1. Updates
  2. Community Wealth Blog

Community Wealth Blog

Annually, the Great Place to Work Institute releases its list of top 100 companies to work. The 2009 list, which is published by Fortune magazine, shows that employee owned companies in the U.S. are becoming more prominent, with 14 of the 100 companies being employee owned.

The Howard University Center on Race and Wealth has announced that it is hosting a Summer Institute.  The 4-week program aims to provide an opportunity for students (undergraduate or graduate) who have completed a paper on a topic related to asset building, wealth accumulation and/or wealth and racial economic inequality, particularly in communities of color and low-income populations, to refine their research and convert their papers into work of publishable quality.

The National Alliance of Community Economic Development Associations (NACEDA) is a national organization created to support the work of community economic development (CED) associations, local community development corporations (CDCs) and practitioners nationwide.  NACEDA is seeking a Director of Policy to assist the association to analyze legislation and advocate to Congress on behalf of its members on a broad range of issues including: housing, community development, social services, and financial literacy.

Presented by the Opportunity Fund— a San Jose-based community development financial institution—Kiva— a person-to-person micro-lending website that enables individuals to lend directly to micro-enterprises in the developing world— and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, Microfinance California 2009 hopes to attract 350-450 investors, policymakers, practitioners and clients to examine the success of micro-finance in California to date and to raise resources to increase access to micro-finance services.

The Winter 2009 issue of the community development journal Shelterforce examines at length a wide range of issues facing housing and community development practitioners in the current economic crisis. 

In Boston, nonprofits academic hospitals own $2.4 billion in property. If their property was taxable, the city’s eight biggest teaching hospitals would have owed $64.2 million in city taxes.  Instead, according to report Community Labor United, they made voluntary payments of $4 million.  Community Labor United recently issued a report titled the Nonprofit City that examines these issues.

With the inauguration of President Barack Obama, now is the time to rebuild community-based economics and to re-energize co-ops, argues longtime co-op activist David Thompson of the Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation. A link to the full letter and supporting materials is here.  Based on data made available by the National Cooperative Business Association, Thompson argues that health care co-ops, credit unions, workers co-ops, purchasing co-ops and green collar jobs.

Two community development financial institutions or CDFIs—the Chicago-based IFF (formerly Illinois Facilities Fund) and the Santa Fe, New Mexico-based Homewise took away top honors at the 2008 national Opportunity Finance Network conference, held earlier this month in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As part of the second-annual Wachovia NEXT Awards for Opportunity Finance, the two organizations received grants and low-cost program-related investment loans totaling $8.25 million.

The EMES Network owes its name to its research program on “the emergence of social enterprises in Europe”. More generally, it studies social enterprise and related forms of economic organization which variously go by such names as the third sector, the social economy, the civil and solidarity-based economy ("e’conomie solidaire"), the non-profit sector, and voluntary organizations.  Created in 1996, the Network organized the 1st EMES International Conference, titled “Social Enterprise.

Buffalo ReUse and the Building Materials Reuse Association (BMRA) are co-sponsoring the first Great Lakes Building ReUse Conference, November 16 through 18, 2008 in Buffalo, New York. People interested in attending can register on line. This will be the first regional conference on developing and implementing building deconstruction and other creative solutions to address problems and solutions surrounding vacant and abandoned structures.

In recent months, it has become popular among some to blame the Community Reinvestment Act, a piece of legislation passed in 1977 to create an affirmative obligation by banks to make loans available to people in low-income and minority communities and end red-lining, for causing the subprime crisis.  For a recent example, see this article by Charles Krauthammer.

Created as part of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, the Neighborhood Stabilization Program at the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) is a one-time grant program that aims to assist states and localities to acquire foreclosed properties, reduce the impact on neighboring families (who are seeing their property values fall due to a foreclosure-saturated housing market), and rehabilitate them for affordable housing.