Community-owned mobile parks keep eviction at bay. Can they work in North Carolina?

Four local organizations have teamed up to provide $15 million in loans for the Latinx community in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. The affordable loans have gone to affordable housing, small businesses, residential mortgages, and development projects.

In the the Nuxalk Nation, the deep seated effects of colonialism were felt, literally. The Nation had a housing crisis, that was exacerbated by outside contractors and architects who built subar housing. In 2015, community leaders created an apprenticeship program that matched “Nuxalk apprentices with advanced skilled workers, members of the Nuxalk Nation are building their own homes with their own resources, just as their ancestors once did.”

Years of misrule and a subsequent dearth of hard currency, along with crippling bank-fostered debt cycles and exorbitant home mortgage interest rates, have created immense suffering for Myanmar's poor. But with the guidance of a local NGO, Women for the World, a pilot project helped women in some of Yangon's poorest neighborhoods capitalize on their cultural "head-of-household" status. It helped them form and manage community savings cooperatives, secure land, build homes, buy food, and even generate profit through loans to families' business enterprises.

Chattanooga, once called the dirtiest city in America, was later dubbed a Tornado of Innovation by former U.S. President Barack Obama. Now, the city is hub for the tech industry. Despite its rag to riches story, the city’s gap between the rich and the poor has increased dramatically over the past ten years. 1 in four people live in poverty. Nonprofits and activists have been helping, but they need city leaders and elites to listen before it's too late.

A parametric heat insurance program covering 276,800 women workers across India provides automatic cash payouts (₹300-1,250) when temperatures exceed city-specific thresholds for consecutive days, successfully delivering financial relief during extreme heat events. However, the program faces sustainability challenges due to heavy subsidies, trust issues when thresholds aren't met, and the need for behavioral change among beneficiaries.

An Equitable Development Initiative was launched as a result of a racial equity analysis that gauged the effect that Seattle’s economic growth would have on communities of color. Funding for the initiative has gone toward capital for these communities to purchase real estate and develop projects that build up affordable housing, child care, food security, and other issues that would best serve longtime residents and prevent gentrification.

A collective of artists in Seattle bought real estate for a community center with the help of city funding. Known as Black and Tan Hall, the space drew funding and sweat equity from community members who sought a safe and affordable place to gather. The initiative to buy the building is “an anti-gentrification model that combats displacement, keeps dollars hyper local, and sustains good jobs.”

Bristol Redistro is an experiment in wealth redistribution that taps the social-justice consciences of people who pool what they see as their excess money to make grants to small community groups that are "challenging unfair power structures." An initial round made £1,000 grants to such groups as Mandem, an online artistic platform for young men of color, and No More Exclusions, which seeks to reform school discipline. Funding decisions get made by a collective, not Redistro's leaders, with the aim of driving social change and challenging inequality by sharing the wealth with grassroots community groups.

Black businesses in Mississippi are receiving a financial boost from a nonprofit that seeks to level the playing field for rural African-Americans in the state who have historically been overlooked when it comes to federal aid. Higher Purpose Co is a black-led economic justice nonprofit that has raised $400,000 for entrepreneurs and has received over 2,500 applicants. The nonprofit has given up to $5,000 to small businesses with 20 or fewer employees.

Mark Brown has brought Ghandian economic principles of economic justice and local autonomy to the Mexican countryside to form a farm-to-garment textile business that employs villagers who once made woolen textiles until the industrial clothing era started producing cheap synthetic clothing and rendered their craft unprofitable. Khadi Oaxaca aims to regenerate the village way of life in a sustainable way and employs several hundred villagers who grow the cotton, spin the thread, design the clothing and bring it to market for tourists - bringing a previously economically depressed village out of poverty.