Featured Publications

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.

This book takes the reader step by step through modern money creation, explores improvements made possible by advances in digital technology, and proposes upgrades that could transform our outmoded 19th century system into one that is democratic, sustainable, and serves the needs of the 21st century.

How anchor institutions can collaborate locally, leveraging the power of their economic assets to address social and economic disparities and to revitalize their communities.

Mission-led employee-owned firms embody a powerful model of enterprise design for a new era of environmental sustainability and social equity. This report shares the story of this emerging model, embodied in 50-plus firms that are employee-owned B Corporations and benefit corporations, plus dozens

Our new report explores the “right to own”—giving workers the right of first refusal anytime their workplace is up for sale—as a strategy to massively scale up employee ownership in the economy. We outline the major provisions and legal changes necessary to enact this right, and the ecosystem of

How investments in the green infrastructure needed for climate resiliency can be leveraged to build community wealth with worker cooperatives and social enterprises.

This report focuses on the role of urban and metropolitan universities as anchor institutions in their community to address long standing inequities.

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.

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 report offers an in-depth look at how the Toledo, Ohio based health system ProMedica (a member of the Healthcare Anchor Network) aligned its institutional operations and clinical practice to better tackle the social determinants of health, and serves a useful guide for hospitals and health systems embarking on similar shifts.

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.

This report examines how an ongoing — and expanding — effort to track the impact of colleges and universities on the financial and social well-being of their surrounding neighborhoods is helping these anchor institutions align their resources to build stronger community partnerships and create more inclusive local economies.

Anchor institutions can play a key role in helping the low-income communities they serve by better aligning their institutional resources — like hiring, purchasing, investment, and volunteer base — with the needs of those of communities. The recommendations in this “playbook,” drawn from research carried out to help Rush University Medical Center (RUMC) align around its Anchor Mission, are being published to help other hospitals and health systems accelerate their own efforts to drive institutional alignment with community needs.

This report by Mary Ann Beyster, president and trustee of the Foundation for Enterprise Development (FED), discusses the investing landscape for potential opportunities in employee ownership.

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.

In The Next System Project’s first policy brief, Democracy Collaborative Fellow Ellen Brown, founder and president emeritus of the Public Banking Institute, explores what’s wrong with President Trump’s approach to infrastructure. Brown also identifies an even bolder approach that could bring the costs of investment in infrastructure down to zero.

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.

In 2016, leaders from 40 health systems gathered in Washington, DC to explore the potential to more fully harness their economic power to inclusively and sustainably benefit the long-term well-being of American communities. This report summarizes the events of that convening and next steps, inviting your hospital or health system to join the network and help advance the Anchor Mission of healthcare in your institution, in your community, and nationally.

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.

While employee-owned businesses have historically used a wide range of financial tools, the role of private equity and impact investors has been limited to date. In a meeting convened by the Fifty by Fifty Initiative, the Foundation for Enterprise Development, and the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, participants took a deeper look at barriers, opportunities and resources for connecting the gaps between investors and employee-owned firms.

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.

This toolkit on local and diverse purchasing showcases examples of how hospitals and health systems are reevaluating their roles as their community’s largest purchasers, understanding that a thriving local economy is fundamental to a healthy community.

This report from The Democracy Collaborative explores ways in which impact investors can help build an inclusive economy by accelerating the growth of broad-based ownership models — worker cooperatives, social enterprises, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), hybrid enterprises, and municipal enterprise.

Establishing a local and inclusive hiring strategy is an important first step towards rethinking your health system’s role in the community. This toolkit can help you get started.

On June 13 and 14, 2016 in Washington, DC, many of the nation’s leading experts in employee ownership, sustainable business and finance, community and economic development, and philanthropy came together in a Learning + Design session. The purpose of the session was to discuss how to achieve unprecedented scale of employee ownership by focusing on achieving an audacious goal: 50 million U.S. employee-owners by 2050. This report summarizes and expands upon the meeting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

This report offers an overview of how 30 representative community foundations, large and small, urban and rural, are working toward adopting this new anchor mission.

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.

How can we scale up the cooperative movement without losing our cooperative values? That is the question contributors seek to answer in this collection of essays. Contributors include Hilary Abell, Michael Johnson, Joe Guinan and Caitlin Quigley, along with contributing editors Thomas Hanna, Andrew McLeod and Len Krimerman.

This paper aims to help build the field of U.S. worker co-op development by providing a current view of the cooperative landscape and by analyzing factors that inhibit or promote cooperative development. Although informed by the cooperative giants in Europe, this analysis highlights lessons learned through the development and growth of worker co-ops in the U.S.

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 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.

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 report presents research to assist anchor institutions in measuring their community impact.

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 report connects struggling communities to local institutional wealth through engaging student activism, profiling 3 administration-led initiatives and 3 student-led initiatives, as well as 5 potential future partnerships.

This report provides an in-depth look at six hospitals in five cities that are rethinking their economic and community engagement strategies.

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.”

To understand emerging ownership alternatives, Marjorie Kelly reports from a community-owned wind facility in Massachusetts, a lobster cooperative in Maine, a multibillion-dollar employee-owned department-store chain in London, a foundation-owned pharmaceutical in Denmark, and other places where a hopeful new economy is being built. Along the way, she finds the five essential patterns of ownership design that make these models work.

Authored by Rita Axelroth Hodges and Steve Dubb as part of Michigan State University Press’ series on Transformations in Higher Education, the book features ten in-depth cases and examines how universities, by pursuing an anchor institution mission to improve surrounding communities in cooperation

Co-published by two research centers of the University of California, Berkeley, this paper from the Democracy Collaborative explores the impact of anchor institutions on wealth building and job creation in low-income communities.

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.

This report provides the first comprehensive survey of community wealth building institutions in the green economy. Featuring ten cases, the report identifies how policy and philanthropy can build on these examples to create “green jobs you can own.”

How can universities leverage their resources for community benefit? This report from The Democracy Collaborative outlines a comprehensive strategy to meet that goal.

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