Community Wealth, University Action, and Municipal Power
September 4, 2025
TDC President Joe Guinan moderated a panel discussion at the Next System Convergence, September 4-5, 2025. The Democracy Collaborative co-sponsored the session with Next System Studies at George Mason University, with TDC panelists Neil McInroy and Grace Chai, plus Ben Manski of GMU.
The following are Joe Guinan’s opening remarks. A recording of the event will be available shortly.
Our session today is on “Community Wealth, University Action, and Municipal Power” and first I want to set the scene a little.
At The Democracy Collaborative we are cetainly supporters of the idea of “uni-muni-community partnerships,” which fit squarely within the framework of a Community Wealth Building approach based on anchor institution strategies for bottom-up local economic system change and transformation.
For those of you who don’t know the Community Wealth Building model, CWB was developed back in 2005 as a strategy for democratizing the economy, and was behind the implementation of the Cleveland Model with the Evergreen Cooperatives in Ohio, inspired the Preston Model in England, and is now being advanced into legislation in Scotland. There is CWB activity as far afield as South Korea, Australia, Poland, France, Ireland, and of course efforts across the United States from St Louis and Chicago to Seattle and Denver, and also here in the Washington DC-Maryland-Virginia region, from Fairfax County to Prince George’s and in between.
Community Wealth Building is an economic development model that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets.
CWB takes progressive elements like community land trusts, worker cooperatives, public banking, and more – what we call the democratic economy – and supercharges their power, systemically connecting and scaling them to change people’s lives and the economic future of our communities.
It does so in coordination with local governments, economic development teams, “anchor institutions” – like universities, hospital systems, and local governments which unlike footloose corporations are place-based and substantially tied to their localities – and community leaders and organizations, helping them to adapt the model to their own needs and contexts.
“Local governments and place-based ‘anchor institutions’ should lead with procurement practices that relocalize economic activity, build local multipliers, and end financial leakage and extraction.”
The idea is that local governments and place-based “anchor institutions” should lead with procurement practices that relocalize economic activity, build local multipliers, and end financial leakage and extraction.
The Limitations of Anchor Strategies
In practice we now need to interrogate some limitations and next-stage possibilities given where we are today.
First, while the anchor institution model is pregnant with possibility it is as yet to a large extent unrealized.
While anchors have similarities, in terms of their rootedness and potential susceptibility to democratic influence and control, they are also very different things:
Local government
Local government is a vastly underutilized vector of change for local economies, but also has all the usual problems and limitations of the political system in terms of elite capture and bureaucratic inertia and also a fiscal squeeze which makes systemic transformation strategies difficult to pursue.
It needs a great deal more democratization and challenge, and a rebirth of the understanding that these are our resources as a community and should be for us to direct and control.
So, while I obviously support strategies around procurement and workforce and local public policy-level structural reforms, we also need to further democratize those strategies with public banking, participatory budgeting, and democratic forms of community and municipal enterprise and ownership.
Healthcare
Health systems, too, while substantially dependent upon public dollars and favorable tax and other treatment in public policy terms, are limited in their exposure to direct democratic pressure and control. There is great work being done on the Health Anchor Mission, not least by the Healthcare Anchor Network (HAN), which was incubated at TDC and spun off a few years back as an independent organization.
There are also challenges – of technocracy, and of voluntarism – and a heavy reliance on enlightened leadership and a self-interested recognition of the “business case” for anchor strategies and the imperative to move further upstream in the system to what is now increasingly but not entirely recognized as the social determinants of health.
Universities and higher education
University anchor strategies also need greater ambition, as Steve Dubb at NPQ and a former colleague at TDC noted over a decade ago with his book The Road Half Traveled, and it remains half traveled today.
Not only do town-gown tensions that go back to the Middle Ages still persist in unbalanced and extractive relationships between universities and their neighborhoods and surrounding communities, but the neoliberalization of the university and the current right-wing assault on academic freedom and campus speech are further challenges.
There is a far wider conception of the anchor and next system role of the university, which draws upon the Wisconsin Idea and the history of the land grant system and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and more.
The Mosaic of Local Next System Possibility
The “uni-muni-community” vision, as it is beginning to be developed, really aligns with and substantially contains the idea of what Gar Alperovitz, TDC’s co-founder, has called “the mosaic” – the bringing together in one place not just of a collection of democratic economy projects and initiatives but a knitting together of them all in a unified strategy for economic and social transformation at the municipal and regional level that begins to achieve some of the ambition of what can deservedly be called a next system.
Imagine not just a land trust or a public bank or a network of co-ops or new community-owned digital infrastructure or participatory budgeting or new forms of guaranteed income but all of them, in their best in class versions, being brought together in one place – a powerful demonstration of what we not only know works in theory but already is being put into practice in communities and neighborhoods and workplaces and social spaces all across the United States and around the world.
“Imagine not just a land trust or a public bank or a network of co-ops or new community-owned digital infrastructure or participatory budgeting or new forms of guaranteed income but all of them, in their best in class versions, being brought together in one place – a powerful demonstration of what we not only know works in theory but already is being put into practice .”
The university is a special kind of anchor in that regard in that it also holds the potential of hosting some of the space for the visioning and incubation and nurturing and inspiring of those visions and models, together with access to large-scale resources that are desperately needed in communities. This is one of the reasons that universities have been so high on the hit list for Trump in this recent fascist turn.
For that reason, as well as the others mentioned above, I think we need to aggressively pursue “uni-muni-community” strategies as a central plank in our transitional program and as a majorly important pathway to building the next system that we don’t just desire but urgently need to set about building.
