The goal of this research project was to understand the barriers and challenges that prevent wider use of community bonds and to identify opportunities to scale their use nationwide and successful long-term implementation.

Community bonds are a way to boost local investment and engagement. They are essentially debt instruments that allow community organizations—like nonprofits, charities, and cooperatives—to raise money directly from their supporters to finance projects that generate revenue. They offer an alternative to, and augment financing from, traditional financial institutions.

I supported this national research project as a GRA supporting research activities including coordinating and completing interviews with ecosystem leaders including asset managers, foundations, investors, and bond holding organizations.

Land Back and Community Wealth Building are two social movements countering extractive wealth accumulation structures and systems that continue to harm people and land while concentrating economic power and assets into the hands of the wealthy elite and away from communities. While vast differences could be exposed between movements, this research unearths points of relation driving and mobilizing movement action centering the themes of community, wealth, land, building and taking back.

Through a systematic literature review this secondary qualitative research engages reciprocity through reflexivity and is grounded in TwoEyed Seeing. Thematic analysis is engaged applying the Indigenous perspective of relationality along with the Western theory of interpretive frames to discuss the relations of people, land, ideas and the cosmos. These relational findings initiate bridges, ignite sparks and offer starting points to understand how relations could be strengthened, and reconciliation and allyship embraced by non-Indigenous settlers to collaboratively re-create a living and thriving future economy.

Read more or watch my defence.