In our blog post on "Marketplaces"  we  described our firm conviction that  poor communities need new kinds of marketplaces in order to reveal, generate and exchange the hidden value and capacity that already exists in people and place, and to connect those people and places to mainstream economic life.
Our daily work  at Trusted Space Partners is to bring this conviction to life  in partnership with community institutions and the private sector. Most efforts by foundations and non profits are programmatic or strategic "interventions" focused on a place, an issue or a population. These are - in many cases - wonderful "new seeds of change". The problem is that these seeds can be the wrong ones for the ground they fall on and often - as it says in the Bible - those seeds fall on on rocky soil - in communities where there is such disconnection and distrust that well designed and intentioned interventions die or yield minimal change.

Marketplace - 'The varieties of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations 
and infrastructures where parties engage in exchange.'

One of the best kept secrets in the United States is the hidden wealth and value embedded in every community, even the ones considered to be “poor.”  We treat struggling neighborhoods, and the people who live there, as one of our societies’ social ills that need to be fixed.