Report

Every day, we learn more about how patients’ health outcomes are tied not only to the healthcare they receive but also to the conditions in the communities where they live. Social and economic inequities, amplified by race, often emerge as the leading factors explaining differences in health outcomes and life expectancies.

Through local and inclusive hiring, health systems can invest in an ecosystem of success that lifts up local residents; helps create career pathways for low-income, minority, and hard-to-employ populations; and begins to transform neighborhoods. In the process, health systems can develop a more efficient workforce pipeline, meet sustainability and inclusion goals, and ultimately improve the health of their communities. Establishing a local and inclusive hiring strategy is an important first step towards rethinking your health system’s role in the community. This toolkit can help you get started.

How can impact investors, family foundations, and financial institutions strategically leverage  their investments toward solutions that help stem and reverse rising economic inequality? This new report from The Democracy Collaborative explores ways in which impact investors can  help build an inclusive economy by accelerating  the growth of broad-based ownership models—worker cooperatives, social enterprises, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), hybrid  enterprises, and municipal enterprise.

On June 13 and 14, 2016 in Washington, DC, many of the nation’s leading experts in employee ownership, sustainable business and finance, community and economic development, and philanthropy came together in a Learning + Design session. Co-hosts for the meeting were Marjorie Kelly and Jessica Bonanno of The Democracy Collaborative and Camille Kerr of Democracy at Work Institute. The purpose of the session was to discuss how to achieve unprecedented scale of employee ownership by focusing on achieving an audacious goal: 50 million U.S. employee-owners by 2050. This report summarizes and expands upon the June meeting:

This new report from TREC, an Ontario, Canada based developer of community-owned renewable energy and member of the Federation of Community Power Co-operatives, assesses opportunities to build community wealth stemming from Ontario’s Feed-In-Tariff program (FIT), which provides higher payment rates to renewable energy providers. The report recommends focusing the FIT on cooperatively-owned, First Nations-owned, and municipally-owned enterprises, finding that that every dollar spent on such community-owned energy efforts results in $2 more in additional local economic activity. The authors suggest publically-funded loan guarantees to grow the capacity of these enterprises.

This new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) acknowledges the importance and potential of community land trusts (CLTs) to build wealth, stabilize communities, and preserve affordable housing. It outlines the characteristics of shared equity models and provides site acquisition strategies for CLTs. The author makes policy recommendations to restore funding for affordable housing and community development programs, broaden CLT’s access to the secondary market and FHA-backed mortgages, and increase lenders’ comfort with the model:

With nearly ten million households in the U.S. lacking a bank account, many families face challenges building wealth. However, with financial counseling and coaching, families can work towards financial security. This new collection of essays from Cities for Financial Empowerment (CFE Fund) and Citi Community Development highlights this potential and brings together the perspectives of leading experts in the field. The essays share strategies for building cultural competency, accessing public funding opportunities, and scaling and professionalizing efforts. 

This new paper from Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson, a New York-based grassroots organization and member of the Right to the City Alliance, calls for “utilities justice”—the right to have affordable, accessible, healthy, and community-controlled energy. It examines the ways in which communities and families in Poughkeepsie, New York are burdened by energy insecurity and notes racial and income disparities. Recommendations put forth address affordability and access to renewables and weatherization resources, as well as local and common ownership of energy sources. The authors also list strategic advantages for utilities justice community organizing.  

Forty-six communities across the U.S. and Canada implemented participatory budgeting initiatives in 2014, involving over 70,000 residents in the allocation of $50 million. This new report from Public Agenda assesses the impact of these initiatives, compiling and presenting data on implementation, participation, and the types of projects funded. It finds that youth and women, as well as black and low-income people, are disproportionately active in the participatory budgeting process when compared to their census data. The authors highlight this potential for participatory budgeting to extend decision-making power to groups that have been traditionally excluded from democratic processes and pose questions for the field to spur further research on how to improve and scale-up participatory budgeting: