Five Big Ideas from My Monthly Conversation with Jen Risley
If you’d rather watch than read, the replay is right at the top of this post. If you did watch, think of this as the “take-home version”—the themes Jen and I kept circling, the “wait—say that again” moments, and a few lines worth underlining.
We kicked off in full holiday spirit. Jen teased me for “dressing up for the gig,” and I confessed I’d spent “six months growing the beard for Christmas.”
That’s the vibe of these monthly conversations: friendly, real, and (we hope) useful.
And we do this every month because we’re deeply aligned. As I put it, we share “ambitions for the way capital can work in our society,” and we want readers to know what the other is doing.
Jen edits The Main Street Journal; I publish Superpowers for Good. Different lenses, same mission: community investment, community ownership, and systems that serve people better.
What follows are the five big ideas that stood out in this month’s conversation—grounded in the articles we discussed, but centered on what we said to each other.
1) Convenience can be expensive—and communities pay twice
We opened with a topic that’s quietly enormous: how public agencies buy everyday supplies.
I mentioned that I’d seen Amazon marketing itself to schools and had been “consciously curious” about whether it was truly a better way than local bulk contracts.
The answer, according to the reporting we discussed, is often no—because “dynamic pricing” can mean schools pay a premium for routine purchases.
Jen broadened the frame immediately. It’s not just schools; it’s “cities, and other municipalities” too.
She acknowledged why it happens—“It’s easy to have your staff log onto Amazon and place all the orders”—and then landed the gut punch:
“But if it’s actually reducing your tax base and it’s also costing you more, you really have to rethink that.”
That tax-base point was the one I admitted I’d missed. It isn’t only that public funds can be overspent; it’s that those dollars aren’t circulating locally with vendors “who would be paying some local taxes as well.”
Jen also emphasized something I loved: this isn’t just “here’s the problem.” She pointed to the organizing work behind the scenes—the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and allied groups—and the move from awareness to action: “now they’re putting out toolkits and things like that… how can we work collectively to change the policies in our schools and our local government?”
That’s the pattern to watch for again and again: when money leaks out of a community, the fix isn’t only personal choices. It’s governance—policy, procurement rules, and collective action.
2) When “the good guys” get big, they can drift—and we can’t ignore it
Next, we turned to credit unions—an area that hit close to home for me. I shared that early in my career I worked on Capitol Hill on legislation that “governs credit unions to this day,” and I felt a little guilty seeing today’s challenges play out.
Jen didn’t let me wallow. She laughed and put me on the “naughty list.” (Holiday-themed accountability—apparently a new tradition.)
But the substance here matters. The problem we discussed isn’t “credit unions are bad.” It’s that some very large credit unions can start behaving like the institutions they were meant to be an alternative to—especially when scale and incentives change.
Jen captured the emotional reality of it perfectly:
“You wanna believe in something… ‘here’s an institution I can believe in. A hundred percent.’ And then… when it becomes bigger, it starts to lose that connection with the community.”
That’s not just true of credit unions. It’s true of almost every institution that starts as mission-driven and ends up measured primarily by growth.
And Jen went one step further: mission drift doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It can shape what institutions support—or oppose—when new community-building tools appear.
3) “Move your money” is about power, not purity
Jen shared something from her own annual rhythm that I think deserves to be a bigger part of more people’s lives.
“Every April… I do a move your money month,” she said, where the focus is “banking local and investing local.”
That matters because “move your money” isn’t a slogan. It’s a strategy. It’s how ordinary people regain leverage in systems that are designed to make us feel small.
And then Jen told a story that connects directly to the credit-union conversation. Some groups approached her organization asking support for public banking. She did the homework—read widely, spoke with Michael Shuman—and her reaction was visceral: “wow, this looks incredible… what a great opportunity for our communities and our municipalities.”
But then: “When I looked at our credit union bigger partners, they were against public banks.”
And she admitted what many of us feel when we discover conflict inside “the good ecosystem”: “nothing is easy and nothing simple.”
That line has been ringing in my ears.
We want clean heroes and clean villains. But community economics is messier than that. Sometimes the institutions we trust most will resist the changes that would most empower communities—because those changes threaten their position.
The takeaway isn’t cynicism. The takeaway is clarity: follow the incentives, and keep building tools that keep power close to the people.
4) Public banking isn’t a fantasy—it’s a practical “how do we pay for it?” answer
One of Jen’s biggest highlights this month was a Main Street Journal piece aimed at New York City’s mayor-elect—focused on a question every ambitious leader faces: how do you pay for big promises?
Jen summarized the challenge: leaders talk about “free buses… affordable housing and all that great stuff,” and the immediate pushback is: “Are you gonna raise the taxes?”
And then the pivot:
“Why raise taxes? Why not start a public bank like the Bank of North Dakota?”
Jen walked through the core logic: instead of parking public funds in the usual places, a city could create a public bank, place deposits in local banks and credit unions, and use the interest “to go into the economic development projects that they were really passionate about.”
She also highlighted what I think is the most exciting civic-finance idea embedded in the conversation: a city making it easy for residents to see and support local investment options—“lists of local investment options… regulated crowdfunding that you could invest in,” plus incentives like “tax credits to people who are investing in locally owned businesses.”
This is a bridge between our two worlds: Jen’s focus on local economic ecosystems and my focus on regulated crowdfunding as a practical pathway to community ownership.
If you’re someone who wants to do more than “vote and hope,” this is a lane worth learning about.
5) Climate solutions must scale—and communities shouldn’t be steamrolled
Jen also brought up my rebroadcast interview with Project Drawdown’s Jonathan Foley and the idea of “100 different climate solutions that we could all take on.”
She liked that Foley can translate science into outreach—“so that people understand their choices make a huge impact.”
I shared a core point from that conversation: “climate solutions have to scale, quickly” because “the problem is enormous.”
And I noted a specific example—how conventional concrete “continues to emit carbon long after it’s built,” while innovators are developing alternatives that can reverse the effect.
But the most important part of our exchange wasn’t the science—it was the ethics of deployment.
I said that when we talk about scaling climate solutions, “we need to keep an eye on communities,” local and Indigenous, and “balance community interests” so projects don’t harm people.
Jen took that and sharpened it with today’s political reality:
“It’s gonna be even more of a challenge now because… it’s not being supported by our federal government. So it’s gonna really be up to the local communities… Having these conversations is more important than ever.”
And when I talked about the risk of plowing ahead too aggressively, Jen gave us the plainspoken guardrail: “Steamrolling over anybody.”
That’s the heart of it.
Scaling climate solutions is not just a technical problem. It’s a governance problem. An ownership problem. A trust problem. And that’s why Jen and I keep coming back to community investment and community ownership: if projects are happening in a place, people in that place should have a path to participate, benefit, and shape what happens next.
A moment of tenderness—and why it belongs in this conversation
Before we wrapped, I shared a Thanksgiving story that still has me a little misty: our grandson was fussy at dinner, nothing worked, and when I took a turn holding him, “he put his head on my shoulder and gave me a tight hug… and he was just at peace instantly.”
Jen’s response was exactly right: “My heart melted.”
I told Jen I was “stretching the metaphor a little bit,” but the connection feels real to me: community investing can create genuine relationships in a way that conventional investing doesn’t—investing in people you know, or get to know, and then doing business together in the same community.
That’s not just warm-and-fuzzy. It’s an alternative economic operating system.
One small (but meaningful) holiday request
Jen made the best pitch of the whole conversation, and I’m going to happily borrow it:
“If they have a long list for Santa, make sure that subscribing to Superpowers for Good is on that list… subscribing to both of our publications is just going to make more of an impact… and… we can learn together.”
So yes—watch the replay if you haven’t. Share it with someone who cares about community and fairness. And if you’re able, subscribe to The Main Street Journal and Superpowers for Good. This work is how we keep the conversation—and the practical solutions—moving.
Happy holidays, friends.
