Jesse Marshall:	I'm just going to introduce myself. My name is Jesse Marshall, Swarthmore class of 2011. It's good and strange to be back and I am part of a project with Troy, New York, called Margination and we're building a network of worker-owned businesses that share resources and support one another, as well as a supportive community for the folks involved. This is exciting for me. It's the first long-format talk that I've given in front of an audience, so you guys are my guinea pigs and it's a good environment for experimenting with this. This is cool. Really good. Good to be here.
	I'm going to start here at Swarthmore around my sophomore year and give a little personal backstory about my trajectory from this campus to where I am in Troy and what I'm doing now. This is, I think now we're calling it the Chester Youth Garden Cooperative in Chester, in the Bennett Homes. Have any of you guys been here? Do you know a little bit about it? Yeah, cool.
	I was first on this piece of land, gosh, in the spring of 2009 to take the samples of the soil, to test for lead and other toxic metals before any beds had been put down, before there was a fence, before anything. And so, the group of students that started this garden in the Bennett Homes were part of a group called environmental justice and they came together around that idea of environmental justice and their first project was a campaign against a tire incinerator that was going to be located in this city that's very poor, predominately African American, that's already home to the fourth largest waste incinerator in the country. That was a successful battle. That incinerator, the second incinerator anyway, was pushed out. And then after a slightly less successful foray into local politics and the city council race, they started to think about more constructive, proactive ways to contribute to environmental justice in Chester instead of the kind of rear guard, defensive work of fighting off large development projects.
	In their conversations with the folks in Chester that they had worked with on that tire incinerator campaign, the issue of food access came up again and again. Chester is a town of 30,000 people without a supermarket. I guess, I hear that there was one briefly in the last four years and that it's shut down again. There's another one coming. Right? And then there's the Fare & Square Market by [inaudible 00:02:48]. At this point, there was no supermarket in the city limits and the issue of getting access to fresh vegetables came up again and again. Obviously, one angle in environmental justice.
	These students, who were friends of mine ... I wasn't involved quite at this point yet ... found a willing partner in the Chester housing authority, which is the public agency that operates and owns public housing in the city of Chester, about 450 units of housing. The housing authority put up a fence, figured out a water source, and sent us into the world. 
	The first time I got involved was doing the soil testing and digging the garden beds. I was a sophomore at this point. Slightly adrift. I hadn't really figured out what it was that made me tick, what I cared about. I bounced around from a lot of extracurricular activities. And this garden in the Bennett homes was like nothing I had ever experienced before and it lit a fire in me. 
	The next semester, I studied abroad in Copenhagen, and I had kind of a very educational and somewhat demoralizing experience at COP 15 at the UN Climate Conference in 2009. I was a youth delegate inside the conference and just had a pretty disappointing experience with international politics, with advocacy at that level. Because nothing happened in Copenhagen. And so, when I came back to Swarthmore my junior year, I got into the garden project with renewed gusto, because here was something that was local, it was concrete, it was at a scale that was meaningful. It was a project that could be replicated. And it was engaging folks who were disadvantaged, who were the victims of injustice, instead of just treating them as rhetorical pawns, which is what I saw at the United Nations in Copenhagen.
	By the time I graduated from Swarthmore a couple of years later, I knew some folks on staff at the housing authority pretty well, and they ended up offering me a job. When I graduated, I went straight to work for the housing authority. 
	I'm going to tell a quick little story about the day before I graduated from college, when I took my family to the garden. I grew up in California and the kids that I work with at the garden were always confused by the idea that my parents and my little sister could be 3,000 miles away, several days worth of driving, when three or four generations of their family all live within a few mile radius. And so, they'd always ask me questions about my parents and my family and did I fight with my little sister when I was younger ... and then suddenly, one day I showed up with my mom and my dad and my sister and we had a great time. My mom had a picture on her cell phone of me as a little kid and that was a really big hit. We all planted basil and kale seedlings together. And it was just one of those really satisfying, heartwarming moments for me.
	On the drive back, my parents told me how proud they were of me. Here I was, 19 years old, I'd gotten invested in this community and this project and I had managed to turn it into a job. And they raised me to believe in social justice. They raised me to want to make a difference in the work that I did. And this had happened right out of college in a way that doesn't happen for a lot of people, so I felt really lucky.
	As we were leaving the Bennett Homes, I can picture the spot, we were making the turn and there was this moment of silence and my dad said to me, to the car, he said, "If only ten things were different in those kids lives, what you were doing in that garden might actually make a difference in their prospects."
	I was like, "Man. Thanks, dad. Really appreciate the reality check." But he was right and I really ... it's one of the things that I admire most about my dad, actually, and that I try to live up to, is his ability to see clearly through type to what's really going on.
	I was supposed to advance the slide a while ago. This is the slide that was going to be showing while I was telling you about my family visiting the garden.
	So, this is Nicole. Nicole is one of my favorite kids who came to the garden around this time, right around the time I graduated. And Nicole lived right across the street from the garden, so she was always the first kid who saw me pull up in my car and would come out and often help me set up. Pull the tools out of the shed, connect the hose to the fire hydrant, which was our water source. And Nicole got in trouble at school often. She was big for her age, she had a temper, and all your had to do to get under her skin was tell her she was fat and she would go berserk. And we saw it happen a lot. But she was one of the most thoughtful, hard-working kids at the garden. If you actually wanted to get something done, she was one of the people that you would call over. She had two little sisters and it was really her job most of the time to take care of them. At the age of 11, she already had, basically, two kids that she was responsible for in her daily life. 
	Now, what the garden offered to a kid like Nicole, much more ... I mean, the access to fresh vegetables was important and the nutrition education was important, but more than that, the garden offered a place, one, where it was okay to ask questions. It was okay to be curious, even if the grownups around you didn't even know the answers to the questions. Two, the rules were painted on a sign by the kids in a process that we developed with them where we talked about what people liked about the garden and what needed to happen for the garden to stay that way. And that was really different from the rest of their lives, where I think the rules tended to be arbitrary-seeming and mysterious. Just meted out by the grownups in their lives in a way that wasn't always easy for them to understand. And third, I think the garden is a source of stability and constancy in lives that are very uncertain and precarious. This is a project that these kids have been involved in for many years, they've helped to build it up and they get to follow the growing of plants and the changing of the seasons in a way that their daily lives doesn't really allow them to experience time and contributing to something in the long term.
	I think I'm a pretty fortunate person, in general, in my life. But I think one of the things that I'm most fortunate for are the two years that I got to spend working in Chester. My job, what I got paid to do, was to run a health and nutrition education program and part of the program was to train and compensate housing authority residents to basically run the program with me. To teach the nutrition. And we had a curriculum that we all learned together and then quickly abandoned in favor of hands-on sessions in the garden, daily cooking and exercise classes. I learned more from Iris and Debby, who were the folks that I worked most closely with in that program, than I did for my four years at school, at Swarthmore. And I was also really lucky to have mentors on staff at the housing authority, in a way that I think a lot of folks out of college don't get to experience. And I'll talk more about that later.
	One day, just a few months after I started working at the housing authority, Ramon, who was one of the folks on staff that I worked closely with at the housing authority, came into my office and he asked if I had seen the tall girl who lived across the street from the garden today. And I said, no, that I hadn't. And he said that the day before, he had been making repairs in the Bennett and Nicole had approached his truck and asked for a few dollars for potato chips for her and her sister because they had come home from school and the door to their unit was locked and there was an eviction notice on the door and their mom said that they were moving. They couldn't pay the rent and that they were moving and all of their food was locked inside the house in their refrigerator and they weren't allowed to access it. Ramon gave them the money and I never saw Nicole or her sisters again.
	I think we all have these moments in life where you're confronted by the limitations of your work and what you're doing. So of course, right away in my head, like a billboard, come my dad's words, if 10 things were different in Nicole's life, the work that I was doing at the garden and with the education programming might actually have made a difference in her prospects. But those 10 little things won, in the case of Nicole, and they were going to win just about every time with the kids that I knew and loved at the garden. 
	I think that there are three things that folks do, in general, in their professional lives or otherwise when they are confronted by the limitations of what they're doing and they realize the impact that their work is having and the impact that it's not having. One is to recognize those limitations but not let it get in the way of the good of the work you're doing and to not forget about the value of it and to keep pressing on even if you're sobered. Another approach that people take is to pretend that those limitations aren't there. To claim that your work is achieving more change, more impact than it really is. And there are a lot of reasons to do this. There's a lot of pressure to do it, especially in the nonprofit and the public sectors, because you've got to justify your funding and, by extension, your livelihood. And so, folks make claims and have thoughts about what they're doing and the impacts, the change that they're having on people's lives that aren't necessarily true.
	Now there's a third response, and the fact that I had this response and that a group of us in Chester had this response is really the birth of the Margination project. And that response is to stare those limitations right in the face, accept them, and then refuse to accept them. So, to acknowledge them and then say, there's got to be a better way of doing this. There's got to be a way that we can affect the prospects of someone like Nicole.
	That's my personal origin story for how I got involved in Margination. Now, we're going to take a step back and approach these things at a larger scale. I thought I'd ask you all just a little informal poll for a second. Most about your parents, since most of you are students. But if you're not a student, answer for yourself. I'm just curious, how many of your parents own their own homes? Just want a show of hands. Okay, so 75% maybe even a little more. How many of your parents own part of a business or are a partner in a firm, a law firm, that kind of thing? Not very many. Great. How many of you have heard your parents talk about being worried about retirement? So about half? Okay. Great. 
	These things that I'm touching on are the economic pillars of the middle class. Home ownership, job security, equity and property or in a business. They're what probably brought a lot of you into this room and attending this institution, right? They're what allow a lot of your parents to pay the tuition and they're really what are the rungs of the ladder out of poverty in this country, as well, and into the middle class.
	I've got a few figures here at the national level and then a few about where we are in Troy. 45% of Americans don't make enough money to afford basic needs like food, healthcare, and housing. 36% of working people in the United States have less than $1,000 in savings. And in our neighborhood in north central Troy, 17% of families own their homes. And there's a bunch more numbers I could throw at you. 3.6% of people under 30 have equity in a business, and that's down from 11% in 1989, the year I was born. Oh and then one other thing, that 17% number is half what it was in 2000. Half of the folks who owned homes in our neighborhood in Troy in 2000 lost them between then and now, and obviously, the financial crisis of 2008 has a lot to do with that.
	Are any of you surprised by these numbers? They more than you thought? Jacob's at least surprised.
Speaker 2:	[00:16:51] This one's pretty striking. I don't think I've even seen that in numbers before.
Jesse Marshall:	Yeah.
Jacob:	The other one I think is striking, too. Does it really not surprise you guys?
Jesse Marshall:	Yeah. They're more recently educated than we are, I guess. I think it's a safe conclusion to draw from these numbers that the economic pillars of the American middle class are effectively crumbling. I want to revisit my dad's statement after visiting Chester and think about what that means on a greater scale. These are the things that are going to make a difference in the life of someone like Nicole's and they're not that different than what are going to make a difference in my life and in your life in terms of long-term economic security, prosperity, opportunity. These are the pillars that have been absent from a place like Chester for a long time, but they're crumbling for people across a broader range of the socioeconomic spectrum, which is really what I think these numbers tell the strongest story about.
	That fact is the key insight behind what we're doing at Margination. That more and more people are facing these basic issues about what does it mean to be economically secure in the long term? What does it mean to make a living? What does it mean to have a roof over your head?
	Here we are. This picture's actually a little outdated. We've added a few folks since then, but this is the core team of Margination. Several of these folks, Ramon in the upper left, Blaine below him, Franci in the middle, Rick down below, and Georgia, all came together working in Chester around the garden and related projects. What we share is this conviction that if the people struggling with those challenges that I was just talking about, struggling with precarity, came together, they would have a lot of what they need to rebuild local economies.
	I think what we believe that they need, what is needed, I guess, in general, is we need new structures of doing business that build equity for folks while limiting the risk of those businesses. This economic activity needs to be anchored more locally than it currently is. It needs to build ownership for folks and control, rather than just providing them with wages. And more than just providing jobs for folks, which is a lot of what the politic rhetoric is about at the national level, it needs to create a future that is driven by the people that it's for. So, again, we think that these challenges can be solved by folks in their own communities if they figure out how to come together and work together.
	The strategies for doing that are really pretty basic. It's about sharing resources, it's about sharing skills, it's about supporting each other. But that's a huge cultural shift. Maybe just one more show of hands, I don't know how close you all are to graduating, but how many of you seriously think about going in with friends, somebody you know, on starting something new? On a business, rather than thinking in terms of what companies, what organizations are you going to apply for a job at? Anyone think about that seriously?
	Bobby. Maybe? Yeah. So it's just not on the table, right? There are these big organizations that we see ourselves in, but we don't really see ourselves starting something new. We don't really see ourselves taking a risk with folks, putting our trust in individuals that we know. So that's a lot of what the work that we do is about. How do we build a culture in a place and among a group of people that inspires that kind of trust and that allows people to work with folks from different backgrounds? A lot of what we do is figuring out how to put aside identity politics, how to put aside differences in other values, so that we can come together around the very simple idea that we're better off together than we are owning our own house, owning our own car, working a wage job somewhere.
	There's the cultural obstacles. There's also some real structural obstacles that prevent people from rebuilding local economies. These are the structures that we think need to be in place. At this stage, as we're still working in Chester and talking about what a solution would look like from scratch, so we're no longer thinking about being in a regulated public institution. We're thinking about, how do we build a context in which folks can create livelihoods for themselves.
	We've got three structures. We envisioned a network of small businesses that share resources and support one another. By cooperating in purchasing and marketing, by sharing labor and management, these businesses achieve economies of scale while staying rooted locally. We envisioned a nonprofit glue that holds this network together, so this infrastructure would coordinate the cooperation, it would hold resources like property and equipment in common, and it would ensure that opportunities being built were accessible to disadvantaged folks by providing training and social support for people. And then finally, there was the one thing that we didn't have to envision because we already had it, and that was the community.
	Imagine what it's like to have a group of people who looks you in the eye and says, "I'm not going to let you fail. I'm committed to your success, you're committed to mine." And think about the kinds of risks, the kind of growth, the kind of advancements you could take in your life if you had that and think about how crazy that sounds for me to say to you. So, that's the structure.
	Now, there are particular places in this country I think where innovations like that concept are going to happen. These are the small and mid-sized towns and cities in this country where real estate is cheap, where populations are increasingly diverse, and where people are entrepreneurial. These are photos that I took with my Blackberry on a whole series of road trips up and down the east coast. And each of these pictures is from a different town where we could have done Margination, where the conditions were right. Where it would be cheap to get started, where there was a real need for development, but also, and this is crucial, these towns are all parts of larger metropolitan areas that are more economically diverse. Where there's markets for business services.
	We left Chester and we looked at these towns and we ended up in Troy, New York. Old, post-industrial city on the Hudson River, right where the Erie Canal connects to the Hudson, just a few miles north of Albany. Really old, historic, industrial city where things like horseshoes for the Union Army were made. Where the bells for this country were made for a long time. Where the detachable shirt collar was invented. So, we're talking about a long time back, first around the turn of the century and then in the 1920s, where Chester was booming. It was the fifth wealthiest city in the country in 1890. And at that point, its population was 80,000 people. It's population is now 50,000. So, think about Detroit on a smaller scale in terms of population lost, in terms of dis-investments. That's where we're at.
	Now, the innovations that we're talking about aren't going to happen in places like New York City. They're not going to happen in San Francisco, where I'm from, simply because the costs are too high. It's too expensive to start something different. Not to mention the kind of political and economic interests that are very set in a place like that, where there's so much money at stake. Here in Troy, we immediately have a relationship with city government. It's a scale where we are known in the community and know the community quickly and it's a place where it's cheap to live. We literally pooled our resources to buy a house in Troy to start this work.
	I'm going to quickly tell you about the last two years since we moved to Troy and use Ramon as a case study for the kinds of things we're talking about doing. Since we moved to Troy, we started a nonprofit and it's called Margination and two worked-owned businesses, one of which is Papi & Daughters. Ramon was one of the folks working in Chester in the maintenance department, actually, but he also did a lot of work mentoring housing authority residents to own their own businesses in the building trades. And they were using the housing authority as the anchor customer for these businesses. Really interesting idea. The institutional evolution that it took to make it sustainable wasn't there within the timeframe that we needed it to be, so we are doing it on our own terms.
	Ramon was born in Honduras. He started working in construction at the age of 11, mixing concrete. He's got an 8th grade education. He came to this country washing dishes on a cruise ship in the 70s and has spent the last 30 years basically as a journeyman tradesperson doing carpentry work. This is someone who can build you anything, who's the most skilled carpenter you'll ever meet. But English is his first language, he's not going to write a business plan, he's not going to file his own tax return. The things that he needs to do to achieve security out of the skills that he has are out of his reach.
	Now, as part of Margination, as part of this community, we all have those skills collectively. So, Ramon hooked up with Georgia and Francisco to start Papi & Daughters. And between the three of them, they have a lot of these capacities, I have some of them, and we just bootstrapped it. Papi & Daughters got a $5,000 loan from the Margination nonprofit which came out of our very first donation and they started a successful business. They did about $80,000 over the course of about six months in business last year. 
	Now, the infrastructure piece of this is still in the embryonic stages. But, this is a great example. A set of scaffolding that would cost a new business $3,000 to buy, as part of an infrastructure is very cheap to rent out to someone and suddenly Ramon goes from doing handyman jobs to doing big, $10,000, $15,000 jobs that are actually creating work for folks. That's a little case study of what we're after. I forgot to mention, Kimberly, his daughter, which is another angle of the social supports, Ramon would struggle to figure out healthcare for himself. He would struggle to put Kimberly in a good school in an urban environment. We were able to help him with that. So these are all the kinds of things that folks need, first to achieve stability and then to think about actually reaching and taking the risks to start something that would make a difference and create opportunity for other folks.
	We move from that little case study to a five-year vision of what Margination looks like. Again, using this motif of the community, the enterprise, and the infrastructure to think about how this thing is structured. We've got the big, old Victorian house that a lot of us live in right now, is the first piece of infrastructure. We've got three family residential I'll show you some pictures of, we're rehabbing that now. So, housing, shared commercial space, and ultimately, a piece of rural property, we want to have as well. To really have a self-sufficient system. Really an ecosystem of both housing, a commercial infrastructure, and food production. 
	We've got the first two businesses. Thinking about how these can spin off more, how there can be synergies between businesses that cooperate in terms of purchasing, marketing, tools and equipment. And then a growing community of folks that has equity in the project, that owns some of these businesses, that cooperatively manage this nonprofit infrastructure, and that support each other. A lot of the work that traditional social service agencies do, we do in terms of case management, helping apply for benefits, all that kind of stuff, we do on a much more organic, ad hoc, informal basis as members of a community. It's really the village approach to economic development, you might call it.
	Let's see. Where are we going next? This is one of our big current projects. This is a tax foreclosure, abandoned three-unit apartment building that we bought from the city in November. It cost us $1,000 to buy this building because it was abandoned, and for most people, even at $1,000 purchase price, the economics of fixing this place up don't make sense. It takes about $150,000 to fix it up. If you wanted to flip it and sell it on the open market, it would be worth about $80,000. So, that's the kind of real estate market we're talking about in places like Troy.
	But for us, this rehab has a lot of different benefits. One, it creates training opportunities. These are trainees with the local youth build program, which is an AmeriCorps-funded program that's run by an organization we've partnered with called the Commission on Economic Opportunity. This rehab is right in their neighborhood, they're learning skills, and they're confronting blights in their neighborhood at the same time. When this building is done, it will be housing for more Margination members. Folks who are coming in, getting job training, getting support, starting a business. They're also getting a roof over their head at an affordable price. The money that they would be paying in rent to an absentee landlord, most likely, is going back into this infrastructure that's supporting them. Ultimately, we want to explore, as well, how housing can create equity-building opportunities for folks, as well.
	The other big thing that we're focusing on, and this is my focus, is a capital campaign. We've got this residential infrastructure growing, we need a commercial infrastructure. This warehouse is just a few doors down. It's actually right in between the big, white Victorian and the little red apartment building. It's a 13,000 square foot warehouse that we can buy for $150,000. It's in great shape. It's got an open floor plan. This is the kind of facility that in New York City would probably cost you $5 or $6 million dollars. These are the kind of possibilities that are there.
	Our vision for this space is to basically have everything under one roof that someone walking off the street would need to create a livelihood for themselves. A workshop, a commercial kitchen, a media studio, flexible shared office space and meeting space, and a café and retail space. This will be a flagship property. Our public face. Our headquarters for this infrastructure in Troy. We're trying to raise a little over $300,000 in the next six months for this. We've done about $35,000 so far in just a couple of weeks of fundraising 3,000 miles away in California. And we're now getting into the local scene of foundations, nonprofits, philanthropists. Pretty exciting and it's my job and yeah. It's a real learning experience and it's a lot of fun.
	One last slide here. I'm going to leave you with Thaddicus. Thaddicus we met through that youth build program that I mentioned. He graduated in the last term, so he wasn't working on our building, but when we were first talking to them, both to the instructor and to the manager of the program, we asked them, "Who is your best graduate? We want to offer them a job." And everyone was unanimous. Thaddicus was the guy. He lives two blocks down from us. He's 19 years old and he lives in a four bedroom apartment with him mom, his 80-year-old grandmother, his 17-year-old brother, his brother's baby, and his 15-year-old brother, and his 14-year-old sister. He is so smart, so thoughtful, and he's basically what we call in the social service business, a [thread to five 00:34:34] young person. So, it is his job to take care of his younger siblings at the age of 19, and to take care of his mother, who has a brain aneurysm and could drop dead at any moment.
	I just want to leave you with the question, what does it take for someone like Thaddicus who now has skills in the building trades, he's motivated, he's focused to overcome the obstacles in his life, to actually become an asset to the community. This is really the question that drives what we're doing at Margination. This is the kind of gap we're filling in the social service infrastructure. When he graduated from youth build, the best that all those folks could do, who said that he was the best graduate that they had, the best they could do for him was find him a job disassembling computer parts for $8 a computer, when the computers were there, for recycling.
	He's had seven months worth of training, about $20,000 of program funding put into him and there simply aren't any jobs, so there's this huge disconnect between what's there in terms of developing people and what the opportunities are. This is the kind of situation that led us to the conclusion that we need to be comprehensive. You can't build skills when there aren't jobs. You can't create jobs when people don't have the skills and they don't have the supports to take advantage of the opportunities. With that, I will shut up and let's have a more organic conversation. Thank you all for listening.
	Yeah.
Speaker 4:	[00:36:23] I was just wondering, to start off with the racial composition of Troy?
Jesse Marshall:	Yeah, it's a great question. It's very diverse. It's about 15% African-American. The Hispanic population has doubled in the last 10 years. I don't remember the exact numbers. A lot of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans. My sense is they are getting priced out of New York City and moving upstate, where the housing is more affordable and where there's more opportunity. Troy also has a big university, RPI, and a smaller college, so there are professors, there are graduate students, there's the beginnings of markets for the kind of services that we're trying to set people up to provide. That was one of the things that we loved about Troy, but it's certainly not unique either. 
	Yeah.
Speaker 5:	[00:37:17] Well, first, I wanted to say thank you so much for coming. I think you did a fantastic job, this is your first time out, I loved the story telling.
Jesse Marshall:	Thanks, good.
Speaker 5:	And so, knowing that you're from San Francisco originally and you were a student at Swarthmore, you worked in Chester and now you're working in Troy, neither of which is your hometown. Can you talk about how you go about entering into a community that's not your own and getting to know and be a part of it?
Jesse Marshall:	Yeah, definitely. It's not as complicated as it sounds. Because part of what motivated me to do this project was the experience of working in Chester, where it was much more of an issue. Where I was coming into town, collecting a paycheck to work on these problems and then going home at the end of the day to my shared house in West Philadelphia with my white, college-educated roommates. In Troy, it's a pretty different situation because we basically are the community. We bought a house, we're living there, and so the way that we entered into the community is by being ourselves. We are not going around having big community meetings, talking to folks about what the community needs, because I think everyone knows what the community needs is jobs. People need income. So, we've spent the last 18 months quietly getting ourselves established, getting ourselves solid, doing this experiment on the group to figure out what works and what it takes to start a business in a place like Troy. Now, we're slowly getting out and talking to people and the beginning of the conversation is about work. We really are just sort of like everyone else that's living there who's trying to get by.
	Yeah.
Speaker 6:	[00:39:20] Political scientists like to talk about a phrase that I don't much like, about social capital, and I'm curious about what exists on the ground in Troy and have some of these neighbors in the community been involved with each other in other kinds of projects? Are you having to try to build that as you go or what might have brought them together in the past?
Jesse Marshall:	Yeah, that's a great question. Social capital is a really interesting term and I think it's relevant here because despite me saying 30 seconds ago that we're just like everyone else, the thing that really separates us is that I have social capital and I have cultural capital. I can make this logo. I have 700 friends on Facebook all over the world. So, I do have the ability to bring resources to back me up in a way that folks in this community don't. But to answer your question more directly, part of the reason why we chose Troy was the community, the network of grassroots activism and projects that were already going on. And that community really is what attracted us and helped us get settled. There are gardening projects happening. There's a transition town group. There are pretty active churches. 
	But at the same time, the folks who brought us there, who are doing the garden, even in this neighborhood, the folks who are organizing concerts at the independent media center, they are still part of the university community and the middle class. And they care about this community very much but most of them don't live in it. And so, they were kind of like I was in Chester. Folks who are really low income, who have been living in this community for a long time, church is really the main thing that they have. If they have that. But there is a real sense of atomization, of isolation. There isn't a lot of collaboration going on. 
	Yeah.
Speaker 7:	[00:41:39] What did you mean by going beyond identity politics?
Jesse Marshall:	Yeah, so the folks here, even those of us who don't look particularly diverse are in our backgrounds, so we've got different religions in the group, we've got different sexual orientations in the group, and these are all things that are recognized and cherished, but there's a lot of stuff ... think about diet for this group living in the same house, for example, that we just put on the back burner and say, "We have bigger fish to fry than what kind of food we're going to eat." A lot of the issues that I think your standard collective house spends most of their time grappling with: whether to use paper towels or not, whether it's okay for two men to have sexual relations, these are the things that we have this pact that we're here for this bigger mission. We're here to create more space for folks to come in and figure this stuff out. So, that's kind of what I meant. I'm not sure if that answers your question.
Speaker 8:	[00:43:13] Some of what you're doing reminds me of the anarchist [inaudible 00:42:57] of Spain, where the workers owned their own businesses and even the industrial workers of the world, their ideal was that the workers should own their places of where they work. How do you ... have you been able to draw from that history anything rather than having to start from scratch to see what did they do?
Jesse Marshall:	Sure. Yeah. The question I get more often is around, what are the models today? And there are various components of what we are doing are alive and well today, so there's a real resurgence of worker-owned cooperatives in this country, which is really exciting and a lot of buzz around that. Cooperative housing has been around for a long time. And in terms of historical antecedents, that territory is much more rich, I think. Even Spain is a really interesting example, but in this country, you look, actually in Troy was the first women-owned industrial cooperative around laundries and textile production. And that was in the late 19th century. 
	The one that really stands out for me is more actually in California during the Depression, because I think that the context is a little more analogous to the situation in Troy today. But the ... what was it called? The UXA, the Unemployed Exchange Association, was really, in the same way that we're building a network of small structures, they had a network of small cooperatives that started around taking abandoned pieces of machinery that were no longer being used because it was the Depression, and these were mechanics who were unemployed, and so they fixed them up and put them back to use and created their own capital by pooling resources. And they expanded into ... gosh ... into, they had a saw mill, they had a kitchen, they had a repair shop. So there are definitely a lot of antecedents that we draw from.
	I think that the context today, particularly because of the culture that we live in, is really different and there's a real ... oh, that's not good. Four hours? You think we'll be done in four hours? There are political and ideological barriers to coming together in the way that we're coming together that didn't exist in the 19th century in Troy or in the 1930s. Yeah.
Speaker 9:	[00:45:49] You said that there' a ... you think there's less resistance in Troy than there is in New York where this economy is a lot more stratified and there's a lot more capital there. So do you have any sense of how the town, the university people and administration at Emma Willard might be afterwards?
Jesse Marshall:	Emma Willard? Nice got.
Speaker 9:	Have you fundraised there yet? [crosstalk 00:45:58]
Jesse Marshall:	Not yet, do you have a connection for me?
Speaker 9:	There's always [inaudible 00:46:00] that go through [inaudible 00:46:02], but yeah.
Jesse Marshall:	Cool.
Speaker 9:	I was just wondering what your thoughts were about it.
Jesse Marshall:	Yeah, we have been very well received and it's really been the last couple of months, it's been really exciting. But I had a meeting with the head of RPI's entrepreneurship program last week and this is someone who came out of the software startup world and is an engineer and thinks about the economy in terms of global foundries and the production of computer chips, but who, when he was a grad student, lived in this neighborhood in Troy and has never gotten past the income disparity that exists and the capital up on the hill that is RPI, versus the folks that are living in this town. 
	Part of it, too, I think has to do with the language that we use, which a lot of work went into phrases like, "cooperate and prosper." They're very ... one person called them post-political. We're not using the terminology that anarchists use or that socialists, even, use. We're really trying to get back to much more basic not-polarizing ideas about coming together, sharing skills, this is a village. And that really just has to do with our conviction that futures like this need to be accessible to different kinds of people if they're going to work. So, again, it's back to the identity politics thing, in a way, folks that I know who are lefties who were involved in Occupy, which I was involved in, being a lefty is part of their identity. And it was a part of my identity and I kind of left it at the door, because talking ... saying certain words doesn't achieve the objectives that you want it to achieve. Yeah.
Speaker 10:	[00:48:06] Given your nine people and your own diverse set of skills, but what skills have been most integral to you getting set up and what surprises have there been and doors have opened by the cooperating with nine people?
Jesse Marshall:	That's a good question. The skills that have been most useful ... let's see. Obviously, the construction stuff is obvious, the cultural capital has been huge. I think the combination of those two has been the most explosive. Being able to take someone with these incredible skills, this incredible ability to teach someone like Ramon or Francisco and link them up with someone like Blaine, who's doing graphic design work for clients all over the country, and knows how to connect with different kinds of markets, has been really interesting. The other big one, I think, has been ... really I think what our strength is is our understanding of people and our experience working with people from different backgrounds. I would say that ... he would kill me if he heard me say this, but his MSW has been huge. The work that it takes to get folks to see eye to eye, to trust each other, to take risks together, that is a skill.
Speaker 9:	Whose MSW?
Jesse Marshall:	Rick. Yeah. Was there a third part of the question?
Speaker 10:	What surprises?
Jesse Marshall:	Right, what surprises? I think how much work it takes to get people to be interdependent in this way. What it ... the kind of explosiveness that it can create was a pleasant surprise, but how much work it takes, on the other hand, and what it means to really build a culture from scratch, that was surprising. Yeah.
Speaker 11:	[00:50:06] You talked a little bit about how you envisioned Margination developing in the next few years. I'm wondering how you see your own work developing in the next few years, especially when I imagine Margination becomes sustainable economically and you don't necessarily need to fundraise all these huge amounts of money.
Jesse Marshall:	Right. That's a great question. I dream, when I'm feeling stressed out and frustrated, I dream about just having Ramon be my boss. I love construction work and then I'm like, you know what? We should just forget about fundraising, just live a simple life. But I think our goal is to have this be a model that other communities can follow. It's open source, we're documenting everything that we do, but I think there's a role for folks who have been through this first round and I really see myself as a generalist. I studied political science. Carol was my advisor. I can't code, I can't build stuff, but I can connect dots and I can make ideas comprehensible to a software startup guru and to Kimberly, the 13-year-old from Honduras. I think that there is always going to be a role for that expansion or expansion is not the right word ... replication. Yeah.
Speaker 12:	[00:51:30] How did you decide how far you were going to go to fundraise? You said you were out in California. Does the local ... did that ... how did you decide to go all the way across the country if you wanted to be more local?
Jesse Marshall:	Right. We started in California because that's where our social capital is. Because I'm the son of two progressive lawyers in San Francisco who have a lot of progressive professional friends. Because Blaine is the son of two lawyers in Los Angeles. And so, part of it was, we're very new at this. Several of us have run programs at nonprofits before. None of us have been the development people. So it was a way to break the ice among people who have known us for a long time and who love us and who are also 3,000 miles away from the people that really count. That was, I think it worked out really nicely. We got our credibility by raising that money, we got our practice, and now we're back in Troy and Albany and New York City doing it. Yeah. Jacob.
Jacob:	[00:52:38] What's the vision for bringing other people into this community? What I mean specifically is what would that practically look like? What would you have to have and when do you look at somebody from Troy in the eye and say, your success isn't as important to me as mine or ...
Jesse Marshall:	Yeah, that's a really good question and one that we're, particularly with the beginning of this rehab project and we've done a lot of construction work for other clients, that apartment building that we're renovating from scratch is our first in-house project and so, it's allowing us to bring people in as trainees, as employees, really for the first time. And so, we've got a guy named Brian who works in construction, he's 33, has a wife and a four-year-old kid who's been working with us in this building. He got laid off from his state employee job two and a half years ago and hasn't been able to find steady work since. And so, for us, we want people to be employees for as little time as possible. It's really just a way to check folks out. 
	But the progression, in general, is that the two entry points, if you have the skills already, you can get employed in one of the businesses. If you don't, you become a trainee through the nonprofit, and you're basically a participant in a program that is funded by my fundraising. And the nice thing about having this comprehensive model is that we've got a nonprofit structure, but it's partnering everyday with businesses. Folks get immediate, on-the-job training in whatever area they're in.
	And then, the goal is to as quickly as possible move someone from participant in a program to provisional member in the network and what that means is basically that you're on the track to being a co-owner of a business that's supported by the Margination nonprofit and within a year, you have an equity stake in the business and you're committing to the success of the other owners in the network and you're committing to dedicating all of your training and new job opportunities to new folks coming in. That's kind of the progression.
	But, we're very small. We're very new. It really is kind of whatever works. And our general operating principle is that whatever works for each new person coming in, that will become part of the process, and by the time we maybe have five people who have been at it in this way, we'll know what the process looks like. But, this is the research and development part of this that makes it really fun.
	Yeah.
Speaker 6:	[00:55:29] Under the Obama administration, is there any federal money going to rebuilding America's rust belt cities in ways that you guys have any hope of tapping? Or is the agenda really different of theirs?
Jesse Marshall:	Yeah, that hasn't come up at all. I think that if there is money, it's in infrastructure. The state of New York has a lot of money for supporting startups. Their focus is much more in tech stuff, because that's where the money and the future tax revenue is for them. But, no, not that I'm aware of. Yeah.
Speaker 8:	[00:56:12] I know that recently that there have been people in New York City who organized their house cleaners kind of organized themselves and healthcare workers, rather than working for an agency, because so much of the money is drained from the workers to the agencies. I think that would be a relatively easy way to get people organized and by bringing in a few people who have the skills of management to help with that, I think that would be really, really a good starting place in a community that maybe not had the infrastructure for businesses.
Jesse Marshall:	Right. Totally. And what's nice about those is that they're mobile. You can be based in a poor community and bring resources into that community without relying on your neighbors as consumers, when they don't have any expendable income. The largest worker-owned cooperative in the US is that home health aid cooperative in New York City. So, definitely a model and we're hooked in with the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives and they actually ... they have a little institute now in New York City, which is really exciting, to build capacity for organizations like us. Yeah.
Speaker 9:	Can I ask another question?
Jesse Marshall:	Of course. 
Speaker 9:	So when you say the home health aids and house cleaners my social [inaudible 00:57:29] in my brain saying, but they're just trapping people to wage slavery for the rest of ... it's the way the [inaudible 00:57:36] economy has been expanding for years and years. I was wondering how your nonprofit is envisioning getting people, and you already touched on this, but to avoid falling into wage slavery?
Jesse Marshall:	Right. I mean, that's what the last person was commenting on with the idea of them being worker cooperatives is that suddenly you're not a wage slave anymore. Those businesses in particular, that are employing disadvantaged folks, often immigrants whose language ... their first language is Spanish or something else, there is a class of managers, of agents, of brokers, that takes a huge cut out of the money that they make, right? So an agency might charge a client $20 an hour and pay the aid $9 an hour. But if the business is owned by the workers and there is even, potentially, a nonprofit providing some of those services, suddenly a much bigger chunk ... it's still really hard work. It's also one of the few parts of the economy that's growing right now is healthcare. So, that's the difference between the last cooperatives in Troy in the 1890s when it was the industrial revolution and folks were flooding into town because there were so many jobs, even if they sucked. Now there simply aren't any jobs. So ... yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:	[00:59:06] When you use the word disinvestment, I assume you're referring to actual decisions maybe made by politicians or private business actors that led to the vacant buildings and the [inaudible 00:59:18] that's experienced in Troy. I'm wondering if you have any specific examples? I'm just doing research in something like that in North Philadelphia this summer, so ...
Jesse Marshall:	Yeah, I think it's a combination of discrete decisions, like the one you're talking about and just big, macroeconomic changes. So, they're just ... industry ... it's funny, the big narrative about the industrialization is that factories went overseas in the 70s, starting. In Troy, factories left for the Midwest during the Great Depression, and they didn't really come back after World War II. So, we're talking about almost a longer legacy of disinvestment than in places like Detroit, or even places like Chester. There's this incredible infrastructure in place from those days. Downtown Troy is coming back a little bit with more bourgeois-oriented businesses because it's so charismatic. It's walkable. It was the place to see and be seen in 1890 and it suddenly is again, a little bit.
	I don't know if that answers your question. But, yeah, the ironworks in Troy was one of the largest in the country and now it's gone. Yeah. And just simply with population loss. There's just a lot of vacancy. Yep. Yeah.
Jacob:	[01:00:58] What sort of analytics, for lack of a better word, are you guys especially interested in keeping track of both in terms of yourselves and in terms of the community, to try to go present the case, for example, to donors or whoever that you're having an impact on a community? How do you measure that?
Jesse Marshall:	Right. That's a great question. We have an open invitation to folks out there to help us with that. We don't really have the capacity internally to be taking those metrics. But the things that we measure our own success by are basically number of businesses off the ground, really number of livelihoods created, number of buildings restored, number of folks who can pay taxes to the city and who can contribute to the improvement of the neighborhood.
	Yeah.
Speaker 12:	[01:01:58] I was wondering if, since it's kind of small right now and you're not necessarily employing all their own people yet, I was wondering how you interact with or deal with folks who you're working very closely with but may not share this vision. I guess, you said you're partnering with this youth group. There might be other folks at your department working on a day-to-day basis with who might not have buy-in to this idea.
Jesse Marshall:	Right. I think the big difference is really about folks' commitment to the project. We're obviously very committed, the administrators at the Commission on Economic Opportunity, have less of a stake in what we're doing. But there's a pretty broad recognition among a lot of different kinds of people for the need for what we're doing. So that story about Thaddicus being the best graduate and then having no jobs, they see us as that piece that gets layered on top of the infrastructure that they have that is actually going to make their work have the outcomes that they want it to have in terms of employment, business creation, all that kind of stuff.
	Another example is the big nonprofit that does social services, that does supportive housing, that has a food pantry that helps folks get their benefits. They're excited about us because they recognize their work is more conventional stabilization, basically. Someone comes in off the street after losing their home and they help them get a roof over their head, get their next three meals and figure out how to get food stamps, but then what? This is kind of the missing ticket that not a lot of folks are doing. For us, the magic ingredient really is the community piece. It's that mutual commitment, which is also the hardest part.
	Does anyone want to know how they can contribute? I should have ... one of my friends, I should have planted that question. Glad you asked, Bobby.
	We are looking for research partners and interns from academia. We've got a residential internship program happening this summer where folks can come live with us, eat with us every day, have a real hands-on project that they develop in partnership with us and really contribute to this model being built from the ground up. So it's a pretty special opportunity. That's something to think about. There's also longer-term, if you're interested in this kind of stuff, which maybe you are because you're in this room, I've got so many things that I need researched and developed. If you had a project where you said, "Man, I wish that I was ... I'm writing this paper about disinvestment. If only there was someone out there who could really use the paper that I produce." Well, I can use it as long as you talk to me in the development of it. So, just another thing to think about.
	And then I hope, when our crowdfunding campaign launches this spring, that you've all liked Margination on Facebook and you broadcast it to hell and high water ... that's a mixed metaphor if I ever heard one ... so that we can raise this money. You can donate online now. Folks like you are really the bridge between where we're at now and when we raise the capital for this building, so we're really depending on regular folks to help us in our day-to-day operations as we reach this next level, which is fast approaching, but we still ... every little bit counts. That can be done online at fund.margination.org. And just, share us. 
	We're going to have some news stories coming out soon. Put them on your Facebook page, all that. This is really how it's worked. All the connections that I've made locally over the last week came out of a little story in a measly blog called All Over Albany that probably about 500 people look at, but it was enough to end up with a series of connections that have me at the upper echelons of RPI and at the big local community foundations and that kind of stuff.
	Each of you has a tendril to draw for us, so keep us in mind. Yeah. How are we doing on time? Okay. Are people tired? I'm tired. Are there any more burning questions or are we wrapping it up? Wrapping it up. All right. Thank you all so much. I had a great time.