Creating a just economy through shared ownership
By Joe Guinan
March 26, 2025
TDC President Joe Guinan spoke on Community Wealth Building at NCRC’s Just Economy conference in Washington, DC. The following is the text of his remarks.
Good afternoon. Thank you to NCRC for inviting me to speak here today.
My name is Joe Guinan, I am the President of The Democracy Collaborative.
We’re an action-oriented think-do tank based here in Washington, DC, and in Cleveland, Ohio – seeking to build a democratic economy through political-economic system change from the ground up.
We do this in two ways: through our on-the-ground practice – what we call Community Wealth Building – and through interventions in the ideas system and at the level of policy and politics, to promote and advance a more democratic economy as the next system of political economy.
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At a time when there is so much bad news everywhere, I am here to talk about solutions.
I scarcely think I even need to identify the problems at this point.
They’re increasingly obvious, even self-evident.
Inequality. Cost of living. Climate breakdown. Rising fascism. Collapsing faith in democracy and democratic institutions. Racism. Poverty. Plutocracy. War.
At the bottom of it all, I would argue, are the operations of our economic system.
Everybody knows that the U.S. economy is no longer working for most ordinary Americans.
Indeed, it hasn’t done so for a very long time.
If you doubt the veracity of that statement, then you are in a tiny minority.
At the last several presidential election cycles in America, supermajorities across gender, age, race, party affiliation, geography told pollsters that they held an unfavorable view of the economy, that they felt the economy was rigged against them.
And they were not wrong.
I’m not going to run through all the data – if you want that, you can go to our website.
There we publish something every five years we call the Index of Systemic Trends.
This is a data bank of economic, social, environmental and political indicators of the health of the United States.
It is a compilation of publicly available data from government (for the most part) and nonprofits that we bring together as a kind of dashboard for the overall health and direction of the system over time.
The trends considered in our Index include poverty, wealth inequality, racial wealth inequality, income inequality, wage stagnation, the cost of higher education, homeownership, corporate taxation, taxation of the rich, labor union density, incarceration rates, healthcare costs, climate change, and life expectancy, and much, much more.
And across all this data the dashboard warning lights have been blinking red for danger for a long time.
For all the ups and downs of the political and business cycle, for most Americans on many very important indicators of economic, social, and democratic health there has been little improvement and, in many cases, substantial ongoing deterioration over this period.
If you look at the vast majority of workers, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics category of “production and nonsupervisory workers” — that’s 7 out of 10 workers, 110 million of a total workforce of 160 million — then the average U.S. worker hasn’t had a real terms pay increase since the 1970s!
All the gains to the system over a period of half a century have gone to the top!
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There are political consequences of running a system in which all the gains go to the very top for an extended period of time.
It’s not politically sustainable, there is inevitably a backlash.
This is a significant aspect of the current political crisis in America.
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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?
This is where Community Wealth Building comes in.
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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 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.”
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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What we found was that the elements of this new direction were already emerging, all around, as a response to pain and crisis, in a series of powerful models: state-owned banks, municipally-owned utilities, worker-owned firms, community-owned solar, and many more practical efforts that are rooted in collective ownership and the core value of community.
These institutional designs prefigure some of the fundamentals of a next system: a democratic, community-sustaining political economy that operates within planetary boundaries, where all can thrive.
What we did with Community Wealth Building was begin to stitch them together in a strategy for transformation of our local and regional economies, from the bottom up.
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Community Wealth Building is an economic development model that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets. CWB challenges the failing approaches that have been widely accepted in economic development for too long, addressing wealth inequality at its core and building a new economy from the ground up.
Instead of the ongoing concentration of wealth in the hands of a narrow elite, Community Wealth Building pursues a broad dispersal of the ownership of assets.
Instead of icily indifferent global markets, it develops the rooted participatory democratic local economy.
Instead of the extractive multinational corporation, it is recirculatory, mobilizing large place-based economic institutions – such as local government, hospitals, and educational institutions – in support of socially oriented firms that are often democratically owned and controlled by their workers or the community.
Instead of outsourcing and asset-stripping privatization, it turns to plural forms of collective enterprise.
Instead of austerity and private credit creation by rentier finance, Community Wealth Building looks to the huge potential power of community and state banks and public money creation.
And on and on.
Viewed in this way, Community Wealth Building is economic system change, but starting at the local level.
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CWB achieves this through five pillars of direct intervention into local economies:
Our economies should have multiple forms of worker and consumer cooperatives, social enterprises, public ownership, municipal enterprise, and more.
Cities and local institutions should redirect money in service of the real economy through public and community banks, credit unions, and targeted public pension investments.
Every worker should receive a living wage and real power in and control of their workplace to deliver decent work and conditions, and advance trade union rights.
Cities should mobilize land and property assets to build real wealth in communities, bring local land and real estate development back under community control, and combat speculation and displacement.
Local governments and place-based “anchor institutions” should lead with procurement practices that re-localize economic activity, build local multipliers, and end leakage and financial extraction.
Within each pillar there are key elements that help to deliver CWB outcomes. There are myriad examples from across the country, and around the world, that demonstrate the success of the approach.
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The first self-conscious model of Community Wealth Building, our attempt to advance the new democratic economy through demonstration projects, was in Cleveland, Ohio, with the Evergreen Cooperatives.
Cleveland had lost half its population and most of its Fortune 500 companies due to de-industrialization, disinvestment, and capital flight.
But it still had very large nonprofit and quasi-public institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, and University Hospitals – known as “anchor institutions” because they are rooted in place and aren’t likely to up and leave.
Together these institutions, themselves largely dependent on flows of public funds and favorable tax treatment, spent billions of dollars per year – very little of which was going to the local community.
We worked with the anchors, the city, and the Cleveland Foundation to pursue a strategy to localize their procurement in support of a network of purposely created green worker co-ops tied together in a community corporation.
These included an industrial-scale ecologically advanced laundry, a large urban greenhouse, and a renewable energy company.
A fund has recently been added to pursue employee ownership conversions of existing businesses.
Linked by a community-serving nonprofit corporation and a revolving fund, the Evergreen companies cannot easily be sold outside the network, and return a percentage of their profits to develop additional worker-owned firms and grow the local economy.
Unlike conventional corporations, these democratic businesses will not pick up and move their jobs to another location.
Through such strategies, money can be kept circulating, anchoring jobs and building community wealth, reversing long-term economic decline.
Today the Evergreen companies are profitable and competing with the multinational corporations that had previously provided contract services to the big anchor institutions.
Evergreen is owned by its employees, the vast majority of whom are Black, many returning citizens, most of whom live in nearby historically underserved and under-resourced neighborhoods.
The company is now the second-largest minority-owned business in Northeast Ohio, and recently beat out the multinational corporation Sodexo to secure the laundry contract for the Cleveland Clinic, taking over the existing plant, rehiring all of Sodexo’s former employees on a living wage, and offering them a fast-track to employee ownership.
No jobs were lost, and the only thing that disappeared was the dividends to Sodexo’s absentee shareholders – a source of financial extraction away from the community.
Such re-localization of economic activity creates local economic multipliers, in which dollars are re-spent and recirculate within the local economy, with spillover benefits for other local and regional businesses, and for city and state tax receipts.
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The story of Community Wealth Building then leaps across the Atlantic.
In the postindustrial city of Preston in the North of England we’ve seen the success of Community Wealth Building when it is taken to scale on a whole-of-jurisdiction basis.
With the collapse of a plan for major private sector investment, Preston had been left high and dry by its conventional economic development approach.
Preston took up Community Wealth Building and radically expanded it.
“The Preston Model,” as it has become known, encompasses a string of public sector anchors across Preston and the county of Lancashire, to which has been added public pension investment and affordable housing, while laying the groundwork for the development of a community bank.
Once a poster child for economic deprivation and “left behind” places – ranked in the bottom twenty urban areas in Britain – Preston has seen significant payoffs from its alternative economic development approach, having been named the UK’s most improved urban area by PricewaterhouseCoopers for years running.
The share of the public procurement budget spent in the city has risen from 5% to 18%, while across the surrounding region it has risen from 39% to 79%, representing hundreds of millions of pounds of re-localized economic activity.
Unemployment has fallen and Preston has also achieved above-average improvements for health, transport, work-life balance, and youth and adult skills.
A major statistical study funded by the National Institute for Health Research written up in the British public health journal The Lancet, found measurable impacts from Preston’s Community Wealth Building program on mental health and wellbeing in the local population relative to control areas, including a 9% improvement in life satisfaction and an incredible 11% increase in median wages.
The study concludes: “Place-based approaches such as Preston’s Community Wealth Building programme provide a model that can potentially support the joint aims of economic regeneration, health and wellbeing improvements, and reduced regional inequalities.”
Now Community Wealth Building is being taken to the national scale, in Scotland, which is at the tip of the spear globally – the place where the model is closest to becoming the dominant paradigm for government policy on economic development.
National legislation on Community Wealth Building was announced in the Scottish government’s 2024-2025 Programme for Government, and just this week a Scottish Community Wealth Building Bill has been published for legislative action this summer – a global first.
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Community Wealth Building is now traveling all around the world, from Britain and Ireland to Canada, France, Poland, Australia, and South Korea. And it’s coming back home, with a growing number of U.S. cities – from Atlanta and St. Louis to Seattle and Denver and more developing their own CWB strategies.
With all this activity the principles of another, very different economy begin to come into view.
Finance in this economy would be put back in the service of people, communities, and the planet.
Good decent work would be a core social aim and source of individual development. Ownership would be not concentrated but broad-based and widely shared.
It would be a real and not a financialized economy.
This economy would recognize that we have only one planet, on which all life is interdependent and real ecological boundaries require limits to growth.
Human development would be the real face of freedom, requiring removal of unfreedoms such as poverty and the lack of opportunity.
Government would play a big role in this economy, in a democratic and decentralized fashion.
It would be recognized that our collective ability to govern ourselves is the bedrock of the good society.
The institutions of this democratic economy would be consciously designed and controlled to serve the common good.
This democratic economy can be hard for some people to imagine.
Perhaps because we’ve forgotten how to hope, how to demand.
“We’ve impoverished our imaginations, and as a result it’s harder to imagine an economy in which, when we wake up each day, we can know that in and of itself the economy will produce better outcomes. Greater equality. More democracy. Healthier people and communities. A cleaner environment.”
We’ve impoverished our imaginations, and as a result it’s harder to imagine an economy in which, when we wake up each day, we can know that in and of itself the economy will produce better outcomes.
Greater equality. More democracy. Healthier people and communities. A cleaner environment.
It’s hard to imagine — but not impossible. And more and more people are doing it.
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And that’s the good news amidst so much gloom and doom and disaster.
We know what a radically different economy would look like, and we increasingly know how to build it.
All that remains is just work – as my colleague Gar Alperovitz would say.
Just work.
So do we want to build it or not?
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Thank you.