Magic City Agriculture Project (MCAP) Points the Way Ahead with Practical Solutions for Poverty and Gentrification
Birmingham, Alabama - The City Council and Mayor squabble for power and debate whether the Mayor-Council Act is due to be amended, while the People of Birmingham are searching for answers to the questions of poverty and gentrification. At the core of the Mayor-Council Act debate is a proposal to transfer power from the Birmingham City Council to the mayor. Proponents claim the amendments are necessary to protect and promote the executive authority of the mayor’s office, while objectors state the proposal will cause undue harm to the City government and eliminate necessary checks and balances. The current debate shows that the People of Birmingham are seeking practical solutions, not more political grandstanding.
The promotion and establishment of locally controlled political and economic institutions changes clearly needed, and Magic City Agriculture Project is poised to provide solutions to these seemingly enigmatic issues of poverty and gentrification plaguing Birmingham. Over the previous two years, MCAP has collaborated to establish a 10-year strategic plan for addressing racial and economic disparities through developing a large-scale democratic economy and local sustainable food system across Greater Birmingham.
MCAP’s strategic plan focuses around the creation of four anchor institutions for creating a grassroots-controlled, democratic economy. Three of these institutions are included in City of Birmingham's comprehensive plan or in the subsequent framework plans. They represent the requirements for a functioning economy - land, labor, and capital. MCAP’s plan only costs a fraction of what the city has spent on downtown.
The Components of MCAP’s plan:
- Education: Birmingham Institute for Social Change. BISC is an anti-racist and community organizing training housed within MCAP.
- Labor: MCAP wants to start a cooperative training center. Cooperatives are worker-owned businesses that keep wealth in the hands of employees. Aquaponics is a highly productive agricultural production system able to sustain a profitable business. The cooperative training center will educate on business practices, cooperative economic principles, and aquaponics agricultural production. After training, apprentices will start their own firms, independent from MCAP.
- Capital: Community Enterprise Zones in partnership with the City of Birmingham. CEZs have two parts - $10 million in capitalization for a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), and a tiered job credit plan that favors democratized businesses. The zone will encompass an area of 50,000 low-income people within Birmingham. A CDFI is essentially a bank that does micro-lending for the purpose of community development. (Micro-lending was developed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammed Yunus in Bangladesh as a form of economic development for the poor.) A majority of the board of the CDFI will include residents from the CEZ.
- Land: Community Land Trusts for low-income homeownership and land use planning. The key feature of a CLT is dual ownership. The trust owns the grounds upon which a house or business sits, and the homeowner or business owners owns the improvements on those grounds. Representatives from home and business owners control the CLT allowing them to collectively make land use decisions for their communities.
Each institution will be an independent entity and controlled by community members. MCAP supports the self-determination of the institutions by serving in an advisory capacity while they are in the startup stage, and by assisting communities through education, information, training, and connections to resources. MCAP members may serve as board members of these community institutions, especially on Advisory Boards, but only by invitation, and never to be the majority or in control of the institution.
Magic City Agriculture Project's mission is to engage in value-based community organizing to reweave the threads of the community, develop sustainable urban agriculture as a solution for economic and food justice, and to dismantle racism.
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