India's Heat Insurance Plans: Look Promising, But Resilience Needs More Than Payouts

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 Gambia, a National FGM Strategy and Action Plan backed by the government, UNICEF, and the Ministry of Gender, Children, and Social Welfare, has worked to translate a legislative ban on Female Genital Mutilation into real community change. The strategy combines policy reform, school and community awareness programs, engagement with religious and traditional leaders, and empowerment programs for girls. Despite FGM persisting in rural communities, FGM rates among girls aged 0–14 have declined from approximately 76% to 45%.

Twenty women in Kaduna, Nigeria formed a cooperative in 2015 that pooled their farm labor earnings to collectively purchase land, transforming them from hired laborers earning ₦2,000-₦10,000 per day into independent landowners who now harvest enough to support their families' education and healthcare while contributing food to their community.

Several nonprofits are running a solar cooperative in El Paso, Texas, that helps homeowners come together to buy and install solar panels in bulk, which makes them more affordable.

Some states and cities protect residents of mobile-home communities from eviction with opportunity-to-purchase laws, which require the corporations that rent the land beneath a mobile home to give residents a chance to buy a community when it's for sale. But most places in the U.S. lack such laws, and often zoning rules favor corporate owners. So organizations like ROC USA provide the financial leverage to help residents band together to own their communities, which are also called manufactured housing. ROC has helped 280 communities in 18 states make such purchases.

A real estate investor has led the charge in creating a Housing Impact Fund in Charlotte, NC, to preserve affordable housing. The housing it seeks to preserve is not considered public housing but it does serve those who make less than the area’s median income. This type of housing is known as Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing (NOAH) and can be profitable over a longer period of time while simultaneously providing a service for the rapidly growing city.

A University of Pennsylvania professor's observation of the wealth disparity in West Philadelphia led to the creation of Bridges to Wealth: a program that teaches financial literacy to marginalized communities who have historically been shut out of building wealth. College students in the program teach financial literacy to high school students alongside computer technology and technical skills. Bridges to Wealth has grown to offer personal finance and investing advice to adults as well as young students.

Economic mobility becomes far more attainable when children grow up in a "high-opportunity" area as opposed to a "low-opportunity" area: housing within the city with access to transportation and amenities, higher-performing schools, and lower crime rates. An enhanced voucher program through the Charlotte Housing Authority offers families housing vouchers to move into high-opportunity areas. They also offer incentives to landlords who accept the vouchers, such as up to $1,000 to repair damage beyond normal wear and tear. The program is still new, and it will take generations to see its affects.

While waiting on $1 billion of federal money to help address repercussions from a century of coal mining, communities in Kentucky and other Appalachian towns create their own solutions. Chapters of the Black Lung society seek financial means to help individuals with black lung receive medical care, and local businesses turn abandoned mines into sustainable energy plants and other new economic drivers.

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.”