We engage with communities and institutions to connect them with innovative strategies, models and training to build community wealth in their neighborhoods.
We build knowledge and leadership for the community wealth building field with cutting-edge research and analysis.
We promote & communicate our vision and engage in collaborative partnerships to co-create the community wealth building field.
We work to raise awareness of the need for systemic change, designing models that better realize fundamental values of equality, democracy, and sustainability.
It is easy to be distracted by what passes for economic news these days, focused as it is on short-term fluctuations and assurances of recovery and revitalization. The simple truth, however, is that year by year, decade by decade, life in the United States is steadily growing ever more unequal.
As cities wrestle with the growing challenge of wealth inequality, more and more leaders are looking to broad-based ownership models as tools to create jobs and build community wealth. These models are highly effective, with a positive impact for low- and moderate-income individuals and communities. This report looks at six such models—ESOPs, Worker Cooperatives, CDFIs, Social Enterprises, Municipal Ownership, and Emerging Hybrids—with examples of best practices, and explores how these models can be used in community economic development.
On June 13 and 14, 2016 in Washington, DC, many of the nation’s leading experts in employee ownership, sustainable business and finance, community and economic development, and philanthropy came together in a Learning + Design session. Co-hosts for the meeting were Marjorie Kelly and Jessica Bonanno of The Democracy Collaborative and Camille Kerr of Democracy at Work Institute. The purpose of the session was to discuss how to achieve unprecedented scale of employee ownership by focusing on achieving an audacious goal: 50 million U.S. employee-owners by 2050. This report summarizes and expands upon the June meeting:
Our new Learning/Action Lab program helps amplify local capacity to deploy new strategies for building wealth in low-income communities, connecting grassroots leaders with the models and best practices they need for transformative economic development. Our first cohort of Lab participants is bringing together five Native organizations for ongoing training and consultation as they develop new community-owned enterprises.
Our executive director outlines how community wealth building can help empower marginalized communities. Read more about PolicyLink's Angela Glover Blackwell interviews Ted Howard...
Our co-founder Gar Alperovitz sketches out the major institutions of a systemic alternative based in plural forms of democratic ownership, oriented around community at various scales—what he has called “The Pluralist Commonwealth.” Visit thenextsystem.org for more resources and information.
Read more about The Pluralist Commonwealth...
This new working paper from The Next System Project—prepared as an invited contribution to the "After Fossil Fuels: The New Economy" conference in Oberlin, Ohio from October 6-8, 2016—explores the intersections of systemic economic and ecological crisis, and propose that only a break with the mechanisms of corporate capitalism is capable of guaranteeing a sustainable future.
This study seeks to introduce a framework that can assist anchor institutions in understanding their impact on the community and, in particular, their impact on the welfare of low-income children and families in those communities.
How can cities redeploy their economic development resources to focus on building a more inclusive economy grounded in broad, local ownership? How can policymakers get strategies like worker cooperative development the support and resources needed to reach truly meaningful scale? How can collaborations between communities, local government, and key institutional stakeholders build pathways to economic equity for the people left behind by the traditional trickle-down economic playbook? Read more about Municipal leaders share visions for cities that build community wealth...
Our Community-Wealth.org site is an essential resource for practitioners and policy makers working to build community wealth. For almost a decade, our site has served as a central clearinghouse for key research and reports from the field, cutting across traditional community development silos and offering a comprehensive guide to local wealth building strategies.
Our new 2017 Impact Report highlights the work we did in the last year to build community wealth and advance a more democratic economy. It has been an incredible period of growth for The Democracy Collaborative and our projects, including The Next System Project, the Healthcare Anchor Network, and new transatlantic initiatives, especially in partnership with community wealth builders in the UK. Read more about The Democracy Collaborative: 2017 Impact Report...
31 colleges and universities across the United States have been selected as inaugural members of the Higher Education Anchor Mission Initiative, a national collaboration designed to develop and share new strategies for deploying higher education’s intellectual and place-based resources to enhance the economic and social well-being of the communities they serve. The Higher Education Anchor Mission Initiative is a joint project of the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU) , a national organization dedicated to connecting urban universities and their partners, and The Democracy Collaborative (TDC), a national research institute developing strategies for a more democratic economy, and is supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. Read more about The Democracy Collaborative and CUMU Launch the Higher Education Anchor Mission Initiative in Partnership with 31 Colleges and Universities...
Based on Ted Howard's remarks to the recent Alternative Models of Ownership conference, we've distilled the eight basic principles behind community wealth building—a transformative approach to local economic development—into this handy one page guide. Read more about Community Wealth Building: Eight Basic Principles...
When the city government of Richmond, Virginia, established the country’s first Office of Community Wealth Building in 2014 , we were pretty excited here at The Democracy Collaborative, and not only because University of Richmond professor Thad Williamson, our former colleague and co-author, with our co-founder Gar Alperovitz, of Making a Place for Community, had been tapped to set up the office. It was also an important milestone for our work as advocates for “community wealth building.” Using this name for an office within a city government represented a new level of engagement with the idea that a new approach—focused on cross-sector collaboration and the use of local assets to catalyze opportunities for broad-based ownership, with an intentional orientation towards inclusive development rather than the failed promises of trickle-down strategies—was necessary if cities were going to really tackle persistent place-based poverty. Read more about “Community Wealth Building” on the rise in city governments...
The Democracy Collaborative's Ted Howard gave the keynote address at an event in Preston, England, announcing the launch of a new Community Wealth Building Unit designed to help Labour councillors build more inclusive and democratic local economies. The new initiative will be advised by The Democracy Collaborative and housed in the office of Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party. In launching the Community Wealth Building Unit, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer John McDonnell praised the ground-breaking work of Preston City Council, which, inspired by the work of The Democracy Collaborative in Cleveland, Ohio with the Evergreen Cooperatives, has returned almost £200 million to the Lancashire economy and supported more than 1,600 jobs by using the town’s anchor institutions and local government contracts to keep money in the local economy and develop worker-owned cooperatives. Read more about The Democracy Collaborative Joins Jeremy Corbyn's New Community Wealth Building Unit As Advisors...
The Democracy Collaborative's testimony to the IPPR Commission on Economic Justice on how to bring about a thoroughgoing democratisation of our political economy.
Our new report, Higher Education's Anchor Mission, examines how an ongoing—and expanding—effort to track the impact of colleges and universities on the financial and social well-being of their surrounding neighborhoods is helping these anchor institutions align their resources to build stronger community partnerships and create more inclusive local economies.
Anchor institutions can play a key role in helping the low-income communities they serve by better aligning their institutional resources—like hiring, purchasing, investment, and volunteer base—with the needs of those of communities. The recommendations in this “playbook,” drawn from research carried out to help Rush University Medical Center (RUMC) align around its Anchor Mission, are being published to help other hospitals and health systems accelerate their own efforts to drive institutional alignment with community needs.
