GROUP ECONOMICS AND ACCESS TO CAPITAL
Group Economics is a term that sounds very scholarly and academic, it can be boiled down to a simple definition. Individual business people in the community or neighborhood getting together to provide a service or products to make MONEY, and keeping the profits in their community.
In the African-American/Black community it’s been said that less than 5% of all monies stay in the urban and rural areas. According to Federal statistics, African-Americans/Blacks earn in the neighborhood as a population one trillion five hundred million dollars. That would be equivalent to the seventh largest economy in the world. That does not include the trillions as a people generate in revenue that’s made from other business endeavors i.e. entertainment, the sports industry and several other business sectors.
Group Economics takes work; collaboration, cooperation, partnership, communication, unity, and a whole lot of listening. Group Economics starts out with product or a service that can provide the basic needs of the community or neighborhood. Allow me to give you an example or case study.
Clean water is a basic need or should be a right, if we don’t drink water we will die. The water industry currently generates 11 to 15 billion dollars in revenue. The cost of bottled water is two thousand times as much as tap water. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of bottled water companies that sale water and that’s not counting all the equipment that you can purchase like filters, pitchers with filters, and machines with filters to get clean water.
We should have clean water. we all know what happened in Flint, Michigan and now we are hearing rumors around the country about effective lead fill pikes. Come on can you see it, I see cases and cases of water in almost every place of business. Why you can even get water delivered to your door just like milk in the old days. The question is how much are you spending for clean drinking water in your household. Example if you and your family of four buy two cases of water a week that comes out to over $1600.00 dollars a year at $4.00 a case. I wonder how much money these companies are making off the urban areas. I dare say in the hundreds of millions just for clean drinking water. Who’s making that money not a Black company? Okay back to the case, Let’s take John Doe water company who is located in Arkansas and a Black company. He has access to clean drinking water in the Arkansas springs, he can produce and deliver it to stores and communities. Thats where Group Economics comes in and that of millions would stay in the community.
Drinking water is a commodity and it should be a free utility, and its not free as we know because every month most of us pay a water bill, so we can wash our dishes, clothes, and take a shower. Water is part of our capitalist conundrum it’s a product now in a big way it’s time we kept those purchases in the community.
For more details on Group Economics go to www.panafricanalliance.com I recommend the article. 30 ways you can practice Group Economics and the book ‘PowerNomics’ by Claude Anderson