The Cleveland Model—How the Evergreen Cooperatives are Building Community Wealth
Something important is happening in Cleveland. Read more about The Cleveland Model—How the Evergreen Cooperatives are Building Community Wealth...
Overview
University & Community Partnerships
Institutions of higher education have an obvious vested interest in building strong relationships with the communities that surround their campuses. They do not have the option of relocating and thus are of necessity place-based anchors. While corporations, businesses, and residents often flee from economically depressed low-income urban and suburban edge-city neighborhoods, universities remain. At a time when foundations that help establish community-based projects are commonly unable to continue with ongoing involvement over long periods of time, universities can play an important role. Read more about University & Community Partnerships...
Anchor Institutions
Anchor institutions are nonprofit institutions that once established tend not to move location. Emerging trends related to globalization—such as the decline of manufacturing, the rise of the service sector, and a mounting government fiscal crisis—suggest the growing importance of anchor institutions to local economies. Indeed, in many places, these anchor institutions have surpassed traditional manufacturing corporations to become their region's leading employers. Read more about Anchor Institutions...
Transit-Oriented Development
Many cities focus their real estate investments to encourage greater use of mass transit—a strategy better known as “transit-oriented development” or most often, simply “TOD.” The idea behind TOD is to build greater densities near rail stations and major bus lines in order to encourage transit use and reduce traffic congestion and pollution. Of course, to the extent the development succeeds, real estate around the station can become very valuable, with the city or transit system earning millions of dollars in direct lease revenues. Read more about Transit-Oriented Development...
State & Local Investments
City and state governments have adopted a wide set of policy tools to spur community wealth building, including creating loan funds to start up local businesses and venture capital funds that give cities and states an equity stake in the outcome of their public investments. Another important strategy has been economically targeted investments, which employ pension assets to support local jobs and community economic development. Read more about State & Local Investments...
State Asset Building Initiatives
Increasingly, state officials are designing broad-based efforts to support wealth building by low-income families. While states and localities have supported different forms of community wealth building in some areas for at least the past couple of decades, it is only within the last few years that this has become an explicit policy goal. Read more about State Asset Building Initiatives...
New State & Local Policies
While community wealth institutions and efforts are expanding around the country, many U.S. federal tax and expenditure policies act in a contrary manner, concentrating wealth and income among a few, rather than building community wealth. One result of this growing income and wealth gap has been to make it increasingly difficult for state and local governments to provide basic public services.
In response to these trends, there has been a flurry of grassroots activity at the state and local level. Key areas of innovation include the following: Read more about New State & Local Policies...
Municipal Enterprise
Municipal enterprises are businesses owned by local public authorities that provide services and often revenue in cities across the United States. Increasingly, local governments have turned to municipal enterprise to both raise revenue and promote local jobs and economic stability by developing a more diversified base of locally controlled wealth. Read more about Municipal Enterprise...
Urban Agriculture
Across the world, the practice of urban farming - the process of growing food or raising livestock and then processing it and distributing it within an urban environment - is not unusual. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Alternative Farming Systems Information Center, 15 percent of the global food supply is grown in an urban setting. Although in the United States this number is significantly smaller, this may be changing. Read more about Urban Agriculture...
Socially Responsible Investment
One feature of the U.S. economy is the growing importance of institutional investors, including pension funds, universities, and foundations. A September 2005 report by The Conference Board found that at the end of 2003, public sector pension funds alone had $2.27 trillion in assets, of which roughly $1.3 trillion were invested in stock. Public pension fund stock holdings totaled 9.7% of the stock market's value in 2003, up from 7.6% just three years before. Read more about Socially Responsible Investment...
Social Enterprise
Social enterprise refers to non-profits that operate businesses both to raise revenue and to further the social missions of their organizations. These businesses build locally controlled wealth, which helps stabilize community economies, and represent a shift in non-profit operation toward a model of collaborating with "client" populations in community-building efforts. Social enterprise is particularly common in non-profits with an employment training focus, since the businesses themselves can be integrated with the programs. Read more about Social Enterprise...
Reclaiming the Commons
Although many think of the "commons" as the common grazing land of medieval towns, the concept is much broader than that. Indeed, the United States is full of everyday commons management systems including public libraries, the Internet, blood banks, and parks. In addition, over 150 million acres are held in trust by states; much of this is leased for timber, grazing or oil production, with revenues going to public schools. For instance, proceeds from offshore oil and gas leases finance The Texas Permanent School Fund.
Program Related Investments
Foundations use many tools to spur community wealth building. Grant-based initiatives are one prominent strategy. Here, however, we focus on program-related investments. Program-related investments, also known as PRIs, leverage limited foundation dollars—most often by providing long-term, low-interest loans—to promote community wealth building and other mission-related foundation goals. Read more about Program Related Investments...
Outside the U.S.
The international asset building and cross-sectoral strategies reviewed here provide illustrative models that suggest possibilities for future efforts in the United States. While we cannot be comprehensive of our coverage of international developments, the links and information sources here provide a good starting point for looking at exciting developments in asset strategies throughout the world. Read more about Outside the U.S....
Individual Wealth Preservation
In order to build wealth, you also have to preserve what you have — a lesson painfully reinforced by the foreclosure wave that began in 2007. In 2008 alone, Americans lost $2 trillion in housing wealth, with minority and low-income communities being the hardest hit.
Read more about Individual Wealth Preservation...Individual Wealth Building
Individual wealth building programs aim to increase the savings of low and moderate-income individuals. One of the pioneering efforts in this area is the Individual Development Account (IDA). Individual Development Accounts illustrate a central feature of the community wealth-building approach: namely, that to end poverty, communities—and the people in those communities—must be given the tools they need to develop their own, long-term income-generating capacity. Read more about Individual Wealth Building...
Green Collar Jobs
Prodded by rising energy prices, the role of “green collar jobs” and the “green economy” is now a common theme in community development circles. This section explores three key questions: Read more about Green Collar Jobs...
Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)
Employee stock-ownership plan (ESOP) companies are for-profit entities in which employees own part or all of the companies for which they work. ESOP companies play a critical role in building the tax and wealth base of local communities, as ownership is rooted in the workers who reside in the community, making plant relocations less likely. ESOP companies are also less likely than comparable firms to lay off workers in downturns. Read more about Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)...
Cross-Sectoral
A critical challenge for practitioners and foundations is how to develop linkages across sectors in a way that broadens and deepens the overall impact and support base for community wealth-building strategies. Ideally, an integrated approach would encompass mutually reinforcing government, community, and individual wealth-building efforts. It might include direct government asset-based efforts that promote local job stability (such as local investment policies and municipal enterprise), matched savings programs, and community-based wealth-building efforts. Read more about Cross-Sectoral...
Community Land Trusts (CLTs)
A community land trust is a community-based, non-profit organization that buys land on behalf of the community and holds it in trust. By taking the land out of the market and capturing the equity gain for the community, the land trust builds community wealth. Most community land trusts lease homes out to residents using a model that enables residents to gain a minority share of the equity gain, but keeping most of the gain in the trust, thereby ensuring affordability for the future members. Read more about Community Land Trusts (CLTs)...
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