Alima Samad and her brother Ismail Samad are the co-founders of Loiter, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reconsidering and reimagining a different future for the City of East Cleveland, Ohio, where the siblings were born and raised.

Founded in 2020, Loiter focuses on building community-owned businesses that encourage reinvestment in habitually excluded communities.

Starting in East Cleveland, a 3.5 square mile municipality where nearly 90 percent of residents are Black, Loiter’s aim is to promote economic and spatial justice to reduce health disparities and the racial wealth gap.

Kresge had the opportunity to visit Loiter’s food ecosystem during a recent gathering of practitioners and allies of the Equitable Food Oriented Development (EFOD) Collaborative.

Equitable Food Oriented Development is a community-anchored development strategy centering Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) food and agriculture projects and enterprises as vehicles for shared power, cultural expression and community asset building. In 2022, Loiter received a grant through the community-controlled EFOD Fund, which supports BIPOC-led organizations working at the intersection of food, agriculture and community asset-building. To date, EFOD has deployed more than $2.8 million through its practitioner-controlled fund into communities using food as a vehicle for community wealth building.

In this interview, Alima Samad, current president of Loiter Board of Directors, discusses the events that led to the organization’s founding, the importance of “closed loop” systems, and Loiter growing portfolio of community-owned businesses.

Q: What inspired you and your brother Ismail to start Loiter?

It started with an invitation from Ismail to join him and a group of change makers in challenging status quo economic and community development practices in impoverished communities. This group functioned more like a think tank discussing important realities uncensored very openly, and very honestly, with our families and with each other.

Through Ismail’s fellowship at Common Future, an organization that is rooted in the advancement in racial and economic equity, we received unrestricted funding to further the collective movement for creating an ecosystem of systemic change.

We were able to seed some of these ideas in a grounded reality of people in our home town of East Cleveland, where my mother and father still live, and where we have witnessed a spiral of economic decline. This forced us to admit that we were not excluded from the problem of undervaluing our own community by taking our skills and talents elsewhere in pursuit of economic prosperity.

We said, “There is an opportunity to realign our life’s purpose in order to make a difference on behalf of the people that are still there.” That’s how it bloomed into Loiter.

Q: Before we talk about Loiter’s work, let’s talk about the organization’s name. I understand it is an acronym?

Yes. The name Loiter came from Ismail. As a Black male it resonates with him because he has been perceived as a criminal rather than a human being just while driving, shopping, or hanging out.

For Ismail, it is a way to have honest conversations about the narrative change and intentional investment needed to realize the ignored potential of people in East Cleveland and other marginalized places.

The meaning of the name was an evolution of how exactly to state the requirements we think are necessary for long term socioeconomic reform.

Loiter stands for “Love, Opportunity, Investment, Transformation, Equity, Restitution and Reparations.” It comes across as heavy, but it covers everything we intend to do and everything that people — not just in East Cleveland, but also in other small suffering communities across the nation — can support. It’s our values.

Q: How do those values translate into action?

In everything we do, the long-term goal is through the scope of economic advancement because the city and its people are economically distressed. East Cleveland is the most cash poor city in the state. Poverty is the norm. Our approach is meeting people where they are and through community engagement activities offering what we call ‘emotional reparations”. In partnership with the East Cleveland Public Library, we present lectures and other programming to the community to introduce our theory of change.

Economic opportunity is still such a far-fetched dream when there’s no grocery store, bank or other vital assets that contribute to a thriving neighborhood.

So, we needed to be sure to illustrate that change is not just coming, it is here. We have pre-selected industries and started growing a portfolio of product lines that community members will see as an investment opportunity. Loiter’s efforts will work to scale these companies until community wealth is actualized while reserving a place for community members to participate in the future.

We started with low-hanging fruit, using assets in our control, to grow raw mint, dry it into a tea, package and brand it as a community-owned Loiter product. Handpicked, local and organic products reestablish pride of place instead of violence, poverty and blight.

Test marketing that product to the community first offered healing and something they could see, touch, taste, smell, and feel, and something they can believe in too. We do not want to sell hope, rather demonstrate what is possible as a market opportunity while gathering feedback about the product itself.

We are also currently invested in a chocolate collective, Chocolate Rebellion,  and a fermented foods company, Wake Robin Fermented Foods.

We are furthering our connection to the community by designing a café that will sell tea and other community owned products lines to the public. Instead of waiting for a chain of retailers to fill this void, our café will build on a strong community brand that is non extractive and restorative at its core.

By recruiting East Cleveland homeowners and providing the technical assistance necessary to become a homeowner farmer, we guarantee the business opportunity to become a grower for us and create a passive income opportunity for them at the same time.

The strategy is to create a “closed loop” solution.

Q: What do you mean by a “closed loop” solution?

A: At Loiter it means a full food production and distribution system that is self-sustaining, and community owned that does not rely on external inputs. Deploying this strategy in East Cleveland will allow for all the resources that are used to produce food to be recycled and reused as well.

We started this process with Wake Robin Foods, where the produce that is grown by our partner farms are selling at the local farmers market. Any products not sold are integrated into our fermented foods process and sold as a finished good like kimchi or pickles.

Any remaining surplus from the farm is then composted and the compost is then sold back to the farmers. Finally all glass jars are brought back to our site to reuse, a full 360 degrees circular economy.

Q: You mentioned the goal of establishing a portfolio of community-owned businesses. Do you have others in mind besides the tea product?

With the purchase of Wake Robin Fermented Foods, we can fast track Loiter to where we need to be in terms of delivering economic opportunity through farming to the people of East Cleveland. With this business, we are expanding the product line and expanding operations to East Cleveland as well, bringing jobs to people as growers of produce the company uses to make its fermented products. To have the financial support of EFOD meant everything to us because it allowed us the latitude to make some good decisions for the long-term benefit of the community.