Challenges Addressed by CWB

We live in times of deepening systemic crisis. Our economy is lopsided and unequal. Our cities and communities are ravaged by disinvestment and decay – or by rapid gentrification, deepening extraction and exclusion. The racial wealth gap remains entrenched. People are losing faith in democratic institutions and politics just at the moment when collective action is required to avert climate calamity and build the decarbonized economy of the future.

The crises we face are driven by the extractive nature of our existing system – concentrated ownership, community disinvestment, attacks on labor, environmental degradation, and structural social and racial injustice. In this moment of compounding crises, we will not succeed by tinkering within the confines of this extractive system. We need a transformative new approach: Community Wealth Building.

Community Wealth Building keeps hard-earned wealth in the hands of the people and communities that create it in the first place. Instead of extraction and exploitation, CWB creates an economy that produces equity as its everyday, natural function – and in doing so, shifts the behavior and attitudes of people, communities, cities, and ultimately the economy as a whole. CWB replaces the focus on what our local economies have conventionally accepted and valued – growth combined with trickle-down economics, attracting large corporations, maximizing shareholder profit – with new progressive values and goals: communal ownership, justice, and shared wealth.

By keeping wealth in our communities, CWB addresses the interrelated challenges of our time. When workers are their own bosses, they are less likely to be laid off during a pandemic. When we invest in local green energy solutions, citizens will no longer be at the mercy of energy prices that are themselves vulnerable to global instability. When public investment flows into housing, local businesses, and resources for Black and Brown communities – rather than the shareholders of distant corporations – racial justice will finally be within reach. CWB is not yet another conventional neighborhood revitalization strategy with a new name. It is about a different way of organizing our local economies to ensure that they genuinely work for all.

Elements of CWB are already being deployed in American cities and communities all over the world: a worker-owned enterprise in the Bronx, a CLT in Georgia, a community bank in Ohio. What has always been missing from these one-off projects is the structure and strategy CWB provides: the ability to connect and scale across the whole local system, and ensure each progressive intervention works together in synergy to create a local economy greater than the sum of its parts.