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Community Wealth Blog

Good Jobs First is a non-profit resource center and advocacy group that promotes corporate and government accountability in economic development and smart growth for working families. The group tracks corporate accountability legislation, including job quality standards, disclosure rules, and monitoring, as well as holding triennial conferences that link advocates across the nation.

The Champlain Housing Trust, then known as the Burlington Community Land Trust, was initiated by the City of Burlington in 1984 as an experiment that aimed to slow gentrification of urban neighborhoods and provide housing ownership opportunity for low and moderate income households.

In the strange, but common, way that Washington politics work, some of the most important community wealth building legislation since at least the passage of the New Markets Tax Credit program in 2000 is expected to become law as part of a much broader foreclosure prevention bill, which President Bush has now said he will sign, as the New York Times and others have reported.

Launched in May 2008, the Indiana ESOP Initiative is a new state program designed to promote and encourage the formation of Employee Stock Ownership Plan companies. State Treasurer Richard Mourdock began his effort to create an Indiana state structure to support ESOPs in February 2007, when he created an ESOP Advisory Committee, which focused on the question: “How might we encourage more companies to become ESOPs in the State of Indiana?

Last December, the Green Jobs Act and the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program were approved as part of federal energy legislation. The Green Jobs Act, authorized at $125 million, is an initial pilot program designed to identify needed skills, develop training programs, and to train workers for jobs in a range of renewable energy and energy efficiency industries.  It targets a broad range of populations for eligibility, but focuses 20 percent of its funds on “green pathways out of poverty."

Want high speed internet?  Wilson, North Carolina, a city of just under 50,000 people located about 35 minutes east of Raleigh, initiated its high-speed internet service this month and will roll out service citywide over the next year.  Financed by a $28 million investment, the city-owned fiber-optic network offers some of the fastest Internet speeds available nationwide.  Customers of its Greenlight community-owned all fiber optic cable pay $34.95 a month for 10 Megabytes-per-second service.

The New Hampshire Community Loan Fund and the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) have announced the formal launch of a new organization, Resident Ownership Communities-USA (ROC-USA), which aims to provide technical assistance to help the 17 million Americans (3.5 million households) in manufactured home communities (or “mobile home parks") become owners of these communities through member-owned cooperatives.

Efforts to create a new kind of company, known as a low-profit limited liability company or L3C bore fruit when Governor Jim Douglas (R) signed into law Vermont bill H-775 on April 30th. The full text of the law as passed is here.  As discussed previously in this blog (see also this previous posting), the legislation creates a new kind of company that would be for-profit, but would also pursue a charitable purpose, as determined by the IRS.

The consulting company WorldBlu recently announced its 2008 list of the 25 “most democratic workplaces.” The criteria by which WorldBlu judges competing companies are available here.  An article in US News & World Report entitled, “Why Workplace Democracy Can Be Good Business,” notes in its article covering WorldBlu’s list that, “Democratic companies may be slower in making decisions but faster in carrying them out because employees are invested in them.”

The Network of Latino Credit Unions and Professionals is joining forces with the National Federation of Community Development Credit Unions to co-organize the nation’s fifth Latino Credit Union Conference, which will focus on ways credit unions can engage the large and growing Latino community.

As a recent article written by Rick Cohen in the Nonprofit Quarterly notes, “In the subprime mortgage foreclosure fiasco, nonprofit organizations have stood out as relative successes compared to their counterparts in the for-profit financial sector and among federal government agencies.”

Every two years, the Social Investment Forum surveys the social investment field. Copies of past reports, stretching back to their initial 1995 survey, and a link to the executive summary of the 2007 report can be downloaded here. The report notes that assets held by community development financial institutions rose nearly 32 percent from $19.6 billion in 2005 to $25.8 billion in 2007.