Monday’s Inauguration Makes it Clear: We Must Act Now for Racial and Economic Justice

Visioning: Tenets of an Equitable Economy

Even in dark times, we continue to vision. The darkness only obscures the fact that there is still light. We find it in one another and in our collective efforts—especially when we are our most tired. In a country where histories are known to tie closely to destinies, we recognize that our futures can be grounded in the truth of the past without reflecting it forward. We are self-determined, self-projected. We have choices available to us. It is through these lenses that at Common Future, we continue to vision forward, imagining, and defining what an equitable economy—and, as a result, a multi-racial democracy—looks and feels like. This is even as we and many partners will have to play more defense to protect the rights, liberties, and freedoms that we have yet to secure, the ones that we do have but are threatened or that have just been eliminated with the stroke of a pen. 
Whether playing offense or defense, studying the past, or planning for the future, we need to have a clear vision and a justice-filled approach to get us there.
 

In Common Future’s vision, we aren’t limited by capital, nor does “capital” any longer refer to our people or planetary resources. Your mere existence means that you are deserving and worthy of wellness and thriving. In the future, we imagine that wages will not be your worth. Your labor and your time are yours. The land is part of a shared trust—for community and for conservation. Residents have “bought the block” and residents are co-invested. Assets belong to the community, not shareholders across town or on Wall Street.
 

As Octavia Butler has said, “there is nothing new under the sun. But there are new suns.” Wisdom from cooperative economics, land stewardship, non-extractive finance, and mutual aid are once again mainstream. Trust and character are the cornerstones to accessing capital so that businesses can grow and their shared owners can thrive.

Fundamentally, an equitable economy is anti-racist, pro-Black, and pro-Indigenous and centers on proximity and lived experience. We ground our strategy in the Curb-Cut Effect, a decades-long research study by Angela Glover Blackwell. This research finds that by centering the solutions designed by the people most harmed, we build the policies, the infrastructure, and the economy that works for all people. Such an approach is ultimately “a substantial investment in the broader well-being of a nation -- one whose policies and practices create an equitable economy, a healthy community of opportunity, and a just society.”
 

Thus, the tenets below weave in this understanding and are a vision that pervades through the next chapter of our work at Common Future and as a nation:
 

• Workers have power over their rights, their labor, and the choice about where they work and in what conditions. That all labor is dignified with fair compensation and the opportunity for progression, ensuring workers can fully provide for themselves and their families.
• Workers and communities share ownership. Land, real estate, and enterprises are owned by workers and communities, ensuring that dollars circulate and stay in those communities and produce the infrastructure and other markers of thriving communities. 
• Capital is patient, flexible, and affordable and designed intentionally to meet the needs of communities, businesses, and individuals as a tool for responsible growth and opportunity. 
• Our society redistributes wealth, and tax policy enables redistribution by design so that historically excluded Black, Indigenous, and other excluded communities are able to fully participate in the prosperity of our country, build individual and community wealth, and have these gains persist for the long term.
• We share power and decision-making. Rather than being concentrated in the hands of a few, Black, Indigenous, and other excluded communities are actively making decisions about the design and stewardship of resources and infrastructure in their communities without disinvestment. 
• Reparative processes exist and are practiced. Land acknowledgment and Sovereignty for Indigenous communities, along with reparations, restitution, and reconciliation for Black and Indigenous people, is codified in true and full acknowledgment of generations of economic extraction, exclusion, and violence. Present and future generations are actively healing and exist in a society without the burdens and badges of slavery, Jim Crow, land extraction, segregation, economic exclusion, and the other systems that have yielded the inequities we have experienced to date. 
• Our workplaces are equitable and reflect these values internally, demonstrating a love for and valuing people. Organizations are resilient, and rather than upholding the status quo of inequity, they serve as vanguards that advance and maintain equitable practices.
• Government (Local, State, and Federal) partners with people in articulating and affirming rights and ensuring that public goods and infrastructure receive proper investment, specifically in communities that have been underinvested in or that live with outdated public infrastructure. These rights and investments ensure that individuals, families, and communities are valued and are thriving. 
• We write and apply the laws, regulations, and rules that govern our society equitably, and disparate impacts—intentional or not— for Black and Indigenous communities cease to exist. The playing field has been leveled, and the US legal framework helps us actualize a multi-racial democracy. Our constitution is rewritten to codify human rights, equal protection under the law is actually afforded, remedies for past injustice—individual and structural—are an accepted and actionable component of a thriving democracy, and the law is not used as a tool of white supremacy with shifting goal posts as excluded groups make gains in economic and political power. In this practice, we ensure racial hierarchies and other caste systems—de jure and de facto—are dismantled.
• We build coalitions to ensure progress. Alliances coordinate impact that is greater than the sum of individual organizations—we must lean into partnership and coalition building to ensure that our needs are advocated for and met. 
• We uphold solidarity—even when put to the test—and difference is experienced as a strength rather than as a rationale for dominance and power over.
   

By sharpening our racial equity lens on each of these attributes, we are able to envision a fuller, multisensory picture of what an equitable economy looks like and the steps it will take to get there. These tenets provide guidance for the rest of our work—from one, our investment thesis; two, our impact initiatives; and three, the stories we tell and when and why we speak truth to power.
 

Building Towards an Equitable Economy

At Common Future, we continue to build towards this vision while fully cognizant of our current reality and the work it will take to get there. For us, this has meant a time of adaptation and ingenuity. It has meant ruthless prioritization of the work that either will have the greatest impact—or is the most under-resourced and neglected while promising. It has meant difficult tradeoffs like right-sizing the organization, being selective about the work we showcase, and the work we hold most sacred and safe.

We want to make all these futures possible—we know that they remain within our grasp. Our ancestors have faced setbacks greater than this, with more bravery than is currently on display. Taking a page from On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder, and as Vu Le reminds us, we need not obey in advance. As we ascertain the risks and obstacles ahead, we plan accordingly; we move more intelligently, and we do this in coalition.

We know that an equitable economy is also a key pillar—a precursor, a bellwether—for the multiracial democracy that we promise to be. By 2044, less than 20 years from now, our country will hold a New Majority; that majority will also hold zero to little wealth. At Common Future, we know this is untenable for our nation and that it’s not already a forgone conclusion.

To us, an equitable economy is one that is held up by regenerative systems and practices that take into account our bodies and the planet we live on as finite resources that need to be sustained. It is pro-Black, pro-Indigenous, and multi-racial by design to ensure the accessibility of solutions needed for collective well-being. And most of all, it is one where power, wealth, and decision-making is distributed so that all people have what they need to participate and prosper.

To get here, we assess root causes, in particular, those where Common Future is most poised to affect change, including:

Extractive financial systems: Our financial system originates with slavery and colonization and has been intentionally designed to exclude, exploit, and extract capital from communities of color. This has limited access to affordable capital necessary to grow and sustain community-rooted economic strategies and build community wealth.

Exclusionary and fractured power structures: Communities of color have had limited influence and decision-making over the financial and economic practices that affect their communities, partially due to intentional exclusion, limited visibility, networks, and resources. The work to build a more equitable economy often lacks the infrastructure (e.g., bandwidth, tools, and relationships) to develop cohesive agendas, narratives, and goals. Such a breakdown contributes to where our society is today.

Predominant and harmful narratives: Narratives have been used to exclude communities of color and maintain status quo power, exhausting and limiting our collective imagination to change policies, behaviors, and practices.

With this in mind, we step boldly towards addressing these through Common Future’s work, now redoubling efforts in three areas: one, changing capital flows; two, building power and influence; and three, creating new narratives.

View the Theory of Change Here

Designing long-term structural solutions aimed at root causes sometimes feels abstract and far-reaching. But, we are reminded that we’ve seen glimpses of this at different points in our nation’s history, in cultures that have thrived outside of capitalism, and in our present-day with communities and movements that are building collective power. We have always believed the solutions to a more equitable economy are already here; they just lack the attention and investment that they deserve.

In this moment, now more than ever, we can shine a light. We can be that light.

Discipline of Hope

Our vision is that, alongside many others, we are able to keep supporting the many solutions needed to create an equitable economy.

Yes, we are tired because with progress comes shifting goalposts or the morphing of laws and norms to maintain power through racial and economic hierarchy. Yet, our practice, as we come into 2025, is one that is forged in the discipline of hope. When the winds of momentum have ceased, our discipline comes into focus. This discipline requires practice and community. It is believing in justice, even as we sit in the depths of authoritarianism’s dark cave. It is having faith in the possibilities, even when you have no reason to, given the seemingly indomitable challenges surrounding us. It requires keeping the long view while navigating short-term losses and accounting for the real progress and wins gained. Simply, it is continuing to put one foot forward, in front of the other, and remembering Bryan Stevenson’s wisdom that “hopelessness is the enemy of justice,” but clarifying that “it’s not pie in the sky hope…it’s [an] orientation of the spirit…be[ing] willing to believe things we haven’t seen.”

In The Next Ten Years: Retrenchment or Reconstruction, Nicole Carty explains that in movement studies, we are at an inflection point in the movement for racial and economic justice: we could burnout from the rising backlash, or we could transition our efforts into investing in and scaffolding the infrastructure that upholds more just systems—the infrastructure needed to sustain the solutions we want to see exist in this new paradigm that we imagine.

This year, Common Future emerges as a more targeted and agile intermediary partner to our colleagues. We recognize that there is critical infrastructure missing for the road ahead, and it starts with the ability to deploy capital, amplify models that are already working, and ensure that all stakeholders are made aware not only that a more equitable economy is possible but that glimpses of it are already here. These leaders deserve our attention and investment; our shared future as a multiracial democracy is dependent on it.

Equipped with our new Theory of Change, we seek to add value to actors that have long been fighting the forces of inequality on the ground. By investing, building power, and writing new stories, our hopeful discipline creates new ways to regenerate our economy and rebalance the scales of power toward a multiracial democracy and future that works for everyone.