Twenty Years of Community Wealth Building
Essay collection
October 14, 2026
In celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the coining of the term Community Wealth Building, The Democracy Collaborative is proud to publish an essay collection charting the trajectory and ups-and-downs of the model. Its 21 chapters map how CWB has “progressed in fits and starts, experienced setbacks and challenges, and moved forward across geographies, incrementally or in great leaps and phase-changes.”
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Preface
Introduction
It Started in Cleveland
Community Wealth Building: Culture and Political Economy
Community Wealth Building, Anchor Institutions, and the Anchor Mission
From Transactions to Transformation
Community Wealth Building and Democratic Ownership
Community Wealth Building and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement
From Exclusion to Ownership
Delivering a Just Transition Through Community Wealth Building
The Origins of Community Wealth Building in Richmond, Virginia
Building A New Economy Together
Community Wealth Building and Corbynomics
Scotland: Community Wealth Building at the National Level
Community Wealth Building in North Ayrshire
The Preston Model of Community Wealth Building
The Community Wealth Building Movement in Canada
Community Wealth Building in Australia
Community Wealth Building in South Korea
The New National Politics of Community Wealth Building
Community Wealth Building in Northern Ireland
From Shock Therapy to Community Wealth Building in Eastern Wielkopolska
Community Wealth Building in Amsterdam
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Organization of the Material
We have organized the contributions to this anniversary compendium not by strict chronology but in clusters of meaning, some of which is chronological, some geographic, some thematic. It is not intended as a single synthesized narrative but rather as a mosaic of information, analysis and interpretation that charts the course and central arc of the development of Community Wealth Building from a think tank term of art to an increasingly international movement.
We did not secure all the contributions we would have liked, and so some areas are more developed than others and there are notable omissions that we have tried to correct as best we can. The compendium has been designed to be read together, but each individual contribution can also stand alone as an account of one particular dimension of the wider Community Wealth Building story.
In “It Started In Cleveland,” TDC co-founder Ted Howard tells the origin story of Community Wealth Building in the creation of the Evergreen Cooperatives as a demonstration project for a new model of ownership-based development in one of the most distressed and disinvested inner-city neighborhoods in Cleveland, Ohio. Ted’s chapter gives a sense of the sweeping ambition of the early CWB vision, and includes insights into the early design questions and intricacies that sought to balance radical political economy with practical viability, and even compatibility with the requirements on nonprofits of the U.S. Internal Revenue code.
It also recalls the radical centrality of the vision of “community” to the early Community Wealth Building vision – something which John Duda also takes up in “Community Wealth Building: Culture and Political Economy” (expanded greatly in an account of the political economy of Community Wealth Building that will be published separately alongside this collection). John also raises the fundamental challenge of scope and scale and reaching the tipping points capable of truly displacing the extractive economy with a more democratic one.
While TDC did not invent the term “anchor institution” – the concept was first formally articulated in 2001 by the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Comprehensive Community Initiatives, and advanced by Ira Harkavy and the work of the Netter Center and Anchor Institutions Task Force – we did augment it with the sense of purpose encapsulated by the “Anchor Mission,” as Thomas Hanna’s contribution on “Community Wealth Building, Anchor Institutions, and the Anchor Mission” makes clear.
The insight that the often problematic and extractive relationship between large placed-based economic anchor institutions like universities and hospitals (“eds and meds”) could be flipped into a more virtuous one gave rise to TDC anchor initiatives – including the birth of the Healthcare Anchor Network, created by TDC in May 2017 and subsequently spun off in 2022 as a separate organization, servicing a membership that includes many of the major non-profit healthcare systems in the United States. The anchor mission offers a practical framework for aligning institutional self-interest with community well-being in aid of a practical but transformative approach to local economic development.
The pluralism of the CWB approach also permits a welcome degree of ideological diversity, as worker-capitalist visions met cooperativism and more solidaristic and community-oriented economic frameworks – something that becomes clear from Jessica Rose’s account, “From Transactions to Transformation: The Role of Capital in Broadening Ownership.” Jessica also recounts the role of TDC as a force for positive disruption in a field at risk of stagnation, and her work with Marjorie Kelly brought a new focus on capital and new capital actors to bear on the challenge of growing employee ownership in America, encapsulated in the audacious goal of TDC’s “Fifty by Fifty” initiative – the aim of reaching fifty million worker-owners in the United States by 2050.
In addition to recounting the birthing of the new field of employee ownership finance, Jessica highlights the centrality of demonstration projects, catalytic interventions in the ideas system and on the ground, to TDC’s theory of change and field building in advancing Community Wealth Building as a practical method and approach.
In “Community Wealth Building and Democratic Ownership,” Marjorie Kelly highlights the centrality of ownership to Community Wealth Building as it is to all political economy – that who owns and controls capital determines where power lies in any system.
In her work at TDC as in her book on Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises, Marjorie is clear about the fundamental opposition between the political economy of CWB and financialized neoliberalism – that democratic ownership of and control over capital is incompatible with the current ownership regime built upon wealth supremacy and capital bias.
As Community Wealth Building spreads far and wide the risk of cooptation and dilution will increase, but the democratic economy and the extractive economy are antithetical and cannot ultimately be combined. This takes on special significance in the area of ecology and the climate crisis, where it is clearly impossible to reconcile an absentee ownership regime measured in milliseconds with stewardship of natural resources that ought to be safeguarded over millennia.
In “Community Wealth Building and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement,” Thomas Hanna recounts the civil rights origins of models of community ownership and the development of a radically different democratic economic vision and theory of change to that of mainstream American liberalism and postwar European social democracy.
Of particular interest in this history and crucible is the role of the Exploratory Project for Economic Alternatives – a lineal predecessor to The Democracy Collaborative, as were the National Center for Economic Alternatives (subsequently the National Center for Economic & Security Alternatives) and the Cambridge Institute – which had the aim to systematically develop support systems at various scales that would allow these nascent new economic forms to achieve the scale, coordination, and power necessary to alter declining economic, social, and environmental trends and point in the direction of a new political economic reality.
Of all the roads not taken in the postwar United States, this may be the most momentous – prefiguring as it does exactly where we now need to go to beat back the billionaire-owned corporate plutocracy that is busy dismantling democracy and destroying the foundations of a livable planet.
In this, the precursor work to Community Wealth Building was already embarking upon a fundamental shift away from older progressive strategies – presciently recognizing that traditional social democratic strategies – such as the “countervailing power” of organized labor, tax-and-spend social programs, and centralized approaches to poverty reduction – were both in decay and structurally insufficient to address the problems of entrenched racism, inequality, and ecological decay – something which Thad Williamson lays out explicitly in a subsequent contribution.
In “From Exclusion to Ownership: Why Community Wealth Building Is Black America’s Most Urgent Economic Project,” Anthony Cook and Stephanie McHenry build upon Thomas’s argument, expanding the immediate origin story of Community Wealth Building in the U.S. civil rights movement to situate it within the centuries’-old story of racialized capitalism and the struggles of African and African-American enslaved people to break their bondage and build their own economic institutions and take control of their destinies.
Drawing on a powerful lineage that includes W.E.B. Du Bois, Anthony and Stephanie put down an important marker for the success of CWB in America: that if it can be made to work for Black communities, then it can be made to work for everyone. New work at TDC on the racial wealth gap, on the “gray to black” conversion of white-owned enterprises with majority Black workers to employee ownership, and with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as anchors should be understood in this light – as the effort to build a next system that is also a racially just economic order.
In “Delivering a Just Transition Through Community Wealth Building: Democratizing the Green Economy in a Climate Crisis,” Max Lacey-Barnacle links Community Wealth Building to the green transition. Central to this is the importance of combining decarbonization with an attempt to tackle economic inequality – as the original Evergreen model had done – as well as the importance of marrying bottom-up Community Wealth Building efforts with national industrial strategy, especially green industrial strategy.
In “The Origins of Community Wealth Building in Richmond, Virginia,” Thad Williamson fuses the story of the historical development of Community Wealth Building in the heart of the old Confederacy with the intellectual development of Gar Alperovitz’s larger system-change vision of the “Pluralist Commonwealth,” going back to an original essay in the early 1970s.
Now on the TDC Board of Trustees and serving as policy adviser to the Mayor of Richmond, Thad was one of a long line of beneficiaries of the most labor-intensive course in political economy in the world, serving as research assistant to Gar – a lineage which stretches back to include Pulitzer prize-winning authors and stretches forward to include the current generation at TDC, including TDC President Joe Guinan and Vice President Thomas Hanna. Thad’s earlier book with Gar Alperovitz and David Imbroscio, Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era, laid out an early version of Community Wealth Building avant la lettre.
The experience of organizing for Community Wealth Building in another mid-sized U.S. city – St. Louis, Missouri – is detailed by Charli Cooksey and Abimael Chavez-Hernandez in “Building A New Economy Together: A Vision for Community Wealth Building in St. Louis.” The familiar history of segregation, redlining, and urban renewal as displacement is combined in this instance with the centrality of Community Wealth Building to the bottom-up community organizing response in St. Louis in the wake of COVID-19, the killing of George Floyd, and the devastation to the city caused by tornadoes. In putting together their Community Wealth Building playbook, WEPOWER in St. Louis may have conducted the single largest community consultation and organizing effort around Community Wealth Building to date. Their strategy reflects a sophisticated understanding of the interaction between disaster relief and long-term reconstruction and political-economic transformation against a legacy of harm, with non-extractive capital paired with technical assistance in a context of community mobilization and bottom-up demands for change.
Across the Atlantic, there was a brief interlude when Community Wealth Building achieved prominence in national politics and economic policy in Britain under the radical then-leadership of the UK Labour Party. This was the period in which Preston in the North West of England was hailed by The Economist magazine as “Jeremy Corbyn’s Model Town,” and a Community Wealth Building Unit was set up in the office of the Leader of the Opposition, with an advisory board of CWB experts and practitioners, including TDC.
In “Community Wealth Building and Corbynomics,” Joe Guinan talks to John McDonnell MP – Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Corbyn, responsible for economic policy – in a wide-ranging interview on how CWB sat within the ‘new economics’ and relates to a history going back to the heady days of McDonnell’s financial leadership of the Greater London Council. Matthew Brown’s later chapter on “The Preston Model of Community Wealth Building” adds that well-known story to the overall picture of the development of CWB in England.
There are no final victories and no final defeats, and the crushing of the Corbyn Project merely caused the seeds to be scattered elsewhere, with Scotland next in line in taking up the mantle of Community Wealth Building from a beleaguered English left.
In “Scotland: Community Wealth Building at the National Level,” Neil McInroy chronicles the journey by which Scotland moved to the forefront of global Community Wealth Building practice, culminating in national policy and legislation, through a process involving all three legs of the CWB stool – policy, practice, and movement-building.
In “Community Wealth Building in North Ayrshire: Lessons from the Political Front Line,” former Council Leader Joe Cullinane details the pioneering work of North Ayrshire in introducing CWB to Scotland and first rolling out the five-pillar model. North Ayrshire functioned as the hinge that took the Preston Model to the Scottish context and allowed it to translate to the national level, culminating in Scotland’s Community Wealth Building Act, the first national CWB legislation anywhere in the world.
Joe’s account also serves as a reminder of what it takes to do the hard yards of institutionalization, and the importance of building a resilient base of support for CWB initiatives capable of withstanding local and national political changes.
The remaining chapters all situate Community Wealth Building in specific geographies, each with their own particular political economies and dynamics presenting both challenges and opportunities.
In “The Community Wealth Building Movement in Canada: Recommendations for a Comprehensive Strategy,” Heather Hachigian and Audrey Jamal detail some early progress in Canada but also a deeper challenge stemming from “a dynamic but fragmented movement marked by early experimentation, growing cross-sector collaboration, and a recent surge of momentum driven by concerns for economic sovereignty and recognition of the importance of communities for our economies.”
In particular, in an observation that may resonate elsewhere, they argue for a democratization of economic policy, in which a wider array of public and community actors and stakeholders need to take themselves seriously as economic actors: “This requires shifting beyond criticizing mainstream economic development models from the sidelines toward constructive engagement in re-imagining an economy that serves community.”
The next two geographies present an interesting comparison, given that both have seen early-stage development with attention from TDC, but only one seems to have taken off, despite the similarity in favorable economic conditions.
Moving down under, in “Community Wealth Building In Australia: The Necessary Turn for the Lucky Country,” Patrick Fenshaw sets out the case as to why Australia needs Community Wealth Building. While Patrick spotlights some of the progress made at local level, alongside the national and state policy developments that align and support the five pillars of CWB, he also draws attention to the deep structural constraints facing the country.
These wider vulnerabilities make the case for CWB all the more urgent. Yet Australia’s relative prosperity, coupled with a degree of economic and political complacency, has constrained the uptake of CWB, limiting its emergence as a framework for economic development and wider economic transformation.
By contrast, in “Community Wealth Building in South Korea,” EunKyung Lee and JeongBok Song of the Hope Institute offer a more upbeat story in South Korea, which has sent repeated delegations to Preston and Scotland and seems to have mobilized the beginnings of a formidable movement set on adapting CWB to prevailing local conditions of successful industrialization rather than deindustrialization and the need to pursue greater social cohesion in economic policy. (For TDC, we need to reflect upon these contrasting lessons, which suggest that there may be limits to our arm’s-length global engagement – some contexts support rapid growth, others less so.)
In “The New National Politics of Community Wealth Building: The Case of Ireland,” Seán Byers gives a sharp political-economic appraisal of conditions in Ireland, North and South, that both increase the need for Community Wealth Building and present opportunities and challenges. Ireland is situated directly on some of the major faultlines of the global economy in the increasingly unstable Trump era, and comprador elites in the South may be running out of road. New social forces and the advent of a new constitutional moment in which the prospect of a United Ireland looms large may resurrect old questions about ownership, control and benefit across the island.
Meanwhile, in “Community Wealth Building in Northern Ireland: Reflections on the 2022 Independent Advisory Panel Report,” panel chair Sarah McKinley recounts the context and content of the report to then-minister Deirdre Hargey at the Department for Communities in the Northern Ireland Executive, and provides an update on actions since, including a rough scorecard against the report’s 26 recommendations across the five pillars of CWB.
In a measure of how quickly things can move, both Ireland chapters were completed before the recent flurry of activity in Dublin, kick-started by Bohemians F.C. who launched a new Community Wealth Building strategy in May 2026.
Dublin City Council (DCC) has since renewed its commitment to pursuing CWB, with a view to conducting a full-blown Community Wealth Building Action Planning process in Dublin. DCC has created a sub-committee of the Finance Strategic Policy Committee as a special purpose vehicle to drive CWB in the Irish capital. An All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Community Wealth Building has been initiated in the Oireachtas, the national parliament of Ireland, and TDC and the Bohemian Cooperatives will provide the secretariat for the APPG.
In “From Shock Therapy to Community Wealth Building in Eastern Wielkopolska,” Przemysław Piechocki and Mateusz Piotrowski give an account of the promising combination of Community Wealth Building and the just transition in the brown coal (lignite) region of Western Poland, where a full-fledged effort at a cooperative transition to a more democratic economy is well underway.
Last but not least, in “Community Wealth Building in Amsterdam,” Frans Bieckmann details the work in the Nieuw-West district of the largest city in the Netherlands. This is an effort on the part of a city CWB team to adapt Community Wealth Building to the “hot market” conditions of Amsterdam whilst providing economic justice and opportunity for the neighborhood’s immigrant communities, all set against a forbidding backdrop of entrenched neoliberal ideology and the habitual operations of large and powerful city bureaucracies.
Continuing the Community Wealth Building Journey
The timing of this collection is significant for more reasons than a simple anniversary. Over the past 20 years, the world has experienced financial crises, widening inequality, democratic distrust, climate emergency, austerity, pandemic disruption and geopolitical instability. Together, these crises have exposed an economic system that is highly centralized, extractive, and vulnerable. They have also intensified the search for alternatives.
Community Wealth Building has gained traction precisely because it offers something both visionary and practical. It connects structural critique with grounded action. It demonstrates that local government, anchor institutions, trade unions, community organizations, activists and citizens are not powerless within the eddies and currents of global economic change. We can and will reshape economic futures.
This collection also reminds us that Community Wealth Building is deeply relational. Its progress has depended on alliances among activists, policymakers, practitioners, researchers and communities willing to challenge orthodoxies and experiment with new forms of economic practice.
The stories here are not stories of individual policy innovations alone; they are stories of collective endeavor. While specific players have helped to grow aspects of CWB, its strength lies in its ability to be owned and driven by many. Community Wealth Building has flourished precisely because it is not proprietary; it is a theory and practice carried forward by a movement far bigger than any single actor.
This collection has reflections, critiques, case studies and provocations. Some essays look back at the origins and foundations of Community Wealth Building. Others explore the conceptual framing, contemporary applications, the inertias and barriers but always future possibilities. Together, they provide both a historical record and a statement of intent.
What is running through all the contributions is a belief that economies are not indubitable constructions beyond citizen and democratic influence. They are social constructions and can therefore be reshaped through intentional collective action and activism. Community Wealth Building insists that wealth should circulate, not leak away; that ownership matters; that democracy must extend into the economy; and that places prosper when people have genuine power over their economic destinies.
Importantly, these essays show how Community Wealth Building continues to develop. Today CWB leans into and connects ever more deeply with climate justice, the energy transition, racial inequality, and indigenous sovereignty – and will need to do so with artificial intelligence and other coming economic and technological revolutions.
Twenty years on, Community Wealth Building is no longer an emerging conversation. It is an international movement of ideas and practice that continues to evolve in response to the crises and possibilities of our age.
This compendium is both a reflection on that journey and an invitation to continue it.
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Neil McInroy is the Global Lead for Community Wealth Building at The Democracy Collaborative
Joe Guinan is President of The Democracy Collaborative
