Resources for local government

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.

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.

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.

The City of Rochester’s Office of Innovation has been coordinating a project to develop worker-owned cooperative businesses as part of a comprehensive wealth building strategy for Rochester, New York. The Democracy Collaborative completed this study in February 2016, which documented the incredible potential for the project, a high degree of community support including local Anchor Institution buy-in, as well as several potential business niches for future worker-owned businesses.

If climate planning efforts do not take concerns around equity, justice, and power into consideration during implementation, they have the potential to further segregate U.S. cities; contribute to widening economic, social, and health inequality; and even, in the extreme, create wealthy, ecological

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.

Cities are increasingly turning to their “anchor” institutions as drivers of economic development, harnessing the power of these major economic players to benefit the neighborhoods where they are rooted. This case study shows how the Greater University Circle Initiative achieved this coordination among three large anchor institutions located in Cleveland’s park-like University Circle area—almost one-square mile of world-class educational, cultural, and health institutions.