The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar “Remaking the Economy: Building Regional Solidarity Economies.” View the full webinar here.

Something that came up earlier is the patience involved in this work, and how slow the development of these projects [can be]. [It takes] five years to get a business nearly self-sufficient. These are not the kind of fast-paced—you make an investment, [and] a thousand people have received something within a year or two of the grants being administered—kind of situations that many, many funders are used to. I think the ask here really, for philanthropy, is to exist in the solidarity economy with us, to not do things in the hustling and fast way that [they]’re used to, and to not require metrics that aren’t really feasible in the community. [To] trust us and the people we’re working with to figure out what we need and to get it done on the timeline that’s actually going to make a difference.

That often looks like longer commitments of funds, rather than a one- or two-year grant. Something like a three-year, five-year commitment. It looks like freeing up some of the restraints on that money so that the community can be creative and responsive to emergent needs that are on the ground. It also looks like funding some of these shared commons, pots of resources and capital that we’ve been putting together to support [the] solidarity economy. I think about the Seed Commons loan fund that all our organizations are members of, [which is] an opportunity to invest slow money into something that is going to impact cooperatives across the country in the ways that those particular regional ecosystems need. We’ve got members that do the local organizing work, and Seed Commons creates backbone infrastructure at the national or international level to provide that financing in a non-extractive way. Those are some of the first things that come to mind for me: slower commitments, [and] more interest in letting the communities determine what those impacts need to be.