St. Louis, Missouri

A Case Study of Community Wealth Building (CWB)

Community Profile

Located on the border of Missouri and Illinois, St. Louis, MO is home to approximately 300,000 people (U.S. Census Bureau 2020), while St. Louis County, encompassing the area to the north, west, and south of the City, has a population of nearly one million. But, like most post-industrial cities, St. Louis’s population is steadily declining, particularly in the City (Kirn 2024). 

The median household income in St. Louis is slightly over $50,000 (2020), which aligns with the relatively low cost of living. However, for many of the city’s residents, this cost can be unaffordable. As of 2021, over 20% of St. Louis residents lived in poverty (OneSTL 2023). Of that, Black residents were three times more likely than white residents to live in impoverished areas (City of St. Louis 2024). Indeed, home to Dred Scott, racial segregation defines the St. Louis region, coming to a head at Delmar Boulevard. One article reads, “[the] ‘Delmar Divide,’ [refers] to Delmar Boulevard as a dividing line running east to west across St. Louis City and County. In the early 20th century, as former enslaved persons and their descendants began to escape the Jim Crow south during the Great Migration, the white-controlled St. Louis real estate industry employed a system of racial covenants and steering to drive the city’s growing black population to neighborhoods north of Delmar, while driving white families to the south” (Abello 2019). 

Much like Richmond, VA or Baltimore, MD, the fragmentation of the region’s principal jurisdictions—St. Louis City and St. Louis County—shapes the City’s politics and access to financial capital. According to the research of one group, Better Together St. Louis, who supports a merger between the City and the County, this division in the region’s local government has led to: “(1) a system focused on internal competition over regional growth; (2) a disparity in services and the allocation of resources that results from fragmentation and internal competition; and (3) an inability to formulate and execute a vision for regional success” (Better Together n.d.). 

From the 1877 St. Louis Rail Worker Strike to Percy Green scaling the city’s landmark Gateway Arch in 1964 to protest the exclusion of Black workers from the construction project, St. Louis boasts a long history of organizing in the region. St. Louis is also a very relational town in a “show me” state; residents are often skeptical of things with which they are not yet familiar or have not yet seen work, so often need to be convinced of impact first.

Background and History

In response to deindustrialization, much of the economic development in St. Louis to date has been rooted in business attraction and retention (St. Louis Economic Development Partnership 2017), despite the model’s limitations. As a result, much of the impetus for CWB in the region was to offer a pragmatic, localized alternative that brought forward an economy reliably anchored in the community. Further, because of the city’s deeply racialized past and present, organizers were keen on approaching CWB work with a race-explicit lens, focusing on the potential to use CWB approaches to reduce racial inequities in both wealth and life outcomes. 

Founded in 2018 by St. Louis native Charli Cooksey, WEPOWER is an organization committed to activating the power of everyday people—particularly poor and working class Black and Latinx people—in St. Louis to transform education and economic systems through policy design, public leadership, and community organizing. For the past several years, WEPOWER has pursued entrepreneur development and investment work, including: a business accelerator, a revenue-based investment fund, and a microlending program in partnership with Kiva, supporting a community of nearly one hundred Black and Latinx entrepreneurs. 

Since its founding, WEPOWER’s approach to economic policy-change and programming work has evolved. In developing their strategic plan in the wake of the 2020 uprisings, the WEPOWER team observed and grappled with the limitations and contradictions involved in:

  • trying to reduce racial wealth disparities by supporting individual entrepreneurs with conventionally structured businesses (i.e. what has been critiqued as “Black capitalism”)

  • focusing on changing or passing specific policies without a more comprehensive or overarching plan for economic systems change, and 

  • working from an individual organizational strategy to achieve systems change, which requires deep collaboration and coalition building.

As a result, WEPOWER decided to shift their approach to entrepreneur development and community investment to be anchored in economic systems change, rooted in CWB. Initially, this began as an effort to build the organization’s CWB strategy—including working with community members and partners to develop their own, localized definition of CWB and working to shift their accelerator and investment fund to more deeply integrate CWB principles. 

Over the following years, inspired by the “Cleveland Model” and a recognition that systems change is a team sport, they came to conclude that it was more important to catalyze the development of a shared strategy. Instead, WEPOWER came to guide a coalition of actors in St. Louis in working together to build community wealth (i.e. a “St. Louis model”), rather than developing a strategy in which WEPOWER is the primary actor. 

To do this, they engaged in a participatory, community-centered design process centering the wisdom and power of poor and working class Black and Latinx community members, with approximately one hundred people spread across five “Solutions Teams”, each focused on a key domain of economic systems change: Business, Labor, Capital, Land & Property, and Ecosystem Development and Coordination. The design process also incorporated the insights of a diverse mix of institutional representatives via a “Design Council” that served as thought partners throughout the process. After two thousand hours and over 1,000 community engagements, the design process resulted in the development of a shared vision and theory of change alongside a set of seventy collectively developed “solutions” to bring that theory of change to life. 

Overview of CWB in St. Louis, MO 

As WEPOWER works to catalyze a more collectivist approach to building community wealth in St. Louis, the organization has mapped out existing work in the region that loosely corroborates with TDC’s Five Pillars and is exploring potential partnerships to build a stronger community wealth building ecosystem. A subset of that existing and prospective work is described below:

Fair work: leveraging ballot initiatives and trigger laws to overcome resistance from a conservative state legislature

To advance fair work, the Missouri Workers Center (MWC), the Missouri chapter of Jobs with Justice, and other partners are working to advance the Missourians for Healthy Families and Fair Wages ballot initiative. Though primarily considered to be a harm reduction labor strategy, this initiative will allow Missouri workers to have higher wages in accordance with the Fight for $15 campaign and have paid sick leave (Missouri Jobs with Justice 2024).

MWC and partners are also working with progressive local lawmakers on an innovative strategy to use trigger laws (i.e. laws that are passed by a legislative body but only go into effect when a “trigger” event happens, like a court decision or constitutional amendment) at the local level to promote fair work in the state. For example, this can include providing fair scheduling or other worker protections and benefits currently prohibited by state preemption. This coalition is hopeful that they may be able to raise the stakes and increase the popularity of and turnout for an eventual ballot initiative to amend the state constitution and roll back the state legislature’s ability to “preempt” the region’s ability to set its own policies related to labor and other issues. 

Inclusive and democratic enterprise: WEPOWER Accelerator

The WEPOWER Accelerator has been the organization’s signature program to support enterprises that reflect the diversity and values of St. Louis. The 10-week accelerator provides curriculum, connections, and capital to Black and Latinx entrepreneurs who run early-stage companies (i.e. less than three years old) and are ready to scale. 

To design the program, WEPOWER interviewed over 100 entrepreneurs and 58 residents to identify key challenges in the entrepreneur ecosystem and their needs—the two most common of the latter being mentorship and access to capital (WEPOWER 2019). In response, WEPOWER offers participants investment readiness curriculum, 1:1 coaching with SMEs, in-kind professional services, $5,000 in equity-free grants, and wellness support. WEPOWER also initially incorporated a community voting component, in which over 800 community members voted to help select each year’s cohort (WEPOWER 2020). 

To date, 36 St. Louis entrepreneurs have participated in the accelerator. According to the WEPOWER website, “The first cohort saw an average increase of 3.5x in their monthly revenue following the completion of the program. They’ve also retained 100 percent of their team members and accessed a total of $400,000 in seed capital” (WEPOWER 2020). 

More recently, WEPOWER is exploring collaboration with Cooperation St. Louis, a project of Solidarity Economy STL, to expand their capacity building and consulting work aimed at advancing economic cooperation and worker cooperatives in the St. Louis region. 

Just use of land and property: mixed income neighborhood trust

There are emerging efforts in the southside of the City to create a mixed income neighborhood trust, or MINT, to preserve affordable rental housing. Several years ago, there were also promising efforts to create a land trust through the Green City Coalition, which raised over one million dollars and began to search for an Executive Director. However, some public leaders, more focused on growing the private, speculative real-estate market and driving up property values, which, in turn, drive tax revenues and city budgets, were skeptical of land trusts and this effort was deprioritized. In alignment with one of their key domains of economic systems change, Land & Property, WEPOWER is now meeting with relevant stakeholders to explore the possibility of working together to accelerate efforts aimed at expanding community stewardship of land and property. 

Locally rooted finance: WEPOWER Capital 

To raise and recycle capital to build independent (i.e. outside the rules and regulations of 501(c)3 spending) political power, WEPOWER is piloting a community investment fund. The $1 million pilot fund, called WEPOWER Capital, uses revenue-based financing to support Black and Latinx companies, “where entrepreneurs repay a fixed percentage of their revenue until a pre-agreed total has been paid back. This model is more flexible than traditional loans, allowing [WEPOWER] to…share risk with entrepreneurs…without reducing their ownership in their company” (WEPOWER n.d.). Recently, WEPOWER was also accepted into Seed Commons, a cooperatively governed loan fund  providing non-extractive capital to cooperatives through a network of place-based chapters.

Progressive procurement: St. Louis Anchor Action Network

The St. Louis Anchor Action Network—co-led by the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Edward Jones and supported by TDC in its early stages—is dedicated to investing in 22 zip codes in the city where nearly a third of the population live below the poverty line. Specifically, they hope to increase local hiring and purchasing by 10%, resulting in what could be a $49.8 million investment in St. Louis (St. Louis Anchor Action Network 2022). 

One of the members in the Network, BJC HealthCare, made a significant initial investment into WEPOWER Capital in 2023.

Challenges & Opportunities

Much like the structural fragmentation of the region’s local government, the work of CWB is also splintered. As a result, coalition building efforts to build unified infrastructure is critical. At the same time, managing the governance and overall coordination of such an ecosystem can be difficult, especially when all decisions simply cannot be made by committee. 

Thankfully, in spite of some of the cultural resistance to change mentioned in the Introduction, there is a real opportunity to inject a more transformative vision and agenda for St. Louis’s economy. With a progressive mayor and aldermen, the conditions are even more ripe to advance political education campaigns that increase the awareness of CWB’s efficacy.

Additionally, Representative Cori Bush worked to direct a large portion of ARPA dollars (nearly $500 million!) to St. Louis (City of St. Louis 2024), meaning an expansion of public funding for things like housing equity in a resource scarce landscape. Additionally, the Rams settlement has brought in an additional $280 million to St. Louis (City of St. Louis 2024). 

Community Stakeholders

Resources

  • A one-pager launching the community design process for the region