Ownership is how a community keeps what it builds
Good Soil EDC unlocks ownership for people who have been kept outside it. A business. A building. A stake in the place you already live.
The barrier is trust
Capital exists. Programs exist. Whole institutions exist to serve these communities. What does not exist is a reason to believe any of them, or a way to know which one applies to you on the particular day you need it.
The wall is trust, not money
Somebody has to know your situation well enough to point, and be trusted enough that you walk through the door they point at. Nobody's job was that. So we made it ours.
People did not want more courses
We asked members to rank eleven kinds of help. Online courses came last. We stopped building a library and started building something that carries a person to the resource that actually fits.
Revenue was the wrong measure
A million dollars in revenue can be one person working themselves to exhaustion. What counts is ownership: a first hire, a deed, an asset that outlasts the person who built it.
Nationally supported, locally led
Good Soil EDC is not trying to run programs in every city. We hold the platform, the national partnerships, the back office and the funds. Delivery belongs to partners on the ground who already have standing where they are.
The national storehouse
One place where philanthropic and corporate capital can be committed to ownership at scale, then deployed through partners in the markets that need it. Compliance and reporting sit with us.
The platform and the connections
Good Soil HQ and the national relationships a local partner cannot build alone. Lenders, certifiers, retailers, universities and corporations, connected to the places where the work happens.
The work itself
Local partners deliver. They know their market, they hold the relationships, and they stay long after any national initiative moves on. When it works, the local organization is out front.
Two thousand entrepreneurs in one room, each one hire away from building something that lasts.
Good Soil Forum · Dallas · 2025One hire changes everything
The line between a business that runs payroll and one that does not is the clearest measure of ownership we have. It is where an owner stops selling their own hours and starts building an asset.
The window is open, and it is narrowing
Black-owned employer businesses grew 62 percent between 2017 and 2023, against 3.3 percent for American employer businesses overall. Then the rate collapsed, from near 21 percent in a single recent year to roughly 3 percent the next.
1.8 million jobs
supplied by Black-owned employer businesses, alongside $249 billion in revenue and $69.8 billion in wages.
78 percent growth
in Black women-owned employer businesses, the fastest of any group measured.
3.4 percent
of American employer businesses are Black-owned, against 14.4 percent of the population.
Source: Andre M. Perry and Hannah Stephens, Brookings Metro, March 2026, using the Census Bureau Annual Business Survey.
What has actually been built
The Forum is four years old. The corporation that holds it is two. We publish what we can verify, and we are rebuilding how we count the rest.
The Good Soil Movement launches in Orlando
The inaugural Forum brings more than 2,500 entrepreneurs together and roughly 5,000 business owners join the network in that period. The Good Soil HQ app goes live. The Seed Capital Competition awards $250,000.
The Forum moves to Dallas and the competition doubles
June 13 to 15 at the AT&T Performing Arts Center. The Seed Capital Competition rises to $500,000 with Wells Fargo, ranking third-largest of its kind in the country. Good Soil HQ passes 20,000 members.
A record year in Dallas
2,082 people in the room at the AT&T Performing Arts Center, presented by Wells Fargo, with a fireside between Oprah Winfrey and Chairman T.D. Jakes. Seed Capital applications reach 1,829, more than double the prior year. The first Business Strategy Cohort graduates.
The Sessions tour opens and Good Soil EDC steps forward
The Sessions tour launches in Arlington, Virginia and continues in Chicago, bringing the work into individual markets for the first time. The Forum moves to the Irving Convention Center, October 8 to 10. The corporation is introduced publicly, organized around ownership, with home ownership added alongside business ownership.
