The co-founders of Nashville Made, Audra Ladd and James Soto, each have had their own journeys in Nashville’s manufacturing and maker community. Soto, since 2003, has run a marketing firm focused on the industrial sector in and around Nashville. And Ladd is a ceramicist who also has run point on Nashville’s creative economy for the metro government. Nashville Made was created to help the region’s smaller makers and producers band together and give them a say in the policy decisions affecting their sector, to learn what it takes to succeed as makers in business, and to ensure the workforce needed to grow their sector tomorrow is being prepared today.
“It’s been slower to come together than one might think, given how much energy there is in the sector,” says Ladd. She points to two challenges: that smaller makers are preoccupied with their own businesses, which reduces their bandwidth for policy discussions and community-building; and that medium and larger manufacturers in the region, who should be natural allies in a Nashville Made program and lend it additional gravitas, have not seen themselves as part of the community. At least not yet.
Despite that, Nashville Made has managed to program a full slate of community-building and educational programs in very short order. Unfortunately, all of that ground to a halt on March 3 when seven tornadoes tore through the Nashville area, killing 24 people, destroying almost 800 structures, and damaging 1,400 more. Nashville Made mobilized immediately. “It’s been all hands on deck since then to help businesses cope and figure out what’s next for them,” Ladd says.
A local CDFI quickly worked with partners to put together an emergency lending program for loans of up to $50,000 at four percent interest—well below market. The loans have a term of five-and-a-half years, with no payments (or interest) due during the first six months. A total of $4 million is available to Middle Tennessee small businesses.
But businesses who are struggling to stay open and regain a market share may not benefit from taking on debt at such an uncertain time. Because of that, Nashville Made is exploring how it might develop a grant fund for its member businesses. “Cash assistance that enables businesses to get through this time is absolutely essential, especially for businesses owned by people of color that may not have as much of a runway or savings,” said Ladd.
UMA has found that so-called “made in” organizations (also called Local Brands), like Nashville Made, are essential to helping a burgeoning maker/manufacturing sector take root in cities. They help elevate the needs of the sector to policy- and decision-makers in a way that no individual small business owner can. And they help officials to understand the sector’s particular needs, especially around land use and capital access. But the community-building role they play within the sector is also key. So much of makers’ and small manufacturers’ success is often rooted in collaboration and shared business prospects. And as we are seeing in Nashville, in the wake of a traumatic event, that community can be an essential part of businesses’ survival.
This case study was co-authored by Mark Foggin and Johnny Magdaleno and published in 2020 as part of the Urban Manufacturing Alliance’s “Forging Fairness: How community-based lenders are centering both inclusion and manufacturing to promote equity [link to report].” This report highlights the work of practitioners in UMA’s Pathways to Patient Capital cohort, and approaches these leaders are taking to help entrepreneurs of color–including makers and manufacturers–get access to the capital and know-how they need to realize their business ideas and plans at scale.