Bottom-Up Growth: Little is the New Big | Finance Forum 2025

The 2025 Milken Institute Finance Forum, themed "Building Resilient Communities," was convened to address federal funding declines and promote locally led innovation in underserved U.S. and international areas.

• The forum coincided with the launch of "Pathways to Capital," a new platform providing stopgap funding and one-stop solutions for underserved entrepreneurs.
• Organizers identified four "finance 101" basics required to advance community development in a fiscally constrained environment:
  • Increasing government pre-development funding to de-risk contaminated sites and de-risk new market ventures for nonprofits and residents in Opportunity Zones.
  • Boosting pre-disaster risk mitigation funding to capture resilience dividends and reduce future disaster costs.
  • Shifting reliance toward municipal bonds, which currently fund two-thirds of U.S. infrastructure, as federal grant dollars decrease.
  • Applying international blended finance lessons to stack capital for 10,000 communities in emerging market America.
• The event agenda included a plenary on the state of the U.S. budget and economy, scheduled for 11:20 AM after the opening panel.

Panelists from Stand Together, Groundswell, the Beck Center, and the Civitas Institute debated "bottom-up" growth strategies, emphasizing local empowerment over top-down mandates.

• Michelle Moore (Groundswell) highlighted "high-tech meets high-touch" initiatives in rural East Alabama and West Georgia, focusing on cutting electricity bills by 50% for low-income neighbors via clean energy.
  • Recent projects in Lynette, Alabama, included siting 10 community resiliency hubs and repairing 500 homes in regions historically depressed by the post-NAFTA decline of the textile industry.
  • Groundswell utilizes a data-driven framework and "capital stacking" of public-private partnerships and tax credits to scale solutions, though policy frameworks often fail to align with individual human needs.
• Evan Feinberg (Stand Together) argued that poverty should be framed as an "innovation problem" rather than a "resource problem," requiring social entrepreneurship and feedback loops over evidence-based top-down tactics.
  • Feinberg cited "Care Portal" as a success story where just-in-time need matching via a social worker platform reduced foster care placements in Florida communities by 60%.
  • Stand Together operates a marketplace approach using data to guide donors toward nonprofits proven to meet needs, moving away from treating poverty as a static resource deficit.
• Lynn Overman (Beck Center) discussed leveraging digital tools and "human-centered design" to improve government service accessibility and coordination.
  • Overman proposed combining data from the 2-1-1 social service system and the 3-1-1 municipal services system to create a unified view of community needs.
  • A talent pipeline challenge was identified: while Georgetown and UT students are eager to work in social services, early-career pathways in local government and nonprofits remain unclear compared to private sector routes.
• Ryan Streeter (Civitas Institute) presented data linking physical proximity to non-work amenities (parks, houses of worship) with higher community optimism, volunteerism, and lower social isolation.
  • Survey data indicated that individuals within a 5-10 minute travel time to core amenities report significantly higher community pride and likelihood to volunteer.
  • The data revealed a unique anomaly: those whose sole volunteering outlet was politics reported loneliness scores above the national average.
  • Streeter suggested "competitive federalism" and regional coordination over smokestack chasing; for example, aligning incentives across Indiana municipalities to function as a cohesive economic region rather than competing entities.

The panel concluded with a lightning round offering strategic advice for scaling bottom-up initiatives:

• Humility and on-the-ground observation are essential; entrepreneurs must physically visit communities to understand actual needs rather than relying on abstract data.
• A "scout and scale" methodology is recommended: identify existing local solutions to hard problems and focus resources on solving scalability rather than reinventing the wheel.
• Polling data indicates Americans are generally "immune to extremism" and prioritize basic community stability and family flourishing over ideological causes.
• The convergence of "bottom-up" and "top-down" approaches is viewed as necessary; while local innovation drives change, top-down policy must be reformed to support and fund these local efforts.