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JEI Journeys are a series of Q&As with JEI Fellows about the paths they’ve taken to financial activism and what they’ve learned along the way. For this post, we interviewed Nikishka Iyengar, founder & CEO of The Guild, about prioritizing collective wellbeing, a model for community ownership and the importance of self-care when engaging with collective trauma.

The Guild is an Atlanta-based organization building community wealth and power through cooperative real estate, entrepreneurship programs and access to capital for marginalized communities. Their alternative model for real estate development aims to improve the ability of communities to increase asset ownership, anchor jobs locally and ensure local economic resilience.

JEI: How would you describe your community wealth building work? 

NI: Community wealth building is about prioritizing collective wellbeing over individual profit. At The Guild, we do that by building an alternative model for real estate development that enables local communities—especially Black and other communities of color and working-class communities—to collectively own and control assets in their own neighborhoods. In this model, instead of developers and outside investors making decisions for and profiting off of marginalized communities, the communities determine what happens in their neighborhoods and benefit from any development taking place. 

JEI: What are you doing that brings something new to the table in terms of community wealth building? What value are you seeing from that?

NI: The Guild is working on a Community Stewardship Trust that is set up to acquire vacant, underutilized assets, or assets otherwise sitting in extractive models, and develop them into community-owned assets that meet the material needs of marginalized communities. The model allows residents within a ZIP code to invest whatever amount of money is meaningful to them into the CST, and through that investment gain decision-making power about what gets developed in their neighborhood. Community investors also receive a financial return via dividends and share price appreciation. Instead of surplus value being extracted from neighborhoods by developers or outside equity investors, it remains within the community.

The CST can acquire and develop assets like affordable housing, neighborhood grocery stores, daycare centers, commercial space for Black-owned small businesses and meeting spaces for nonprofits. It is tasked with managing the long-term affordability of these assets as well as democratizing any financial returns from development.

As we stand up the first CST in Atlanta, we’re already seeing value in giving people an opportunity to experience land, housing and real estate in an alternative, tangible, non-extractive way. We’ve created a container to collectively question status quo assumptions and design different models and institutions that reflect our values and desires for self-determination and liberation. 

JEI: What lessons can you share about what it takes to be an effective partner to people seeking to build community wealth? What do you wish someone had told you when you started doing this work? 

NI: This work requires you to wear multiple hats, often all at once—from community organizer to capital and resource mobilizer, and everything in between. It requires you to navigate complexity and nuance well. One day you might have to become an expert in investment or tax law, and the next you might have to learn to be a skilled trauma steward and hold space for someone dealing with a traumatic event like an eviction. It can take a lot to balance all of that. 

This isn’t to say you have to be perfect at everything—in fact, recognizing that perfectionism is an expression of white supremacy culture and unlearning that trait is also an important lesson. But being an effective partner in this kind of systems change work does require us to be skilled at navigating complexity and practicing emergent strategy. 

Effective community wealth building necessitates learning to navigate conflict, which is an inherent part of any relationship. If managed well, conflict can even generate progress. 

I wish someone had told me when I first started this work that I needed to learn to take better care of myself. As the world continues to be on literal fire, and structural violence continues to impact our communities, it’s easy to give so much (all) of yourself to this work that you burn out. And burnt-out people can’t build life-affirming institutions.

JEI: What other advice do you have for leaders who want to support community wealth building?

NI: Get clear on your values and double down on them when times get hard and things get uncomfortable (as they often will). Community wealth building is about going against the grain of capitalism in every way. Doing this over a sustained period is incredibly difficult without a clear sense of your own personal values—and your team’s and organization’s shared values. You’ll also need to clearly articulate what principled compromise looks like to you and your collaborators because operating within capitalism will always require that on some level.

JEI: Can you tell me about a project or aspect of a project that you’re proud of? We’d love to hear a community success story. 

NI: I’m proud of our recent launch of the People’s Community Land Trust here in Atlanta. Through the PCLT, we’re acquiring and renovating homes, taking them off the speculative market entirely, and turning them into permanently affordable housing for low- to moderate-income residents across the city, with a specific focus on residents currently battling displacement.

Nikishka Iyengar is a systems entrepreneur working at the intersection of finance, climate action and racial justice. She is the founder and CEO of The Guild, a real estate company creating spaces for social change through new economic models focused on community wealth building. She is also the owner of Whole Systems Collective, an impact consulting collective working towards a just and regenerative economy through two key initiatives – the transformation of our financial systems, and climate action through carbon drawdown and responsible stewardship of our natural resources. Previously, as a sustainability consultant at a top management consulting firm, she helped her clients unlock ~$1B worth of value from renewable energy, water stewardship and emissions reduction opportunities. Then, as a product manager at a waste tech startup, Nikishka built software (including artificial intelligence products) to allow companies to uncover waste diversion opportunities within their supply chain and operations. Nikishka was recognized by GreenBiz as a “30 under 30” emerging leader in sustainability. She has a BBA in Finance, a BA in Economics and an Interdisciplinary Certificate in International Development from The University of Texas at Austin.

JEI Journeys are a series of Q&As with JEI Fellows about the paths they’ve taken to financial activism and what they’ve learned along the way. For this post, we interviewed Kim Pate, managing director of NDN Fund, the lending and investing arm of NDN Collective, about overcoming entrenched barriers to Indigenous prosperity and honoring community-driven solutions.

NDN Collective is is an Indigenous-led organization dedicated to building Indigenous power. Through organizing, activism, philanthropy, grantmaking, capacity-building and narrative change, NDN Collective is creating sustainable solutions on Indigenous terms.

JEI: How would you describe your community wealth building work? 

KP: I help Indigenous peoples defend, develop, and decolonize their communities by increasing access to funds that can be used to fight resource extraction; build strong businesses, homes, and infrastructure; and restore culture. This work is focused in places that have been subject to colonization and therefore have experienced poverty for hundreds of years.  

JEI: What are you doing that brings something new to the table in terms of community wealth building? What value are you seeing from that?

KP: In 2016, I joined the board of directors at Nimiipuu Community Development Fund, a Native community development financial institution serving the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho. Since then we’ve provided consumer and business loans to many Nez Perce tribal citizens. Through our lending, tribal citizens have built better credit, paid off predatory payday loans, and survived the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. 

Businesses financed include a daycare center, a café, a smoke shop, and a tourism company. These businesses are creating jobs and prosperity for the reservation and bringing back the Main Street business sector that has been gone since most can remember. Even more than that, they’re inspiring our youth and giving them hope for brighter futures. 

JEI: What advice do you have for leaders who want to support community wealth building? 

KP: In many cases, there are ample opportunities available to both investors and lenders to be a good relative by listening, learning, growing, and challenging assumptions and processes that create barriers to Indigenous communities thriving on their own terms. It’s never too late to tackle what seem like deeply entrenched barriers to economic prosperity in Indigenous communities. But it takes a commitment to finding out what’s needed and what’s already working, and to really leaning into community-driven solutions that will make a difference.

JEI: Do you have any lessons to share about being an effective partner?

KP: From my experience as an Indigenous lender, we succeed when our loan relatives succeed and when we meet them where they are. Based on our knowledge of what’s needed—capital in the form of debt and equity, plus assistance with various elements of the project or business—we bring a cohesive set of strategies that we call braided capital. We may provide a loan accompanied by a grant and other resources that synergistically support the growth of the project or business throughout the life of the loan. I encourage other leaders to tap into what the need is for the people they serve and create a similarly tailored approach.

JEI: Can you tell me about a project or aspect of a project that you’re proud of? We’d love to hear a community success story. 

KP: Miss Anne’s Maypop Herb Shop in New Orleans, owned and operated by a Lakota woman, has become a community resource for remedies, plant knowledge, healing, and social change by utilizing an ecological and economic sustainability model. During the pandemic, the team had to scale back operations due to the lack of travel and tourism, but NDN Fund’s loan allowed the shop to resume its pre-pandemic service levels, expand its online presence to serve a national market, and hire more medicine makers and herbalists.

We also provided power-building resources to Miss Anne’s Maypop Herb Shop, including hiring Nativ3 (an Indigenous team of creative experts) to develop a new website that brings to life a unique, one-of-a-kind, mobile-friendly experience encompassing access to products, education, and knowledge-sharing. On the back end, Miss Anne’s Maypop Herb Shop will be able to track how well the website is meeting the needs of the target audience so that there can be continuous improvement. We recently expanded this contract with Nativ3 to include social media marketing, another way to support the business’s growth and expansion.

In addition to all that, Miss Anne is positioning the shop to offer electricity through a solar generator in the case of climate events like Hurricane Katrina. Local residents will be able to go there for power and to receive alternative medicine as needed for themselves and their loved ones.

Kim Pate, NDN Fund Managing Director, is a descendant of the Eastern Band Cherokee and Mississippi Choctaw tribes. Pate leads the daily operation of the organization, supports communications and evaluation, and plays important strategic and communications roles within NDN Collective.  She has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Stanford University and a Juris Doctorate from University of California at Los Angeles School of Law. Pate is admitted to practice in Nez Perce Tribal Court and California.

This is the fifth in a series of Q&As with JEI Fellows about the path they’ve taken to financial activism and what they’ve learned along the way. For this post, we interviewed Ain Bailey, founder and lead designer of  New Seneca Village and a  philanthropic strategist, about feeding her long-term vision.

New Seneca Village is a retreat space and social ecosystem seeking to secure gorgeous land and a founding endowment in order to provide justice-focused leaders and healers with access to time, space and nature within an intentional community centered on restoration, connection and visioning – in perpetuity.

JEI: What is New Seneca Village today? How much of your vision has been fulfilled, and what’s next?  

AB: Today New Seneca Village is entering the third year of our pilot phase, hosting women and non-binary leaders and healers of color in an experience centered on restoration, connection and visioning for the sake of their sustained leadership. We continue to partner with existing retreat centers to host up to four residencies a year while organizing to collectively own our own retreat center space so that we can significantly expand the number of Villagers we can host, while deepening our own ability to be adaptively responsive with our offerings and space.  

New Seneca Village is a love offering born out of our knowing what our leaders, across sector, issue area and region/country, are dealing with, which is often similar patterns of negligent and targeted abuse at the hands of institutions and organizational actors who are not ready to make real space for the presence or contributions of leaders of color. These repetitive patterns exist inside of a broader culture that celebrates productivity at all costs, while sidelining reflection, intuition, the creativity that lies in dormancy and the power that is accessed through our connection to ourselves, to nature and to our communities.  

Our current systems ask our leaders to solve many of our society’s most egregious issues and yet provides them with often conditional funding that is nominal for the current work, much less for the work that lies ahead which requires that they are funded also for nimbleness and creativity. We want our leaders to feel abundantly resourced so that they can connect easily to their wise inner selves as they expansively vision and guide our progress.  

New Seneca Village is an invitation into a self-guided liberatory embodiment practice, and it is designed to be a paradigm shift opportunity. At the same time, the productivity programming of capitalism, philanthropy and nonprofit culture is strong and insistent. We want to make sure that the Village experience, the relationships we build and the intentional and impromptu conversations that center our well-being, dreams and visions continue well past the sacred time we share together and this work is still emerging.  

There are many fascinating patterns and questions that continue to emerge in this offering, and they continue to signal the importance of our founding vision of a permanent retreat center that is designed and governed by us and for us. We are actively looking for donors who understand our work, resonate with our legacy vision and can commit to funding us comprehensively, extending beyond the acquisition of land to the (re)development of structures for the intended use of the property, and for appropriately compensated staffing and ongoing self-determined sustainability. This means funding New Seneca Village in a way that allows us to be good stewards with and for the land (and the structures on it), while remaining centered on our offering and all that it takes to be engaged with and responsive to our Village community.  

JEI: When did the vision for New Seneca Village come to you? Did it seem feasible? How did you respond to it? 

AB: The vision for New Seneca Village came to me roughly eight years ago, and I rejected it immediately as someone else’s work to do. For years I simply ignored the vision because it felt too big and too hard to do right. Creating this vision with intention and the appropriate level of resources was especially important because our work is focused on pouring into communities that too often get shortchanged. In time, I realized that the vision had been working in and on me despite my initial rejection and that I was being led to relationships that significantly shaped the eventual Village offering and to experiences that gave me access to resources and connections to potentially make the vision possible. 

My JEI experience—especially the intentionally held container of both introspection and deep listening—supported my ability to communicate my vision, knowing that it would be held with respect. Being with others over the nine months of the experience allowed for the development of trust, which is only expanded whenever I am able to gather with Fellows from my own and other cohorts. JEI attracts such interesting people and creates an environment where we can share not just our professional strategies and innovations, but also our personal passions and heart-held questions.  

All of this resonates personally and within the New Seneca Village vision, which is more interested in questions—and how they inform, expand and guide us—than it is interested in answers, which can often shut down crucial elements of living, creation and experimentation. 

JEI: How do you continue to feed your vision?

AB: New Seneca Village is an invitation to practice the future now. It is a liberated space for leaders and healers to strengthen their connection to their own sovereignty and to their innate and sacred purpose. And to all of the resources that are beyond the limitations of funding and organizational structures.  

To be a useful steward of this transformational work that is alive at both the individual and the collective level, I steep myself in solitude and prayer. Prayer is shorthand for my practice of devoting time, energy and commitment to my intentions for this work while asking for and remaining open to direction.  

In this practice of holding vision, I spend a lot of my time daydreaming generative questions and hosting intentional conversations. How do we get free? Or does this get us free? are the questions that I hold most frequently as I continue to be present to all that is unfolding now for and with Villagers and the Village team.  

I find my answers most often in nature, where it is easy to wait, listen and look for wisdom as shared by the trees, my ancestors, sunsets and the stars, to name a few sources of ever-present clarity and power. Nature tells the true story of our belonging and of all the ways that it is possible to be nourished, sustained and powerful within this human experience.  

I am also deeply connected with and grateful to my growing community of leaders, healers, dreamers and doers who share their hearts and their visions with me, thereby continuing to connect me to the Village vision and beyond it to all that is possible. 

Ain Bailey is a justice focused philanthropic strategist and collaborative leader whose work is grounded in infinite possibility, proven by the miracle of this planet and our shared humanity. After years of funding racial justice, organizational development, housing and narrative shift as levers for advancing an equitable and just society, it became clear to Ain that the systems will not change unless we change the way that we care for the leaders who are doing the complex and perpetual work of shifting them. This belief, along with her deep knowing of the transformative and healing power of nature and the longstanding benefit of healing practices, compelled her to develop New Seneca Village to sustain cis, transfeminine and non-binary women of color social justice leaders who have been at the forefront of all major societal movement in this country (whether they were acknowledged or not.) Ain is most energized by her role as the Founder & Co-Designer of New Seneca Village, a retreat and visioning project designed to connect these critical leaders to nature, restorative practices and each other such that their leadership and work is grounded in restoration, community connection and expansive vision. New Seneca Village is a response to her long-standing question, grounded in 400 years of history and made more relevant by the events of 2020: What is possible for our society, our people and our planet if we abundantly and consistently resourced the leaders advancing our society’s most evolved values ?