Beyond Banking: How Nigeria's instant payments system is empowering unemployed in Gombe

Minnesota's Office of Cannabis Management entered into compact agreements with tribal nations in 2025, allowing tribes to operate cannabis dispensaries beyond reservation boundaries. Seven tribally owned off-reservation dispensaries are now open, with more planned. These dispensaries are serving as significant job sources as Waabigwan Mashkiki, White Earth Nation's cannabis company, has created 200 jobs alone in one of the state's poorest counties. Other states including Virginia and Wisconsin are now looking to Minnesota's framework as a model for their own tribal cannabis policies.

The Brooklyn Cooperative Federal Credit Union provides small business loans to local Black and Brown businesses, through average investments of $24,000. This small, community lender provides more funding to local businesses than larger national banks like Citibank, Wells Fargo and Bank of America, helping support local businesses and finance community development.

An abandoned, flooded mine in Bishrampur, India, is now an eco-tourism site where visitors can take a boat ride to a floating restaurant and locals breed fish. The new facilities offer employment for some of the residents who were left out of work when the mine closed.

Truth or Consequences is a town facing many growth barriers such as an aging population and low average income. Entrepreneurs are seeing an opportunity to develop businesses in this town which is helping to revolutionize the town and bring more people in.

Los Angeles is partnering with two nonprofits, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI) and the Los Angeles Conservation Corps (LACC), to accelerate sidewalk repairs ahead of the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. LANI has spent over two decades helping council districts fix broken sidewalks more cheaply and flexibly than the city's official process, and LACC pairs the repair work with paid job training for youth ages 18–26, with 30 participants already completing the program.

Fab Youth Philly’s Play Captains program hires teens in the summer to lead play groups on multiple streets throughout the city, leading games and activities like science experiments and storytime. Since 2017, the group has supported over 500 teens, providing many of them with their first jobs. Data shows that participating in the program leads to more on-time high school graduations, better work habits, reduced summer slide and improved employability and family finances.

The Hope Work Initiative by Atlantic City's Homeless Outreach Unit connects unhoused community members with temporary employment cleaning up the city streets for three days a week, making $75 a day.

The city of Chicago is offering municipal bond investors — specifically those interested in ESG investing — opportunities to fund social projects like planting 15,000 trees in historically disinvested neighborhoods over the next three years, converting motels and single-room buildings into housing for people transitioning out of homelessness and replacing the city’s gas-powered vehicles with electric.

The government-run Job Guarantee program in Gramatneusiedl, Austria, provides employment for residents who have experienced unemployment for at least a year. After a training course and discussion of their wants and needs, the person can choose to accept the offered job in which they will earn at least as much as they would receive from unemployment benefits.

ChiFresh Kitchen is a worker-owned cooperative that gives formerly incarcerated people an income, and a second chance, under a corporate structure that attacks high unemployment from the ground up. Formed as a catering business on Chicago's West Side just as the pandemic shutdown began, ChiFresh shifted its intended clientele from nursing homes and schools to food-relief programs distributing free meals. The co-op, initially formed by mostly black women with hopes of scaling up to about 100 worker-owners, echoes the sorts of enterprises formed in response to Jim Crow restrictions of the past.