Democratic, public ownership of pharmaceutical development, production, and distribution in the U.S. is necessary to combat the increasingly harmful impacts of Big Pharma which decades of regulation have failed to counteract.

The Making of a Democratic Economy is a clarion call for a movement ready to get serious about transforming our economic system. Illuminating the principles of a democratic economy through the stories of on-the-ground community wealth builders and their unlikely accomplices in the halls of institutional power, this book is a must read for everyone concerned with how we win the fight for an economy that’s equitable, not extractive.

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.

This book is the most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the scope and scale of U.S. public ownership, debunking frequent misconceptions about the alleged inefficiency and underperformance of public ownership and arguing that it offers powerful, flexible solutions to current inequalities.

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

[[{“type”:”media”,”view_mode”:”media_large”,”fid”:”6708”,”attributes”:{“alt”:”“,”class”:”media-image”,”height”:”480”,”typeof”:”foaf:Image”,”width”:”371”}}]]Our new 2017 Impact Report highlights the work we did in the last year to build community wealth and advance a more democratic economy. It has been an incredible period of growth for The Democracy Collaborative and our projects, including The Next System Project, the Healthcare Anchor Network, and new transatlantic initiatives, especially in partnership with community wealth builders in the UK.

Based on Ted Howard’s remarks to the recent Alternative Models of Ownership conference, we’ve distilled the eight basic principles behind community wealth building—a transformative approach to local economic development—into this handy one page guide.

In this book by The Democracy Collaborative’s co-founder, Gar Alperovitz lays out his vision for a next system. The approach and model outlined — the Pluralist Commonwealth — offers a trajectory and pattern for wide-ranging institutional change towards real democracy over the long haul, guided by a transformative vision beyond both corporate capitalism and traditional state socialism.

The Democracy Collaborative’s testimony to the U.K.’s leading progressive think tank on how to bring about a thoroughgoing democratization of our political economy. In the fall of 2017, Institute for Public Policy Research reached out to The Democracy Collaborative requesting evidence from the U.S. on broad-based ownership strategies and recommendations for how wealth can be generated and shared more equally.

In this working paper, the Next System Project’s Cecilia Gingerich focuses on gender-based oppression, since it is both one of the fundamental characteristics of the current system and one that must be eliminated from any desirable alternative future system. The first section provides working definitions for key terms, while the second half turns to visions for the future.

Addressing Inequality at the Root: New Report Lays Out Systemic Drivers and Key Interventions Almost half of all workers earn under $15 an hour and one in every seven Americans – 43 million people – live below the poverty line. A new report by the Next System Project, a project of the Democracy

In this report, Michelle Barth, the Mayor’s Deputy Chief of Staff in Jacksonville, Florida, looks at how a municipal government can plan and carry out a successful community wealth building roundtable.

In this Community Wealth Innovators Series whitepaper, Justine Porter maps out how she and her grassroots team pulled together a community wealth building summit in Poughkeepsie, New York — and highlights the lessons learned so that you can benefit from their experience in planning your own community wealth building summit in your community.

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.

NEWS RELEASE: CITY OF ROCHESTER—MAYOR LOVELY WARREN, MAYOR (Wednesday, March 22, 2016) – Mayor Lovely A. Warren announced that the City will move forward with an initiative to bring more jobs to Rochester’s neighborhoods by developing and supporting employee-owned businesses. “As Rochester

If I may paraphrase my fellow co-founder here at The Democracy Collaborative, the political economist and historian Gar Alperovitz, I invite you to see this moment we are living in as the prehistory of a period of fundamental change: the next American revolution. As Gar emphasizes, behind every

In an era of persistent urban inequality and chronic unemployment disproportionately impacting historically marginalized communities and communities of color, new alternatives to the traditional economic development strategies are clearly needed. This report responds to this challenge by highlighting best practices in inclusive innovation from twenty cities across the country, and offering a unified vision of the underlying new paradigm of community focused economic development.

In the Next System Project’s second official report, project co-chair James Gustave Speth details the steps that must be taken to change the status quo of the political-economic system.

We are in an era when systemic critique of the economic and political institutions of the United States is poised on the edge of mainstream consciousness: the realities of a changing climate, an irrationally destructive financialized economic system, a long and steady historical trajectory

An overview of The Next System Project and the need for systemic solutions for systemic crisis.

By definition distinct from the status quo, radical ideas must always evolve. Still, Gus Speth has had a particularly unusual evolution to his current role as Co-Chair of The Democracy Collaborative’s Next System Project, which launched on March 31, 2015 and seeks to build upon our work on community wealth and take it to scale by opening up a broad national debate in the United States about much-needed systemic change.

Our 2014 Impact Report highlights the work we’ve done across the country in 2014 to advance community wealth building and systemic transformation.

We need to move beyond ‘projects’ and towards policies that help build and sustain community wealth, says John Duda of the Democracy Collaborative. At the Democracy Collaborative, we’re interested in finding ways to build community wealth at scale — that is, in finding ways to anchor capital

This report showcases some key emerging best practices in state and local policy-making to support community wealth building — designed to support economic inclusion goals, create quality jobs with family-supporting wages, address generational poverty, stabilize communities and the environment, and address growing wealth inequality.

This report, prepared by the Democracy Collaborative and submitted to the City of Jacksonville, Florida, highlights key strategic opportunities to leverage existing assets to build wealth in a neighborhood facing concentrated poverty and disinvestment.

Democracy Collaborative senior fellows Marjorie Kelly and Joe Guinan and senior researcher Thomas Hanna each contribute chapters to a new free e-book, Democratic Wealth: Building a Citizens’ Economy. The authors discuss economic institutions, alternative economic system designs, and forms of

Democracy Collaborative Research Director Steve Dubb along with Executive Director Ted Howard and Research Associate Sarah McKinley contributed the chapter “Economic Democracy” to the two-volume encyclopedia, Achieving Sustainability, now available courtesy of Gale Publishing. They outline the history of the economic democracy movement, highlighting community wealth building strategies such as community development finance institutions and cooperatives.

National People’s Action strategic reflections on how grassroots organizing needs to be oriented towards the systemic transformation of economic institutions.

Democracy Collaborative co-founder Gar Alperovitz and Senior Researcher Thomas Hanna discuss the challenge of sustaining and building participatory decision-making structures and organizations within a corporate capitalist system. They note the recent bankruptcy filing of Fagor Electrodomésticos

Democracy Collaborative co-founder Gar Alperovitz and community development associate Keane Bhatt provide 10 concrete action steps that individuals and groups can take to foster democratic economies and build community wealth. Using on-the-ground examples, they show how to engage credit unions, build employee-ownership structures, work with hospitals and universities to forge community partnerships and more.

This essay by Democracy Collaborative co-founder Gar Alperovitz and Research Director Steve Dubb opens the academic symposium journal issue on “Alternatives to Capitalism.”

This working paper by Gar Alperovitz and Steve Dubb examines how “new strategies of worker ownership within a community framework can function as the linchpin of an approach capable of uniting economic justice organizers, progressives, labor, and environmental activists.”

An interview with Seikatsu Club co-op delegation from Japan, by Steve Dubb, Research Director of The Democracy Collaborative. Translation by Ryoko Shimizu (Seikatsu Club Consumers Cooperative Union). Delegation Members Takayuki Watanabe, Chief Managing Director, Seikatsu Club Consumers’ Cooperative

The first across-the-board survey of innovative, asset-based strategies that are advancing social purposes.

How thousands of co-ops, worker-owned businesses, land trusts, and municipal enterprises are beginning to democratize the deep substructure of the American economy, with a new introduction by the author, Gar Alperovitz, and a new foreword by James Gustave Speth. More info and ordering at www

Putting forth a vision of green community wealth building, in which community-anchored enterprises, linked to sophisticated and decentralized planning, support stable and sustainable local economies, this study outlines how truly integrated approaches can help America meet the sustainability challenge.

Read Gar Alperovitz and Steve Dubb’s report “Cooperatives and Public Policy: A Partnership in Progress” below.

Anyone concerned about the state of America’s communities today must give serious thought to how public policy can support on-the-ground practitioners. This report from The Democracy Collaborative outlines an ambitious 10-year strategy to meet that goal.

City finances have long been under pressure, but the Great Recession and steady attacks on federal and state spending have compounded local financial difficulties. The National League of Cities’ annual research brief, City Fiscal Conditions, documents rapid deterioration. Reported revenue declines

Thom Hartmann is joined by Professor Gar Alpervitz.