Collective Entrepreneurship
By Thomas Watson, Craig White and Paul Castelloe
How grassroots groups come together to provide extra income for members and their families
Economic development is a critical issue across Appalachia, where for decades labor and natural resources have been used to profit people and companies outside the region. In Western North Carolina, as in other parts of the rural South, factory and industrial jobs play a large role in the economy, and traditional economic development generally involves efforts to create new jobs by recruiting industries. However, frequent factory closings and massive layoffs have made it clear that industry alone cannot provide a secure economic base for our mountain counties.
Over the last year, CPC has worked with several grassroots groups that are working on economic issues, and they have taught us three key lessons about rural economics at the family level:
· Rural families rarely have just one source of income that meets all their needs. Instead, they piece together a living from full or part time jobs and off hours work like child care, cutting firewood, or selling jams and pickles. At the grassroots level, economic development means creating a dependable source of supplemental income.
· Rural communities are full of stories about workers who showed up at the plant on Friday to hear that it would be closed on Monday. In this context, having income sources that are personally owned and controlled provides important security.
· Traditionally, Appalachian families are both hardworking and independent. People generally have a wide range of skills and ideas for generating income, but by themselves they may not have the confidence or the capital to open a small business.
Together, these perspectives offer an important alternative approach to economic development: people coming together to use their existing skills and talents to create new sources of supplemental income that the members of the group control themselves. CPC has started calling this work “collective entrepreneurship,” because it involves people who create their own innovative economic opportunities by sharing the work and the risk among members of a group.
Women laid off from a Levi’s plant in Murphy formed a crafts cooperative that now has 50 members and is preparing to open a retail store. Small farmers and herbalists in Graham County have come together to earn extra money by planting and selling native plants. A group of immigrant women in Morganton has come together to earn extra income through hand-made crafts. And in Cherokee County, a group of farming families has created a small farmers’ association that will support both community and individual projects.
By working together, these groups are able to accomplish goals that none of the individuals could achieve on their own. In this new picture, people in low-wealth communities are not the target for economic development projects; rather, they are the people who determine, drive, and control that process. Also, the economic outcomes (putting extra money in people’s pockets) are no more important than the social and cultural goals of the work (preserving Appalachian culture, saving farm land, or protecting native plants).
These groups are building a new sector of the rural economy, which does not depend on large investments or outside industry, but on native strengths and resources plus a lot of hard work. Economic benefits, as well as social and cultural ones, remain in the hands of the people doing the work.
Projects are sustainable, because they are implemented at a modest scale, and because they celebrate, rather than exploit, the local cultural and natural resources. And it’s an economic sector that’s expandable, being rooted in collaboration rather than competition, because people are excited to see each other succeed.
The Appalachian Heritage Crafters (AHC) are a great example of CPC’s collective entrepreneurship work. AHC is a crafts cooperative formed in the wake of a Cherokee County Levi Strauss plant closing. The original purpose was to bring former Levi’s employees together to earn some extra income through promoting Appalachian heritage and crafts. The group has since grown to include many different crafters, but the overriding goal of providing extra income to members has remained. In summer 2001, AHC opened a retail crafts store on the four-lane highway outside of Murphy.
Smoky Mountain Native Plants Assocation
The Smoky Mountain Native Plants Association is a group of Graham County tobacco growers, small farmers, gardeners, landowners, herbal business owners, wildcrafters, and ginseng diggers. The group plans to work together to support members as they grow, market, and sell native Appalachian plants such as ginseng and goldenseal. Group members plan to earn extra income through test plots and a farmers’ market; they also hope to preserve family farms and local knowledge of native plant cultivation and use.
Another example of CPC’s support for collective entrepreneurship is a group of immigrant women who have come together to make and market handmade crafts in Morganton, in Burke County.
Members of this group - Hands Together, or Manos Unidas - come originally from Peru, China, Panama, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Hands Together is the only international women’s crafts group in Western NC.
Many members of Hands Together were recently laid off during factory closings. These women have come together to increase their income without relying on factory jobs, support each other by sharing skills and encouragement, and have fun together.Members are learning from each other as they each develop crafting projects - sewing handmade pillows, sewing and decorating tablecloths, and so on. This group has only met for a few months, but one member is already selling her work in a local consignment shop.
Hands Together is a good example of the way that social development can be as important as economic development in collective entrepreneurship work. For this group of women, many of whom have been separated from their families, the relationships and support that they get from working with other immigrant women is as important as the extra money that they make by selling their crafts.
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