Responses to Webinar Questions
Back in October, The Democracy Collaborative hosted a webinar illustrating the transformative potential of what has become a burgeoning global movement towards Community Wealth Building (CWB). Featuring leading CWB practitioners from Atlanta (Kindred Futures), Denver (Center for Community Wealth Building), and St. Louis (WEPOWER), the webinar attracted hundreds of registrants—and an audience of nearly 200 on the day, made up of other place-based practitioners, academics, researchers, national funders, partner organizations, and policymakers and advocates.
Reflecting on the webinar discussions, we are faced with a new set of challenges and opportunities. In response, we wanted to take a moment to briefly respond to the unanswered questions from the event, with the hope that we can help support a diversity of strategic actions in 2025.
In considering CWB’s Five Pillars, participants asked about the following:
How would access to integrated capital, especially in the case of CDFIs and other banking alternatives, help advance CWB?
An integrated system of capital flows—from grantmaking to non-extractive lending and investing—is critical to a robust system of alternative, locally rooted finance. Institutions like community investment vehicles (CIVs) that serve as legal and financial mechanisms by which these integrated forms of capital are more accessible are a great example of a locally rooted, community-governed alternative to commercial banking. Organizations working at the intersection of (access to) integrated capital and CWB include our partners at the Boston Impact Initiative (BII) and Ujima Project, Capital Innovation Lab, Collective Action for Justice Finance, the National Coalition for Community Capital (NC3), Seed Commons, and Transform Finance.
How does the CWB movement see where philanthropic structures and practices need to change? What are the opportunities and innovations you are seeing on this front? Which organizations are leading this work?
Trust-based, long-term capital is critical to the success of CWB. Indeed, the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland would not have been possible without the catalytic investment from the Cleveland Foundation. The same can be said for The Denver Foundation’s initial investment in what is now the Center for Community Wealth Building. Critiques of the impact finance and philanthropic capital sector abound in solidarity economy spaces, and there is an opportunity for us to boldly reimagine the role of philanthropy—specifically, its tolerance for “risky” investments—in advancing CWB. Organizations leading this work include Justice Funders, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, and the Neighborhood Funders Group as well as several values-aligned individual philanthropic entities referenced in the New Economy Coalition’s Solidarity Economy Funding Library.
How does CWB address upskilling and workforce development in innovation-based industries (e.g. advanced manufacturing, electric vehicles, renewable energy, agri-tech, life sciences, etc.)?
It is no secret that recent federal investments in innovation-based industries have sparked considerable conversation and mobilization among local economic development professionals about how to adapt existing workforce development programming to absorb this large tranche of public dollars. However, if done within the framework of our existing economic system, the chances of transforming workers’ lives (i.e. economic mobility) and labor itself by way of these industries are low indeed. We argue that workforce development programming that supports upskilling in favor of career pathways into such industries should collaborate with labor movements in their design and implementation to ensure sustainable, dignified, and fair work and non-extractive, localized wealth creation. For example, could practitioners work with union organizers to ensure that workers are placed in fair wage jobs with good benefits? Can local governments work with local employers in these industries to draft employment charters and/or ensure a living wage for their employees? Beyond wages and benefits, what kinds of firms are incentivized and encouraged to proliferate, thereby capturing the market share of the innovation sector in a particular place? Are they traditional, corporate capitalist firms or more broadly owned, inclusive, and democratic enterprises?
Where can I find recent data on measurable impact anchor institutions have had on moving procurement spend locally? How are Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) playing a role in procurement, if at all?
Spend analyses conducted by public institutions can often be accessed by anyone. Connect with your local anchors to see where their dollars are going—from hiring to procurement. Organizations like the Anchor Learning Network of the Coalition of Urban and Metropolitan Universities (CUMU) or the Healthcare Anchor Network, an organization incubated by TDC, can also support understanding (and reforming!) the procurement practices of local “eds and meds”, or higher education and medical institutions. Some HBCUs have rigorous progressive procurement programming, while others are lagging behind. This 2024 article, for example, outlines a list of HBCUs from around the country who have made an explicit commitment to procure the majority of their goods and services from local, Black-owned businesses.
Others wanted to better understand the governance of CWB, including the role of tech-based solutions in supporting more effective and transparent governance:
What is the role of more participatory forms of governance in CWB? Is the focus on more traditional forms of democratic governance (e.g. voting) and/or others based on broad-based community participation and deliberation?
Democratization of our economic system is both a key practice and outcome of CWB activity. Both traditional and more participatory forms of governance play a key role in advancing CWB, but in different ways.
Civic participation—through voting or other forms of civic engagement—is one way to elect officials and pass legislation that creates an enabling political environment for CWB at the local, state, and national level. In our experience with practitioners, this work is often led by intermediary or backbone organizations—nonprofits that serve as hubs for place-based coalitions advancing CWB.
More broad-based governance activities (i.e. involving every day people in decision-making around the management of land, labor, and/or capital) are inherent to the implementation of many of the elements of CWB, like participatory budgeting, worker ownership, and resident-owned communities.
Ultimately, through CWB, we hope to narrow the gap between (participatory) governance and (a truly representative) government.
How does an organization’s legal status and structure affect the ways in which it is able to advance CWB?
There are lots of different organizational forms that are conducive to advancing CWB at a variety of levels. Much of CWB activity in the United States is led by intermediary, or backbone, organizations that are typically public purpose organizations like 501(c) nonprofits that lead place-based coalitions conducting a variety of CWB activities. Some have a separate (c)4 arm that engages in political advocacy and lobbying work forbidden to the charitable sector. Firms that value more than profit in their missions, such as social or municipal enterprises, B Corps, L3Cs, and other alternatively owned enterprises (like cooperatives) further CWB by 1) expanding the imagination of what’s possible for business in a non-capitalist economic system; and 2) practicing—and thus evolving—the nature of inclusive and democratic enterprise. Because cooperatives, for example, value education and training as well as cooperation among cooperatives, they may be better suited to serve as integral ideological, cultural, and technical assistance support providers in a particular place.
How do you see technology-based solutions supporting CWB initiatives in their efficiency, governance, and transparency? Is there an opportunity for a shared infrastructure of tech-based solutions for CWB initiatives?
There is a huge role for technology in expanding the reach and deepening the efficacy of CWB. One project of George Mason University in Northern Virginia, the Digital Commonwealth Project, focuses on just that. Movement funder One Project has also recently invested in designing new and accelerating existing movement technology to support more transparent governance of and better resource solidarity economy movement infrastructure.
Finally, several wanted to elucidate the ways in which we measure the success of the movement—and also avoid co-optation:
What are the impact metrics that Community Wealth Builders should monitor and evaluate?
Our CWB action guide provides a good starting point—especially for local governments and inside/outside activists and organizers—seeking to identify and work towards quantitative metrics that indicate progress towards CWB activity within each of the Five Pillars. We are currently working with our US Community of Practice to author an updated version of the guide that includes qualitative and quantitative indicators of success. Additionally, while there is some value to existing metrics of wealth building (like financial health or inclusion), there is much work to be done to adopt more expansive metrics that center democratic/collective ownership and control of land, labor, and capital.
How can we ensure that the incentives for excessive extraction in our current system don’t take over the nascent CWB movement?
Financialization and extraction are at the heart of how our current system operates, driving many of the negative outcomes we are seeing in the data. It is not sufficient to engage in CWB as an “optional extra” on the side, aiming to promote a little more inclusion and clean up around the edges of business-as-usual. Indeed, when the current economic system operates on a thousand coordinated fronts, in order to supplant it, we must work on ten thousand. As such, there is a pluriverse of carrot/stick strategies that can incentivize CWB activity and disincentivize more extractive ways of operating. One such example is in our work with anchor institutions: leveraging progressive procurement as a tool to codify incentives to buy and hire from locally-, minority-, and/or cooperatively-owned enterprises. On the policy front, legislation that legitimizes and directs resources to values-aligned businesses, financial institutions, and more, will be necessary. Finally, we must reconfigure the common sense and make it so that the staggering wealth inequality of today is not seen as an inevitability of an economic system, but a particularly horrifying and unacceptable outcome of ours, necessitating broad-scale, radical economic transformation.