What is Community Wealth Building?
Community Wealth Building (CWB) is an economic development model that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets. It challenges the failing approaches that have been widely accepted in economic development for too long, and addresses wealth inequality at its core.
First articulated by TDC in 2005, CWB takes progressive elements like community land trusts, worker cooperatives, public banking, and more and supercharges their power, systemically connecting and scaling them to change people’s lives and the economic future of our communities. It does so in coordination with local governments, economic development teams, anchor institutions, and community leaders and organizations, helping them to adapt the model to their own needs and contexts..
At TDC, we believe that when practiced strategically and interconnectedly, CWB can democratize our economy from the ground up to build the equitable and sustainable political-economic system we all need.
Action guide for advancing Community Wealth Building in the United States
This action guide is for those seeking to pursue and advance a Community Wealth Building approach in their locality, including economic development practitioners, community activists and organizations, anchor institutions, local government agencies and leaders, and other interested stakeholders. It is designed to be a practical framework for action to help readers determine how they can begin to advance Community Wealth Building where they are, using the resources and policy levers already available to them. It takes readers through the process of adopting a Community Wealth Building approach and the steps required to develop a CWB action plan, offering practical tools to help local stakeholders plan and work together.
Hear from The Democracy Collaborative and our practitioner-partners, showcasing the evolution of Community Wealth Building (CWB) in the United States.
The Transformative Potential of the Growing CWB Movement
Who is CWB for?
While CWB principles can be applied at all levels by all actors within a local economy, it is especially powerful as the defining framework of local government. It is made for cities and localities not satisfied with tinkering around the edges but determined to reset the system entirely – challenging the failed ideas and appproaches that have been widely accepted in conventional economic development for too long.
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How we support CWB
TDC’s Community Wealth Building (CWB) team fosters relationships and trust to empower a global movement of CWB leaders, offering strategic guidance and research to advance impactful practices worldwide. TDC connects diverse sectors to innovate and drive CWB efforts together.
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How CWB is Practiced
Community Wealth Building (CWB) challenges the systemic injustices of our current extractive economy by promoting broad, democratic ownership to foster equity and social justice. CWB's approach is grounded in five key pillars that transform local economies for the better.
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CWB In Action- Case Studies
Community Wealth Building is taking root across the United States and globally, with cities and organizations deepening their CWB practices across the Five Pillars. Through innovative approaches, they are achieving localized success and transforming their communities.
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Networks
The role of networks is critical to the advancement of Community Wealth Building in the United States and abroad. Not only do communities of practice provide practitioners and scholars an opportunity to connect and collaborate, they also serve as a vehicle for movement-building.
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Elements
Within each pillar there are key elements (actions, activities, approaches) that help to deliver CWB outcomes. There are myriad examples from across the country (and around the world) that can be considered elements of Community Wealth Building, and they are constantly evolving and developing.
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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.
Backstory and Brief History
Community wealth building (CWB) has a rich history, inspired by global movements to address economic inequalities – from the modern cooperative endeavors of Ujamaa in Tanzania and the Mondragon Cooperatives in the Basque Coast of Spain, through European welfarism and socialism to the laboratories of democracy in the US that bubbled up during the New Deal to become our social security system.
More recently, in the US, CWB connects back to economic justice activities of the Civil Rights era and the following War on Poverty. In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously noted: “When…profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people the giant triplets of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” King observed that racial integration by itself would not be enough; without change to the economic system itself, he would simply be “integrating my people into a burning house.” He saw that to achieve true equality, every person needed to control their own economic future – and have a meaningful stake in the wealth we collectively create.
In the years that followed, movements for collective ownership and a more democratic economy grew at a local and national level. Activists including Gar Alperovitz, the future co-founder of TDC, pushed for federal legislation through the Community Self-Determination Act (CSDA) – urging Congress to authorize community-controlled organizations that would supplement social services. Game-changing ideas like Community Land Trusts (CLTs), community development banks, and worker-owned businesses organically sprung to life in communities ranging from Georgia and Ohio to the Pacific Northwest.
These individual, one-off successes were never amplified and replicated at scale. Despite the abiding need, through the 1970s to the 1990s, the American political establishment lacked the will and desire to deliver the radical jolt to the system. Liberal politicians and organizations largely remained committed to orthodox economic thinking, and the conventional social democratic framework ultimately gave way to neoliberalism – a globalized, deregulated system designed to maximize profit and shareholder dividend. This increase in corporate influence has stymied and undermined efforts to democratize our economy ever since.