The Democracy Collaborative’s latest report, Hospitals Building Healthier Communities, provides an in-depth look at six hospitals in five cities that are rethinking their economic and community engagement strategies. These hospitals have recognized that health is more than just treating the patients that come through their doors and are beginning to adopt an “anchor institution mission” that can help build not only more prosperous, but also healthier communities.
Democracy Collaborative Reports and Publications
The Anchor Mission: Leveraging the Power of Anchor Institutions to Build Community Wealth
This report from The Democracy Collaborative and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT focuses on the path-breaking Vision 2010 Program implemented in Cleveland and Northeast Ohio by University Hospitals System. Over a five year period, the initiative targeted more than $1 billion of procurement locally to create jobs, empower minority- and female-owned businesses, and create a “new normal” for responsible, community-focused business practices in the region.
Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution
As long as businesses are set up to focus exclusively on maximizing financial income for the few, our economy will be locked into endless growth and widening inequality. But now people across the world are experimenting with new forms of ownership, which Kelly calls generative: aimed at creating the conditions for all of life to thrive for many generations to come. These designs may hold the key to the deep transformation our civilization needs.
To understand these emerging alternatives, Kelly reports from across the globe, visiting a community-owned wind facility in Massachusetts, a lobster cooperative in Maine, a multibillion-dollar employee-owned department-store chain in London, a foundation-owned pharmaceutical in Denmark, a farmer-owned dairy in Wisconsin, and other places where a hopeful new economy is being built. Along the way, she finds the five essential patterns of ownership design that make these models work.
The Road Half Traveled: University Engagement at a Crossroads
Authored by Rita Axelroth Hodges and Steve Dubb as part of Michigan State University Press' series on Transformations in Higher Education, the book features ten in-depth cases and examines how universities, by pursuing an anchor institution mission to improve surrounding communities in cooperation with community partners, can positively impact the welfare of low-income residents.
America Beyond Capitalism
How thousands of co-ops, worker-owned businesses, land trusts, and municipal enterprises are beginning to democratize the deep substructure of the American economy, with a new introduction by the author, Gar Alperovitz, and a new foreword by James Gustave Speth.
Climate Change, Community Stability, and the Next 150 Million Americans
Curbing carbon emissions requires far more than technical know-how. We must change not only our energy use and transportation practices, but also where and how we work and live. It also requires ending the commonplace economic practice of treating built communities as disposable items that can be abandoned when market conditions change.
The challenge is daunting. Yet it also presents an opportunity. Putting forth a vision of green community wealth building, in which community-anchored enterprises, linked to sophisticated and decentralized planning, support stable and sustainable local economies, this study outlines how truly integrated approaches can help America meet the sustainability challenge.
Community Wealth Building in Jackson, Mississippi: Strategic Considerations
Drawing from the inspiration of the Jackson-Kush Plan and the vision put forward by the late Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, Cooperation Jackson emerged as an independent organization focused on developing a cooperative economy in Jackson in the summer of 2014. As an aspiring network of cooperative enterprises, Cooperation Jackson aims to reduce income and wealth gaps, generate living wage jobs with quality healthcare, and ensure the provision of adequate housing through the growth of worker cooperatives and other democratically owned enterprises.