It's All My Fault: How I Messed Up the World, and Why I Need Your Help to Fix It

by Jordan Phoenix

  It’s time to move into a paradigm of collaboration on a global scale that goes beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. Through the process of building upon and properly executing the ideas contained within this chapter, it is possible for us to end homelessness in the United States. Through the process of building upon and properly executing the ideas in this chapter, it is possible for us to dramatically reduce poverty, career dissatisfaction, and overall displeasure with life for billions of people worldwide. This plan is called Crowdfunding for Cities. Ideally, a fully developed version of the Project Free World site features that were discussed in chapter nine (and whose detailed visual wireframes are available for viewing online) would massively enhance and accelerate the ability to collaborate and execute this plan, but it can technically be done without it as well.

  Right now in the United States, there are millions upon millions of people that are either unemployed or underemployed, searching for better jobs that simply don’t exist anymore. Millions of people have lost their homes to foreclosure since the real estate market crashed in 2007. According to a Census Bureau report from 2013, there are over 14.2 million vacant houses across the country. Cities such as Cleveland, Las Vegas, St. Louis, New Orleans, Detroit, Atlanta, Indianapolis, and many others contain thousands (or tens of thousands) of vacant properties and lots. When there are boarded up houses, empty neighborhoods, and ghost towns, urban decay and rising crime rates are often not too far behind; which encourages even more people to leave the area. When I look at all of these factors from a bird’s eye view perspective, the main thing that I observe is that we seem to be suffering from a system that has become extremely inefficient at resource allocation. We have open land, we have open houses, and we have people who need them. We have people who want to work, but can’t find work to do. For some reason, we just haven’t been able to figure out how to organize things in a way that creates a win-win scenario for everyone. There is one main ingredient missing from this equation that is so vital that it has the ability to create a domino effect; in essence revolutionizing the way we approach poverty alleviation.

  You see, the reason why this system slows to a halt and stagnates is because we are judging the people and elements involved as they are in their current state right now; treating them as if they’re all static and unchangeable. We see an empty lot in an empty neighborhood as having minimal value, and we also see an unemployed or homeless person as someone with minimal value to offer to the world. But this is a very limited perspective. Speaking as a person who nearly became homeless myself once upon a time, I know that this couldn’t be further from the truth. The most underrated and underutilized resource that we have on this entire planet is human potential. People who are unemployed have a massive amount of potential that is going to waste right now. It’s not because they’re incapable of using it, but rather because they simply don’t have access to the resources that will help them unlock it, in order to rise above their current conditions. Like I had mentioned in chapter eight, the people who are most in need of empowerment are least able to afford it. But here’s the other side of the coin: If we can give people access to the services they need to unlock their potential and learn how to create new jobs and value for society, they will then be able to contribute back into the system afterward, making the whole process financially sustainable. The way we can make this possible is by unleashing the secret weapon: Equity crowdfunding.

  In 2012, the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act was officially signed into law. What this signified is that it was time for the SEC to begin studying more efficient ways to give companies access to capital, in order to create new rules that can both accelerate progress and protect consumers without regulations that are overly burdensome. Two years later, the results of this process are very close to being signed into law. The CEO and Founder of Return on Change, Sang Lee, predicts that these new laws are expected to become official in mid-2014. He has been working in conjunction with Crowdfund Intermediary Regulatory Advocates (CFIRA) in Washington D.C. to take part in the revision process, and a major change involves the legalization of equity crowdfunding. Already underway in Europe, equity crowdfunding enables individuals to invest in an idea and become partial owners of a venture. If said idea or venture grows into a thriving enterprise, the investor gains financial rewards as a result of their decision to put funds into an early stage business concept. In the past, this type of investing was mainly limited to accredited investors that had achieved specific benchmarks for income or net worth, but this will allow a much larger number of people to get involved. With crowdfunding already firmly entrenched as a multi-billion dollar industry internationally, this new incentive prepares to help it expand its reach even further; potentially opening up the flood gates.

  To utilize equity crowdfunding in the most effective and optimal way, the first order of business should be to apply it towards revitalizing downtrodden and vacant cities. In order to execute the Crowdfunding for Cities plan, leaders from different cities can utilize a community incubator model to begin rebuilding their respective regions. Over the past few years, business startup incubators such as TechStars and Y-Combinator have emerged to assist entrepreneurs in taking concepts from the idea phase into full-fledged businesses; providing them with access to mentorship and capital in order to do so. The community incubator model that I’m proposing takes this idea a step further, and would potentially open the doors for many more people to gain access to the resources they need to prosper. To create a rock solid foundation upon which to re-establish these neighborhoods, it is essential that we place a strong focus upon building up local economies, with an added emphasis on self-sufficiency and environmental factors. We can develop new types of communities that combine the best elements of environmentally friendly eco-villages with 21st century training programs focused on personal development, technology, and social entrepreneurship.

  As far as the systems of formal education that we currently have in place go, one of the biggest problems is that they are not evolving nearly as fast as the world around them. It’s as if we’re essentially spending the first two decades of our lives in a training program designed for the year 1950, and then we come out surprised that the skills we developed did not prepare us for life in 2010, 2020, and beyond. We’re so focused on multiple choice exams, regurgitating information, certifications, test scores, degrees, and prestige that we’ve forgotten to check up on the most important aspect of education --whether or not it provides us with the skills to better navigate and solve problems within the world in its current condition. At that, we are failing miserably. We overemphasize intelligence, and underemphasize wisdom. We’ve been trained to become experts at learning how to game the system and maximize our scores on tests, but we’ve neglected to develop our critical thinking abilities in order to identify which tests are even worth taking. We learn about how to negotiate and exploit opportunities, but we are not trained to care about how attempting to gain a small advantage for ourselves can have widespread negative impacts on many other people’s lives; which ends up coming back to affect us all. This is why we’ve learned how to develop so many amazing technologies and maximize profits, but we’ve yet to figure out how to prevent these things from leading us down a path to self-destruction.

  Further complicating matters is the fact that the price of higher education in the United States has skyrocketed, and so taking out loans to pay for it locks us into irreversible debt that makes this situation even worse. We’re now in an era where, sadly, many hopeful parents who are encouraging their kids to go expensive colleges are unknowingly decimating their longterm quality of life; pressuring them into taking on a massive financial burden that they may not get out of for decades. It’s the equivalent of a musician paying $100,000 to get their albums recorded onto CDs and cassette tapes, putting them up for sale, and then realizing that tablets, smartphones and laptops have rendered them useless. Since the universities are paid in full regardless of whether o
r not their students can go on to find careers that earn enough to cover the steep costs of tuition, there has not been enough of an incentive for them to change with the times.

  But what if we tweaked this model a bit to make it so that the success and financial stability of the community incubator programs were tied directly to the success of the fellows who go through the program? A system like this would ensure that the highest leverage skills were being taught, because otherwise, the system would cease to exist. To give this idea a frame of reference, imagine this for a moment: What if the salaries for a university’s president and governing board were not fixed, but rather were earned based upon a percentage of the income of the students in the last ten graduating classes? This type of system would essentially create a built in failsafe mechanism against exorbitant tuition costs, since the only way the governing board could command higher salaries would be by ensuring that the students earned larger salaries. They would be invested in the success of the students long after they graduate, and would be much more likely to even begin making personal introductions and providing ongoing mentorship as well.

  What has become glaringly obvious in the 21st century is that the rate at which we’re collectively making technological advances shows no signs of slowing down, and is only accelerating even faster. It is possible for a student to spend four years of college learning how to use a specific computer program for a particular trade, and by the time they graduate, that program has become obsolete. We live in a world where we are trained to learn one particular skill to earn money, and we use the money we earn from that skill to pay for all of the other things we need to survive. However, when you combine the speed at which technology can eliminate entire industries with the realization that the global financial markets are prone to volatility, we end up with epidemics of structural unemployment that have devastating consequences on society. As a result, the foundational core of the Crowdfunding for Cities plan is based first and foremost upon a community’s ability to provide for their own basic survival necessities. If the market goes into a recession, an industry disappears, or a business fails, we could ease the burden on people’s lives significantly by setting up systems in a way that ensures that they can still continue to provide their own basic needs to survive. In the words of Ron Finley: “Growing your own food is like printing your own money.” To describe a clearer picture of how the Crowdfunding for Cities plan could function in its entirety, I will give you a fictional example that depicts how an interested person or group can begin executing this to revitalize their city.

  On the east side of Detroit, a 24--year-old woman named Jade looks on as yet another empty building gets demolished. As the city has already declared bankruptcy, many of these demolitions are done primarily as an attempt to limit these barren buildings from becoming trash heaps, or homes to criminal activity. There are tens of thousands of empty homes and plots of land in neighborhoods nearby; some of which have become completely empty ghost towns. The city does not seem to have a plan or the funding to do anything to fix the situation. Jade has recently been laid off, as her company continues to undergo a major downsizing. Ideally, she would love to do some type of work that involves rebuilding the city, but just doesn’t know where to start. She can’t find any jobs that will pay her a living wage to do it. So, she decides that the best option available to her is to stop searching for jobs that don’t exist, and begin creating her own.

  She searches around the internet to try to gain some ideas about where to even begin. As fate would have it, she comes across a book called It’s All My Fault: How I Messed Up the World, and Why I Need Your Help to Fix It that sounds as if it might lead her in the right direction. Skeptical at first, she checks out the book reviews online, and she finds a few that tear it to shreds. “Hands down the worst book I’ve ever read, I actually burned it halfway through,” says one reviewer. “This guy is a cross between the spawn of Satan, Karl Marx, and the guy from the double rainbow video. Way too idealistic. He actually believes it’s possible to end global poverty, and needs a reality check.”

  Being somewhat of an idealist herself, Jade is intrigued by the last sentence, and decides it couldn’t hurt to pick up the book anyway. At this point in her life, she is completely fed up with the number of people she knows that spend all of their time and energy arguing and complaining about everything on the internet, but don’t ever actually do anything about it. She decides that moving forward, she is only going to focus her time and energy on surrounding herself with people who are looking to take action and create positive social change.

  Using some of the ideas from the book, and other resources online, she organizes a group of no-nonsense people who are equally passionate about revitalizing the east side of Detroit, and gets everyone in a room together. Since Jade’s background is in urban planning, she seeks out others with complementary skill sets in areas she lacks expertise, such as: urban agriculture, construction, teaching, psychology, renewable energy, technology, computer science, finance, real estate, law, and others. She buys additional copies of the book for everyone in the group, and a few dozen extras for all of her friends and acquaintances as well, just for good measure (notice the emergence of my self-preservation instinct). After several discussions, she develops a solid core team of individuals that truly believe in her mission. They seem to have a common set of values, an excellent work ethic, and the attributes necessary to work together cohesively; and so they begin the process of putting the plan into action.

  The first order of business is to identify land that they would like to purchase, in order to establish the community they are looking to build. The great news is: in the cities that have the strongest need to rebuild -- the ones with the most vacant lots -- the prices are the least expensive. Huge quantities of land can be purchased for pennies on the dollar. The group selects a neighborhood that fits as an ideal location for them to purchase, with several dozen acres of space in total -- most of which are empty lots. Before making the purchase of the land and setting the plan in motion, they begin to accept applications from potential fellows who want to become candidates to take part in this community incubator program. The screening process can vary depending on the group’s overall objectives; but the most important areas of focus are placed upon a fellow’s determination, their willingness to learn, their willingness to create value, and their willingness to get along with others. Different incubator programs can focus on serving different groups of people, depending on their life circumstances, abilities, and interests. Some can be geared towards serving recent school graduates; others can serve individuals who are unemployed, underemployed or dissatisfied with their current careers; others can serve the formerly homeless; others can serve victims of domestic violence; others can serve veterans; some groups can be mixed; and so on. Depending on which groups of people will make up the community, the resources and training programs can be designed and tailored accordingly. For example, communities that are comprised of people who were formerly homeless would likely need to bring in additional therapists, social workers, and mental health counselors to ensure that each individual is moving along at the pace that is optimal for them. Though personal development and leadership training are vital elements of any community incubator program, groups dealing with overcoming major life traumas would likely need to place a major emphasis on therapy and healing before transitioning into learning skills related to survival or career options.

  Next, the equity crowdfunding aspect comes into play. An online platform can be utilized to facilitate this process, in order to bring in investment dollars from individuals who want to contribute to the rebuilding movement -- while also gaining the opportunity to receive a financial return as well. There can also be community incubator programs that seek to raise funds in accordance with Muhammad Yunus’ philosophy of social business -- meaning that the investors simply aim to empower others and get their money back, without receiving any personal financial dividends from the deal (Kiva --
www.kiva.org -- specializes in this type of model). The investment funds will be used to cover the cost of land, development, materials, program coordinator salaries, and tuition and living expenses for the fellows during the two-year fellowship program. Once the training programs are adequately prepared to suit the needs of the fellows that are selected, and sufficient funds are raised, the fellowship begins.

  To begin with, the fellows learn how to rehabilitate houses and build their own shelters, in a minimalist and environmentally friendly fashion. Drawing inspiration from tiny home designs and Earthship Biotecture (www.earthship.com), these structures should ideally be able to be constructed using as many natural and recycled local materials as possible, with an emphasis on safety. There are methodologies accessible right now that allow for the creation of housing structures that harvest their own rainwater, contain and treat their own sewage, and heat and cool themselves without fuel -- even in brutally hot or cold climates. This has the potential to significantly reduce costs related to water, sewage line installations, and heating and air conditioning. Additionally, built in greenhouses and vertical Windowfarms (www.windowfarms.com) can provide for the growth of food year round. Fellows will learn about how to utilize the land optimally to create thriving urban farms; in order to not only produce most of their own healthy food to eat, but also to gain the ability to sell the surplus at a profit. Aquaponics systems can be implemented as well, to create revenue streams from fish farming. For additional energy needs, there will be a heavy emphasis on utilizing renewable energy forms (depending on which are optimal for each geographic location) such as solar, wind, hydropower, and geothermal. Fellows can learn the basics of how to operate, repair, and even manufacture these systems.