The Cleveland Model

New Haven is following the lead of the Evergreen Cooperative under the Cleveland Model. It hopes to secure finding to buy a building with the intention to spark local economy. 

The Evergreen Cooperative in Cleveland, OH is featured as an example of the benefits of employee ownership. The Democracy Collaborative's Jessica Bonanno Rose, also a strategy advisor for Evergreen Cooperative, discusses what the goals of the Cooperative are. 

The Evergreen Cooperatives' new fund that will acquire existing companies from retiring business owners and sell them back to the employees. This conversion strategy is gaining popularity among advocates of worker ownership in the face of a “Silver Tsunami” of retiring baby boomer business owners.

The Fund for Employee Ownership, as the Evergreen fund is called, is the latest and perhaps most potent initiative aimed at expanding employee ownership and the principles of democratic governance....

The city of Preston, England, is a case study in how a community reimagines itself when long-sought after corporate investment fails to materialize.

TDC's public comments discussed how anchor mission and anchor collaborative work helps to address the social determinants of health and builds community wealth. 

Ally Swartz writes for WAMU, "‘Amazon Doesn’t Need The Money’: In The D.C. Region, Resistance Is Growing To Tax Breaks For HQ2." In this article, she highlights alternative models of community development to Amazon's proposed HQ2: 

The office’s director, Reginald Gordon, says his agency has helped connect Richmond residents to jobs at new enterprises like Stone Brewing, which the city and state attracted to Richmond with a $6 million incentives package. Gordon’s office is also taking steps toward what it calls a “social enterprise strategy” to help locals start their own businesses, some of which could be worker-owned. In Cleveland, Ohio, residents have taken community wealth building to the next step, starting a network of cooperatives that serve the city’s universities and hospitals.

At the Our Revolution Arlington meeting at Summers Restaurant, a research director from the Democracy Collaborative extolled the benefits of community wealth building while Arlington County Board member Christian Dorsey sat at a table, listening.

Read more in WAMU

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.

In Next City, Sarah Trent writes "Turning Health Care into Community Wealth in Cleveland." Trent highlights community wealth building work by Democracy Collaboratives in Cleveland, Ohio: 

“[The expansion] proves that local businesses can deliver at the quality and cost that institutions require,” says David Zuckerman, director of health care engagement at the Democracy Collaborative, a nonprofit research, advisory and advocacy organization with offices in Cleveland and Washington, D.C.

Ten years ago, the Cleveland Clinic joined the Cleveland Foundation, University Hospitals, Case Western Reserve University, the Democracy Collaborative and the city government to launch the Evergreen Cooperatives, a network of three worker-owned and worker-managed companies, starting with the laundry cooperative, later adding a construction cooperative specializing in renewable energy installation, and an urban agri-business cooperative. According to Evergreen Cooperatives, the median income in the six neighborhoods they target is $18,500.