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Moving Your Money Month Includes Local Investing
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Moving Your Money Month Includes Local Investing

AMIBA's Jen Risley Explains Why Local Investing Is an Important Part of Moving Your Money to Local Banks and Credit Unions

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Devin: What is your superpower?

Jen: I think my superpower is finding the connections between things, meaning connections between different pursuits or different silos or different movements.


Jen Risley of the American Independent Business Alliance, commonly abbreviated as AMIBA and pronounced like amoeba, joined me for a great conversation about the power of moving our money to deploy it locally.

AMIBA has been advocating for local businesses for a long time. Traditionally, its Move Your Money Month effort in April has focused on moving your banking to a local community bank or credit union. This year, the team has expanded the scope to include more discussion of local investing, including through crowdfunding.


AI Summary

  • Jen Risley is the Director of Operations for the American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA).

  • AMIBA's Move Your Money Month initiative encourages investment in independent businesses through community banks, credit unions, and crowdfunding.

  • Risley discusses the evolution of local business support and changes in the banking industry.

  • She shares information about AMIBA's Choose Indie Sustainable Month, which promotes cooperatively owned businesses and triple-bottom-line businesses.

  • Risley discusses her personal story and interest in local economy work.

  • She sees connecting different ideas and movements as her superpower for promoting local businesses and building community.

  • Jen encourages people to support local businesses and utilize resources like the AMIBA website and social media.

  • She emphasizes the importance of investing in and supporting local communities.

  • Jen shares tips for making strategic connections between ideas.


Jen found her passion for local business about a decade ago. “I got really interested in forming a food co-op in our community. So, that is kind of what sucked a lot of my energy and enthusiasm in from working with all these locally owned businesses to create a local food co-op that was going to boost our local food system.”

The co-op she helped form is thriving. “It's been wildly, fantastically successful,” she says.

“It was just amazing that we could go from opening a store to expanding seven years later, surviving COVID and then thriving and able to celebrate on the other side of everything,” Jen says.

Throughout her career, Jen has developed an ability to find connections between disparate efforts to create success.

How to Develop Connecting Movements As a Superpower

Part of what drives Jen’s superpower is a powerful curiosity. “It's hard for me to stay in one lane,” she says. Her work at the co-op helped bring together separate parts of the local economy built around food to benefit them all through collaboration.

Jen sees her leadership in AMIBA’s Shop Indie Art Month as an example of what comes out of her superpower. Rather than conceive of art in a traditional sense, she broadened the effort to essentially include all creators.

Jen offers a couple of suggestions for enhancing your ability to make these sort of connections.

First, she says, it starts with a love of research, which grows out of a genuine desire to understand a topic. You don’t have to limit yourself to boring academics; she notes that she finds social media to be a fun and relevant way to learn about a topic.

Second, she sees a need to consciously seek an outcome. She is often working against a calendar for one of the local business-themed months at AMIBA or in her monthly article in the local paper. Having a specific deadline for a product helps to activate her thinking.

Finally, she focuses on making her work relevant to other people. This, I think, is a lynchpin piece of her model. It is when she starts thinking about how a topic or movement that is important to one group of people may be relevant to other groups that she makes the connections that define her superpower.

By following Jen’s advice and counsel, you can make connecting movements into a skill that could become a superpower, enabling you to do more good in the world.

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Jen will speak at SuperCrowd23. She’ll be a vital part of a panel discussion entitled, “Why Founders Who Know How to Network Raise More Money.” This will be a great session for entrepreneurs.

We’ll also have great content for investors—and everyone can be an investor.

Superpowers for Good readers get a 50 percent discount. Early bird pricing ends April 30! Register today.

Register for SuperCrowd23

Guest-Provided Profile

Jen Risley (she/her):

Director of Operations, American Independent Business Alliance

About American Independent Business Alliance: The mission of AMIBA is to build a strong local economy movement by supporting the growth and development of local business alliances and networks that are committed to the following objectives:
- Supporting local independent businesses in growing and thriving
- Building a strong local economy that is diverse, inclusive, and equitable
- Working to mitigate climate change and adapt to the damage brought on by global warming

Website: amiba.net

Twitter Handle: @theAMIBA

Company Facebook Page: fb.com/theAMIBA

Biographical Information: Jen served as an early organizer of her local food co-op in 2007. In addition to her co-op and AMIBA work, she’s program manager of The Local Crowd Monadnock, a community-based crowdfunding program for independently owned businesses. She holds a Master’s in Education from Antioch University New England and lives in Keene, NH.

Twitter Handle: @MonadnockLocal

Personal Facebook Profile: fb.com/MonadnockLocal

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/jenniferrisley

Instagram Handle: @the.amiba

Other URL: monadnock.thelocalcrowd.coop

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