New economy advocates must pivot in a new direction that blends place and the democratic economy into a holistic solution that sustains and preserves community over the individual. Ironically, this “new direction” borrows from an idea nearly 50 years old, originating in a tumultuous era of Black activism.

The way we practice mainstream local economic development needs a reset. Community wealth building is the emergent development paradigm for making that happen.

To address growing wealth inequality, and in particular the racial wealth gap, we must build wealth in our communities. Community wealth building is a new way of thinking about economic development, poverty alleviation, and wealth creation and accumulation.

As our housing crisis worsens during the COVID-19 pandemic, we urgently need new approaches and institutions that center permanent affordability, community ownership and control, and the long-term goal of decommodification.

“If we want true, transformative change, we must invest in new ideas that get at the root causes of the challenges our Black and Brown residents are facing,” says Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

The VA’s not-for-profit. Private shareholders play no role in the Veterans Affairs system. While the private sector, and even many nonprofit hospitals and healthcare systems, have fired or furloughed staff because the procedures they make their money off of weren’t taking place during the pandemic

The former CEO of a leading UK economic think tank will be central in helping build capacity to offer powerful new technical assistance to cities and local authorities pursuing community wealth building strategies.

The Next System Project is an initiative of the Democracy Collaborative, which has long been showcasing the best research and strategic thinking about “visions, models and pathways that point to a ‘next system’ radically different in fundamental ways from the failed systems of the past and present

As we ready ourselves to reconstruct our economy, we must strive to make the recovery the starting point for a new birth of community, with an economy centered on the collective well-being of people and planet.

In this paper, we review and analyze the history and practice of community wealth building, including its origins in the tumult of the 1960s and ‘70s, how it has evolved over time, and how it has spread from the US to the rest of the world.

Ownership is the engine of our extractive economy. Capital and debt are its servants. No one knows more about this than Marjorie Kelly. In her seminal book Owning Our Future, she states: “Ownership is the gravitational force that holds our economy in its orbit, locking us all into behaviors that

Blue Tent’s Eoin Higgins features the work and mission of The Democracy Collaborative in his piece “The Democracy Collaborative Is On a 30-Year-Plan for Changing the Economy”. “There’s a lot of worker ownership and community development in different parts of the state,” said Alperovitz. “Our goal is

The call from the No Shutoffs Coalition—led by Food & Water Watch, Free Press Action, Center for Biological Diversity, the Partnership for Southern Equity, and the Democracy Collaborative—declared that immediate federal action is needed to help millions of individuals and families facing poverty and

“A diverse coalition of more than 600 labor, environmental, racial justice, and faith-based organizations delivered a letter Wednesday urging President-elect Joe Biden and his administration to enact a nationwide moratorium on utility disconnections on day one in the White House, stressing that

WFPL reports that nonprofit REBOUND, Inc., has taken the first steps create a Community Land Trust in Louisville, KT. The nonprofit could be awarded up to $2.1 million in federal Community Development Block Grants, which would be used to build, rehabilitate or acquire 10+ homes in neighborhoods that

We cannot return to business as usual and we must resist at all costs a doubling down on neoliberalism that has pushed us beyond ecological limits and led us down a path of wealth extraction, inequality, poverty and precariousness. The on-the-ground solutions and experiments around bold alternatives

A plan for local economy preservation funds that would “save local businesses at scale” that would otherwise be casualties of the economic damage done by the CIVID-19 epidemic was delivered on November 19, 2020 to the Biden-Harris transition team by The Democracy Collaborative and the Council of

The Healthcare Anchor Network (HAN) convened the “Anchoring Resilience: Aligning Supply Chains and Impact Purchasing for Community Health” summit to spark collaboration in the healthcare sector around onshoring and localizing production of PPE and other supplies, with an emphasis on equity, sustainability, and supply chain resilience.

Democracy Collaborative vice president Joe Guinan, who is also a contributing editor at Renewal, talks to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite about the outcome of the US election, the unfolding crises of COVID-19, the openings for a transformative political economy and the strategies he would like to see

The United Kingdom town of Preston and the development cooperative Stir to Action have launched a groundbreaking community wealth building initiative to increase Black, Asian, and minority ethnic representation in the cooperative sector.

Prioritizing local and minority-owned suppliers can help create jobs in the community. Well‑paying jobs bring health insurance which encourages more preventative care. The Democracy Collaborative has developed a toolkit for exploring other case studies on employment initiatives and how different

[Community wealth building] must realise its potential to develop institutions and build a new ecosystem rooted in participation and ownership by the community that will ensure a power base for long-term sustainability. To do so the movement needs to be properly resourced and supported, both in

Ee must work to ensure that the response to the COVID-19 crisis ushers in a new era of community wealth building as the basis of new local economic transformation plans to create the kinds of democratic, inclusive, and community-based economies we need.

[Cleveland] boasted very large 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 three institutions had a combined spending

“Obviously, there is somewhat of a tension between one group seeking for housing to be affordable, which means low prices, and another group seeking continuing investment return, which requires not just high prices but continually increasing prices,” says Peter Gowan, policy associate at the policy

In an article in Red Pepper, Joe Guinan of The Democracy Collaborative argues that “following major defeats, the left on both sides of the Atlantic must urgently get stuck into community organising, movement building and political education.” It’s time to get concrete and specific about political

“It is unconscionable that Congress has failed to provide relief to the people of the United States for months, while continuing to roll out corporate bailouts programs. Our essential workers deserve access to PPE, we need our Postal Service now more than ever to help us deliver a fair election, and

Mercy Health highlighted their commitment to the Healthcare Anchor Network and anchor mission work in an opinion piece in The Cincinnati Enquirer. “In November 2019, Bon Secours Mercy Health (BSMH) was one of several leading health systems across the country announcing its commitment to the

The Community Wealth Summit was a week of virtual learning and place-based organizing to rebuild local economies around shared ownership and racial justice that started on July 6, 2020. In the opening session, Ted Howard, the president of The Democracy Collaborative; Dayna Cunningham, executive

Steve Roach, interim president for HealthAlliance-Clinton Hospital, highlights the Healthcare Anchor Network’s role helping the hospital pursue its Anchor Mission work of investing in the local community. “Our commitment to community health is exemplified by our work with Anchor Mission initiative

An important shift brought about by the community wealth building movement is towards regionalizing and localizing financial flows and keeping money in communities through initiatives such as local currencies and community banks. This is now rapidly catching on in the UK.

In June 2018 The Laura Flanders Show released a special report, “Building the Democratic Economy, from Preston to Cleveland ,” co-produced with The Democracy Collaborative. The documentary features the exciting trajectory of a new model of inclusive, democratic local economic development in what had

The “Preston Model” is helping inspire a new conversation about the role of local government in catalyzing locally-driven economic revitalization and transforming patterns of ownership towards democratic alternatives.

COVID-19 has created economic hardships that have created severe business challenges for local small businesses, but broad based participant ownership structures could be the solution to supporting these local businesses. Schneider writes, “[B]ack in 2018, President Trump (whether knowingly or not)

Part of ensuring the recovery from the COVID-19 economic slowdown works for everyone, not just the richest, could take the form of a state holding company with a mandate to support struggling businesses directly and to prevent the emergence of an “Amazon recovery.”

The Democracy Collaborative prepared a report, created for the Healthcare Anchor Network, that looked at how racial and ethnic disparities in the economy are showing up in the COVID-19 pandemic and in the public policy response to the pandemic. The report also covers how the economic effects of the pandemic will likely impact racial and ethnic inequality.

The council recently launched its Community Wealth Building (CWB) strategy which sets out how the council and other ‘anchor’ organisations – including NHS Ayrshire & Arran, Ayrshire College and wider partners – will work in partnership with communities and businesses to build a strong economy which

Local economies are being decimated in the COVID-19 pandemic. By this point, every community has stories about a business that has closed and won’t re-open and friends and family members who have been laid off. As the economic shutdown continues, large numbers of local businesses face bankruptcy and

Community wealth building and democratic, pluralistic ownership of the economy are crucial to any fair reconstruction programme after the Covid-19 crisis, says a report. UK thinktank the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) worked with US organisation the Democracy Collaborative (TDC) on the

COVID-19 is bringing a new level of attention to the deadly effect of health inequities in our country, particularly the disparate impact on people of color, immigrants, low-wage service workers and those without access to health care. We need to deepen a national conversation and accelerate action

Earlier this year Hartlepool Borough Council put forward initial work exploring what a local community wealth-building strategy would look like for the town. The approach, which was developed initially by the Democracy Collaborative in the USA, aims to ensure the economic system builds wealth and

The COVID-19 pandemic could become a moment of crystallization, with communities and governments working together to build a genuinely inclusive economy. But to do so, we need ambitious interventions, both at the national level and at the level of a new common sense, built upward from community.

The post COVID-19 world must usher in a new era of community wealth building, according to a think tank. The Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) has today (20 April) published two papers, which outline a number of measures to help build a new democratic economy, once the pandemic subsides

At a time when businesses pivot from making booze to hand sanitizer, and from sewing t-shirts to facemasks, we look at the cities that have already successfully re-localized industry. Amid the grim reality of COVID-19, one of the rare feel-good storylines has been a local business that changes its

COVID-19 is a combined health and economic crisis poised to further devastate rural communities already suffering severe economic stress. Already, rural health care systems are strained by the outbreak, and workers across the country are facing increasing precarity as the crisis unfolds. The

Stephanie Gutierrez discusses the community wealth building collaboration between the Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation and The Democracy Collaborative. For the Lakota people of the Plains, ‘wealth’ has always meant to live by our virtues in order to have a happy, well-balanced life

Advocates of the Preston model in the United Kingdom are engaged in a conversation on how their experience wh community wealth building can inspire similar interventions in Kigoma, a city of some 235,000 in northwestern Tanzania.

The Democracy Collaborative today introduced Hospitals Aligned for Healthy Communities, a toolkit series to help health systems use their hiring, purchasing and investing power to improve the health and well-being of underserved communities and communities of color. Inclusive, Local Hiring: Building the Pipeline to a Healthy Community is the first installment in the series, developed with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Laura Newberry reports from Springfield, MA to highlight a case study shown in Democracy Collaborative’s report, Educate and Empower: Tools for Building Community Wealth: The city’s burgeoning network of worker-owned cooperatives, Wellspring Collaborative, is getting some street cred for its work

This report, prepared by The Democracy Collaborative and submitted to Cooperation Jackson, highlights opportunities to build a cooperative economy in Jackson, Mississippi linked to anchor institution procurement.

This report draws upon practical experience accumulated over the years in many areas and proposes a strategic approach to integrate, expand, and coordinate a powerful array of activities focused on promoting community wealth building in the nation’s distressed communities. Or, to put it more simply