About Island CultureZ

Our Mission: Aligning our potential to ignite a culture of liberation.

More: Island CultureZ is community-driven development hub for building back community wealth in historically neglected and excluded communities in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. We do this by working together in cooperative ways to create viable worker-owned jobs, increase market access and market alternatives, reinvigorate collective land ownership, fortify democratic community control, and restore community health through the fertile economic avenues of local food and agriculture.

Many of us here have seen decades of “community development” taking place in Winston-Salem, yet somehow so many of our communities continue to struggle from the same well-worn problems.

For all the talk -- and reports and convenings and grant cycles -- we’re not much closer to seeing the conditions that actually allow all of our people to thrive socially, physically, and economically.

Less talk & more action. “Equity” ultimately means shifting resources and influence to those in our communities historically denied both.

Island CultureZ is a departure from what hasn’t worked in pursuit of proven economic, social, and political practices that promote equity in all dimensions, solidarity and cooperation, sustainability, and community control & democratic decision-making.

This framework (one amongst several) that undergirds our efforts is known as solidarity economics.

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Location

Island CultureZ (ICZ) is located in the neighborhood of East Winston proper (bounded by MLK Jr. Drive to the West, Highway 311 & Skyland Park to the north, Business 40 to the south, & Brushy Fork Creek to the east).

Demographics

This is a low-income/-access neighborhood of color (89% Black) with poor socioeconomic and cardiometabolic statistics. Homeownership pre-pandemic was 7%, employment 47%, & median household income $14,688. 62% of residents are experiencing poverty, 14% have an Associate’s degree or higher, 12% of students in the high school district meet ACT proficiency, and 49% of residents receive SNAP (also pre-pandemic numbers).

Racial Equity

This is one of our many lower-income communities of color that has not been invested in in ways that bolster meaningful democratic participation, non-displacing economic development, and community-led placemaking/placekeeping. Island CultureZ is an innovative step toward solving that problem.

“Island” represents a socioeconomic reality where residents have been historically “cut off” — that is, economically, politically, and culturally marginalized, often intentionally excluded, under-resourced, and underrepresented politically and economically resulting in generations of low wealth and poor cardiometabolic health (amongst other cascading correlates).

There are many "island” communities globally as a result of persistent neoliberal economics that promote scarcity, poverty, and the further concentration of wealth among the few to the detriment of the many.

Island CultureZ implements economic alternatives on a small-but-broadly networked scale that promote health, access, equity, dignity, accountability, sustainability, democratic participation, and resilience.

“Z” in “CultureZ” represents man, woman, child, sun, moon, stars, and all of the elements. It is an expression of the roots of our communities -- where we’ve come from and where we want to go -- as a truly grassroots-driven effort.