Scott Galloway calls the US economy “America is one big bet on AI“, with AI-related stocks since 2022 registering 76% of the S&P 500’s return, 87% of earnings growth, and 90% of capital spending growth. He names three scenarios: The AI bubble bursts. AI delivers as promised, but on a slower timeline. Or, AI disrupts faster than we can adapt.
Andrew Yang, Kevin Roose, and Casey Newton put it plainly on a recent Hard Fork episode: the AI sector is not well liked, job displacement will make matters worse, universal basic income (UBI) is maybe a solution, and no check replaces the structure a job provides. This thought piece builds out a “how” we can move, for AI companies and our communities.
I’ve been building this “how” for years: as an international lawyer-consultant, VR startup exec, and advisor to faith and public leadership development programs in DC, and from 2013-2025 alongside the Mexican NGO PSYDEH and our marginalized partners organizing our own sustained prosperity. In late-2024 I began building the next iteration with Eric Gordon, former CEO of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District and current CEO of Positive Education Program (PEP). I also run Salon Cultivar, a local civic engagement proof-of-concept in NE Ohio for navigating the harms caused by the attention economy.
Our thesis: no-strings-attached, hand-up investment in our communities doing for themselves. No charity. No infantilizing.
The Problem Yang, Roose, Newton, Galloway and NY State Assemblymember Bores Name
There are no AI sector sponsored mechanisms to spread the wealth as inequality grows across the USA. Yang names what a job actually is: structure, purpose, community, somewhere to go in the morning. Newton’s question follows: people who lose all of that won’t be made whole by a monthly allowance, even after the checks start rolling out. Roose notes, jobspocalypse or not, the disruption is real. They, and others like NY State Assemblymember Bores, believe that the window to mitigate it is now.
The AI bet looks like $400B+ invested in 2025. Anthropic’s CEO estimates: 50% of entry-level white-collar positions eliminated. Yang’s projection: 20-30% of 70 million white-collar workers in five years. Communities already strained by inequality must absorb more disruption with no common-good mechanism offered. UBI may be necessary, but is insufficient and feels fantastical.
Our dominant paradigm still treats inequality as a technical problem best solved by experts. Challenges like workforce preparedness gaps, unequal home and business ownership, food insecurity, limited tech access are real, but they are symptoms. The root cause of inequality in democracies is a citizenry unaware of their power and that their rights come with civic responsibilities.
When citizens disengage, elites take over. The result is unchecked power of the private sector and the state. Faced with marginalization and algorithmic capitalism, vulnerable people create their own hidden economy and decide not to vote. “If I don’t see how I matter,” the reasoning goes, “why organize? Why vote?”
The Behavioral Hypothesis
Sustainable shared prosperity requires shifting power directly to local groups through ground-up attention building and economic and political rights work. Michael Fullan and Joanne Quinn put it plainly: people closest to the problems are best positioned to solve them by strengthening the base, mobilizing the middle, and intriguing the top. This works.
The mechanism is relationship building. Daniel Siegel’s Interpersonal Neurobiology, myriad sources of our best leader training programs, the 60-year evidence-based Re-Education (Re-ED) model building resilient young people–all show that relationships rewire neural structure and mental framework at any age or station.
Behavioral evolution mechanisms are specific. Question thinking and active listening slow time down, moving people from judger to learner, from isolation to belonging. john powell’s formulation: poverty (mental and economic) is fundamentally about exclusion. Create belonging, reduce poverty.
Two paths get named in this AI-society debate: put money in people’s hands (this works), or guarantee jobs (paternalistic and unamerican). The Center for Sustained Prosperity is the sweet spot: citizen demand oriented, no-strings-attached, hand-up investment in groups doing for themselves. We start in Northeast Ohio, with a model designed to replicate across post-industrial regions. Here is what this looks like when it has been tested in the field.
Proof of Concept: PSYDEH and Say Yes Cleveland
From 2013 – 2025, I built the Mexican non-profit PSYDEH from a one-person CSO into a globally recognized NGO. Results: 19x financial and 62x total contribution growth; thousands of direct and indirect beneficiaries; Fortune 500 partnerships with 3M, Adobe, Viasat, and Zoom; recognition from Fast Company, GlobalGiving, Anthem Awards. All during sector-wide contraction.
83% of PSYDEH’s women partners surveyed report needing economic, tech, and leadership opportunities, and they are ready to build it together. In the Red Sierra Madre network, 60 women lead economic collectives that bring in revenue and produce community-impact projects. They make smart demands of government to drive their own economic development. The team walks with them throughout.
The behavioral lessons are transferable: (A) Consciousness precedes being (Havel, 1990). Human relationships — with self and others — are critical to change and best formed through in-person contact rooted in specific disciplines. (B) Continuous, local-based professional coaching is vital for sustained growth. (C) Investing directly in people building their own projects undergirds longer-term solidarity work.
Sustainable community transformation requires a specific handi-up oriented process that is adaptable across contexts and anchored in human flourishing and citizen-led economic and political rights work. It’s hand-up work. Done right, it resonates with local, national, and global donor-investors. The multi-generational initiative Say Yes Cleveland model (shepherded forward by Eric Gordon and his CMSD team) shows we have what we need in NE Ohio. In year six (2025), its first college-going cohort (class of 2019, without the full benefit of K-12 wrap-around services) is already posting meaningful gains on college applications, continued enrollment, and graduation rates compared to prior cohorts.
The Center for Sustained Prosperity in a Three-Quadrant Ecosystem
The Center is designed as a new product for an existing institution, keeping costs down and giving the fiscal sponsor a new impact platform. It operates within a three-part ecosystem of action in NE Ohio.
Make hard decisions. Not every institution doing good is the right vehicle for what comes next. Resources are finite; life cycles end. We map what works, allocate to who impacts, and are honest about what needs to sunset or merge. With policy retreat at the state and federal level, every choice is bad. We make them anyway. The City of Cleveland explores what this looks like. The Urban Agenda, with 14 of the county’s largest institutions, make these decisions possible by building ecosystem understanding around Black and Brown homeownership, business ownership, and workforce preparedness.
Learn from and do with both economies. Understand the visible one in wealthy urban areas and suburbs and the hidden one that 43% of the counties households falling below the ALICE threshold build for themselves. The hidden economy investigation lies at the core of the Center’s work: real conversations, not surveys; paid story-gathering facilitated by trusted community leaders (they are expert consultants, not data sources); 4-5 distinct profiles emerging from what we actually hear. We co-design fail-fast pilots from what surfaces.
Use buckets one and two as the evidence base for harnessing local resources and attracting outside investment. Visual storytelling built for the attention economy: cinematic, data-based case studies told by partner beneficiaries themselves, not reports. This bridges city to suburb, local to global capital. Fellowship and local seed co-investment first. Outside investment with clear ROI goals follows. Everyone wins. Proved in Mexico and Cleveland.
The strategy: walk slow to run fast. Year 1 prioritizes proof-of-concept credibility over capital volume, building systematically to 6:1 leverage by Year 3. It’s a three-year start-up inside a multi-generational commitment to empowering families with children (and their neighbors) to create home-grown emergent solutions.
Even if the Center doesn’t scale past Year 1, the seed produces durable wins: nationally applicable published hidden-economy research, a replicable pilot, multi-stream funding lessons, a cinematic case study on community-led development in post-industrial USA.
AI and the Center: Futures Intertwined
AI is inevitable. Greater Cuyahoga County has carried stubborn poverty and inequality for 60+ years and now must absorb fresh disruption from Columbus, DC, and AI. We are dynamic and active, not broken. We need a hand up, not a hand out. Co-developed with Eric Gordon, the Center is a cross-sector framework under active consideration by NE Ohio philanthropic and civic leadership and national institutions.
The Center directly addresses what Galloway, Yang, Roose, and Newton identify: not just cash, but the infrastructure of belonging. We document what our communities do and need economically (the hidden economy) and build a new development ecosystem from the ground up, based on shared reality.
Why AI Companies Can Co-Build
AI’s approval rating is 26% and will worsen without proactive common-good investment. The ROI of getting ahead of this is significant.
LLM/AGI is built on citizen digital property with no compensation. Top AI companies in the “moon race” offer 8-9 figure salaries and bonuses. Yet unlike the postwar highway system with comparable capital and universal benefit, AI offers no specific common-good return, even as thousands lose jobs and states slide toward recession.
If AI transforms the economy the way rail did, forward planning must include targeted investment in communities doing for themselves alongside investment in future energy and computing power. It strengthens the talent pipeline, surfaces new AI use cases, and heads off a PR disaster.
Community investment hedges the bet, building public trust and real-world AI use cases while the AGI timeline plays out.
The exact structure and program of the NE Ohio Center work is for the co-creating planning committee we are forming. At minimum, three value propositions for AI sector co-builders:
Local economic mobility. Ground-up, measurable proof that AI enables communities to solve their own problems. Not top-down tech solutions, but specific investments in the common good.
Belonging-focused work. The hidden economy investigation humanizes economic development, building the trust and shared prosperity the tech and adjacent sectors need with citizens.
Tech talent training pipeline. Future AI employees and customers grown through business and home ownership pilots, workforce prep, and AI tool adoption for micro-entrepreneurs. Ground-level engagement is where practical AI solutions get proofed against the daily lives of everyday people.
Cuyahoga County, OH has everything the sector looks for: a post-industrial area building its own economic transformation (replicable); a strong institutional coalition of generous citizens (ranked #1 among major US metro areas for giving to human services (Fidelity Charitable, 2023)), investors, tech-adjacent community-led development; measurement infrastructure with outcomes-based accountability. The alternative? Wait for the PR disaster, then scramble in crisis mode, paying double or triple for much less goodwill.
Capital Activation: The Four Streams
The Center does not rely on any single funding stream. Four streams activated concurrently or in sequence. Nobody wants to be first. Local actors watch for outside investors; AI companies watch for local traction. Seed funding works both angles for mutually assured creation.
- Local investors: Boomer generation legacy building, mid-market corporate workforce pipeline investment, foundation partners, and, eventually, a social impact bond at tiered recognition levels.
- The AI sector: Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust, Google Philanthropy, the OpenAI Foundation. The Center offers a replicable, outcomes-accountable proof case that AI can enable community resilience rather than community collapse: shaping citizen-AI sector relationships, mitigating risk, and building the next talent pipeline.
- Fortune 500 companies: ESG and CSR investment in measurable outcomes. PSYDEH’s track record proves the shared-value model produces ROI alongside genuine social impact; it transfers to Northeast Ohio. We move from ego-system to ecosystem. This is good for bottom lines and communities simultaneously.
- Ultra-wealthy philanthropy: MacKenzie Scott’s $16.5B no-strings model is the new standard. Trust-based giving, localization, no middle agents. Blue Meridian ($4B) and Co-Impact ($800M) facilitate multi-donor, national-local co-investment.
The Center’s target leverage goal: 6:1 by Year 3, or $10.2M mobilized on $1.7M invested. Not aspirational. It’s our performance threshold. We hit it or reassess after each year. Under-promise and over-deliver.
Build a seat at the table
Yang asks: how do you spread the wealth?
The answer lives in communities doing for themselves. Built from the ground up, designed with communities, not for them. A “we,” not “those people”. Voting rates begin to tick up because people feel seen, like they belong. The poverty rate (16.1% in Cuyahoga County today, against an Ohio average of 13%) ticks down for the first time in a generation. A seat at the table is not given. It is built. We are building it.
Interested in co-building or learning more? damon@damon-taylor.com
