The Everly Collective curates social enterprise, stewards community-owned land, and designs economic development that keeps wealth in local hands, statewide.
Enterprise creates revenue. Land holds it in place. Development strategy makes sure it circulates locally. Our three practices are built to reinforce each other.
We identify, incubate, and connect mission-driven businesses that generate both revenue and community benefit — building an ecosystem where entrepreneurs of color, neighborhood-scale ventures, and cooperative models can thrive.
We advance models that keep land and property in local hands — protecting neighborhoods from displacement while transforming vacant and underutilized properties into productive community assets.
We partner with residents, foundations, municipalities, and anchor institutions to design development strategies measured in ownership, resilience, and self-determination — not just jobs and investment.
Every engagement moves through four stages designed to end in durable community ownership — because success is a handoff, not a headline.
We start with residents. Listening sessions and asset mapping surface what a place already holds — land, talent, enterprise, and trust.
Together we structure the right vehicle — a land trust, a cooperative, a blended-capital enterprise — matched to the community's goals.
We connect ventures and land projects to mission-aligned capital, technical assistance, and market relationships to get them operating.
Governance, equity, and returns transition to community hands, with the Collective staying on as a long-term steward-partner.
Three scenarios — a rural county, a small urban city, and a county-scale strategy — showing how the model takes shape in different kinds of places. Each starts from that community's real numbers.
Homeownership runs high in a county like Cass — but farmland is a different story. As longtime landowners age out of farming, acreage risks passing to outside and speculative buyers, taking local food production and generational land wealth with it.
An agricultural community land trust holds farmland under community stewardship, paired with a grower-owned food cooperative that connects small farms to schools, hospitals, and grocers across southwest Michigan — with succession pathways for retiring farm families built in.
The land, the food dollars, and the farming livelihoods — held locally by design, not by luck.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau — median household income: ACS 5-Year Estimates 2019–2023; poverty: SAIPE 2021; homeownership: ACS 5-Year Estimates 2014–2018. Business ownership: SBA Office of Advocacy, Michigan Small Business Economic Profile (2022), from Census Annual Business Survey & Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics.
Highland Park's story of disinvestment is well known — vacant commercial and residential parcels, absentee ownership, and wealth flowing out of a community whose residents' strength is equally well known.
Vacant parcels move into a community land trust governed by residents. A renovated storefront becomes a social enterprise hub where resident-owned businesses launch with shared back-office support, mentorship, and patient capital — with commercial rents held affordable by trust governance.
The corridor itself — its land, its storefronts, and the businesses anchoring it — owned by the people who live there.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau (Wayne County) — median household income: ACS 5-Year Estimates 2019–2023; poverty: SAIPE 2021; homeownership: ACS 5-Year Estimates 2014–2018. Highland Park city-level data is not published at county granularity. Business ownership: State of Michigan 2022 business profile / Census Annual Business Survey.
A county like Kalamazoo faces a quiet wealth transfer: hundreds of profitable small businesses whose owners are approaching retirement with no succession plan — each one a risk of closure, consolidation, or sale to buyers with no stake in the county.
A countywide pipeline, built with philanthropic and anchor institution partners, identifies these firms early and supports their conversion to employee ownership — while anchor procurement commitments direct institutional spending toward locally owned firms.
The jobs, the profits, and the decision-making — transferred to the workers and rooted in the county for the next generation.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau — median household income: ACS 5-Year Estimates 2019–2023; poverty: SAIPE 2021; homeownership: ACS 5-Year Estimates 2014–2018. Business ownership: SBA Office of Advocacy, Michigan Small Business Economic Profile (2022), from Census Annual Business Survey & Nonemployer Statistics by Demographics.
Ready to be the first?
Start a conversationFrom legacy cities to rural townships, we work where disinvestment has run deepest and community capacity runs strongest.