Cross-Sectoral

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance takes a comprehensive approach to community building. Its “Rules Library” provides a wealth of practical examples of local legislation that has supported local community wealth-building efforts and can be used as templates for similar efforts in other communities. The ILSR web site also contains many publications on efforts to develop environmentally sustainable businesses as part of a community wealth-building strategy.

A project of LISC Chicago, the Institute for Comprehensive Community Development works to build the capacity of community development practitioners by providing technical assistance to community development initiatives across the nation, highlighting and developing best practices and supporting public policy that effectively links government programs to community development.  The Institute focuses on a holistic approach that looks beyond single issue, project-based strategies and instead incorporates a broad vision of how local agencies, organizations and institutions can partner to improve a community's quality of life.

innovation@cefd is a new resource site launched by CFED, a leading asset-building organization, which hopes to facilitate the next generation of effective strategies to build economic opportunity. The Innovators-in-Residence program will help identify individuals with promising ideas who would benefit from additional monetary and technical support.

Founded in 1995 and hosted at the University of Toledo, COMM-ORG has evolved into a community of scholars, community organizers, community development workers, and others that looks at a broad array of community wealth building strategies. The website includes a wide range of scholarly articles and links to many other related sites of interest.

An initiative of the University of California, Berkeley with the support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation and W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Big Ideas for Jobs is an effort to tackle unemployment in the short-term. Bringing together more than a dozen experts from a variety of fields, the project tasked them with coming up with job creation ideas that require limited investment and are practical, tested and available to low-skilled workers. In addition to listing the many reports and ideas for this initiative, the website also allows for visitors to submit their own short-term employment ideas to be considered for inclusion in the next Big Jobs report.