Because Slater was a real estate agent, he was familiar with land availability in the Albany area. Eventually he located a 5000-acre former plantation outside of Albany called Featherfold Farm, at the price of approximately $1,000,000. On such a tract we could put several hundred homes and still have plenty of land for farming. In Israel this is called a Moschav Shitivi—a village with small homesteads of half an acre each clustered around a village center and large, cooperatively-farmed fields surrounding the village. This model was adopted by the civil rights leaders as the best way to relocate families on the land.

The main problem was how to raise $1,000,000. Fay Bennett and I (the only other white person on the trip to Israel) arranged a $50,000 one-year option with her organization. We set out to raise the money with the one-year deadline at our backs. Fortunately Slater had many friends from his work in the civil rights movement and from his years as a student at Oberlin College. One of these friends was Chester Carlson, the inventor of Xerox and a multimillionaire. He was very interested in the project and offered to give the money for the land on one condition—that Slater and I should first meet with the Fellows at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. The Center had been established by Robert Hutchins, formerly President of the University of Chicago, where the Great Books method of education started. We agreed, of course, and flew out to Santa Barbara with great expectations. Here was the chance to dialogue with these distinguished Fellows. But most important was the million dollars.

At the Center W. H. ("Ping") Ferry acted as liaison for us. Hutchins arranged an evening meeting with ten or twelve of the Fellows around a large table. The dialogue went well, with several constructive suggestions offered to improve our proposal. But before the meeting began, Ping asked us to come into an adjoining room and relayed a message he had just received that our benefactor had died suddenly a few hours before! This was the first disappointment in our quest to raise the money, but not the last.

The next disappointment came when a promised grant from Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty program failed to materialize. The story is that Robert Kennedy had managed to have a twenty-million-dollar fund set aside within the Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO) for programs to help poor people, primarily in the South. What was unique about this fund was that it was designed to prevent racist governors from blocking such grants for the South—as they had been doing by refusing to approve the grants. Bobby Kennedy's fund removed the requirement of approval.

With the help of friends inside and outside of government we managed to get a commitment from the OEO for $1,000,000 from the Kennedy Fund. The only provision was that within a year's time we do a feasibility study, for which we were given a $100,000 planning grant to be administered by McClaughry and Associates. We completed the study, and although the plan was approved, we never saw the million dollars. Slater King had been killed in a car accident, and without his leadership in Albany the OEO staff probably questioned the ability of other local leaders, in particular Reverend Charles Sherrod, to manage such a large project effectively.

We still had the option on the land, however, and we set out to raise the loan money from private sources. We had to patch it together with $20,000 here and $50,000 there, mostly from Church groups who were ready to "put their money where their hearts were." Out of this experience came the idea of a nonprofit Community Investment Fund for the purpose of investing in socially responsible businesses.

Altogether we had to borrow over half of the million dollars, including a first mortgage with Prudential Life Insurance. The background on this is interesting. The two brothers who were the sellers of the land had a mortgage of $400,000. Customarily, such a mortgage can readily be taken over by the buyers. In this case, however, Prudential at first refused to transfer the mortgage on the grounds that when they had given a mortgage to a church several years earlier, the church defaulted on the loan. Because the church was a religious, nonprofit organization, Prudential decided not to collect on the mortgage in order to avoid bad publicity. Therefore, the company adopted a policy of not lending to a nonprofit organization, which they considered New Communities to be. It would be willing, however, to give a mortgage if New Communities were a for-profit organization. Fortunately we found a sympathetic Wall Street lawyer, who arranged almost immediately a for-profit "shelf" corporation to take over the New Communities corporation and then lease the property back to New Communities—all very legal. Now as a for-profit corporation, we had the approval of Prudential—and not only approval, Prudential increased the mortgage!

While the first mortgage from Prudential went a long way toward our target of $1,000,000, at the end of the day before the option was due to run out, we were still $50,000 short of our goal. But we did have a promise from a black church group in North Carolina that they would loan the $50,000. C. B. King, Slater's brother and also a lawyer, Slater's wife, Marion, and I were still in the offices of our Wall Street lawyer in New York. He had just received a call from the group in North Carolina confirming that they would have a $50,000 check in C. B. King's office in Albany, Georgia, before the noon deadline the following day.

It was late in the afternoon when I called for reservations on a regular flight from New York to Atlanta and on to Albany. I was told that all seats were sold out from Atlanta to Albany. After two more calls I located a private airline that could accommodate us. So far so good, but when we got to Atlanta and found the private airline, the manager informed us that the plane could not take off because the rear door wouldn't close. I asked if he had some rope, and after getting a reluctant yes, I finally convinced him that I could hold the door shut with the rope all the way to Albany, which I did.

The next morning we arrived early at C. B. King's office. Everyone assembled had an interest in the project, including, of course, the two brothers who owned the property. They were nervous and clearly hoped the sale would not go through because apparently they had been threatened by some of their neighbors. As the hands of the clock moved to twelve noon and past, the two brothers jumped up and gleefully shook hands, saying "too bad." C. B. King, however, called their lawyer aside, and after a brief consultation with the two brothers their lawyer announced that his clients would extend the time for another twenty minutes. At that very moment a messenger arrived with the $50,000 check . Now it was time for our group to cheer. Everyone, of course, wanted to know what C. B. King had said to their lawyer, but he said only that he had certain information that their lawyer would not want reported.

Tragedy marked the history of New Communities. When Slater was killed in an auto accident just before we took the option on the land, there was serious discussion about whether to continue with the project. With trepidation but as a tribute to Slater, the vote was to go forward. Then, one night only a year or so after purchase of the land, came another accident—a truck with its lights off blocked the road on which six key workers from the farm were traveling. They were in the hospital for months, which set the project back immeasurably.

In spite of all these setbacks the many people involved managed to hold onto the land for over twenty years although few of the plans worked out under the OEO plan were ever realized. This was a great disappointment because New Communities could have been an exceptional model for integrating large and small-scale farming enterprises and creating small industries to provide long-term employment. Perhaps these models would have prevented the mass exodus of blacks to northern cities, where property became tinderboxes for rioting, drugs, and gang warfare.

During the period we spent raising funds for New Communities we were able to do a lot of "spade work" with church groups, foundations, and other nonprofit groups that had considerable money invested in stocks and bonds. Most of these investments were in securities considered "safe or prudent," but they were often with companies that manufactured products harmful to health and the environment or socially destructive. Our appeal to these nonprofit groups was to use an investment "screen" to establish criteria for investment from a social perspective. "Put your money where your mouth is." This became known as "social investing." (Morris Milgram was one of the early proponents of this approach, which he used to raise funds for his work in creating integrated housing.) Most of the early social-investment funds used what we called negative criteria (no pollution, no segregation, no pesticides or insecticides, etc.) We, however, developed what I believe were the first positive criteria for social investing, and New Communities was the first example.

There was considerable resistance from board members of these nonprofit groups, many of whom were bankers. They thought their responsibility was only to make investments that would earn maximum profits. Moreover, they were convinced that "social investing" could not, by its nature, be as profitable as "regular" investments. This assumption has proven to be wrong, and gradually social investing has become respectable as well as profitable. But in the 1960s it was still a "hard sell." Today billions of dollars are in social investments.