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Community Wealth Blog

According to a recent article in the business journal Portfolio.com, the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) form of business ownership may be due for a major boost in numbers. “In the last 18 years, only 3,300 private and public companies have turned to this model,” the article reports, “but the next decade could see an increase as baby boomers with businesses search for exit strategies and ESOP companies continue their success.”

Following a kick-off event in Washington on July 13th in which President Barack Obama delivered these remarks, the White House Office of Urban Affairs began its tour of urban America ten days later with the first stop in Philadelphia. 

This summer the nonprofit CFED (formerly, Corporation for Enterprise Development) launched its first class of Innovative Ideas Champions.  The program aims to support “ideas and policies, products and practices that will help Americans build wealth, bring about greater social equity, alleviate poverty and lead to a more sustainable economy.”

As Ryan Van Lenning of Sustainablog writes, “Oakland may be on the list of the top 10 Greenest Cities, but certain areas like West Oakland are nearly bereft of healthy, local food, which is an important element of sustainability. Fortunately, an oasis has just appeared in West Oakland in the form of a worker-owned grocery store with a focus on healthy, organic, local food and community.”

A group of California cooperative organizations have come together to hold an event that is billed as the state’s “first annual” co-op conference.  Organized by the California Center for Cooperative Development, the conference aims to teach co-op skills, foster connection among co-ops across the state, and build a statewide cooperative economy.

This past April, Congress passed the Serve America Act, a summary of whose provisions is available here.  As philanthropic adviser Sean Stannard-Stockton outlines in his Tactical Philanthropy blog, the Serve America Act was a key policy recommendation of America Forward, a coalition of more than 70 nonprofit organizations, organized in part by New Profit, a venture philanthropy funder.

Among a narrow band of U.S. academics and activists, the worker cooperative model provided by the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation has long been attractive. See, for instance, this report from David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance dating from 1992. The story of Mondragón is told well by the late Vermont sociologist George Benello here.

Since 2003, in the state of Massachusetts alone, community development corporations (CDCs) have help build or preserve 7,811 homes, created 11,609 job opportunities, supported 6,211 local businesses, served 123,556 families, and attracted $1.362 billion worth of investment to struggling neighborhoods.

We call this website Community-Wealth.org, but we rarely discuss the nature of wealth on this site itself.  An interesting paradox, however, of our age is revealed in a debate stirred by a recent book, featured on this website but until now not commented on by this blog, called Unjust Deserts.  Co-authored by Lew Daly of Demos and Community-Wealth.org’s own Gar Alperovitz, the book is receiving increasing attention.

More than 350 people from social enterprises across the United States and beyond came to the tenth Summit of the Social Enterprise Alliance, held in New Orleans earlier this month.  This year’s Summit featured a new policy track that explored federal, state, and local policy options.

Two months ago, this blog profiled the upcoming Microfinance California 2009 conference, California’s first statewide conference on domestic micro-finance.

Published by the Penn Institute for Urban Research, Retooling HUD for a Catalytic Federal Government: A Report to Secretary Shaun Donovan—a collective effort of over 100 urban policy practitioners and academic researchers—develops in ten chapters a new vision of urban development that seeks to put the “UD back in HUD” (that is Urban Development back in “Housing & Urban Development").