Community Wealth Building to Economic System Change

Joe Guinan and Neil McInroy

April 16, 2025

The Democracy Collaborative participated in the recent April 3-4 online convergence towards the Next System Teach-Ins in November 2025. Our session covered Community Wealth Building as a method for delivering local economic system change from the ground up.

Community Wealth Building to Economic System Change

At a time when there is so much bad news everywhere, we are here to talk about solutions.

We scarcely even need to identify the problems at this point. 

They’re increasingly obvious, even self-evident.

When we talk about a systemic crisis, we are not being rhetorical. 

We are facing a crisis not just of politics or the economy or ecology but all of them at once, in a multifaceted crisis of our system of political economy.

Inequality. Cost of living. Climate breakdown. Rising fascism. Collapsing faith in democracy and democratic institutions. Racism. Poverty. Plutocracy. War.

And at the bottom of it all, we would argue, are the operations of our economic system.

If the economy isn’t working for most Americans, then it has to be changed.  Either that, or all our problems will continue to get worse.

But economic system change is a tall order. 

Change to what? How do we know it will work better? Is it even possible?

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Twenty-five years ago, when The Democracy Collaborative was formed, we set about the work of political-economic system change. 

We started from the premise that what needed to change was the fundamental operations, institutions, relationships, and outcomes of the economy.

It was our belief that we could no longer work on the basis of what might be called social democratic or liberal redistributive strategies that seek to allow capitalism to produce growth and then clean up around the edges with regulation and redistributive social spending “after the fact.”  

We are up against an economy whose structural workings increasingly make that impossible – like trying to climb up an ever-faster-moving downward escalator.

The institutional arrangements at the heart of today’s capitalism – private ownership, credit creation by banks, global capital markets, giant publicly traded corporations – together form the most powerful engine for the extraction of value the world has ever seen. 

It is this set of relationships, this basic institutional design, that drives the outcomes we are seeing in terms of crumbling public infrastructure, social atomization, uneven development, environmental destruction and a widespread sense of popular disempowerment.

We determined that if we were serious about addressing our real economic challenges then we needed a different set of institutions and core economic arrangements capable of producing sustainable, lasting and more democratic outcomes – a new paradigm, a democratic economy in support of a democratic polity.

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It’s empowering to take up the work of system change.

And we believe there are more ways of doing it than are commonly understood.

If systems are stalemated or in crisis the usual paths forward are reform or revolution.  But we don’t believe that exhausts the possibilities. There is also evolutionary reconstruction – the steady build up over time of institutional alternatives that grow and displace the old.

“If systems are stalemated or in crisis the usual paths forward are reform or revolution. But we don’t believe that exhausts the possibilities. There is also evolutionary reconstruction – the steady build up over time of institutional alternatives that grow and displace the old.”

Our colleague and founder Gar Alperovitz has written a great deal about this as a theory of system change. That and crisis leaps that can allow us to move forward not linearly but in great shifts at key inflexion points like the present moment.

The point is that systems are designed by humans – and can this be redesigned. Ursula Le Guin reminded us that people living in the centuries of the pharaohs or of the divine right of kings in the middle ages might have thought their systems immutable and unchanging. But they gave way to system change.

Systems come and go, system change is as common as grass in history.

The essential thing to know is how that can happen today, and how we might go about the work, in the face of so many challenges, of actually building a system worth living in.

And that is where Community Wealth Building comes in.

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