Community Wealth Blog
Green. Local. Not-for-profit. That’s the goal in Boulder, Colorado where grassroots activists and the local nonprofit New Era Colorado Foundation have been campaigning to turn the city’s private power source into a public utility in order to more aggressively pursue renewable energy options and reduce carbon emissions.
The Democracy Collaborative is hiring a Chief Operating Officer
Reporting to the CEO and a member of the senior management team, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) is a newly created position that will allow the CEO to focus more externally on fundraising, advocating nationally for the CWB paradigm of economic development, building key stakeholder and strategic partnerships, and strategizing about “what comes next”.
Learning/Action Lab for Community Wealth Building
The Democracy Collaborative – working in close collaboration with Jill Bamburg of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute and Marjorie Kelley of the Tellus Institute, and supported by the Northwest Area Foundation – is spearheading a year long intensive training and advisory program designed to help Native communities better engage in comprehensive community economic development.
The Fifth Season Cooperative: Building Community Wealth and a Regional Food System
We first learned about the innovative, multistakeholder Fifth Season Cooperative Wisconson's 7 Rivers region from the community wealth builders at Gundersen Lutheran Health Systems, whom we interviewed for one of the case studies in our report Hospitals Building Healthier Communities: Embracing the Anchor Mission. The more we learned, the more excited we became...
Employee Ownership Reduces Layoffs and Saves Taxpayer
Many of the benefits of employee ownership are quite apparent. Through owning a portion of stock in her or his company through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP, an employee is part owner and receives not just income, but has the opportunity to build wealth that would otherwise be unavailable in a traditional workplace.
Democracy Collaborative Offers Paid Internship
We are pleased to announce a new intern position at The Democracy Collaborative that will focus on the Community-Wealth.org newsletter and adding web content. For further details, please see the position description below. Remember to submit your applications by August 30!
Harnessing the Power of University Endowments for Community Investment
As highlighted in a recent post for The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Democracy Collaborative's new report Raising Student Voices, co-published with the Responsible Endowments Coalition, insists that "everyone benefits when colleges invest in local businesses and sustainable economic development, and that students and community organizations should work together to push for more such alliances."
Students Push Universities to Invest Locally
In response to my earlier post about anchor institutions and community development, Andrew Frishkoff, executive director of LISC Philadelphia, commented “Too often we have seen beneficent anchor institutions acting paternalistically on behalf of communities, instead of in partnership with them.” Frishkoff called for “intermediaries who can help to bridge the divide ... Such intermediaries need to be independent of, but accountable to, anchors and communities, with a deep understanding of both.”
Local Governments Recognize Benefits of Buying Local
Last month the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, better known as BALLE, had its annual conference in Buffalo, New York, bringing together international thought leaders, on-the-ground social entrepreneurs, policymakers, local economy funders, and philanthropists who are all working to build a new localist economy.
Community Organizing for a New Economy
Earlier this month at Left Forum, The Democracy Collaborative helped organize five panels on a variety of different topics related to cooperatives, sustainability and growing a new economy. The last session of the weekend, “Community Organizing for a New Economy,” offered a spirited conversation around some innovative new work that is helping build a new economy.
A Third of All States Now Have Benefit Corp Laws
Last month, the state of Nevada became the 17th state to pass legislation enabling businesses to incorporate as benefit corporations. There are nearly a dozen other states considering legislation, illustrating just how rapidly this idea has spread since Maryland became the first to pass legislation in April 2010. Legislatures in all corners of the U.S. have supported this concept overwhelmingly.
How Nonprofit Institutions Can Improve Local Economies
Can a hospital’s economic development strategy do more to heal a city than its emergency room? This question was at the core of a MIT-University of Maryland (UMCP) case study of University Hospitals’ (UH) Vision 2010 program in Cleveland, Ohio.