Community-Wealth.org

Community-Wealth.org is an organization that seeks strategies for democratic, community-based economic development. The website that they have created contains directories, breaking news, and examples of cutting-edge intiatives from cities, states, community-development corporations, employee-owned firms, land-trusts, non-profit organizations, co-operatives, and universities. It provides information and links to many companies that are using different community-based economic development strategies.

Vision and Mission

Community-Wealth.org brings together, for the first time, information about the broad range of community wealth strategies, policies, models, and innovations. The site is built upon the proposition that above all, practitioners, policy makers, academics and the media need solid, cross-cutting information and tools that can help them to understand and support the expansion of these institutions. Across-the-board information, experience, and expertise can also contribute to creating a favorable policy environment in which community wealth approaches are more fully legitimized, recognized, and appreciated as meaningful to the revitalization of our communities. <ref> http://www.community-wealth.org/about/vision-mission.html </ref>

Video Overview of Community-Wealth.org

About Community-Wealth.org

Community-Wealth.org is a project of The Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland, College Park. The Democracy Collaborative was established in 2000 to advance a new understanding of democracy for the 21st century and to promote new strategies and innovations in community development that enhance democratic life. The Collaborative is a national leader in the field of community development through our Community Wealth Building Initiative. The Initiative sustains a wide range of projects involving research, training, policy development, and community-focused work designed to promote an asset-based paradigm and increase support for the field across-the-board.

Among their most recent publications are:

• Building Wealth: The New Asset-Based Approach to Solving Social and Economic Problems
• Linking Colleges to Communities: Engaging the University for Community Development

In 2010, The Democracy Collaborative will publish two new studies:

• Growing a Green Economy for All: From Green Jobs to Green Ownership
• The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads

Their research, strategy and policy website – www.Community-Wealth.org – is updated quarterly and is the most comprehensive source for information about the community wealth building movement nationwide.

One of The Democracy Collaborative’s current flagship projects is the Evergreen Cooperative Initiative in Cleveland, Ohio. In partnership with The Cleveland Foundation, the Ohio Employee Ownership Center at Kent State University, and many of Cleveland’s major health and educational “anchor institutions,” the Collaborative has designed and is helping to implement a comprehensive wealth building effort in six low-income neighborhoods. The Initiative is building community-based businesses that will employ hundreds of local residents. Each new start-up company is organized as a worker cooperative. For more about the Initiative, see this article in Yes! magazine. More information can be found at this page. <ref> http://www.community-wealth.org/about/about-us.html </ref>

What is a wealth strategy?

A wealth strategy aims at improving the ability of communities and individuals to increase asset ownership, anchor jobs locally, expand the provision of public services, and ensure local economic stability. <ref> http://www.community-wealth.org/about/faq.html </ref>

Recent History

Across the United States, democratic, community wealth-building institutions have begun to multiply dramatically in number in recent years. Although many ventures are small in size, a number have already become a major presence in their communities and have implications for longer-term community change. The various efforts differ from traditional corporations, on the one hand, and small individually-owned businesses, on the other. For example:

• community development corporations have grown from a mere handful in the late 1960s to around 4,000 today;

• there are also now more than 11,000 employee-owned firms (ESOPs), which employ more people than workers in America's private sector labor unions;

• cooperatively-owned businesses involve more than 100 million members nationwide;

• nonprofit organizations have increasingly begun to initiate profit-making business enterprises to support their public service missions;

• in one of the fastest-growing and most interesting innovations, a host of local municipal enterprises that help anchor jobs and contribute to the tax base have gained the support of Republican and Democratic mayors alike.

These seemingly diverse institutional strategies share certain key principles. First, they change the nature of asset and wealth ownership in a manner which serves the community. Second, they offer new ways to provide and anchor local jobs and to finance community services.

These developments are not occurring in a vacuum. They are being spurred by two converging trends with historic importance:

• the steadily increasing insecurities of the global economic era–which, in turn, are generating a demand for new approaches to local economic instability; and

• the dramatic and rapidly expanding fiscal crisis at all levels of government–which is systematically forcing consideration of new alternatives that promise new ways to achieve service-supporting revenues.

In short, as many matters of vital interest further devolve to local and state authorities, Americans have begun building institutions that make their communities more stable and economically viable, offer a greater sense of security, further the goal of equality, and strengthen democratic practice and participation.

Few Americans are aware of this steady and continuing build-up of new and alternative forms of economic activity through the United States over the past several decades. The range of practical activity – and its implications for the future – has rarely been appreciated even by practitioners and experts working on such matters. Specialists in one sector (community development corporations, for instance) often have little knowledge of other sectors (such as employee-ownership or municipal enterprise). This “silo” effect prevents the transfer of experience and knowledge between sectors and works against collaboration. It also diminishes the potential that these important developments can be understood in a broader context as representing a new, more democratic vision of community-building in general. <ref> http://www.community-wealth.org/about/vision-mission.html </ref>

Primary Goals of C-W.org

• Facilitate conversation, connection, and collaboration among those now working in “silos” within this field, and to encourage the support and participation of new constituencies who have not been formally involved in democratic, common asset, wealth-building programs;

• Broaden and deepen information available about the field (including the numbers of institutions; their economic value; actual and projected growth; their contributions to democratic practice; innovative cross-sectoral partnerships; and best practices and policies) which can further contribute to comparative analysis and actions that can support greater expansion and effectiveness across sectors;

• Illuminate and bring attention to the vast range of experiments and help paint a compelling picture of how neighborhoods and communities—particularly low-income communities and groups—can address the economic challenges they are facing using an asset-based, community wealth approach; and

• Help lay the groundwork for changes in policies more supportive of community wealth-building programs. <ref> http://www.community-wealth.org/about/vision-mission.html </ref>

Key Community Wealth Building Principles

Some guidelines for developing your own community wealth building program:

• Identify and inventory the existing assets of your community. Leverage what you have.

• Focus on building local equity in everything you do. Ownership matters.

• Concentrate economic strategy on increasing the local circulation of goods and services.

• Work with existing anchor institutions (universities, hospitals, churches, museums, public utilities) to support your economic development strategy.

• Leverage funding from community and local foundations, anchor institutions and existing city and chamber of commerce business development programs to support wealth building.

• Implement a systematic local-preference procurement policy at all major institutions (especially hospitals, universities, local government, utilities and major corporations).

• Begin a “buy local” campaign directed at households and small businesses.

• Help retiring owners sell their businesses to their workers through pension-financed employee stock-ownership plans (ESOPs).

• Work across silos to produce new synergies and multi-sector strategies. Build community awareness of the need for a comprehensive, local community wealth–building approach.

• Expand Community Development Corporation (CDC) capacity to generate income (especially through property management, but through other business development as well).

• Develop land trusts early on to provide for permanent low- and moderate-income housing, both to stabilize neighborhoods in the short term and to avoid gentrification problems that success can bring.

• Attack efforts that strip assets away from communities or otherwise have wealth-reducing effects (e.g., predatory lending).

• Expand use of individual development accounts (IDAs), earned income tax credits and other related mechanisms that help low- and moderate-income individuals save and acquire wealth.

• Develop investment opportunities for low-income people by promoting shared-equity housing and affordable equity shares in community-owned enterprises.

• Work across the asset-development continuum to devise mechanisms that integrate individual or family asset-accumulation with community wealth-building strategies. <ref> http://www.community-wealth.org/strategies/tools/index.html </ref>

Community Development Strategies

• Local Communities
  • Community Development Corporations (CDCs)
  • Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs)
  • Community Land Trusts (CLTs)
  • Cooperatives (Co-ops)
  • Cross-Sectoral
  • Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)
  • Green Collar Jobs
  • Individual Wealth Building
  • Outside the U.S.
  • Program Related Investments
  • Reclaiming the Commons
  • Social Enterprise
  • Socially Responsible Investing
• Government
  • Municipal Enterprise
  • New State & Local Policies
  • State Asset Building Initiatives
  • State & Local Investments
  • Transit-Oriented Development
• Place-Based Institutions
  • Anchor Institutions
  • University & Community Partnerships <ref> http://www.community-wealth.org/strategies/index.html </ref>

Links

Community-Wealth.org

Video Overview of Community-Wealth.org

References

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