.In a more sustainable economy, everyone would have a vast array of local choices for investing, saving, and borrowing money. We’re looking beyond Wall Street and giant corporate financial service providers and asking: How can community members pool their financial resources to support the thriving of our local economies?

We develop resources, incubate projects, and advocate for policies to give communities greater control of and access to capital and financial services. We navigate legal and practical questions around local investing, community-sourced capital raising, lending circles, complementary currencies, mission investing, and more. To finance local enterprises, land, and farms, we help communities tap into pools of capital, such as community capital (savings and investments of ordinary people), retirement savings, foundation endowments, and more. 

Click below to learn more about our projects and resources:

Transfer Retirement Savings Out of Wall Street

Create More Investment Funds, Permanent Cooperatives, and other Financing Intermediaries

Increase the Use of Direct Public Offerings (DPOs)

Adopt State Income Tax Incentives for Local Investments

Support Economies Based on Barter, Gifts, Time Banks, and Local Currencies

Resource Libraries

Check out our two legal resource libraries:

1. CommunityEnterpriseLaw.org with information financing, local investing, business entities, employment, and land and housing. 
2. CommunityCurrenciesLaw.org with information on barter, time banks, and local currencies.

Resource Guides: 

• Grassroots Financing Guide for California Farmers
• Capital Raising for Worker Cooperatives: Using the AB 816 Community Investor Provision

Videos: 

• Securities Law Basics video, featuring squirrel cartoons!
• Legal Basics for Time Banks and Barter Exchanges, featuring soup cartoons!
• Legal Basics for Complementary Currencies, Part 1
• Legal Basics for Complementary Currencies, Part 2

This work is funded, in part, by a grant from the Clarence E. Heller Foundation.

America's retirement investment system is broken.

Locally-owned businesses represent 60 to 80 percent of the U.S. economy and are highly profitable and competitive, yet they are disconnected from the trillions of dollars invested in Wall Street mutual funds, pension funds, and insurance funds that control your long-term retirement savings. 

We want to change that.

Crowdfunding and other recent changes in the law make it cheaper and easier for all of us to invest in local businesses, projects, and people, but almost no one knows how to connect these opportunities with our current retirement and workplace savings plans. Self-Directed IRAs, solo 401(k)s, and employee-directed 401(k)s are alternatives, but are underutilized. This is due to legal barriers, cost barriers, and lack of public awareness and education. 

We want to change that and tap into the incredible potential of retirement savings to help you invest in locally-owned and socially-just enterprises!

Introducing: The Next Egg

The Next Egg creates resources, builds communities, and shares tools necessary so that millions of us can move our retirement savings out of Wall Street and into our local communities. These tools include self-directed IRAs, solo 401(k)s, and employee-directed 401(k)s. Whether you work for yourself, are an employee, or run a business, we will help you access the best—and least expensive—tools for localizing tax-deferred savings. If we succeed, we will see trillions flow into our communities and out of the global corporations.

Who We Are:

Our core team includes LIFT Economy (Kevin Bayuk and Erin Axelrod), the Sustainable Economies Law Center (Janelle Orsi, Cameron Rhudy, Sophia Leswing, and Sue Bennett), and author Michael H. Shuman.

Sign up and get involved!

We're asking everyone to join by contributing $9.99 per month, which includes access to monthly webinars, resources, and the community we're building! If the price tag is a challenge for you, email Janelle [at] theselc.org and we'll send you an invite to join for free. GO TO https://www.thenextegg.org/ TO JOIN!

En Español:

Cómo: Vender Productos de Patios Traseros, Jardines Comunitarios y Granjas Pequeñas

Cómo: Vender Huevos en California

Cómo: Crear una Empresa de Comida Casera

Save Seed Sharing Page: Check out our Seed Democracy Advocacy Toolkit and our Seed Law Toolshed here.

Legal Advice: We offer donation-based legal advice to small-scale food enterprises and other community-based enterprises through our Resilient Communities Legal Cafe. Locations rotate weekly to different San Francisco Bay Area locations. Click here to see the schedule and RSVP.

Case Studies

• Revising the CA Labor Code to support small-scale farmers

Creative Financing: Check out our Grassroots Finance page.

Bite-Sized Guides: We are constantly creating new easy-to-understand legal guides on a variety of topics, including food and farming! Click here to visit see all of our bite-sized guides.

By Julie Gilgoff, Legal Fellow //

While billion dollar development companies eat up affordable housing units throughout the Bay Area, dedicated teams of organizers, nonprofit service providers, community development corporations, and others fight a relentless battle along side and on behalf of those at threat of displacement. Some are seeking to transform the current system of land ownership, removing profit incentives, and assuring that the land is used for the benefit of longtime community residents.

By Chris Tittle, Director of Organizational Resilience //

At a recent Oakland City Council meeting, Wilson Riles, a community leader and former City Councilmember, reminded us why Wall Street is so-called: it actually had a wall built around it in the 17th century to keep out Native tribes displaced by early colonists.

It’s also worth remembering that Wall Street was the site of New York City’s first slave market, and the first modern financial instruments were developed to collateralize Black bodies in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

This Guide discusses options for obtaining funds for farm enterprises in California through methods other than bank and institutional loans. With growing consumer interest in local sources of food, there are increasing opportunities for farmers to include their customers, friends, family, neighbors, and other community members in the farm enterprise as investors. Receiving investment dollars from community members instead of larger institutions may also be more feasible for many beginning farmers, since banks and other institutions generally only lend to well established businesses with steady revenues.

However, numerous state and federal laws apply to soliciting investments from individuals and organizations, which this Guide will explain in detail. These laws are collectively known as securities law and they are primarily designed to protect investors from entering into fraudulent or overly risky investment deals. Before asking anyone for money, farmers should be aware of the basic of securities law.

Click here to view and download the guide.

Released in September, 2017

Written by Christina Oatfield, Policy Director for the Sustainable Economies Law Center. This guide was supported by the Beginning Farmer and Rancher Grant of the USDA-NIFA program titled, Growing Roots: Deepening Support for Diverse New Farmers and Ranchers in California, Grant # 2015-70017-22868.

By Christina Oatfield, Sustainable Economies Law Center Policy Director

I just stumbled upon an opinion piece by Adam Calo in the San Francisco Chronicle from several months back, which describes the crisis of farmland access and ownership facing beginning farmers. It very poignantly calls on farmers and eaters to engage in policy, specifically around farmland ownership and lack of access to farmland on reasonable lease terms for beginning farmers.

By Sustainable Economies Law Center Executive Director, Janelle Orsi

So often, it comes back to money. Questions of finance are tethered to nearly every issue we work on at the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Efforts to build sustainable systems for food, housing, energy, water, and jobs rely on a community’s ability to access and transact with dollars.

Contact: Christina Oatfield, (415) 8285627, [email protected]

OAKLAND, CA.— Sponsored by the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), the California Local Economies Securities Act (AB2751) passed through the CA Assembly Banking and Finance Committee. LESA will exempt certain securities offerings from California permit requirements, and therefore open doors to raising capital for a variety of enterprises necessary to the economic and ecological health of California, including small farms, agricultural land trusts, cooperatives, nonprofit organizations with business income, and renewable energy systems. It was introduced by Assemblymember Cheryl Brown.