TDC has been pioneering community wealth building since 2005.  Over the course of these last two decades, we have steadily grown community wealth building (CWB) as a concept and practice, working with valued funders and partners across the US and beyond.  

We spent the past year taking stock of the CWB movement. As a result, today I can announce with great pleasure the launch of a new report highlighting some of our early findings, offer a refreshed articulation of CWB, and detail below our plans for the next stage of CWB’s development.

Today we have what is likely our best and final chance to simultaneously address the crisis of wealth inequality and the economic, social, racial, and environmental injustices exacerbated by it. Doing so will take courage and a radical new approach that requires fundamentally rebuilding our economy from the bottom up—connecting together common-sense community-based solutions, and scaling them with supportive policies and frameworks. We believe CWB is the best way to do this. 

This next phase of the work is about muscling up community wealth building practice so that it moves from the fringes to the mainstream of economic development practice.  

Building on what we’ve learned from CWB practice in places like Cleveland, Ohio, and Preston, England, we are currently pilot-testing our new action planning process with local governments across the US, including Chicago, IL.; Somerville, MA.; and Meadville, PA.  We offer an assessment process with a goal of linking existing elements of a CWB approach—such as community investment vehicles, employee-owned cooperatives, and community land trusts—to a comprehensive suite of actions that scale and amplify these elements. When these actions come together across all sectors of a local economy in a coherent CWB strategy, they have the ability to fully rewire the local economic system, disrupting and displacing the extractive economy with a democratic economy.  

Alongside our action planning process, we are growing a US network that will offer communities of CWB practice tools, guides, training, and workshops.  As localities move from ideas to action, we are also developing a new technical assistance taskforce of subject-matter experts and advisors in specific elements of CWB to help grow local capacity to deliver real outcomes on the ground. The network will link directly to a growing global movement of local governments advancing CWB, led by the country of Scotland, where I just visited, and where they now have a Minister for Community Wealth Building, recently debated CWB on the floor of their parliament, and will soon be introducing national legislation to support localities in taking the agenda forward.  

As the movement grows, and on-the-ground community wealth building actions snowball up from neighborhoods, to local government, all the way to counties, states and nations, we are committed to working in partnership to provide the resources and support to truly tackle injustices and offer real solutions to build an economy that genuinely works for all. 

I hope you will join us online July 19 for a webinar to celebrate this important work. I look forward to seeing you there!