A bold idea to rebuild the working class | Molly Hemstreet

0:00With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. You want to get your backyard summer ready, but you don't want to break the bank? Wayfair gets it. Planning on dining al fresco or relaxing poolside?

0:37Wayfair has everything you need to prep your space. Shop now and save up to 70 % off during Wayfair's 4th of July clearance. Score huge deals on outdoor furniture, area rugs, and more. We're talking thousands of products for every style and budget. Plus, surprise flash deals July 6th. Don't wait. Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com. Way fair, every style, every home.

1:27That's why LinkedIn built HiringPro, your new hiring partner that screens candidates for you. So instead of sorting through applications, you can spend your time talking to candidates who are actually a good fit. With HiringPro, you can hire with confidence knowing you're getting the best talent for your business. In fact, according to LinkedIn, those hiring with LinkedIn are 24 % less likely to need to reopen a role within 12 months compared to the leading competitor. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com slash tedbiz, spelled B-I-Z.

2:09Terms and conditions apply. There are so many of us who feel deeply disempowered by our current economy, especially if you've lived in a town or region where good jobs have shriveled up and opportunities to support yourself and your family feel harder and harder to find. But our speaker today reminds us that we are still part of the economy, even and especially when times are tough. We have power in it, especially when we reinvest in the places we love and recognize the skills and talents that have always existed there.

2:49I'm Madhupak Enola. This is TED Business, a podcast from TED. Molly Hemstreet is the executive co-director of the Industrial Commons, an organization which helps create and support worker-owned textile manufacturers and worker development programs. Molly lays out how she went about revitalizing the rural economy in her community without relying on extracting resources from the land. Molly is a 2025 TED Fellow, and she was featured in TED's annual Fellows Film Series, where she dove deeply into her project. We're bringing you an audio version of her film on the show today. Then afterwards, I'll think about finding your connection to place and why it matters.

3:37But first, a quick break.

3:47With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. You want to get your backyard summer ready, but you don't want to break the bank? Wayfair gets it. Planning on dining al fresco or relaxing poolside?

4:25Wayfair has everything you need to prep your space. Shop now and save up to 70 % off during Wayfair's 4th of July clearance. Score huge deals on outdoor furniture, area rugs, and more. We're talking thousands of products for every style and budget. Plus, surprise flash deals July 6th. Don't wait. Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com. Way fair, every style, every home. And now, Molly Hemstreet takes the TED stage.

4:59When you've had a lot of opportunity taken out of your community, you just feel incredibly powerless. You're not sure where to start. You also don't have the energy to figure out how do you impact something like an economy. Often what we really need is a new imagination. How do we create opportunities that can root wealth and overturn these cycles of generational poverty in our communities? I'm Molly Hemstreet. I'm the co-founder and co-executive director of the Industrial Commons, and I work to bring opportunity to rural communities across southern Appalachia. Appalachia, for me, is a really beautiful place, and it is where I call home.

5:44I always think the season I'm in is my most favorite season. There's lots and lots of trees, animals, insects. It's my favorite place to be. It's also a really complex place. A lot of the story of Appalachia has been about extraction, things leaving our communities. Where I grew up, we have been manufacturers and makers for generations, and particularly textile manufacturing. Textiles are really these workhorses of our world. It's not just the clothing we wear. If I think about the stint that's in my dad's heart that's keeping that heart beating, that's a medical textile. If you think about a firefighter that walks into a burning building, they're protected by a textile.

6:34So much of our world is about fiber and is about the textile industry. And it's really our communities that are helping to ensure that that industry stays vibrant and active in the United States. But around the 1990s into the 2000s, that work left, leaving our communities with upwards of 15 percent unemployment. Entire families just didn't have work. So I really started asking this question of myself, like, what do I do as someone who really wants to stay here, but someone who wants to be sure that there's opportunity, not just for me and my family, but for my friends and neighbors? There were several things that I wanted to be different from what I had seen coming down around me.

7:25I wanted this to be a profitable enterprise. I wanted it to be about people. and I wanted to be sure that we were making things that weren't hurting the environment. And I knew that the people in my community had incredible skill and incredible knowledge. And so Opportunity Threads was started as an employee-owned company around developing sustainable textiles. The idea of employee ownership is just really, really basic. And I think we can all relate to it. If we work really hard for something, that reward should come back to us. We all want to feel like we're valued. We all want to feel like the opportunity that we create, the profits that we create, we have a say in those.

8:09Opportunity Threads is a really magical place. They're one of the largest upcycling facilities in the U.S., upcycling upwards of 60 ,000 T-shirts every week. They're a profitable company, a really brilliant, bright light in our community. I'm very proud of that work. From there, I was like, oh, this is kind of cool. This seems to be working. Let me find some more help. I wasn't an economist, didn't have a business major, didn't consider myself an entrepreneur. What I did know is that I cared very deeply about where I lived. And so we started building a network. We called it the Carolina Textile District with this whole idea of being big by being small together.

8:51So we were going to band together in order to build scale. And then after we built that, we built the Industrial Commons. What we do with the Industrial Commons is we support workers. We support businesses. Some of those businesses we help to buy and convert to employee-owned companies. Some of those businesses we start ourselves. We've drawn the attention of folks like the National Science Foundation, who have chosen us as one of 10 innovation communities across the country. And it was really the organization that I needed when I was getting started that I didn't have. One of the projects that the Industrial Commons right now is working on is called Material Return.

9:31And what we do at Material Return is we take back the region's textile waste, we grind it up, and we send it through this big machine, and then we're able to make that back into a yarn, something that might be sold for three cents a pound. If we can put it through our system, it can come out on the other side, and we can sell it for$9 a pound. So we're engineering value back into this waste stream, just like we're trying to engineer opportunity back into our communities. Bob has really been the leader that's helped Material Return get started. He's somebody that grew up in Burke County, started to work when he was 16 in a sawmill.

10:09What's so neat about Bob's story is, you know, Bob is still working in manufacturing. In fact, he's working in these same plants where his uncle and his dad used to work. But now he's an owner of that plant. He has a say in what's going to happen at that facility. And he's really one of the leaders. So Bob, for me, really represents why I come to work every day. We call ourselves, we're long haul people. We're in this for the long haul. This isn't just a project of six months. This is a project of generations. Right now, there's 27 ,000 workers working in the textile industry. We would love to see half of those workers engaged in some type of enterprise or economic opportunity that we're creating through our ecosystem.

10:52My hope is not just Southern Appalachia, but all over, that there's more say, there's more wealth that can be rooted. There's less extraction and there's really just a more thriving working class. Every community has opportunity. Every community has something good in it. every community has a future where you can show up every day, you can work hard, you can get ahead, but that's not at the expense of the person beside you getting ahead. That there's opportunities for your kids where there's a lightness and there's a joy where you really feel like you're not staying because you're forced to stay, but you're staying because you've chosen to stay.

11:33We forget that we are part of the economy. We forget that we have power in it. It just takes a few people to start and you don't have to necessarily have a complex set of skills. What you really have to have is a deep care and a deep love and a deep knowledge of where you're planted and where you want to grow.

12:19We'll be right back. Thousands of products for every style and budget. Plus, surprise flash deals July 6th. Don't wait. Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends, it's pretty much all he talks about.

12:53In a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC.

13:06Do you remember being a kid and getting asked what you wanted to be when you grew up? We all do. But the truth is that most of us don't figure it out until we're well into adulthood. I'm Anne Morris, co-host of Fixable. And this month on our podcast, we're tackling the daunting question of how to find your purpose at work. Whether you're lost, stuck, or just quietly wondering if there's something more to come for your career, we're tackling it all on Fixable. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.

13:47full video, visit TED.com. I'm really struck by the final lines of Molly's film. Initially, she didn't consider herself an entrepreneur, just a person who was deeply invested in seeing her community thrive. And she's led from that place ever since. Molly reminds us that what is needed to foster new kinds of generational wealth is a deep care and a deep love and a deep knowledge of where you're planted and where you want to grow. You know, sometimes on this podcast, we give more general advice. And I think there's a lot of great advice in this talk that is broadly applicable. The way she talks about innovating away from more traditionally extractive economies and toward worker-owned, worker-supported, for-profit businesses is something all entrepreneurs should think about.

14:39But I think my biggest takeaway is that so much of change-making is site-specific. It's tied to places we are deeply connected to and understand in a unique way. So I want you to think of the place you feel most connected to. How does this place relate to your work? How has this place shaped you as a person? In what ways have you seen it change, for better or for worse? As an entrepreneur, a business leader, or even as a worker and consumer, what do you think you can do to play a role in shaping its economy? I'm fortunate to live and work in the city where I was born and raised. I'm deeply connected to New York City, where my family still lives and where my students now reside.

15:20To be able to share my love of the city with them and to see it through their eyes is such a big part of my work experience. I hope it encourages them to not just be consumers of everything that is available in this amazing city, but to also be contributors, especially in communities that need it the most. Thinking about where you're from, where you're living and working, what you and your communities need to thrive, it's not just a starting point, but an investment. Because caring for a place and caring for the people who live there is how change really happens. That's it for today. TED Business is part of the TED Audio Collective.

16:01This episode was produced by Hannah Kingsley Ma, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Maria Ladias, Farah DeGrange, Daniela Ballarezzo, Tansika Sangmanivang, and Roxanne Heilash. I'm Madupa Akinola. Thanks for listening.

16:47Thank you. wallet. Terms apply. See CapitalOne.com slash bank. Capital One N.A. Member FDIC. You want to get your backyard summer ready, but you don't want to break the bank? Wayfair gets it. Planning on dining al fresco or relaxing poolside? Wayfair has everything you need to prep your space. Shop now and save up to 70 % off during Wayfair's 4th of July clearance. Score huge deals on outdoor furniture, area rugs, and more. We're talking thousands of products for every style and budget. Plus, surprise flash deals July 6th. Don't wait! Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com.

17:27Wayfair, every style, every home.