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.
Stephanie Gutierrez, co-founder of Hope Nation LLC, explores hows effective community wealth building in Native communities depends on an active process of cultural translation. Read more about An Indigenous Approach to Community Wealth Building: A Lakota Translation...
In cities across the nation, a few enjoy rising affluence while many struggle to get by. This situation is created in part by the practices of traditional economic development. Current trends threaten to worsen, unless we can answer the design challenge before us. Can we create an economic system—beginning at the local level—that builds the wealth and prosperity of everyone? Read more about Cities Building Community Wealth...
Public ownership is more widespread and popular in the United States than is commonly understood. This book is the most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the scope and scale of U.S. public ownership, debunking frequent misconceptions about the alleged inefficiency and underperformance of public ownership and arguing that it offers powerful, flexible solutions to current problems of inequality, instability, and unsustainability- explaining why after decades of privatization it is making a comeback, including in the agenda of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party in Britain. Hanna offers a vision of deploying new forms of democratized public ownership broadly, across multiple sectors, as a key ingredient of any next system beyond corporate capitalism. This book is a valuable, extensively researched resource that sets out the past record and future possibilities of public ownership at a time when ever more people are searching for answers.
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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 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...
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...
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.
CLEVELAND, OHIO — MAY 10, 2018 Evergreen Cooperative Laundry (ECL) announced a major expansion today in collaboration with Ohio’s second largest employer, taking over management of the Cleveland Clinic’s laundry facility in Cleveland’s Collinwood neighborhood. This additional location complements ECL’s original facility in Glenville. The expansion brings more than 100 new employees into the company, joining the 50 workers employed at the original laundry. Read more about Evergreen Cooperative Laundry Expands to Second Plant, More than Tripling Its Workforce...
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.
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.
In The New York Times, an in-depth profile of the Healthcare Anchor Network, highlighting how the Democracy Collaborative's work to help start the Evergreen Cooperatives led to a gamechanging collaboration between 45 leading hospitals and health systems to build community wealth.
Democratic, public ownership of pharmaceutical development, production, and distribution in the U.S. is necessary to combat the increasingly harmful impacts of Big Pharma which decades of regulation have failed to counteract.
The Anchor Learning Network is a joint project of the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU), a national organization dedicated to connecting urban universities and their community partners, and The Democracy Collaborative, and is supported by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. It builds on the success of the Higher Education Anchor Mission Initiative, a year-long pilot program launched in 2018, in bringing colleges and universities together to jointly explore how they can adopt an anchor mission: using their place-based assets—educational and operational—to advance the well-being of the communities they call home. Read more about CUMU and The Democracy Collaborative partner with 31 colleges and universities to launch the Anchor Learning Network...
From Ted Howard, co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative, and Marjorie Kelly, author of The Divine Right of Capital, and Owning our Future, The Making of a Democratic Economy is a clarion call for a movement ready to get serious about transforming our economic system. Illuminating the principles of a democratic economy through the stories of on-the-ground community wealth builders and their unlikely accomplices in the halls of institutional power, this book is a must read for everyone concerned with how we win the fight for an economy that’s equitable, not extractive.
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Today most of our money is created, not by governments, but by banks when they make loans. This book takes the reader step by step through the sausage factory of modern money creation, explores improvements made possible by advances in digital technology, and proposes upgrades that could transform our outmoded nineteenth century system into one that is democratic, sustainable, and serves the needs of the twenty-first century.
The Democracy Collaborative’s new report Anchor Collaboratives: Building Bridges with Place-Based Partnerships and Anchor Institutions discusses the role of anchor institutions and collaboratives in leveraging the power of their economic assets to address social and economic disparities and to revitalize local communities.
The report focuses on the work of anchor institutions and partner organizations that have joined to form place-based networks, or anchor collaboratives, to develop, implement, and support shared goals and initiatives that advance equitable and inclusive economic development strategies. Anchor mission work is not easy, but our hope is that this state of the field report will provide information and assistance to groups wanting to do anchor mission work or to create anchor collaboratives.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 30, 2019
Community Foundation for Northern Virginia partnering with The Democracy Collaborative to launch the Northern Virginia Anchor Collaborative
New initiative will build a more inclusive economy by connecting resources of anchor institutions to community needs
FAIRFAX, VA: Although Northern Virginia enjoys one of the highest incomes in the nation, pockets of deep poverty persist. Overall, 15.9% of the 2.32 million in the region are living at or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Level. Creating an economy that works for all Northern Virginia residents, especially the disproportionately Black and Hispanic communities that lack the opportunities to prosper and build wealth whiter ones enjoy, requires aligning all available resources in the region in a coordinated effort.
Catalyzing such an effort is the aim of the new Northern Virginia Anchor Collaborative (NVAC), spearheaded by the Community Foundation for Northern Virginia (CFNOVA). Inspired by the community wealth building framework established by The Democracy Collaborative, the new initiative will use the resources of “anchor institutions” like nonprofit hospitals and universities and local governments to drive the regional economy in the direction of equity and inclusion, beginning with a pilot project in Fairfax County’s Route 1 Corridor.
Our new report explores the "right to own"—giving workers the right of first refusal anytime their workplace is up for sale—as a strategy to massively scale up employee ownership in the economy. We outline the major provisions and legal changes necessary to enact this right, and the ecosystem of support and financing necessary to make it truly operative for workers.
