​The World Needs Local Entrepreneurs

Rising Tide Capital, Beloved Economies,
​ Process Theology, and Spirituality in Daily Life
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​Rising Tide Capital Executive Director, Gillian Sarjeant-Allen, and Community Business Academy graduate, Geoffrey Allen, founder of Property Management Guys. Image taken from RISING TIDE CAPITAL 2019 - 2020 ANNUAL REPORT

The World Needs Entrepreneurs, More than Ever!

"If it hasn’t been clear before now — the world needs entrepreneurs, more than ever! Entrepreneurs are problem solvers, innovators, and fundamentally people who feel and hear the needs of their communities, and find a way to respond. In the face of this great moment that calls us, we all need to dig deep, to remind ourselves of our deepest purpose, and then to re-imagine the rhythms of creativity and rest that can provide balance.' 

ALEX FORRESTER Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer/Co-founder
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"So, I ask that you commit to that first step in the long-term work, to move toward healing and flourishing for all people, starting with our most vulnerable, and by listening with an open heart. If we root ourselves in service to others, we will move toward what is just. Racial and economic justice is a required path to true harmony. We must stand clear in what we know is right.  When we see, feel, and know things are not right we need to put our time and resources into reform.  The world is inviting us to change. I hope you will join me and the team at Rising Tide Capital as we build a beloved economy and nurture resilient, flourishing communities for all." 

ALFA DEMMELLASH CEO/Co-founder

​Entrepreneur Stories - Hope and Resilience

from Rising Tide Capital Annual Report: 2019-2020
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Why This Page?
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This page has several aims. 

One is to introduce people in process community to a non-profit organization called Rising Tide Capital, suggesting that this organization provides a vivid example of how a group can practice process thought in local settings.  

A second is to introduce those drawn to non-profit work in general, and entrepreneurial work in particular, to process theology, suggesting that, with its four hopes, its worldview, and its recommended practices, process theology offers a framework for thinking about and appreciating its work. 

​A third is to suggest that non-profit work and spirituality go together.  As Alex Forrester emphasizes, those of us who want to help build compassionate communities and an ecological civilization need to find ways of linking the "rhythms of creativity" with the rhythms of "rest."   We need to find that place in our hearts where we can live with purpose, a sense of beauty, equanimity, and adventure. 

That place, suggests process theology, is deep within each of us but more than all of us.  We can find this place in loving community with other people and the natural world, and also in the quietness of individual prayer or meditation.  Perhaps the Common Liturgy, presented below, can help.  To the degree that we listen with open hearts to one another and help build the kinds of community the world sorely needs: beloved communities that are the building blocks of an ecological civilization.

I borrow the phrases "listening with an open heart" and "beloved economies" from the founders of Rising Tide Capital.  They have done this kind of listening and are helping to build beloved economies.  I hope this page inspires you and me alike to do the same.

- Jay McDaniel, 11/23/21

Rising Tide Capital
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More from Alex Forrester

Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer/Co-founder
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Alex Forrester Delivers Winning Pitch at 2013 Q Conference from Rising Tide Capital on Vimeo.

"With a passion for the integration of ecology, economy, and spirituality, Alex Forrester is the co-founder of Rising Tide Capital--a nationally recognized nonprofit organization working at the intersection of inclusive economics, social justice, and entrepreneurship. He received an undergraduate degree in Postmodern Philosophy and Theology from Harvard University, an honorary doctorate from New Jersey City University, and is currently pursuing Masters-level research at Drew University on the role of philosophy and spirituality in aiding the political and economic transformation of our world. Alex is a recipient of the prestigious Heinz Award and has been recognized with Rising Tide Capital at the White House, United Nations, World Economic Forum, CNN Heroes, and many other venues. He lives in New Jersey with his two sons Noah and James and his beloved wife and partner Alfa Demmellash, with whom he pursues his most important and precious calling: bringing love into the world. For more information or to contact him, visit www.RisingTideCapital.org or www.LongArcStrategies.com"

 Process Worldview, Its Core Values,
and Some of its Practices

Entrepreneurship with a Listening Heart

The snapshots below introduce you to the process outlook on life and way of living in the world.  With its emphasis on novelty and community, the process worldview offers a framework for considering and appreciating community based entrepreneurs of the kind fostered by Rising Tide Capital.  With its thematization of four core values - whole persons, whole communities, a whole planet, and holistic thinking - it offers a way of situating the work of Rising Tide Capital in a context of the world's best hopes.  And, with its idea that the universe as a whole is embraced by a Deep Listening, it lends support to the idea that we, too, must listen with open hearts to one another and the world, starting with the most vulnerable, and respond with creativity, humility, and lovingkindess, in practical, imaginative, enrepreneurial ways.  Moreover, we can do it together, with other people, in the world of business and commerce if, as Rising Tide Capital emphasizes, we bring humility, love and purpose to what we do.

How Organizations can Practice Process Thought 

If you would like to know more about process thought, there are several organizations that can help you: The Process Nexus, The Center for Process Studies, the Center for Process Spirituality, the Cobb Institute for Process and Practice, and Process and Faith.  The snapshots on Practicing Process Thought and Core Values come from Process and Faith.  It is an international network of people from different parts of the world who are influenced by process philosophy and theology, who come from different parts of the world, and who are committed to the four hopes identified above: whole persons, whole communities, a whole planet, and holistic thinking. 

When we consider such practices, our first impulse may be to think of individuals practicing them.  Certainly this is a good idea.  It can help if individuals live with respect and care for the community of life, if they recognize their own capacities to enjoy life and listen to others with open ears, especially the vulnerable.  But it is also the case that groups of individuals, including organizations, can practice them.  Consider the remarkable work of Rising Tide Capital, featured above and below.  Rising Tide Capital helps entrepreneurs in low-income communities start their own businesses.  Its beneficiaries include single mothers, veterans, the formerly incarcerated, immigrants and the disabled, all of whom have been afforded full scholarships and on-going support in order to achieve their entrepreneurial visions. 

It is important to emphasize that the entrepreneurs themselves and the organizations they help build and support are also examples of practicing process thought.   Rising Tide and its friends show what it is like to practice process thought.  This does not mean that they are are influenced by the process way of thinking in any explicity way.  Nor need they be.  There can be many ways of thinking that support their work, of which process thought is but one.  But it means that those of us who are influenced are grateful for, and can learn from, the work of Rising Tide Capital.

- Jay McDaniel

The Spiritual Side of Things

Process Theology and Long Arc Strategies

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The Cobb Institute: Spirituality as Richness of Experience in Daily Life
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​Alex Forrester is interested in "the role of philosophy and spirituality in aiding the political and economic transformation of the world."  And so are we in the process community as represented in the Process Nexus, Process and Faith, the Center for Process Spirituality, and the Cobb Institute. ​The Cobb Institute offers an understanding of spirituality that resonates with Forrester's interest.  It reads:
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​In a process-relational perspective, spirituality is how we are inwardly animated, enlivened, nourished by life-giving forms of experience and ways of living in the world. Alfred North Whitehead speaks of these qualities of felt beauty: here understood as satisfying forms of harmony and intensity in our relations with other people, the natural world, the heavens, and ourselves. In The Liberation of Life: From Cell to Community, John Cobb, speaks of them as forms of “richness of experience.” Spirituality, then, is the seeking and sustaining of rich experience in community with others and also, as Whitehead emphasized, the solitariness of the heart.

The Cobb Institute affirms and encourages the integration of many forms of rich experience: attention, compassion, faith, forgiveness, hospitality, imagination, listening, meaning-making, openness, peace, playfulness, silence, wonder, and a zest for life, for example. These experiences are available to people of all ages and faiths, relative to the circumstances of their lives. The experiences can be understood and interpreted through many different intellectual lenses, including process philosophy and the cosmology of Whitehead, who, in Process and Reality and other writings, offers a philosophy of experience conducive to their appreciation.

The varieties of rich experience can be fostered and enacted through many different spiritual activities, including rituals, gatherings, and collective actions aimed at supporting  local communities that are creative, compassionate, participatory, inclusive, humane to animals, good for the earth, and joyful, with no one left behind. Such communities are the building blocks of ecological civilization. It is our belief that an integral spirituality can provide the nourishment that makes possible and sustains such civilization.
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- The Cobb Institute

​Long Arc Strategies: Spirituality as Qualities and Characteristics of Daily Life

​Long Arc Strategies is one of the many spiritually-influenced organizations of which Alex Forrester is a part.  It, too, offers a distinctive way of building spirituality very similar to that of process theology and also a tool for integrating spirituality into daily life.  They call it the Common Liturgy.  What Long Arc Strategies calls "qualities and characteristics you most want to cultivate in your life" are similar to what the Cobb Institute calls "qualities of felt beauty."  Or, perhaps better, "qualities of heart and mind" that become habits of the heart in daily life.  Here is how Long Arc Strategies presents its Common Liturgy.
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Welcome to Common Liturgy. We'll send you short notes throughout the year as part of a rhythm of reflection and intentionality. Each Sunday you'll receive a note encouraging you to reflect on one of your core values during the week. During the 7th week, you'll get a daily note and an encouragement to put your thoughts into action. The process repeats every seven weeks as we move through the year.

To get started, you need to identify seven words that represent your deepest values. You can use our community values or customize your own. We'll customize reminders around what you submit. 
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Your core values are the qualities and characteristics that you most want to cultivate in your life and in the world around you. By identifying these and putting them in order, you can create a rhythm of reflection throughout the year that brings you into deeper relationship with what they mean and what they look like when lived out. 

​Images from Long Arc Strategies
illustrating the Common Liturgy
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The Cosmological Side of Spirituality

For many who are influenced by process theology, the qualities of heart and mind have a twofold function.  On the one hand they are ways that human beings can and do respond to one another and the natural world in life-giving ways.  They are ways of being attuned to the horizontal sacred.  They are also, and at the same time, ways of responding to the Deep Listening of the universe, to God, to the vertical sacred.  These two forms of sacrality work together.  Spirituality is a way of responding to, and being nourished by, God and the world at the same time.

God is a lure toward well-being within each person and yet beyond each person, and within the whole of the natural world: the hills and rivers, the trees and stars.  In human life, this well-being is illustrated in the very core values identified by Long Arc Strategies: intimacy, creativity, curiosity, generosity, gratitude, humility, and hospitality.  The place within the heart from which we seek and find values such as intimacy and creativity, humility and hospitality, creativity and gratitude - that place is where the lure and our own lives come together.  It may be named "God" or something else.  Or not named at all!  It is not jealous of names.  But to whatever degree it opens out in us, we can listen with open hearts and, like our friends at Rising Tide Capital, help build, yes, beloved economies.

- Jay McDaniel​

​Personal Addendum: In My Next Lifetime
​I'd Like to be a Small Business Owner
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My father was a businessman.  He worked for a local newspaper in San Antonio, Texas. making enough money to send me to college.  I majored in English literature in college and minored in philosophy, going on to get a doctoral degree in philosophy of religion and theology.  I had many colleagues for whom “business” was a bad word. They thought “business” was mostly about greed and selfishness.  But I knew and still know many local businessmen and businesswomen whom I admire tremendously.  I admire their creativity, their listening hearts, and the good they do for their communities.  Somehow the profit motive and service work together, in small and beautiful ways.  They are not greedy and selfish.

A few of my poet friends think that “business” is uncreative and mechanical.  I disagree.  Yes, I like poetry and music, deeming it very creative.  But I recognize that my local business friends have a lot of creativity that I lack: serving customers, taking care of employees, keeping books, designing spread sheets, getting to know their communities. They’re always thinking about how they might help people and turn a profit at the same time.  They don’t want to turn a profit unless it helps people. The bottom line is not their bottom line. Their bottom line is service to community while making a living.

All of this has helped me appreciate my father and the world of business, especially when it is in service to local communities.  I’ve not yet made my peace with corporations and the world of high finance.  I’m willing to work on this, but when business loses touch with community, I grow suspicious. It seems only to be about money and privilege. But when it looks like the entrepreneurs who have benefitted from Start Up Capital, I am humbled and amazed. They, it seems to me, are the real poets of the world, much more creative than I am.  In my next lifetime I want to be an entrepreneur or small business owner, the kind who benefit from the organization I profile on this page, bringing poetry down to earth.

- Jay McDaniel