E-Newsletter | August 2005
Dear Colleague,
In the two months since we launched Community-Wealth.org,
we have added more than 150 new links to wealth-building innovations,
policies, articles, reports, and resources of all kinds. Many of
these have come from you – web site visitors
who shared new developments and ideas for community wealth building.
(Look for the *NEW*
symbol to find our most recent additions.)
This month, a new feature of our site is a survey of the high leverage
community investment strategy known as Program-Related
Investments or PRIs. Most of us think of foundations only as
grant-making philanthropies. PRIs are long-term, low-interest loans
to community development corporations, community development financial
institutions, nonprofit businesses, and other institutions that
anchor capital locally. One foundation estimates that $1 million
invested in a PRI is the equivalent of $5 million in grant expenditures.
Visit our Access
Panel for links to all of our PRI pages.
We also are grateful to colleagues in the wealth-building field
such as Local Initiatives Support Corporation (www.lisc.org),
the New America Foundation (www.assetbuilding.org),
and the Social Enterprise Alliance (www.se-alliance.org)
that have linked to our web site from their own. Each link
helps us to become a more effective resource. If you would
like to offer a link to Community-Wealth.org, logo graphics
and HTML code is available on the Link
to Our Site page. Thanks!
 Ted
Howard
Executive Director, The Democracy Collaborative
 When
Corporations Undermine Community Wealth
Greg LeRoy, founder of Good
Jobs First and author of No More Candy Store: States and
Cities Making Job Subsidies Accountable, has written a new
book. The Great American Jobs Scam provides a thorough
examination of how state and local economic relocation incentives
often undermine community wealth building. LeRoy’s book also
outlines a number of community-building alternatives that can promote
sustainable job creation.
 Beyond
the Classroom:
the Economic Power of Universities
In 1996, urban universities spent $136 billion on salaries,
goods, and services — more than nine times what the federal
government spent on urban jobs and economic development programs.
Given recent trends, these anchored institutions today are even
greater economic engines in their communities. The
essays in The University as Urban Developer, edited by David
Perry and Wim Wiewel, examine how that money is spent and what could
be done to make urban universities more effective community wealth-building
partners.
 How
Social Investment Builds a True Ownership Society (PDF 462KB)
Building a Real “Ownership Society,” by J.
Larry Brown, Robert Kuttner, and Thomas M. Shapiro assesses the
role government asset-building policies have played over the past
century in creating America’s middle class. The paper critiques
current Bush Administration efforts to build an ownership society
and presents an outline of an alternative, progressive wealth-building
vision. Published by the Institute
on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis and The
Century Foundation.
States
Surpass Feds on Minimum Wage (PDF 120KB)
Is there a progressive minimum wage movement afoot outside the Washington,
DC Beltway? When Wisconsin raised its minimum wage this past June
to $5.70 and then $6.50 in a two-step process, it became the 17th
state to establish a wage floor higher than the $5.15 level that
has prevailed under federal law since 1997. A dozen of those states
have acted in the past 18 months alone.
First
US College Dedicates Fund Exclusively to Community Investment (PDF
213KB)
In June, Mount Holyoke College became the first American higher
education institution to establish a separate fund completely dedicated
to community investment. The Socially Responsible Investment (SRI)
fund was proposed by a campus student group and approved by the
school’s Trustees. Says Rose Levine, a senior on the college’s
SRI Committee, “We believe we have a unique opportunity to
make this institutional investment highly successful and a model
for other colleges and universities.”
The
New Battle Over Who Will Own Broadband
One hundred years ago, municipalities around the country established
publicly owned utilities to provide electrification for regions
that were passed over by investor-owned companies. Today, more than
one out of seven Americans (40 million of us) relies on power from
one of the nation’s 2,000 public utilities.
The movement toward publicly-owned broadband is a growing phenomenon
in cities today – more than 200 communities have chosen to
build publicly owned information networks – but federal telecom
policies are biased toward private telephone and cable companies,
according
to an article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (PDF 33KB) In
June the Institute
for Local Self-Reliance issued a report, "Who
Will Own Minnesota's Information Highways?” which can
be downloaded for free.
 
French
Fund Commits 600 Million Euros to Socially Responsible Investment
A new fund seeks to drive innovation and best practice through a
significant infusion of cash into the European SRI asset management
community.
 National
Vacant Properties Campaign (PDF 87KB)
Backed by a grant from the Surdna Foundation, four groups —
Smart
Growth America, Local
Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) the International
City/County Management Association (ICMA) and the Metropolitan
Institute at Virginia Tech — have launched a joint effort
to reclaim vacant and abandoned properties and restore vitality
and livability to city neighborhoods. Focus cities for the first
round of the campaign will be Baltimore, MD., Bridgeport, CT., Buffalo,
NY, Indianapolis, IN., Richmond, VA., Spartanburg, SC, and Tucson,
AZ.
OurBiz, launched
in May by the Southern Appalachian Center for Cooperative Ownership
(SACCO), provides a national worker cooperative forum for information
sharing and discussion.
www.ourbiz.biz
Coastal Enterprise
is a rural-based Maine non-profit that is both a community development
corporation and a community development financial institution with
over $200 million under management.
www.ceimaine.org
The
Beyster Institute is a non-profit organization whose mission
is to advance the use of entrepreneurship and employee ownership
to build stronger, higher performing enterprises.
www.beysterinstitute.org
The
Calvert Foundation invests more than $54 million in community
development financial institutions and other non-profits working
in urban and rural communities around the globe.
www.calvertfoundation.org
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