A Bold Idea to Rebuild the Working Class | Molly Hemstreet | TED

When you've had a lot of opportunity taken out of your community, you just feel incredibly powerless. You're not sure where to start. You also don't have the energy to figure out how do you impact something like an economy? Often what we really need is a new imagination. How do we create opportunities that can root wealth and overturn these cycles of generational poverty in our communities? I'm Molly Hemstreet. I'm the co-founder and co-executive director of The Industrial Commons, and I work to bring opportunity to rural communities across southern Appalachia. Appalachia, for me, is a really beautiful place, and it is where I call home. I always think the season I'm in is my most favorite season. There's lots and lots of trees, animals, insects. It's my favorite place to be. It's also a really complex place. A lot of the story of Appalachia has been about extraction, things leaving our communities. Where I grew up, we have been manufacturers and makers for generations, in particularly textile manufacturing. Textiles are really these workhorses of our world. It's not just the clothing we wear. If I think about the stent that's in my dad's heart, that's keeping that heart beating, that's a medical textile. If you think about a firefighter that walks into a burning building, they're protected by a textile. So much of our world is about fiber and is about the textile industry, and it's really our communities that are helping to ensure that industry stays vibrant and active in the United States. But around the 1990s into the 2000s, that work left, leaving our communities with upwards of 15 percent unemployment. Entire families just didn't have work. So I really started asking this question of myself, like, what do I do as someone who really wants to stay here, but someone who wants to be sure that there's opportunity not just for me and my family but for my friends and neighbors. There were several things that I wanted to be different from what I had seen coming down around me. I wanted this to be a profitable enterprise. I wanted it to be about people. And I wanted to be sure that we were making things that weren't hurting the environment. And I knew that the people in my community had incredible skill and incredible knowledge. And so Opportunity Threads was started as an employee-owned company around developing sustainable textiles. The idea of employee ownership is just really, really basic, and I think we can all relate to it. If we work really hard for something, that reward should come back to us. We all want to feel like we're valued, we all want to feel like the opportunity that we create, the profits that we create, we have a say in those. Opportunity Threads is a really magical place. They're one of the largest upcycling facilities in the US, upcycling upwards of 60,000 T-shirts every week. They're a profitable company, a really brilliant, bright light in our community. I'm very proud, I'm proud of that work. From there I was like, oh, this is kind of cool. This seems to be working. Let me find some more help. I wasn't an economist. I didn't have a business major, didn't consider myself an entrepreneur. What I did know is that I cared very deeply about where I lived. And so we started building a network. We called it the Carolina Textile District with this whole idea of being big by being small together. So we were going to band together in order to build scale. And then after we built that, we built The Industrial Commons. What we do with The Industrial Commons is we support workers, we support businesses. Some of those businesses we help to buy and convert to employee-owned companies, some of those businesses we start ourselves. We've drawn the attention of folks like the National Science Foundation, who have chosen us as one of 10 innovation communities across the country, and it was really the organization that I needed when I was getting started that I didn't have. One of the projects that The Industrial Commons right now is working on is called Material Return. And what we do at Material Return is we take back the region's textile waste, we grind it up and we send it through this big machine, and then we're able to make that back into a yarn. Something that might be sold for three cents a pound, if we can put it through our system, it can come out on the other side and we can sell it for nine dollars a pound. So we're engineering value back into this waste stream

just like we're trying to engineer opportunity back into our communities. Bob has really been the leader that's helped Material Return get started. He's somebody that grew up in Burke County, started to work when he was 16 in a sawmill. What's so neat about Bob's story is, you know, Bob is still working in manufacturing. In fact, he's working in these same plants where his uncle and his dad used to work. But now he's an owner of that plant, he has a say in what's going to happen at that facility, and he's really one of the leaders. So Bob, for me really represents why I come to work every day. We call ourselves long-haul people, we're in this for the long haul. This isn't just a project of six months. This is a project of generations. Right now, there's 27,000 workers working in the textile industry. We would love to see half of those workers engaged in some type of enterprise or economic opportunity that we're creating through our ecosystem. My hope is not just southern Appalachia, but all over. That there's more say, there's more wealth that can be rooted, there's less extraction, and there's really just a more thriving working class. Every community has opportunity. Every community has something good in it. Every community has a future where you can show up every day, you can work hard, you can get ahead, but that's not at the expense of the person beside you getting ahead. That there's opportunities for your kids where there's a lightness and there's a joy, where you really feel like you're not staying because you're forced to stay, but you're staying because you've chosen to stay. We forget that we are part of the economy. We forget that we have power in it. It just takes a few people to start. And you don't have to necessarily have a complex set of skills. What you really have to have is a deep care and a deep love and a deep knowledge of where you're planted and where you want to grow.