Kimaya Diggs Deeper 010: How to Invest
The stock market!!! S&P 500! NASDAQ!! The music venue down the road!!!!
How to Invest
[You can listen to this post in audio form here!]
Welcome to Investing 101 with Kimaya Diggs!!!! Are you ready to make millions????? Well, you’ve come to the right place.
So let’s jump in: How to Invest in Your Community. Oh, you thought we were talking about finances? Well, I’m a musician and a writer. Voluntarily. So my financial choices are not really a roadmap you should follow.
I do know a lot about investing in and building community, so let’s get into it.
What does it mean to invest in community?
When you invest in something, the idea is that you put resources into something in hopes that it will give you more than that back. In financial terms, you do your research, notice what companies are doing well, give them money to help them do better, and hope that they’ve done so much better that they can return your money and then some.
It’s fairly clear in financial terms, but it gets a bit murkier when you’re investing in something as nebulous as “community.”
I’m going to start by explaining why you should invest in community, and then I’ll give a bunch of examples of ways to invest in community – I’ll include small–scale, medium, and larger examples. Because when you invest in the stock market, you can buy some shares at $5 or $10, while others go for much more. Investment can happen along a spectrum.
Why you should invest in community
The world is big and small at the same time. We can get on our phones and tap into what’s going on thousands of miles away. But the reality of (most of our) day-to-day is that we follow small patterns: wake up, go to work, go home, drive to the gym, take the train to that favorite restaurant, walk to the store.
Take a moment to think about the place where you life. The town or city or neighborhood. The area within your orbit. Do you like it? What do you like about it? What do you wish was better? Do you feel like your home reflects you and your values?
I’ll give you my answer: I like the natural landscape where I live. I love the mountain I live beside and the incredible ecosystem it supports. The way that ecosystem spills down the mountainside and into my backyard. I love the plucky small businesses where I live. Love the weirdos and queers and artists here. At the same time, this area doesn’t reflect who I am – it’s overwhelmingly white (I’m one of 172 Black people in my town of 16,000 according to the last census). It’s a mix of young families and first-generation grownup children of Polish immigrants. The young families skew liberal and the Polish folks skew conservative. While there are other queer childless leftists in town, very few of them are Black. I’m unable to find people like me in the place where I live – no role models, no friendships built on key affinities, and no peers who understand the fullness of my experience. People like me aren’t on the local stages very often. The political pockets that I agree with are prone to the same issues that plague leftist groups all the time – infighting, smugness, and an unwillingness to meaningfully engage with systematically undervalued populations.
I want the place I live to reflect my values. I want the place I live to be somewhere where the art I love (and the art I create!) can be shared and celebrated. It’s easy for me to think about moving away and starting fresh, but the truth is that this is my capital-H Home. The land here loves me and I love it back. The seasons are built into my skeleton. My mood and body move with the weather and the animals, plants, and rivers and I are in love.
Investing in my community means putting the resources I have available to work in service of my vision for the future of my town. I want to see more diversity in art. I want to see more opportunities for weird art, outsider art, and Black art. My resources cast a vote – I want more of this! – and so do yours.
What do you get back?
This is no small part of investment: what’s the return? I’ll say it in all caps.
INCREASED VIBRANCY OF YOUR COMMUNITY
MUSIC VENUES THAT STAY OPEN
ART GALLERIES THAT STAY OPEN
ARTISTS WITH ENOUGH MONEY TO CREATE RISKIER ART THAT REFLECTS WHO THEY ARE
MORE ART THAT REFLECTS WHO *YOU* ARE
MORE VENUES THAT WELCOME SELF-EXPRESSION
What resources can you invest in community?
When it comes to community, you can invest more than cold hard cash. Money’s tougher than ever to come by, so here’s a list of things you can invest:
Money, of course
Time and energy
Curiosity
Physical and digital space
Connection
Now I’ll go through each of the things on that list and give you some examples of how you can invest your resources to build the community you want to live in.
1. Money.
As I’ve said before, people love to say “support independent artists! Support independent venues!” It’s not just a plea to support an artist or venue as a charity case. It’s an invitation to invest your time and money in artists and organizations that are not beholden to capitalist interests, that operate in a bottom-up model as opposed to a homogenized top-down model. You can engage with the biggest, most popular artists in the world without even trying. You will hear Sabrina Carpenter in the grocery store or on the radio without giving her a single dollar. And she’s amazing! But when time and money are tight, a dollar to a venue that keeps your community vibrant goes much farther than a dollar to Ticketmaster.
When you spend locally, your wealth doubles, or even triples. You get more bang for your buck. You get more gratitude for your buck. And then independent venues and artists can take that buck and turn it into so much more. Supporting independent art in your community allows organizations to take the financial risks necessary to do more diverse booking and make room for arts events that may be less lucrative or designed for a smaller audience.
Ideas:
Buy a ticket to a show, and get one for a friend, too!
Buy merch from an artist.
Donate to an artist or venue’s fundraising campaign.
Pay extra to download a song on Bandcamp.
2. Time and energy.
Going to a show takes time and energy. As a chronically-ill person, I don’t take energy investment lightly. Often, staying home and watching a show or playing on your phone sounds really appealing. It sounds better than going to a venue and watching a show. And listen, you know your energy levels best. But I will say that a TV show or a phone game give you nothing. They might not take much energy from you, but they give you nothing back. Live art gives you a lot. There’s a reason we’ve been sitting around fires, playing drums and singing for each other since the dawn of time.
As an investor, you know that your time and energy are finite – use them wisely so that you can invest them where it matters!
Ideas:
Save energy by disconnecting from your phone when you can.
Use that energy to attend a live event.
Use your time efficiently so you can spend it on community.
3. Curiosity.
My pal Cassandra Kyriazis (creator of my favorite Substack) left this comment for me last week:
I love this idea – get curious about what’s already happening in your area! You don’t need to imagine what you want out of your community, you could just co-sign the things that are already taking place. Cast your vote saying yes, more of this. And you don’t even need to *like* the show you go to. You just need to cast a vote that shows you love art in your community, and you want art to continue.
I don’t know where you’re reading this from, but I want to remind many of you that there are MANY places in the world, and even just in the USA, where there. is. no. art. Where there’s not music or painting or drama in schools, where there’s no theater or dance club or music hall for 400 miles, and where the primary entertainment is TV. It’s out there. It’s bleak.
Be curious about new art, the art that’s happening in your community, and the culture currently brewing in your hometown!
Ideas:
Look at posters in your town and go to one of the events listed.
Look at the show calendar for a local venue and go see someone new.
Get to a show in time to see the opening band even if you’re really there for the headliner.
Ask a friend to share some new music with you, and send them your recent fave.
When you see music/art/an event in a friend’s Instagram story, consider checking it out!
4. Physical and Digital Space.
Physical space is hard to come by when rehearsing or performing. This investment can be huge – as big as offering up your home for rehearsals or hosting a show, or tiny – as small as liking and commenting on your favorite artist’s work to help them reach more viewers.
Physical space is finite, but digital space is infinite. As such, units of physical space are naturally worth more than units of digital space because of supply and demand – but it’s complicated by the existence of algorithms that prioritize engagement – algorithmic demands imbue digital actions and investments with a disproportionate amount of power that we can take advantage of to support the community arts endeavors that we care about.
The ideas for this type of investment cover a wide range of effort and resource expenditure.
Ideas:
Offer up your home for rehearsals or host a performance in your space.
Like, comment on, and share the work of artists and organizations you support.
Put art by local artists up on your walls!
Use a local artist’s music in your TikToks or Reels
5. Connection.
As a community member, one of your most valuable assets are your connections and knowledge within your own circles. One way to invest into connective work is to build bridges between the artists and organizations you support and people in your circle who may be interested in the work they do.
The work of connection-building mirrors the work of community-building – it’s a recursive process that grows as it grows. That improves as it improves.
Ideas:
Make playlists with artists you love in your community, combined with artists with a larger audience.
Invite a friend to a show that you think they’d really like.
Visit a new venue and meet the owners – tell them what you think about the place!
Talk to a musician at the merch table after the show and tell them about a local artist you think they’d love.
A bit about how I invest in community:
I don’t have a ton of extra money to throw around, but I invest in ways that don’t involve cold hard cash in large quantities.
Here’s what I love to do:
Like and comment on local artist and venue posts when I see them.
Serve on the board of a local nonprofit music venue.
Offer local artist names when touring acts need openers.
Offer local artist names when other artists need video, photo, marketing, and creative consultation services.
Buy tickets to local shows at a wide variety of venues.
Look at local posters to see what’s happening in my town.
Attend shows by people I haven’t seen before.
Keep active tabs on new bands that pop up and make an effort to see them.
Buy an extra ticket to events I can afford to, and invite a friend I think would like the show.
Donate what I can to local fundraising campaigns.
Create public playlists that feature local musicians combined with nationally-known artists.
Buy postcards/merch/prints from local visual artists.
How do you invest in your community? How would you like to expand that investment? Let me know in the comments :)