Coda: Go Build One

You came to this book to find out whether you could attempt one. Here is the honest answer: yes, and it will be harder and slower than the two roads you already knew, and that difficulty is the point.

The Industrial Nonprofit is not a clever loophole or a funding hack. It is a decision to build something that lasts and to refuse to sell it — made once in the materials and once in the ownership, because they are the same decision. The volunteer commons couldn’t afford the permanence. The commercial venture couldn’t keep the ownership. You can have both, if you are willing to pay the real price: no payday, patient money, heavier governance, and the steady discipline of declining good offers that would loosen the roots.

What you do not have to do is invent the category. It has a name now, and a worked example, and the argument you can hand to a funder or a city or a skeptical board. That was the hard part that kept the form from being built — not the building, the naming. It’s named.

The form is general; your instance will be specific. Another building, another city, other things made, held the same way — that is the same category and a new organism, a dendrite reaching from this idea to your place. If you build one, you are not copying 601 Delaware. You are doing what 601 Delaware did: taking the third option, in the one place only you can take it.

So: name your irreplaceable thing. Decide it will not be for sale. Build it to last, hold it in common, make it produce, and stay.

Go build one.