Overview

Institutions of higher education have an obvious vested interest in building strong relationships with the communities that surround their campuses. They do not have the option of relocating and thus are of necessity place-based anchors. While corporations, businesses, and residents often flee from economically depressed low-income urban and suburban edge-city neighborhoods, universities remain. At a time when foundations that help establish community-based projects are commonly unable to continue with ongoing involvement over long periods of time, universities can play an important role. Read more about University & Community Partnerships...

Transit-Oriented Development is a municipal development strategy that aims to develop compact, walkable, mixed-use communities around public transportation nodes such as rail stations and major bus lines.  While “TOD” is a relatively new term, organizing development around transit hubs is a very old concept and was the norm in U.S. cities before World War II.  Today, the concept has become increasingly popular as municipalities struggle to reduce traffic congestion and pollution, and encourage more efficient land use patterns.

Increasingly, community groups are organizing at the state level to build broad-based efforts to support wealth building by low-income families. While each initiative is unique, they all share the common goal of enabling lower-income families to build wealth and rely on strategies such as financial education; policy development to encourage savings for education, homeownership, small business development, and retirement; access to insurance; regulations to limit predatory lending; and access to tax-based savings for lower-income families. Read more about State Asset Building Initiatives...

Municipal enterprises are businesses owned by local governments that provide services and typically generate revenue for local communities. Local governments have long operated public utilities and public facilities such as ports, parking lots and airports. Many are now entering fields traditionally dominated by private companies. This is motivated in part by political resistance to tax increases and new user fees as cash-strapped municipalities seek to raise revenues, as well as public pressure to create jobs as the economy has faltered. Read more about Municipal Enterprise...

Impact investments are investments made into companies, organizations, and funds with the goal of generating positive, measurable social or environmental outcomes alongside a financial return. The term “impact investing” is of relatively recent origin, only becoming popularized in 2007.  The practice of investing for social—and not merely economic—return, of course, has a much longer history. This community wealth building strategy includes two key approaches: Read more about Impact Investing...

The United States is full of everyday commons management systems such as public libraries, the Internet, blood banks, and parks. Although commercial intrusion into previously public or “common” space is widespread, new efforts to preserve and expand what is held to be in the public domain have emerged in recent years. Three factors, in particular, have spurred this development: Read more about Reclaiming the Commons...

While the mission of Community-Wealth.org is to serve as an information platform for community wealth building within the United States, the forces driving these efforts — most notably, economic globalization and growing fiscal constraints on government — are hardly unique to the United States. It should therefore not be surprising that the community wealth building approach is not unique to our country. Indeed, while the growth of U.S. Read more about Outside the U.S....

Individual wealth building programs aim to increase the savings of low and moderate-income individuals. One of the pioneering efforts in this area is the Individual Development Account (IDA). Individual Development Accounts illustrate a central feature of the community wealth-building approach: namely, that to end poverty, communities—and the people in those communities—must be given the tools they need to develop their own, long-term income-generating capacity. Read more about Individual Wealth Building...

Employee stock-ownership plan (ESOP) companies are for-profit entities in which employees own part or all of the businesses for which they work. ESOPs are created through a pension plan with two unique features: 1) most of the employee pension money is invested in the company where the workers are employed, and 2) workers may borrow against future corporate earnings to purchase company stock. Money or stock the business contributes to fund the plan is tax deductible. Read more about Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)...