Community-Wealth.org

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.

These diverse institutional strategies have two goals:

1)To change the nature of asset and wealth ownership in a manner which serves the community.

2)To offer new ways to provide and maintain local jobs and to finance community services.

Community-wealth.org hopes to serve several purposes. First, it hopes that the website facilitates conversation and collaboration among the field and encourages support for these new community wealth strategies, policies, models, and innovations. Second, it aims to broaden and deepen information about this field, and includes many statistics including the number of institutions, their economic value, their actual and projected growth, their contributions to democratic practice, etc. Next, it hopes to explain how communities (especially low-income) can address the economic challenges they face. Finally, the organization hopes the website will lay the groundwork for policy changes.