There’s a rhetorical commitment to political democracy, but it amounts to nothing if we don’t democratize everything and allow people to have a direct say in the things that affect their lives. This is not a problem we can fix just by voting every two years, and democracy shouldn’t end at the ballot

Publicly and cooperatively owned electric utilities (community utilities) have the potential to demonstrate what an equitable, clean energy system looks like in the United States. They could become powerful “anchor institutions” in their community by grounding their decisions in democratic governance and community partnership, affordable energy and community wealth building, and access to renewable energy.

Not long after Healther Bresch, daughter of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, left Mylan as its CEO, the company’s plant in Morgantown, West Virginia, closed down. At what was then the largest generic pharmaceutical plant in the country, 1,400 employees represented by United Steelworkers lost their

Imagine a world in which insulin and PrEP—the revolutionary one-a-day preventative HIV pill—were available to all who needed them at prices they could easily afford. Imagine that the effective Lyme disease vaccine once available was still on the market, and that new drugs consistently provided new

The Veterans Health Administration—the country’s only fully public, integrated healthcare system—has a lot to tell us about how a national healthcare service for the United States might operate.

The way we promote innovation in the healthcare sector does not meet the real needs of people for equitable access to affordable treatments. There is a better way that takes into account the knowledge and needs of marginalized people.

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.

Democracy Collaborative co-founder Gar Alperovitz talks about how the democratic economy is coming into being during an October 2021 interview with Andrew Van Wagner, who has interviewed a number of leading thinkers for his Substack newsletter. In the interview, Alperovitz points out that elements

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.

Americans deserve publicly owned generic drugs, says Dana Brown, Director of The Next System Project at The Democracy Collaborative, a research and development lab for the democratic economy. In her op-ed, punished on The Orange Leader, she says, “Bold policies could have saved America’s largest

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.

When natural disasters like Hurricane Ida occur, policymakers often wave away the damage and devastation as an unavoidable ​“act of God” (to use common insurance language). However, these types of response ignore deep structural deficiencies and inequities in the way critical infrastructure systems

Bold policies could have saved America’s largest generic drug plant, but it’s never too late to start putting communities first.

Carla Skandier, manager of the climate and energy program at the Democracy Collaborative, says groups like hers are now researching ways to end the cycle of harm through nationalizing segments of the fossil fuel industry. In the simplest terms, the process would involve the federal government buying

The Democracy Collaborative, a nonprofit whose site says they are “a research and development lab for the democratic economy,” had Michael H. Shuman examine the economic impact of the plant’s closure. Shuman is an economist credited with being one of the architects of the 2012 JOBS Act, which was

“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.

In a soon-to-be-released study commissioned by the Democracy Collaborative, economist Michael Shuman puts the losses associated with the shut-down in the hundreds of millions of dollars in a state, West Virginia, that already has the sixth highest poverty rate in the country. Schuman estimates that

A group called Our Revolution — founded by Sen. Bernie Sanders to push for progressive political issues — is joining with United Steelworkers Local 8-957, The Democracy Collaborative, Social Security Works and other organizations to send a letter to Biden on Wednesday urging him to intervene in the

The resolution by Reps. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman shows how we can replace the privatized, fossil-fueled, and racist energy system that we live with today with a public and community-controlled energy system that is rooted in justice.

NEWS RELEASE: The New York State Build Public Renewables Act would make the New York Power Authority a major developer of renewable energy in the state and a key consumer energy provider.

Public power campaigns are striking at the heart of the fossil-fueled energy system and taking on upholders of the status quo. A four-page pamphlet tells the story.

For decades, we have been sold a myth of private health. It is a myth that our health is largely a product of individual choices and personal responsibilities. It is a myth that our healthcare is a service that private corporations can provide, and for which we must pay to survive. But the COVID-19

As more Americans receive COVID-19 vaccinations and we look to rebuild our economy, mission investors have a chance to save local businesses and ensure we are not caught in a K-shaped recovery that leaves many behind. Employee ownership, through which businesses share assets and agency with the

For many people, the pandemic has ripped off the sunglasses that masked the true colors of our political economy. The question now is whether we will settle for a superficial and ephemeral recovery of the old system or use our capacity to build a new system.

COVID-19, an epochal event, has made the case for reimagining the ownership and governance of our economies on both sides of the Atlantic more urgent than ever. An agenda to extend democratic public ownership is essential.

A recent survey by the Employee Ownership Foundation and the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing shows that employee-owned firms during the current economic crisis have laid off fewer employees than comparable conventionally owned firms. Employee-owned firms were

“To achieve a clean and just energy transition Congress must invest in communities that are most vulnerable to the climate emergency, experience the highest energy burden, and have had their energy shut off during the pandemic,” said Johanna Bozuwa, co-manager of the Climate and Energy Program at

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.

“[T]here is a growing consensus that the institutional framework that underpins the Green New Deal must be democratic. Common Wealth has argued for the creation of a Green New Deal commission that could bring together ‘communities at the sharp end of environmental and industrial change as well as

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

Many were pleased when President Trump’s Twitter and Facebook and other social media accounts were locked, due to his inflammatory rhetoric. But others are concerned about the power of these large monopolies to regulate “free speech” with little or no oversight. Thomas Hanna, director of research at

“The Democracy Collaborative, with its 20-plus years of work, attracted the world’s best and highly motivated participants from every discipline as well as multiple onsite projects and initiatives. Perhaps the most stimulating experiences during hours of confinement can be found by clicking onto

“In a world grappling with the consequences of widening economic inequality, cooperatives are gaining attention as an intriguing potential alternative to the established mode of global capitalism. They emphasize one defining purpose: protecting workers. […] In the north of England, the city of

A new report from Common Wealth and the Democracy Collaborative (to which the authors contributed) presents several bottom-up and top-down proposals to fundamentally change the ownership structure, values, governance, and orientation of platforms and data, and gain control over the commanding

“In a poll conducted by YouGov last year, the Democracy Collaborative found that a remarkable 55 percent of voters would strongly or somewhat support a proposal requiring companies with over 250 employees to gradually put half of their shares into a workers’ fund—far more than Sanders proposed

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

With so many firms already begging for bailouts, governments could simply demand equity in exchange for aid, making full use of the powers that the Obama administration wilfully abandoned when it bailed out the auto industry in 2009. Especially for the US, even buying up a 51% stake in the country’s

Digital platforms have proven indispensable to how we live, work, and play. The challenge is to liberate the democratic and enlivening potential of the platform from the logic of concentrated corporate ownership and profit maximization.

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

This week expect to see political pundits once again coalesce, based on a superficial reading of the electorate, around the narrative that the election results are a mandate for center-rightism, a cautionary tale against progressive aspirations for a dramatic reshaping of our market-based political

Thomas Hanna, Research Director at The Democracy Collaborative and Co-Director of the organization’s Theory, Policy, and Research Division, was quoted in an article by Pedro Gonzalez about the need to nationalize silicon valley and the historic precedent of similar forms of nationalization. “[T]he

One of [the Next System Project’s] proposals that makes great sense is to expand the postal service into general services for people, like banking. It is a perfect way to do banking — not commercial banking, JPMorgan Chase giving someone $2 billion — but the kind of banking we all do. It would be

“Voluntary initiatives in the private sector—that’s been the nature of socially responsible business and investing for 30 years,” says Marjorie Kelly, executive vice president of the Democracy Collaborative, a nonprofit research institute focused on building a fairer economy. “We are now at a pivot

Dana Brown, co-director of Theory, Research, and Policy and director of The Next System Project at The Democracy Collaborative writes: Earlier this month, India and South Africa, two of the countries hardest hit by the pandemic, formally petitioned the WTO to suspend [Trade-Related Aspects of

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) is under attack and at grave risk. But with that many Americans are awakening to both the value of the USPS and the manifest dangers of privatization. The crisis has also sparked renewed interest in postal banking, a win-win approach that could both make the USPS more

The strain that the COVID-19 pandemic is placing on our entire healthcare system is threatening to decimate the primary care sector—the doctor’s offices and medical facilities that are the very foundation of any healthcare system. Just when Americans most need consistent and equitable access to high

The Democracy Collaborative (and their vision of a post-COVID world), the New Economy Coalition and the Democracy at Work Institute […] are pointing the way toward a revived democracy, based on democratized ownership. Yes, socialism. When Republicans try to scare our communities into believing

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.

R&D has increas­ing­ly been direct­ed towards pri­vate inter­ests and pri­vate prof­it, result­ing in reduced pub­lic spend­ing on R&D as a per­cent­age of GDP and a reori­en­ta­tion of R&D spend­ing (both pub­lic and pri­vate) towards max­i­miz­ing prof­its, rather than align­ment with press­ing

In an article by Jon Stone, a Community-Wealth.org report is highlighted. “Ministers are being urged by policy experts to set a target to spend 2 per cent of the UK’s GDP on public R&D investment over the next 10 years, a huge increase aimed to fill gaps left by the private sector. The researchers

Dawson suggests something like the strategy outlined the Democracy Collaborative for bringing the oil and gas sector into public ownership. Governments would prepare the way for socialisation by undermining the sector’s market value through the removal of the subsidies it currently receives, and

A statement released Thursday by a group that includes Next System Project director Dana Brown calls for redesigning our pharmaceutical sector so that it is accountable to the public to meet public health needs, rather than to the profit demands of corporate shareholders. “Medicines were long

The Democracy Collaborative’s vice president Marjorie Kelly says that in the radically altered COVID-19 landscape, talk is especially cheap, and that it’s past time for the dominant corporate model to radically change. It’s also time to take dramatic action to stop the evisceration of the small

The Democracy Collaborative proposes a publicly owned pharmaceutical industry, the purpose of which would be to develop lifesaving medication for all rather than maximizing shareholder profits. Decisions that put people first would make sure medications were developed to treat rare diseases and that

As some recognize, internet access in the U.S. is generally far slower and more expensive than in most other advanced countries. According to The Next System Project, a democratic collaborative, nearly 133 million Americans don’t have internet connection speeds of at least 250 megabits per second

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)

Next System Project research director Thomas Hanna, in an interview with Paul Jay for TheAnalysis.news, discusses the growing global opposition to privatization of public services. “All across the world …people are reacting against the deficiencies of privatization and austerity and neoliberalism

The global spread of Covid-19 has shone a bright spotlight on both the vital need for reliable high-speed internet and the inadequacies of the for-profit, corporate model in delivering it. This paper, the first of four modules on democratic public ownership in the United Kingdom and the US, explores

The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated that public services and the people who operate them are truly the foundation of healthy and resilient societies, This book explores a growing international (re)municipalization movement that is helping redefine public ownership for the 21st century.

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.

Vaccines are critical to safeguarding public health as one of the most effective ways to prevent disease, including highly contagious diseases that can cause pandemics. But the for-profit pharmaceutical industry is neither prepared for nor incentivized to tackle growing public health challenges, like global pandemics.

The Democracy Collaborative and Common Wealth is undertaking a 2020 project to explore the frontiers of public ownership in the 21st century, particularly in the areas of digital infrastructure, data and platforms, intellectual property, and land and natural resources.

Introduction Climate change is an unprecedented global social, political, and economic crisis. Without drastic action, the United States will likely experience rising sea levels that will regularly flood major cities, more intense weather patterns that will destroy homes and businesses, longer and

Introduction The information technology sector broadly defined is now at the leading edge of the capitalist system. Material production and distribution, enterprise and professional management, finance, insurance and real estate are all increasingly dependent on digital technology. In the second

A combination of concentrated wealth, the primacy of shareholder interest in shaping company behavior, and the institutional weakness of labour has helped turn many companies into engines of wealth extraction for external owners, institutional investors, and senior management, often at the expense

Across the world, communities have initiated campaigns to shift from investor-owned utilities to publicly owned and operated utilities, increasingly taking on the perspective and language of energy democracy.

Energy democracy—a new idea from the ranks of community organizers, labor, and renewable energy advocates who see our current energy system as broken and destructive—seeks to take on the political and economic change needed to tackle the energy transition holistically.

A personal introduction In the interest of full transparency, this essay is personal. When it comes to journalism, I’ve been on a career-long search for an effective, sustainable alternative to corporate mono-speak. In all that time, regular people have never had more communications capacity than we

Introduction The US economy’s deep systemic inequalities of income, wealth, power, and opportunity are part of global inequality trends, but US-style capitalism and public policy make inequalities more acute. Their observable and felt harm to our civic and economic life is corroborated by research

In Next System Project Report 3, author and Tellus Institute co-founder Richard A. Rosen explores the changes he deems necessary for a modern definition of “socialism”, and describes key concepts and issues that arise when aiming to restructure the American economy to include social and

Drawing on a decade’s worth of conversations with key leaders in the growing field, from cooperative developers and community activists to impact investors and social enterprise innovators, this book of interviews from the Democracy Collaborative dives into the front lines of the movement to build community wealth.

This blog post highlights groundbreaking municipal involvement in worker cooperative development.

Journalist Anne Field unpacks The Democracy Collaborative’s new publication Educate and Empower: Tools for Building Community Wealth, highlighting the eleven case studies from the original report. “Too often, economic development efforts pit communities against each other or fail to help large