Really new ideas will save us

The blogosphere is buzzing about the vice-presidential debate last night. Somewhere in the District of Columbia, and among worried constituents at home, congressional legislators continue to agonize about the threat of another Depression. Like Cleveland’s Council of Smaller Enterprises, local chambers of commerce are probably polling their members to find out where they stand on propping up Wall Street when their own small businesses are teetering.

Let’s face it – no one really knows what to do. Our leaders and lawmakers and candidates and economists are guessing. Some people sound smarter than others and some have relevant experience with money, markets and the dismal science, but there are so many factors in play right now that no one can claim to have the solution to our financial crisis.

Talk about Hail Mary passes – the whole country is muttering a rosary’s-worth of oh pleases while waiting to see where the bailout ball, er, bill, lands.

As co-owner of one of the smallest small businesses in America and someone who will take creative risk-taking over conventional wisdom and stasis every single time, I have to say this:

It’s time to cut the crap and start using our brains here. No reflexive bailout is going to do any real good – the problems are too tangled and ingrown for a double-dip ice cream cone to make them all better. Not doing anything won’t work, either - that’d be like knowing you have an aggressive cancer, but deciding to sit still and just let it sort itself out.  

The fact is that the current administration isn’t smart enough or inventive enough or responsible enough to come up with the innovative strategies we need to rid ourselves of the rotten parts in our financial structure while saving what deserves saving. All we should do right now is help the banks just enough to keep them standing until the next president can collect the best creative brains in the country and start designing a real plan to change the way America’s money is handled. 

I’m not the only one who thinks so.

But I haven’t heard anyone else say that the plan the next administration and Congress devise needs to be  revolutionary. It needs to replace our corrupt and collapsing financial sector with a carefully structured, but imaginative framework of policies supporting not just institutions or the greedheads who run them but, most all, the regular citizens who depend on them.

It needs to create a banking culture that invests in community development by helping individuals, small businesses, neighborhoods and towns get on their feet and stay there. 

I’m not a money or a policy expert, but here are the needs I see:  

Jobs – There aren’t enough good ones. So small businesses, especially the creative kind, need to be encouraged as much as big businesses. Why not expand micro-loans into programs of graduated loans that lend entrepreneurs increasing amounts as they pass certain business-growth milestones? Like those combined college programs that invite a qualified student to earn a bachelor’s and an M.D. without having to go through the med-school application process, a graduated-loan program could select entrepreneurs in the idea stage and move them through growth stages with money and mentoring until their businesses reach pre-determined goals and can operate independently. Unlike venture-capital companies, these programs would aim to help start-ups that would probably always be small, but would also be stable local employers.

Homeownership – There’s nothing wrong with every American wanting to own his or her own home.  Homeowners create community stability, maintain their properties better than renters, have stakes in the future of their neighborhoods. The real-estate industry just got criminally greedy about making money off people’s housebuying impulses. So why not take a similar graduated approach to homeowning? Just as leaders in Paducah, Ky., did, local governments and banks all over the U.S. could offer rundown or foreclosed properties for free or very little to artists and other entrepreneurs who agree to make improvements in exchange for ownership. As these properties appreciated – and in Paducah, they have – whole neighborhoods would improve and become magnets for desirable economic activity such as shops, restaurants and small businesses that employ the residents. And along with creative approaches to bringing homeownership within reach of lower-income people, let’s make sure banks strictly observe the proper standards of income and collateral that regular home-loan applicants should have to meet before they get any money.

Education – We’re going to have to make sure that communities – and thus the larger economy – have the human capital they need to engender creative businesses and provide the skills, knowledge and ideas that all community activities and systems require. How do we make sure that all people get good higher schooling and training and the chance for productive, self-supporting lives?  Maybe financial institutions should offer student loans that don’t have to be paid off in cash. What if students got money for college or vocational training from the same banks that offer graduated loans to small businesses? The banks could let students work off their loans during or after college by serving as apprentices to those same small businesses. The businesses would get skilled, low-cost employees as part of their loan programs, students would repay loans with their labor while gaining hands-on experience and resume credits, and the banks would get an accelerated return on investment in the last phases of the graduated-loan program as the apprentices allow the small businesses to thrive and pay back the banks sooner.

Let’s not come out of this national financial disaster with only a patched-up system and the same old mindsets to show for it. Maybe my creative ideas won’t work. But somebody else’s will.

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Not farewell. I want to say a fond au revoir to Abby Maier, who is leaving her job as the leader of Cleveland’s COSE Arts Network to start a new life as a mom in rural Vermont. Though she will no longer be representing COSE on Geniocity.com, Abby will be returning to this site in 2009 to blog about creativity from the artist’s point of view.

That’s a point of view she knows well. Before joining COSE, Abby earned a degree in art, specializing in fabric-based work. She’ll resume that creative side of her life in Vermont and – because not all inventive art occurs in large metropolitan areas – will give us some needed perspective on what’s happening creatively in the vast areas of the U.S. that aren’t paved and overpopulated.

Just as her own artistic background informed Abby’s work at COSE, so her COSE experience and close connection to the issues, policies and practices of arts entrepreneurship will enrich her commentary on how artists function creatively in small towns. 

Geniocity.com owes Abby more than a “see you later” and a thank-you for her posts. We are deeply grateful for the help she gave us, as she did so many other COSE Arts Network members, in pursuing our entrepreneurial dreams: finding resources and advisors for us, keeping us regularly tuned in to COSE’s many helpful networking and educational events and cheering us on.

As the pioneering first leader of the Arts Network, Abby helped COSE create something unique in this nation: a place for artists at the table of business, a place that honors and supports the economic role  artists play in the Greater Cleveland community. The city may not be wealthy right now, but it is rich in a kind of arts-business innovation that the rest of you around the world will want to give a second look. Abby and COSE, along with Cleveland’s Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, are making this part of Northeast Ohio a home of unequaled resources for the arts and those who practice them.

So I wish her well and wish her back at Geniocity.com soon. Abby, you’re the best.