 Welcome
to the C-W.org Toolbox!
As part of our broader effort to encourage democratic, common
asset, wealth building work, Community-Wealth.org has assembled
this toolbox to bring together a range
of practitioner-oriented materials that cut across the traditional
divisions or “silos” that exist among different
community wealth building sectors. We hope these materials encourage
greater use and experimentation with different asset and wealth
creation strategies. Through this toolbox we also aim to facilitate
further conversation, connection, and collaboration among those
now working as community wealth builders.
Please check back as we update our website quarterly for
new additions to this section. We want to continually develop
this toolbox and welcome your input on how to make these tools
a useful resource.
How to Make These Tools Work For You
The materials in this section include manuals and other basic
“how to” resources that are organized by wealth
building strategy (e.g., community land trusts, cooperatives,
employee ownership). Although some of the manuals may be fairly
detailed, the materials in this section of our website, by
and large, are not intended to be comprehensive. For in-depth
information on a specific strategy, we encourage you to explore
the other sections of this website. For instance, if you are
interested in employee ownership, you may wish to review the
materials in the ESOP section. There you will find a brief
introduction, capsule descriptions and links to support organizations,
examples of leading groups in the field, links to research
organizations, and a wide range of both popular and academic
articles on the topic. In other words, we hope these tools
give you the basic information you need to be able to get
started. And from there, who knows how far you may go!
Rules of the Road: Key Community Wealth Building Principles
Before beginning, we encourage you to review the general
principles listed below. While not the “final word”
in community wealth building, we believe these guidelines
are important in organizing community wealth building programs
and provide a sound basis from which to build a comprehensive
community strategy.
- 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).
- 13. 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.
Community Wealth Building Tools
For a broad overview of the range of community wealth
building tools, we suggest consulting this literature survey
developed by Enterprise Community Partners:
Enterprise Community Partners, Free Online Resources for
Community Development Practitioners, Columbia, MD: Enterprise,
February 2007.
tool-enterprise-overall-guide.pdf
(156KB)
For information on specific community wealth building
tools, please browse the sections below:
Local Communities:
Government:
Place-Based Institutions:
|
