Drawing on the work done in the Learning/Action Lab for Community Wealth Building, Stephanie Gutierrez explores how a systemic approach to inclusive local economic development needs a process of active translation to resonate with the traditional values at the core of Native communities.

With Ronnie Galvin joining The Democracy Collaborative as our new Vice President of Engaged Practice, we thought we’d sit down with him for a quick Q&A about the perspective he brings to community wealth building: John Duda, Director of Communications: There’s a lot happening right now to be

Here at the Democracy Collaborative, we were incredibly excited when the Movement For Black Lives announced their policy agenda last month, underscoring the need to develop real systemic solutions to the drivers of systemic racial inequality in America (and honored to see that our work on building more inclusive local economies had found its way into a few pieces of this collaborative mosaic of transformative policies assembled by an incredible nationwide team of scholars, activists, and policy advocates). After studying and discussing the program internally, The Democracy Collaborative has decided as an organization to formally endorse the M4BL policy platform, not because we necessarily agree with every single detail of every recommendation, but because we believe it is an important contribution to a vital national conversation, and should be a key starting point in the urgently needed efforts to find policy solutions that address both the police violence inflicted with tragic regularity on too many individual Black lives, and the larger systemic violence inflicted on Black communities by an inequitable economic system. Below, our Community Development Associate Nicole Brown delves deeper into the structure and significance of the M4BL agenda and its connections to our work.

Originally published in Rooflines: The Shelterforce blog on July 7, 2016. Since 2010, 60 percent of new cooperative worker-owners are people of color and more than two thirds of total worker-owners are women. These are some of the findings from Cooperative Growth Ecosystem: Inclusive Economic

Our Research Associate Emily Sladek writes on the capacity of local food systems to transform the paradigm of economic inequality, especially for low-income neighborhoods and communities of color.

Low-income communities and communities of color, in challenging structural economic and social inequality, have historically grappled with tensions inherent to development. Who participates in, directs, and ultimately owns the economic-development process? This report draws on case studies of 11 different community economic development initiatives from across the U.S. to highlight a diverse set of powerful answers to this and other critical questions.

Indian Country is the site of some exciting new work taking shape in social enterprise and employee ownership. Five Native American projects are being developed as part of an initiative managed by The Democracy Collaborative and funded by the Northwest Area Foundation, known as the Learning/Action Lab for Community Wealth Building.

Seattle‘s minimum wage ordinance is one step toward lessening inequality and poverty compounded by low-wage work. But there are still many challenges ahead. Cooperative development is one tool in the community wealth building strategy toolbox that can help lift low-wage workers, and especially women, out of poverty.