“Building Community Responsibility for Economic Prosperity”

Seven Community Values ~ SHAREFC* manifest our mission statement:

• Sharing: Communities working together to enhance quality of life.
• Humor: Celebrating humor in our challenges.
• Accountability: How will our actions impact us and others?
• Respect: To uphold the dignity of every individual and our community.
• Education: A commitment to continuously improve ourselves by learning new ways of being and doing.
• Faith: The belief that we can transcend our limitations and be unwavering in our achievements.
• Creativity: The ability to be resourceful and innovative in moving forward!

The fundamental principals around which the Black Dollar Days Task Force is developed are:

• The belief that business growth and development must be a priority for all efforts to economically enhance our inner cities.
• Inner-city residents must be considered as customers who are served at their individual level of need -- there is no creaming. Every person has value and that value is essential to the 21st century economy.
• The belief that community is empowered when its institutions and its citizens are united around the common goal of economic justice for all people. We seek to address the following question in all of our programming: How can we advocate for social justice and create financial capacity simultaneously?

The struggle of the Black Dollar Days Task Force is a legitimate struggle for true democracy in America. In 1928 W.B. DuBois argued, “when democracy fails for one group in the United States, it fails for the nation...” DuBois continued by quoting President Lincoln who said, “It is as true today as it ever was that the nation cannot exist half slave and half free.” More than seven decades later, we remain a nation “half slave and half free” due to the binding constraints of economic blockades against people of color in this country. It is the desire of the Black Dollar Days Task Force to remove those blockades and open channels of access to this nation’s wealth for the purpose of community self-determination. Our purpose for practicing community-based economic development is to promote self-determination.

Goals, Strategy, & Methodology

The Black Dollar Task Force defines community as people who are held together by common self-interest and by how they spend their money. The end effect of all community must be group self-sufficiency.

Thus, even though geographic boundaries generally are a primary indicator of community, we believe that common self-interest and economic inter-dependence are the real factors that define authentic community. Therefore, these are the factors that must now be structured to create community for those who have been historically left out.

For, throughout the entire history of this country, people have been shunned simply due to their ethnic heritage, religious belief and sexual preference. The creation of authentic community does not now, and cannot in the future, mean community isolation. Self-help or community self-sufficiency does not mean being alone; it means being whole.

Goals

1. These goals are accomplished by uniting the community, the church, and business around the issue of economic equal opportunity.
2. To create a cooperative relationship between business development and community organizing.
3. To regain the dignity of the African American community through corporate community economics.
4. To create a structured opportunity for full and sustainable employment for African American people.
5. To create structures that guarantee equal benefit from corporate and government reinvestment in the inner-cities.
6. To create an economic base that enhances the solidarity of deprived communities.

Strategies

• Self-Help: “Use what you have to get what you want.” We take seriously our need to organize in order to best leverage effectively the power of our consumer dollars.
• Institutional Development: We create institutions that are protected by the balance of power which exists after uniting the church, the community, and business.
• Reinvestment in the Community: The creation of community-sensitive institutions provides an equitable base for government and corporate investment. This principle of investment values partnership over dependency.

Methodology

1. Understand and demonstrate the fact that most of our problems are economic based.
2. Come to grips with the fact that we have the means to help ourselves.
3. Create a means by which we educate others and draw the community, the church, and the business world together.
4. Create programs that demonstrate that change can take place, given the opportunity.
5. Begin to create structures that change the way other people relate to our community, once the community has awakened to its own power.