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Peter Gowan writes in Jacobin Magazine "A Plan to Nationalize Fossil-Fuel Companies." In this article, Gowan writes about the Democracy Collaborative's research on the cost of nationalizating fossil-fuel industry: 

"This could be quite costly — writers from The Democracy Collaborative recently estimated “the price tag to purchase outright the top 25 largest US-based publicly traded oil and gas companies, along with most of the remaining publicly traded coal companies” at $1.15 trillion. But there are ways to minimize this cost while still obtaining all of the benefits."

Read more in Jacobin.

Alyssa Ochs and David Callahan write in Inside Philanthropy, "Another Community Foundation With High Hopes for Impact Investing." In this article, the writers highlight the study released by the Democracy Collaborative A new Achor Mission Strategy For A New Century:

Impact investing by community foundations is not a new thing. Back in 2012, for example, the Council on Foundations brought together leaders from the worlds of impact investing and community foundations to help more local funders get going with impact investing. That effort led to a handy field guide to this topic in 2013, produced by COF and Mission Investors Exchange. A year later, the Democracy Collaborative released a study, "A New Anchor Mission for a New Century," which analyzed how 30 innovative community foundations were engaged in impact investing, often around housing and economic development, two areas where larger amounts of capital are needed to move the needle. 

Read more in Inside Philanthropy

Laurie Larson writes the article Trusteee Magazine "Anchoring hospitals in the community." In this article, Larson covers the Healthcare Anchor Network, a project of the Democracy Collaborative: 

Theirs is just one example of the work emerging from the Healthcare Anchor Network, a blooming consortium of nearly three dozen health systems launched in May 2017. The network's overarching goal is to “reach a critical mass of U.S. health systems [that are] strategically improving community health and well-being by leveraging all of their institutional assets, including intentionally integrating local economic inclusion strategies in hiring, purchasing and investing.”

HAN is the brainchild of the Democracy Collaborative, an economic development agency in Cleveland, which was launched as a “democratic renewal” research center at the University of Maryland in 2000. The collaborative has since moved well beyond its research roots, offering field activities to expand community wealth-building, hosting nationwide roundtables to discuss transformative economic development solutions, and advising local governments, foundations and anchor institutions such as health systems on new strategies for addressing the root causes of socio-economic inequity in their communities.

Thomas M. Hanna, Joe Guinana, and Joe Bilsborough write in Open Democracy  "The ‘Preston Model’ and the modern politics of municipal socialism."In this piece, the writers highlight the flagship community wealth building project in Cleveland, Ohio, and Preston, England and what it means for municipal socialism: 

There are now two flagship models of community wealth building—and a growing number of additional efforts in cities across the United States and United Kingdom.  The first model is the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio—created, in part, by our own organisation, The Democracy Collaborative. Cleveland had lost almost half of its population and most of its large publicly-traded companies due to deindustrialisation, disinvestment, and capital flight. But it still had very large non-profit and quasi-public institutions such as the Cleveland Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, and University Hospitals—known as anchor institutions because they are rooted in place and aren’t likely to up and leave. Together, Cleveland’s anchors were spending around $3 billion per year, very little of which was previously staying in the local community. The Democracy Collaborative worked with them to localise a portion of their procurement in support of a network of purposely-created green worker co-ops, the Evergreen Co-operatives, tied together in a community corporation so that they too are rooted in place. Today these companies are profitable and are beginning to eat the lunch of the multinational corporations that had previously provided contract services to the big anchors. Last month came the announcement of an expansion of the Evergreen Cooperative Laundry to a new site serving the needs of the Cleveland Clinic, with a hundred new employees on fast track to worker ownership.

Nissa Rhee, writing for Chicago Magazine, in "Rush Hospital Wants to Tackle the West Side “Death Gap.” Will It Work?" In this piece, Rhee highlights in the work that the Healthcare Anchor Network: 

All this exemplifies a national movement by nonprofits and public institutions “to think differently about how to use its economic resources and social capital to really benefit not only its long-term wellbeing but that of the community,” says David Zuckerman, a manager for health care engagement at the Democracy Collaborative and organizer of the Healthcare Anchor Network, a group of 30 health systems that are doing this work.

Zuckerman says that hospitals have a lot of “sticky capital,” or “dollars that can’t pick up and leave the way that manufacturing or many corporate employers have left communities.” They are in essence grounded cruise ships, requiring a huge staff, thousands of meals for patients, medical supplies, and linen cleaning services. If hospitals are able to redirect some of their purchasing and hiring to their neighbors, say using a local laundromat instead of shipping soiled bed sheets further away, they could have a large impact on the community, says Zuckerman.

Read more in Chicago Mag

"Preston, in north-west England, is a laboratory for other aspects of Corbynomics. Under an agreement with the local council, large public institutions such as the university bias their procurement towards providers in the local area. For Matthew Brown, the councillor who started the scheme, it is about taking back control of public resources. “It democratises the capital,” he says. If elected to Downing Street, Labour would get the government to use its colossal procurement budget for policy goals, demanding that suppliers pay the living wage (a voluntary amount slightly higher than the statutory minimum wage) or cap bosses’ pay at 20 times that of the median worker, for instance..."

Read more in The Economist

Tom Gann writes for New Socialist in "Labour's New Economics Conference: Part Five, Local Democratic Economic Strategies." Gann recaps the UK Labour Party's panel, "Local Democratic Economic Strategies," at the New Economic Conference. The panel included Matthew Brown, Preston City Council; Heather Wakefield, UNISON; Ted Howard, president/co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative:

Ted Howard, Democracy Collaborative

Howard began by talking of the “pilgrimage” from the USA to Preston, and how Preston had now eclipsed what had been achieved in the US. He then outlined the principles of Community Wealth Building.

• The priority of labour over capital, particularly in a crisis, with continued stable employment more important than capital’s profits.
• The need for local and broad-based rather than absentee ownership, as the basis for asserting what interests are valued.
• The importance of active democratic ownership contrasted with the passive, consumer model of neoliberalism.
• The central role for multipliers and internalising the circulation of money with investment sticking rather than capital being extracted.
• Economic development understood not as a partnership between the state and business, in which the state is unaccountable and subordinate, but as a multistakeholder process.
• Place matters, direct investment in neighbourhoods, particularly neighbourhoods of colour is necessary, trickle down particularly into these neighbourhoods cannot be relied upon.
• Systemic change, the current system destroys the environment and produces inequalities so it’s necessary to move beyond amelioration to build systems that produce different outcomes.

Howard concluded, with the properly Marxist-humanist insight, “people made our systems, we can remake them” (or, “if there’s been a way to build it, there’ll be a way to destroy it, things are not all that out of control”).

Kate King, writing for the Wall Street Journal, in 'A New Role For Hospitals: Boosting the Local Economy.' In this article, King highlights the anchor work by New Beth Israel Medical Center in Newark, NJ and the vision and leadership by the Democracy Collaborative:

“The current fee-for-service model, in which we’re not actually addressing the root causes for why people are showing up in the emergency room, just is not sustainable,” said David Zuckerman, director of health-care engagement for the Democracy Collaborative, a think tank and advisory group.

Read more in the Wall Street Journal