By Kristi Waterworth – Published Mar 7, 2024

Appalachia may not seem like the ideal location for a workplace revolution, but that didn’t stop Molly Hemstreet from changing the entire direction of her beloved home in North Carolina. Her organization, The Industrial Commons, helps create and promote employee-owned manufacturing businesses in an area that is in steep decline.

A Brief History of The Industrial Commons

Once, not that long ago, Morgantown, North Carolina, was home to generations of skilled textile and furniture workers. Unfortunately, over time, large corporations came in, bought the factories, and moved jobs elsewhere, draining the community of much-needed skilled careers and the income that comes with them. This took a huge toll on western North Carolina, that still persists to this day. The area’s median household income is 23% lower than the national average, and the poverty rate is 20% higher.

As a teacher in the community, Molly could see in real-time how badly secure employment was needed for her students’ families to be able to become financially secure. Good careers moving to other states and an increasing reliance on unskilled labor to pay the bills were not helping the community build any kind of future or generational wealth. People worked to survive, and they were not thriving.

So, she did something about it.

In 2015, Molly founded The Industrial Commons, modeling it on cooperatives that put workers first and focused on ways to invest them more deeply in the companies they worked for. Instead of a company extracting labor from its employees and not offering stability, the employees would become the backbone of the company and each company’s most important asset.
The Industrial Commons at a Glance

The Industrial Commons has several goals and they’re mostly pointing in the same direction: to create a community of businesses that will provide skilled, sustainable careers for workers who aspire to have more than just a job. Between 2018 and 2022, the cooperative generated $44 million in total revenue and assets, with almost half of that in 2022 alone.

It also supported and trained over 3,700 workers and supported over 270 businesses via five ecosystem enterprises: Opportunity Threads, Good Books, Seat at the Table, Material Return, and Carolina Textile District.

For these reasons and so many more, The Industrial Commons has been recognized by the U.S. National Science Foundation as a Regional Innovation Engine. It has been awarded $160 million over the next ten years to help scale the cooperative up and expand its reach.

“Although this industry has seen its fair share of challenges, we see so much potential for it to drive economic change in our region,” said Molly Hemstreet, Co-Executive Director of The Industrial Commons. “This award will allow us to build on our legacy industries and depth of innovation to create opportunity for workers and our communities.”
The Work Driver and Financial Freedom
It might seem obvious that work is a driver of Financial Freedom, but the way that work is being done under The Industrial Commons is exactly what we mean by “work” as one of our Five Drivers. It’s one thing to labor to make money, but when the available opportunities are scarce, low-paying, unskilled, or otherwise unstable, it is very hard to know where your next meal will come from.

Projects like those through The Industrial Commons create the opposite conditions. These positions are place-oriented, skill-driven, well-paying, and, most importantly, invest in a worker that’s invested in their company. The people who work jobs like these can break free of the curse of living paycheck to paycheck, as their careers create a financially stable base for their lives.

From there, they can do things like buy homes, which helps to create stable communities, support and educate the children of those communities, and grow the entire region far beyond what anyone might have believed possible.

This is our goal, too, at The Motley Fool Foundation, and together with our fellow Fools for Good, we can continue to support social innovators like Molly, whose visions create situations that elevate everyone together as they work toward a Financial Freedom their parents may have never known.

Join us in this effort to create more sustainable wealth for everyone by donating your time, talent, or treasure, even if that just means participating in our Spark Conversation series or telling your friends how they, too, can sign up to become Fools for Good.