where the concealed but unsecured guns are. I don't want to seem nosy or judgey - because finding and keeping Mommy Friends is hard, y'all. I'd just like my kid to keep living to see another play date. 

And as I whisk and rehearse, I will remember that one time she won at hide-and-seek when we visited some friends. They lived on an island where break-ins were common but no alarm service seemed to operate, and both violent crime and vicious wildlife were practically non-existent (well, except for that one cougar who had swam across the inlet and laid low, except for a couple chickens...unless that was the raccoons). After the other kids couldn't find her, I joined the search and found her in the parents' bedroom closet (Ugh! Kid!) - giggling quietly, one hand on her mouth, the other grasping the door jamb ready to spring from her hiding place. She was utterly unaware that her little hand was next to a shotgun -- barrel up.

I have since repeatedly reminded her about staying out of grown up spaces - for so many reasons. I don't know what to do about our new friend's gun safe in the family fun room where the computer and family pets live. Why is it so much easier to compare and align strategies for holding our kids accountable during play dates in our respective homes than it is to discuss the steps we each take to insure that our children are safe in each other's homes? How do we talk with friends and family who seem to be responsible gun owners and parents? We are all raising kids who also seem pretty good...until they're not. 

We are raising human beings who are learning everyday, how to be good people. And they often, heck, almost always learn by making mistakes. Don't touch the fireplace grate, it'll burn you. Check. Walk before you run, or you'll face-plant. Check. If you grab the cat by the tail, she might scratch you. Check. Don't eat the yellow snow. Ever. Ugh, check. Don't throw sticks or play shovels, someone could get hurt. Check, which is why my dear girl has a third dimple thanks to the teacher's kid who will forever be That Little Sh*t, to me. 

But at least he didn't have access to a gun with which to kill her as he overreacted to her hoarding of that swing. 

On the spectrum of bad choices when kids can access their parents' guns (not because they should or are allowed to but because they are physically capable of finding or stumbling across damned near everything we don't want them to find), we have: 

• the two year old boy who broke the rules, unzipped his mom's concealed carry purse, and accidentally killed her
• the six year old who shot a classmate, 
• the eight year old who played with a poorly concealed family weapon and accidentally killed himself - apparently one of three such kids in that weekend
• the twelve year-old girl whose show-and-tell gun shot two classmates - one in the head -when she accidentally dropped the backpack
• the sophomore at my high school in 1992, who shot himself in the head playing Russian Roulette in a car in the school parking lot (though, to be fair, I'm not sure where he got the gun); 
• the "love-sick" misogynist teenage boy just last week, who couldn't handle rejection, so he shot and killed the "Object" of his "Affection"; 
• and the list goes on and on and shamefully on. 

The gift of childhood as fought for and created and nurtured in America requires that we create environments for our children that foster Failing Forward into being better individuals, better citizens, better friends, better family... better people making better choices. That means minimizing their exposure to the dangers that are not age-appropriate. That means creating opportunities for learning - and failing - that can help the children we know and love without hindering or killing the children we don't know (or even the Little Sh*ts we don't like).

Guns are the third biggest killer of American children. And the majority of children killed by guns in the developed world, are Americans. While most of that death is intentional and caused by their own family and friends, or themselves, a non-negligible amount is accidental. And more than 80% of the accidental gun deaths occur in the home, with unsecured guns. There are nearly 2 million children living in homes with unsecured guns and I can guarantee that the vast majority of those kids go to and host play dates. 

I don't want any more children - but especially my child - to be exposed to that degree of risk. And yet it feels increasingly like too many of my gun-enthusiast friends and family prefer to protect their weapons more than our children. The tools they have embraced for protecting their children have become more precious than all of our children. As adults, he have failed backward and our children - all of them - are being dragged by the backdraft.

No wonder so many are marching. And crying. And screaming. And acting out. It's what our children do when they are hurting. And scared. 

I miss the days when my girl was only afraid of zombies because I may have prematurely shown her Michael Jackson's "Thriller". So far this year, she has brought home a flyer from school featuring the NRA's Eddie Eagle, and parents have received two incident messages THIS WEEK with allegations about creepy dudes and kids from her K-2 elementary school talking crap about guns. None of it was true but all of it caused anxiety.

No wonder my girl is desperate to be homeschooled. At least with homeschooling, she's unlikely to be normalized into accepting the risk that a kid, a parent, a neighbor, or a teacher might go rogue (with a gun or without) and kill her while she practices her cursive. 

But homeschooling does nothing about play date safety, which ever since she won hide-and-seek, has taken on deeper meaning for me.

And as a single parent, working for a nonprofit, I cannot afford to homeschool her or hire an old school tutor. So...I guess I'll just bake an effing cake, prep my Mommy Pirate costume, pregame my knees with ibuprofen to prepare for garage dancing to KidzBop with a dozen of my kid's friends and parent-friends, who will also hopefully be in costume. 

The life-and-death matters that should plague me today are how we are going to get through the pre-tween years without me having a heart attack, and whether the party will wrap before the late afternoon hangries create an elementary Battle Royale. Instead I remember the ones lost, the ones we could have lost, and the childhood innocence my eight year old is rapidly losing. I could march but instead I'll bake a cake and try, one more day to keep the anxiety of this worsening Normal at bay. 

Springing Forward...with Stubborn Persistence

I am a fair-weather morning person. So like so many people, this was a rough week. Late winter gloom, Daylight Savings Time and early allergies have made mincemeat of my energy, sleep pattern and focus. 

And yet, I am also jazzed, with clarity about a single-minded mission: becoming a flower farmer and farmstead entrepreneur.

Sure, I just began a new job I love (and which, sadly, is under acute threat if 45's budget hit list is to be believed). But it is 3/4 time and is values-aligned with my stubborn desire (going on eight years now) to start and grow a farm-based business.

A property I have been eye-balling for almost two years went back on the market a short while ago, and my wheels began to turn.

I began communicating with the owner, visited the snow-blanketed property, and went into feasibility research mode in every spare moment. 

This week, my meeting with the local Small Business Development Center went very well, and while I have more homework to complete before our follow up meeting next week, I am reassured in the feasibility of the concept AND my ability to execute it. 

Over the years, I have developed a number of business projects that usually got to the capital raise stage and petered out. I used to lament these but I stopped doing so once I realized that with each effort, I learned more about myself, the markets, and the nature of business itself. But I also learned that it is so much harder to build a business without being rooted in community. 

We are home. 

Finally. 

And this community is one I love and have loved for years. 

It's telling that when I envision the Farm, I don't just see the fields and the canning garden or even the canning kitchen - spaces of meditative work for me and my soul. I envision people coming as guests. People integrating the story of the Farm into the narratives of their lives. Communities planted through seeds of commerce and cultivated through the humus of hospitality, memories and joy.

And so I persist...with spreadsheets, the business plan, and preparing documents for loan applications and prospective investors.

The seed has been planted in good potting soil. It's incubating in the greenhouse, with the seedling beginning to break through. By the grace of God and the stubbornness with which the Divine has gifted me, this is the year the seedling will transplant well and the Farm will finally bloom. 

The Inelegance of Grief and Vulnerability in the Seismic Age of Trumpence

How is a person to act when the first rumblings of seismic shift begins and s/he realizes s/he is standing on shifting sand rather than bedrock?

Having lived in California or Washington for nearly thirty years of my life, I have experienced many earthquakes, most so small that I barely took a pause ("Meh, that's like a 3.0 and I've GOT to get this laundry done"). A few - the Loma Prieta and the Northridge quakes, in particular - were doozies ("Oh, Sweet Lord, is this the day and place where I die?"). 

My one comfort during those bigger - dare I say, "bigly" - earthquakes was that at least I was on solid, if rocking ground. If I made it to a strong doorway or under a solid desk that could withstand the weight of falling debris, I knew I would be okay.

But for folks whose homes and work and and schools and lives were built on landfill (the approximation of equity in property development and urban design) they found out quickly, brutally, and totally just how illusive the security for which they paid dearly truly was.

These days, I've been thinking a lot about earthquakes, given the preponderance of seismic imagery in analyses of the Trump Electoral College victory. And I can't think of a more apt metaphor for the pace and scale of the threats, and the importance of situatedness in determining one's perception and vulnerability to those threats.

I am reminded of this video by Brent Kooi, who was a missionary in Chiba City, Japan, a few hours away from Fukushima when the earthquake struck.

Elsewhere, Mr. Kooi has stated that he was able to stay calm in the crisis because he did not know the scope of the damage further north. What I find striking, however, is not his calm but rather the reactions of some of the others in the video: both the dog and the Japanese citizens at 0:40. While Mr. Kooi admits to feeling disoriented as he continues to meander towards the train station, while recording the liquefaction of the park, the people at 0:40 waste no time leaving and the dog sounds like s/he is having none of it. It's not until 2:26, after noting the rapid expansion of the fissures, the sprouting of lakes where there was once lawn, that Mr. Kooi admits to feeling "a little nervous" because, oh yeah, the park is built on landfill.

It's personally hard to reflect on the seismic nature of the coming age of Trumpence and not react like the people at 0:40 or holler like the dog. Over the last few years, I've noted regional insurgencies and wretched Supreme Court decisions that have made it very clear that core human and civil rights, necessary for a successful free and fair democracy, are not bedrock rights for anyone who isn't straight, white, wealthy, or evangelically Christian. And now, the candidate who campaigned peddling contempt, ridicule and hatred for The Other, is queuing up a Cabinet full of hateful True Believers determined to enshrine their white supremacist, heteronormative, Inquisition-style Christianity into every chamber of government and into the highest law of the land for at least a generation.

How am I to act when the first rumblings of seismic shift begin and I realize I am standing on shifting sand rather than bedrock?

I know there are many who believe that the best way to react is to follow Mr. Kooi's example: stay calm in the crisis; make note of the changing landscape; look to the reactions of others as guidance for how best and when to react; don't panic; and don't disturb others with your nervousness. 

That's a lot to ask these days when the fissures of injustice are undulating and threatening an era of constitutional and humanitarian liquefaction.

Not only does it ignore the messiness of grief and legitimate fear. It fails to create space for the very productivity that it requires. How does a vulnerable person create a plan to alleviate that vulnerability without engaging those who may be inconvenienced but who purport to "empathize"? That's not a rhetorical question. That's my dilemma. If I follow the example of the dog and loudly announce my concerns, I am histrionic in my personal life and unprofessional at work. If I follow the example of the people at 0:40, I am uncommitted. 

I and others more immediately vulnerable (e.g. Muslims, Hispanics and sexual minorities) are now profoundly inconvenienced by the need to create exit strategies that may pull us away from homes we love, communities we enjoy, and work that inspires us.

And resolving those two inconveniences -- the one for those adapting to the liquefaction of their human and civil rights; the other for those on higher, more stable ground who want to help but also need the vulnerable to function as if they too are on stable, unchanged ground -- is a conundrum that many communities and workplaces will need to resolve.

Survival strategies for vulnerable people in the Age of Trumpence are not something that can be gradually evolved in wonderment at the rapidly changing terrain. And their genuinely empathetic but inconvenienced neighbors and colleagues who are less vulnerable to Trumpence priorities have a right to try to maneuver through the transformation with calm. 

I wish I had the answer. I suspect it begins with authentic heart-to-hearts between the vulnerable and the inconvenienced, focused on discerning mutually beneficial pathways towards continuity where possible, and towards escape where necessary. But those heart-to-hearts must be predicated on a shared understanding that while there are always tremors with change, seismic tremors (like the rise of a President openly allied with white nationalists) are different. And the discovery that some principles once believed to be bedrock are in fact landfill in the early stages of liquefaction is a living nightmare.

Requiem for an American Dream

When I started this blog, it was after accepting that my long and circuitous journey towards becoming an academic was derailed, and I needed to re-chart my course.

Last month, I began drafting a post the week after my birthday. I'd learned that a high school friend (the first boy I ever loved) had died tragically. And a few days later, a college friend died after a sudden, fierce and ultimately futile battle with cancer. Questions of mortality and purpose intermingled with grief for two of the kindest and most decent people I've known. And I was plunged deep into introspection.

In the days that I have been drafting this - tapping a few letters, sometimes words, deleting, and gradually needing fewer pauses to remind my lungs to function - I have reconciled with the demise of my delusions about the state of the country of my birth.

My American Dream has long been to finally settle on some land in a rural spot within a half day's drive of an international airport. My mind's shameless cosmopolitanism would finally reconcile with my agrarian progressive heart and I would establish our family's farmstead bed and breakfast some place in rural America that would welcome our presence, and respect this dream.

But in light of last week, my encounter with Trumpence, and the litany of indignities and threats piling on to my black, brown, Muslim, Jewish, Asian, Latinx, and queer friends and acquaintances, I've decided to rechristen my American Dream as my North American Dream.

I've decided to resume the journey of emigrating to Canada, something I've explored off and on for over a decade. And for that, I've been accused of being histrionic. Of being a quitter. Of never really being an American anyway. Of being naive. Of simply not doing enough.

I've been told that now is not the time to walk (or sprint) away. It's the time to grieve through volunteering, strategic donation, and consistent self-care. It's the time to stockpile Plan B and lean in, just a little bit more. It's the time to celebrate the glimmers of hope that also manifested on Tuesday (see 1, and 2). Now is the time to lead and testify and build bridges to those who want me and mine gone my neighbors and listen with an empathy they clearly lack for Others. It's the time to give hate a chance.

But here's the thing: at best, all those exhortations sound like Hamilton's Aaron Burr chatting revolutionary strategy with General Washington, and at worse, they are the knight reassuring the pawn.

I will continue to lean in to support the development of communities that support businesses that implement more positively impactful practices (an aspect of my current work that I deeply enjoy) and I will lean in to advocate for more equitable distribution of economic opportunity to regions beyond the coasts and large cities. But I will not lean in to place my head in the guillotine and become a martyr. And Hell will host the Winter Olympics before I knowingly gamble with my daughter's safety and options. Staying put feels - and with each passing day, looks - like a risky gamble.

Before Tuesday's results and the racist encounter I experienced on Thursday, if I unexpectedly encountered a person as I rounded a corner, I would respond with a chuckle and a greeting, my default reaction for ALL people. Now I go through my day with a heightened vigilance, uncertain whether I am truly, fundamentally safe. My trepidation isn't reverse racism, it's the law of averages. More than 53 million overwhelmingly white Americans voted FOR a candidate who promoted white supremacist views and violence against his detractors. They voted for a man who would rather me and mine weren't here, in the land of our birth, investment and homes. And many millions more didn't bother to vote to keep him and the hate he enthusiastically celebrates at bay.

I'm not the fighter I used to be. For my daughter and for my aging heart, I seek Safe Harbor in a sanctuary where I can mourn, heal, regroup and thrive.

But I also want to understand: 

How have Canadians made diversity and immigration "work," especially in rural and exurban communities?

Sure, I could just stalk the British Columbia OARH online, and dive deeper into reading about Canadian history to glean what I can learn. But, as a former study abroad alumna and a card-carrying cosmopolitan geek, I prefer immersion. In the US we like to talk a good game about how we are the exemplars for the world but on this point, we are a cautionary tale and clearly have a lot to learn.

I just can't - #TamirRice #AliveWhileBlack

On Monday, I binge-watched Netflix and finally watched The Butler. I found it to be a profoundly moving meditation on race, politics and family. The final scenes with Barack Obama's election captured the feelings of grief and release and hope that I fully admit I felt both on Election Night and when I went to DC for the inauguration. Grief for all of those who had to - truly had to - die to make it even possible for "someone like him" to ever be President of the United States. Release of the suspicion that maybe America would never fully become what it could be and should be because it was too beholden to the racist, sexist and brutal foundations of its own origins. Hope that We were finally, truly, on a path to healing, reconciliation and creation of an equitable, just and more perfect union.

The Butler ends with an elderly Mr. Gaines walking tall to meet President Obama. But it reminded me of a little boy I saw on Inauguration Monday.

1/22/09: I saw this kid several times during that afternoon: always playful, happy and radiating a sense of awe that was utterly contagious.

He's probably 12 or 13 years old by now, but back then he was just a little boy who stood a little extra-tall as he played. He was clearly awe-struck and though I never spoke to him, I remember observing that he seemed to play with purpose. He, even he, could be President some day. And as I turned off the credits for The Butler, I remembered that little boy and said a little prayer that he still believes he can grow up to be anything he wants to be.

And then I checked Facebook.

And I cried. No. I began crying because the fact is I have been crying for days now. Tamir Rice is not the little boy I observed in Washington, D.C. on January 22, 2009. But he could have been. They are ... or would be ... about the same age, after all. And I pray that the little boy has not been and never will be Tamir Rice. But he could be. 

He could be if he thinks that he can play with a friend's pellet gun in an open carry state.

Three boys playing Cops & Robbers in NY, 1948

He could be if the wrong scared, white cop sees him as a "demon" or as a grown man, instead of the adolescent boy he really is. The wages of the perpetual cruelty of vicious hate and cowardice are always paid by the most vulnerable.

Tamir was playing with his friend's pellet gun. He could have hurt someone, maybe even shot an eye out by accident. But it wasn't this potentiality that killed him. It was cowardice, cruelty and a latent racist hatred that killed him within two seconds of showing up on the scene. It is possible to empathize with the cop, not because his fears were reasonable (as the prosecutor suggests) but because those unreasonable fears have been so normalized. Racism does tend to show up more as fear than as pure hatred. As Morgan Guyton, has observed:

What we’re running up against is the inadequacy of the modern Western conception of justice. Because racism manifests itself as a collective sin that feels more like weakness than malevolence, even when a society’s racism commits murder through the “errors” of nervous individuals, it just doesn’t feel right to punish weakness and fear. So weakness and fear don’t get punished. 

Not only do they not get "punished," they get normalized by invocation of the objectively reasonable standard as judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene. 

It was reasonable for an officer who was found unfit for duty in his previous police gig to be hired without a thorough background check.

It was reasonable for the officer to jump out of a moving patrol car and shoot a 12 year old in the stomach from 4 - 9 feet away.

It was reasonable for the officer to claim on his police report that he gave numerous warnings, when the two seconds that transpired between his arrival and the shots make that impossible.

It was all reasonable because of fear. And we don't punish fear. No matter how unreasonable it is.

And yet, when I try to convey to my white friends, many of whom I love like family, that the only thing that scares me about moving to a beautiful small mountain town is my uncertainty about the white folks in it, they accuse me of being paranoid, or worse, a reverse racist. They don't understand ... and maybe don't want to understand ... that I am afraid of white fear. I am afraid for myself but more so I am afraid for my daughter, my nephews, my black friends and their children. 

I know what it looks and sounds like when people of color circle in and embrace each other as we grieve, yet again, for yet another unpunished murder of another one of our children who had the audacity to believe that s/he was free to be #AliveWhileBlack, in the presence of cops or white folks in general, without irony, subtext or shuffling. It sounds a lot like the silent wailing that chokes the throat and squeezes the heart until the ache, the ache, the ache just stops. It sounds like the gasp of disbelief, the not here, not now, not again, disbelief. It sounds ... exhausted ... weary ... hopeless ... trapped. How do I make a home for my child when the specter of that sound and soundless horror looms?

The last two nights, the last thing I saw on the bookshelf before I took off my glasses and turned off the light was Stephen Colbert's book, I am America (And So Can You!). It's a funny book. But the title reads like a taunt right now. 

Can I be America? Can my daughter or that little boy from the Inauguration? Tamir couldn't be. America didn't let him. White American fear didn't let him. We don't need to ride the tide of fear and demagoguery to make America "great" again (whatever the hell that means). We need America to become America because for too many of us, it never has been.

#WeekendReads: Highlights from #CommunityWealth Generation Beyond the V/Alley #socent #impinv #sharingeconomy #law #msulawsm

Source: http://www.onthecommons.org

Every Monday the paper.li that I curate updates and as my schedule permits I chip away at reviewing the articles during the week. Below are some of the articles that stand out as significant conversations about social enterprise, impact investing, the sharing economy and the law.

• Improving options for investing and small business access to capital
• Impact investing panel talks crowdfunding, Triangle Business Journal. As we (im)patiently wait for the SEC to promulgate the final rules for equity crowdfunding authorized by the JOBS Act, more and more states are authorizing equity crowdfunding for small businesses within their states, even resurrecting the pre-Securities Act tradition of local stock markets. While this Triangle Business Journal article does not dig deeply into the logic of impact investing and crowdfunding, I find it notable because it highlights the geographic breadth of the interest in this approach to small business funding. Impact investing is not just a left coast liberal "thing." It's about helping businesses do well in their communities and allowing their non-accredited neighbors and customers (people whose net worth is too low for traditional direct equity investment) invest in the businesses they value and support.
• Deep in the Business section of the paper.li, Cutting Edge Capital's "Is a Direct Public Offering Right For Me?" reads like a good substantive introduction to one tool for impact investing, the direct public offering. 

• Worker Cooperatives and the commons - three good reads and a video
• Own the Change: Building Economic Democracy One Worker Co-Op at a Time (video). This video not only profiles worker-owners who have successfully built worker-owned cooperatives, it also breaks down the process of developing a cooperative into discrete steps. Granted, at 22 minutes, it's not as substantive as a session with a lawyer who has cooperative formation expertise BUT it is a VERY good start for organizations contemplating this structure to review the video and start thinking through the governance structure that makes sense for the talents and goals of the members, the products they will produce and the consumer market they will serve.
  
• New York City Invests in Worker Co-ops — and Equitable Growth. I generally prefer to highlight efforts elsewhere, but in light of the high costs for living and for business in New York City, I am inspired by the city's decision to invest "$1.2 million this year in developing worker-owned businesses in low-income communities and communities of color. It's the largest investment in such businesses ever made by a city government in the United States."
  
• Apparently Mondragon Cooperative, based in Spain, has a tumblr. I don't really get tumblr, but the more I learn about Mondragon, the more I believe that their model merits very close scrutiny and broad implementation.
  
• The New Greek Government Endorses Commons-Based, Peer Production Solutions. Greece and Syriza's efforts to retool the Greek economy into a commons-based, bottom-up, peer-production model with transparent national governance should be interesting to track. The focus on implementing these efforts first in education and small business development, rather than rushing to nationalize everything may well place Greece on better footing to make a more effective transition. And the focus on transparent governance should help mitigate corruption.

• Efforts to improve the data analysis for the "social good"
• Calculating the Social Cost of Policymaking - Maryland's former governor and potential presidential hopeful, Martin O'Malley, oversaw a cost effectiveness analysis of state fleet vehicles and included net present value plus (NPV+), "a new way to include social and environmental impacts into the overall cost of something. The concept is an expansion of the more common NPV analysis that calculates the lifetime value of a purchase in present terms by incorporating upfront costs with potential savings and expenses down the road, all while accounting for inflation. The "plus" adds tangential factors like the cost of environmental degradation and benefits like ecological resiliency."
• Also see Can You Set A Standard for Social Impact?
  
• Green energy and energy cooperatives
• How and Why Utilities Make Solar Look Expensive. This is an interesting critique of Tucson Electric Power's apparent effort to dismiss solar power investment despite Tucson's abundance of solar energy. It's a bit snarky and the author takes the utility to task for "exaggerating [solar power's] cost" by inflating the cost by 45%. If, despite the snark, the analysis is accurate, then this is something Tucson residents (like my mom) need to challenge.
  
• Community-Owned Energy: How Nebraska Became the Only State to Bring Everyone Power From a Public Grid. "In the United States, there is one state, and only one state, where every single resident and business receives electricity from a community-owned institution rather than a for-profit corporation. ... In Nebraska, 121 publicly owned utilities, ten cooperatives, and 30 public power districts provide electricity to a population of around 1.8 million people." Though the bulk of the energy is generated from coal and nuclear, the community has voted to increase investment in renewables (especially wind turbines) fairly consistently since 2003. Way to go Huskers!
  
• With Lent now in full swing, I was also pleased to see that Shareable.net shared "What Catholic Social Teaching Can Teach the Sharing Economy". As Catholics go, I'm more Dorothy Day than Opus Dei, and a large part of my faith and spiritual practice has to do with the developed tradition of Catholic social teaching: preferential option for the poor; subsidiarity; solidarity; the commons; and family values (which is not as easily partisan as too many people on the left and right like to believe). It's also worth noting the recent Guardian Lifestyle piece, It's Nice to Be Nice, as a welcome reminder and companion piece to Catholic Social Teaching.

Week in Review: #CommunityWealth Generation & #Socent News Beyond the V/Alley via @OuiShare @nytdavidbrooks @DemocracyCollab

Reviewing the articles collected in this week's edition of Beyond the V/Alley paper.li, I have decided 1) that my future practice must include significant attention to administrative law, and 2) I still want to dual qualify as a solicitor in the UK because I am impressed by many organizations in the community wealth development and impact investing circles.

The articles and video that stood out to me in this edition of Beyond the V/Alley, include:

• Michael Shuman's GritTV interview on "Moving Your Money" followed by a short profile of the Cero cooperative in Boston, MA:

• David Brooks' editorial, "How to Leave a Mark" not only appears in this edition, it was also was frequently shared on Facebook and Twitter, and for good reason. He distinguishes socially responsible investing (largely a strategy of avoiding the bad) from impact investing (a strategy of building the good through targeted community investments). It's a good, balanced and succinct read.

• The Stanford Social Innovation Review article, "US Economic Mobility and Investing for Impact" links to the recent Aspen Institute & Georgetown University report, The Bottom Line: Investing for Impact on Economic Mobility in the US. This is a pretty substantive report "with a focus on deal flow and returns. [They] did not set out to complete a comprehensive state of the field survey, but instead to understand how the investments of active investors could help build economic security for families." The report zeroes in on impact investing for outcomes in education, community economic assets (e.g. reducing the costs of recidivism and affordable housing), and health and well-being. As a law student, I find it curious that "law" is rarely expressly referenced in the full report (except with respect to tax laws), though federal, state and local "policy" is ubiquitous and appears to function as a euphemism for administrative law (See pp 127-128 of the report, which is a chart of the most important federal statutes related to community-based impact investing). At any rate, I look forward to reading the full report...soonish (ahhh, law school...so greedy with my time).

• The business headlines this week are a bit ... odd, but Assets & Opportunity Scorecard (via the Democracy Collaborative) is an interesting resource for "for data on household financial security and policy solutions." From the About page: "The Assets & Opportunity Scorecard is a comprehensive look at Americans’ financial security today and their opportunities to create a more prosperous future. It assesses the 50 states and the District of Columbia on 135 outcome and policy measures, which describe how well residents are faring and what states can do to help them build and protect assets."

• Anyone who is interested in the nexus between local impact investing, community development, and transparency in governance needs to follow the progress of the new Office of Community Wealth Building in Richmond, VA. It was established last year to coordinate poverty reduction and wealth building initiatives. Richmond, VA and Jackson, MS are piloting potentially transformative and scalable models of prudent public-private partnerships and other community-based initiatives. They are definitely communities to watch.

• There are two very awesome conferences soliciting proposals, and I am very put out that I cannot attend either of them. 
• A call for proposals for the 2nd Annual #FLOSS4P2P conference in London is accepting proposals through February 28th. So, if you have a project that is "building software for peer production and organization, with a focus on distributed ones," then you might want to get your proposal in soon. It sounds like a very interesting conference particularly if the projects leverage P2P technology to support effective and efficient cooperative enterprise. Plus it's in London, and as I plan to dual qualify as a solicitor in the not too distant future, my inner Anglophile really wants to attend.

• The third OuiShare Fest in Paris will explore the theme "Lost in Transition" during "a three-day festival about the collaborative society" from May 20-22, 2015, and it seeks proposals for sessions and content that will further discussions and actions in collaborative social development (e.g. "collaborative consumption, open source, makers and fablabs, coworking, crowdfunding, alternative currencies and horizontal governance." It sounds a lot like the Peers.org SHARE conference I was invited to attend last May, but OuiShare appears more focused on collaborative society and not as focused on the collaborative workforce as Peers seems to be. Sadly, I won't be able to confirm this in person this year, but perhaps you will. If you make it to OuiShare, having learned about it from me, please note: I really love Cybèle, an eau de toilette by Galimard. In case you were wondering. 

Crowdsourcing #A2J: Some thoughts on @CrowdDefend & the strategic use of #collcons & the #sharingeconomy

Yesterday, I learned about the launch of CrowdDefend, a new platform combining crowdfunding and impact legislation. This appears to be a desperately needed tool for leveling the playing field, first for socially important litigation and second (perhaps) for private lawsuits in which a monied party uses or threatens to use litigation strategies to bully the other party into submission (by either dropping the case or settling). It is an important companion piece to low-bono, pro-bono, and law school legal clinic solutions.

And it also illustrates the expanding application of the ethics of care at the heart of the outcomes-oriented sharing economy, which strives to use transactions as a means of developing a more equitable, just, sustainable and resilient society. With CrowdDefend, that ethic can be taken to another systemic level, improving social justice outcomes in our case law.

Okay, so maybe that's a bit of an overstatement for a two-day old startup, because CrowdDefend is currently an invite-only crowdfunding platform. BUT it is a perfectly reasonable statement if one takes the long view and CrowdDefend figures out how to last.

Nevertheless, as a legal eaglet and Reinvent Law devotee, I have some concerns, chiefly: what if the campaign owners (the folks who launch a case crowdfunding campaign) are the attorneys of record on the case? Some of my anxiety below is admittedly the pre-emptive nail-biting of a newbie; hopefully, as CrowdDefend evolves and grows, some (if not all) of my concerns will be rendered moot.

• Privilege, Confidentiality and Trial Publicity. Any lawyer who ends up using CrowdDefend as a campaign owner will need to pay extra attention to the attorney/client privilege and confidentiality requirements in Model Rule 1.6 (c): "A lawyer shall make reasonable efforts to prevent the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of, or unauthorized access to, information relating to the representation of a client."

• Attorney commentary about the profession. Imprudent discussion of the counsel or judges involved in a case could also land the attorney in hot water, per Model Rule 8.2 (and maybe 3.5 a wee bit).

• Justice or Advertising? While CrowdDefend is focused on the justice needs of clients, I wonder if it might not run the risk of becoming a form of attorney advertising deemed "undignified" by some jurisdictions. There are bound to be some attorneys who will reference their use of CrowdDefend in advertising material about their professional services and the strategies they will pursue to help their clients. The problem may arise (and perhaps should arise) when the attorney has more skill for launching a campaign than for raising funds for his clients' case. And if the attorney is the campaign owner, rather than the client, then the ethics can become especially hairy if the attorney offers levels of "perks" as authorized in the CrowdDefend Terms of Use. Provided the perks don't amount to coupons or gift certificates for the attorney's professional services, then they shouldn't be considered "advertising" under the current Model Rule 7.2, but using CrowdDefend would, nevertheless increase the attorney's professional visibility.

• Fee-Sharing. CrowdDefend charges campaign owners a flat 7% fee on funds generated through the campaigns.  Model Rule 5.4 always surfaces in discussions around law firm capitalization and ownership, and here it has bearing on the actual cases. Does that fee constitute a kind of fee-sharing arrangement since the total amount paid would vary based on the amount of money raised (with the balance going towards covering the attorney's litigation costs)? Or would that 7%fee be considered an incidental expense for the matter?

Presumably the lawyer(s) would have their clients' informed consent prior to using CrowdDefend for their case. But one of the "perks" of donating to a CrowdDefend case, according to CrowdDefend's marketing, is that the donor will receive updates about the crowdfunding campaign and the case.

Certainly, it is possible to provide updates that are largely procedural rather than substantive because attorneys do that all the time, in compliance with Model Rule 3.6. But imprudent management of case information online could have such significant consequences (including the loss of privilege protection) due to the reach of the internet and information caching online.

If ever there were an innovation that lays bear the logic and timeliness of Lucy Jewell's call to develop a participatory legal culture around professional ethics, CrowdDefend is it. Donors and interested parties may well want more insight into the human story of the legal professionals and not just the case parties, but as things stand now in most jurisdictions, if an attorney's analysis of the other counsel or the judiciary is found to denigrate the profession in some way, that attorney risks some degree of professional sanction.

Well, my hands are good and wrung. But I am still convinced that CrowdDefend is a welcome, necessary and potentially transformative resource for access to justice. Despite my totally premature concerns, I look forward to hearing more about how CrowdDefend grows, evolves and improves social justice outcomes in our legal system and our case law.

The Person I Want To Be & The Work I Want To Do #sharingeconomy #SHARE2014 #reinventlaw

I was raised as an only child, which means neither listening nor sharing come naturally to me.

But the life journey I've been on has taught me how to be better at both. And raising a wonderful, strong-willed and shockingly intuitive four year old challenges me to continue to grow in my listening and sharing skills. Professionally, I look forward to developing my new career path (from academic administration and university teaching to law and legal entrepreneurship), with a commitment to hone my listening ear and heart, and develop a deeper understanding of sharing. Doing so will make me a more effective advisor and advocate for the resilient communities with which I hope to work.

Yet, the prospect of foregrounding that commitment is by no means an obvious one because I am in law school and law too often emphasizes centralized authority that regulates the bejeezus out of the innovative zeitgeist at the heart of the sharing economy.

This tension between law and innovation figured prominently in panel discussions and informal conversations I had at the SHARE conference in San Francisco in May. The topics that captured my attention the most were: grassroots legislation reform; homesharing law wins (here and here) and setbacks; the trifecta between regulation, entrenched market interests (especially with ridesharing), and sharing; the tension between dead capital and venture capital in sharing economy platforms; and questions of access, equity and inclusion. There were some people who felt strongly that if the laws didn't work, then simply skirting the law was a valid response. But overwhelmingly there was more of a willingness to work with regulators as co-creators of the sharing economy, which I found to be a more reasonable position.

Regulators are people too. Work with them as if they are part of the #SharingEconomy. How will you build trust with them? #2014SHARE
— Karen FrancisMcWhite (@accidentalhippy) May 14, 2014

But attending SHARE did not only afford me the opportunity (thanks to generous support from Peers.org and SOCAP) to listen to the incredible speakers and others in more informal gatherings, it also presented me with an opportunity to spend several hours with my professional role model, Janelle Orsi, founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Admittedly, I was a little worried that I may have rubbed her the wrong way even before we met. I had contacted her several months before about the prospect of coming to Michigan to run a Legal Tools for the Sharing Economy workshop for the student organization I co-founded, the Resilient Communities Law Society. Mind you, it's not like my follow-ups had been like that paperboy in "Better Off Dead" (well, maybe a little bit). But Ms. Orsi took my enthusiasm in stride, was personable and allowed me to observe intakes at one of the SELC's Legal Cafes.

Essentially SHARE 2014 and connecting with Janelle Orsi reaffirmed my commitment to growing a new career as a legal advocate for the sharing economy and community resilience. I came to law school convinced that I would focus on community-based urban redevelopment and urban agriculture, and rather than pivot after two years of law school, I think I've widened the aperture a bit.

That widening is largely thanks to the incredible learning and professional development experiences I have had through the MSU ReInvent Law Laboratory. ReInvent Law has introduced me to pioneers in legal design, services and reform, and given me opportunities to develop the project I came to law school to build: MiHomestead.com. I unveiled the first iteration at ReInvent Law London last summer and continued to work on it through a subsequent presentation at ReInvent Law NYC, and for a pitch competition.

So when ReInvent Law London 2014 took place last week, I followed the Twitter feed for #reinventlaw as closely as the four-legged menagerie I am pet-sitting allowed. Last year, I had been so nervous in preparation for my talk that I did not adequately do one very important thing: listen to the other talks. This year, I "listened" to the feed and heartily wished I could be at the conference. Hopefully the videos of the talks will be uploaded soon, especially the following:

• Kanan Dhru, Research Foundation for Governance in India, Lawtoons: Law Made Fun through Comics
• Ivan Rasic, LegalTrek, Lean: Can NewLaw Learn from Tech Startups?
• Mårten Janson, Fondia, Legal Departments as a Service
• Siobhan Duncan, Westminster University Law, Affordable Justice - Prepaid Cards & the Legal Services
• Frédéric Pelouze & Alexandra Uhel, Alter Litigation, The Paris Bar Incubator: Towards Innovation in the Legal Market
• Carlo Rossi Chauvenet, legalPAD/We Have the Future, Law is Not Enough

To say that I have found myself in a bit of a quandary as I consider my professional life after I graduate in May would be an understatement.

I continue to work on MiHomestead, but I am well aware of startup statistics (even as I adopt a Lean approach) and am stepping up my research of other avenues for combining my interests in law, the sharing economy, food system reform and community resilience.

Of course I am also aware that the year I finish law school is the year my daughter starts kindergarten, so whatever I do professionally and wherever that journey takes us must be a good parenting decision for my Washington-born, outdoorsy-and-artsy, and London-loving little girl (Sidebar: she has an airplane roller bag that she keeps by the door because "I might need it to fly somewhere" says the child who at four has already been on over two dozen airplanes).

So as I pet/housesit this summer and work on MiHomestead, I have a lot to review, think about, and DO. Because the person I want to be doesn't just sit on her laurels and listen, she's a doer and a sharer vested in building the more resilient society in which I want my child and all children to grow and thrive. She's also a bit of a law geek inspired by legal innovation and determined to roll up her sleeves and join in the grief and the joys of making the law work for resilient communities, rather than against them.

Shoulding, Rather Than Acting on Love

I've been thinking a lot about love lately. Given that this is the season of Love Actually, and "All I Want for Christmas is You" (versions 1 and 2 - both of which touch my heart), I suppose that's to be expected. But I haven't primarily been thinking about romantic love.

This is also the season of Advent, the period for joyful hope and anticipation of the most selfless love the world has ever known. So, I've been thinking about agape love, in its many translations, and how that love is made manifest today. Here. Now. What should it look like? How should it feel? How should one act, when inspired by agape? How should I?

I first remember learning about agape when I converted to Catholicism seventeen years ago. But as I was a somewhat ...decadent... convert focused on other things, I never really examined what it meant. And in the intervening years, as I eventually grew away from and then closer to my Catholic faith, I've become interested in understanding agape more.

But I think I've been going about it all wrong.

I'm a recovering academic dilettante, so I tend to seek understanding in reading and pondering, which is fine ... as a starting point. But at some point, I need to act on what I have learned. I need to do. After all, practice makes perfect or at least a habit, right? But acting on agape love is just as daunting (scary, even) as acting on eros or even affection. What if I do it wrong? Or worse, what if the feeling isn't mutual? How do I share agape in a manner consistent with Christ's commandment that we love one another? Won't that hurt? Or at least expose me to discomfort or exploitation?

A few months ago, I did something that some suggest is proof that I am being hard on myself, proof that I "get" agape. I donated stem cells through Be the Match.

I was matched to a patient last winter and was supposed to donate in the spring. The extraction was delayed several months, taking place early in the start of my second year of law school. It was not the best timing, for a lot of reasons, and the process was more inconvenient and uncomfortable than I was expecting. But through it all, I would tell anyone who asked - more as a mantra to myself, than as some form of piety to whoever was listening - that it was less inconvenient than leukemia. But when I would say it, or think it, I wasn't thinking about the patient who would receive my stem cells. I was thinking about a friend, more than twenty years ago, who I visited in the hospital just days after she aborted her and her husband's second child (their first was still just a toddler) so that she could undergo aggressive chemotherapy in her fight against leukemia. It was a fight she lost, and from the day I first learned about stem cell transplantation, I wondered: if this technology had been available then, would my friend and her child be here now?

The patient, my patient, became a vessel for my long buried grief and retroactive heroics. Donating my stem cells was not really about Her. It was about hopefully sparing another family and another group of friends the loss that my friend's family, my family and our community suffered. It was about me saving "a" life, because I couldn't save her life years ago. It was, I think, a profoundly selfish "gift."

And it didn't work.

Today, as I was suiting up in the gym for a little morning workout, I received The Call. Unlike the previous call, a few weeks after the transplant, this was not good news. The patient, my patient, has died.

And I am genuinely sad for this woman I never met, never spoke to, never even wrote, because I had assumed that there would be time enough for that...someday. Time and again I was offered the opportunity by Be The Match to send her a card (through them in deference to our respective privacy). Time and again, I'd put it off. Certainly, law school and single parenting and working and trying to take care of myself (body, mind and soul) kept me busy. But it was one card I could have sent. Should have sent. Because in that one card, my "gift" would have truly been directed towards Her. She would have ceased to be a cipher for my attenuated grief. She would have become someone I took time to care about and acknowledge in Her own right.

Though I would often pray for Her and her family, I never reached out. I never told Her. I never shared with Her a desire for her healing and recovery. I made a deposit of stem cells, was reimbursed for my expenses, and proceeded to live my life as normal. And in my normal life, I live and love primarily in my head (with a strong exception made for my daughter, who may well someday move to a different country to avoid my helicopter tendencies).

As I sat in the sauna, I read some of Leo Buscaglia's Born for Love, and was broadsided by the passage entitled, "Love is not a private affair," at the bottom of which there was a quote by Norman Vincent Peale: "If you think you have given enough, think again. There is always more to give and someone to give it to."

It confronted me and shamed me. And it sent me on a course of thought and pondering that compelled me to both write this post and begin drafting a letter to Her family. This post is NOT about me. I am an only child, a Libra and a former drama geek, so I am very comfortable with being the center of attention. But the focus of this post, is agape and the reminder that like all love, it doesn't just happen and it can't just exist in our heads. To make it manifest requires that we do agape, for the right reasons, which is to say...for no reason at all. We do agape Just Because...like a card, sent to a stranger, with the hope that She is well.