Local Communities

The ‘Preston Model’ And The Modern Politics of Municipal Socialism

Thomas M. Hanna, Joe Guinan and Joe Bilsborough
Open Democracy

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.

A Second City

Nissa Rhee
Chicago Magazine

Writing in Chicago Magazine, Nissa Rhee writes a long-form article on the effects of poverty in Chicago; "A second city."  Rhee quotes David Zuckerman about the anchor strategy in Chicago's West Side Total Health Collaborative

“Our job as doctors is to heal and prevent suffering,” says Ansell. “In this situation, the healing needs to be aimed at neighborhoods.”

While most anchor institution strategies around the country have focused on one issue, employment or housing for example, the West Side Total Health Collaborative has a wide scope and an impressive goal: To improve life expectancy across region and halve the 16-year life expectancy gap between West Garfield Park and the Loop by 2030.

According to David Zuckerman, a manager for health care engagement at the Democracy Collaborative and organizer of the Healthcare Anchor Network, it is “the most ambitious collective strategy around anchor work” he’s seen to redirect money into a particular region.

Read more in Chicago Mag

A Plan to Nationalize Fossil-Fuel Companies

Peter Gowan
Jacobin

Writing in Jacobin Magazine, Peter Gowan proposes a "A Plan to Nationalize Fossil-Fuel Companies." Highlight the research of the Democracy Collaborative published in the Nation magazine:

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

Labour's New Economics Conference: Part Five, Local Democratic Economic Strategies

Tom Gann
New Socialist

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”).

The Alternatives: how Preston took back control – podcast

Aditya Chakrabortty
The Guardian

Presented by  and produced by  and The Alternatives: how Preston took back control – podcast. The Guardian looks at the work of the Democracy Collaborative in Preston England: 

To kick off, we hear from Preston city councillor Matthew Brown about the “Preston model”, a new approach to local procurement inspired by a similar initiative in Cleveland, Ohio. In a time of austerity and cuts, how is it that Preston is now seeing an extra £75m being spent in the city?

Listen to the podcast at the Guardian 

Worker cooperatives offer real alternatives to Trump’s retrograde economic vision

Sara Aziza
Waging Nonviolence

Sara Aziza writes in Waging Nonviolence: Worker cooperatives offer real alternatives to Trump’s retrograde economic vision. In this article she highlights the work of the Democracy Collaborative's report Worker Cooperatives: Pathway to Scale and the Democracy Collaborative's strategy and proposals for reducing economic inequality: 

“The field of worker co-op development is just beginning to create the infrastructure and knowledge base needed to increase its scale and impact,” wrote Hilary Abell in “Worker Cooperatives: Pathways to Scale,” an extensive report for the Democracy Collaborative, a research and advocacy institute dedicated to progressive economics.

Read more in Waging Nonviolence

 

A home of their own for the holidays through Frederick Community Land Trust

Jean Marbella
Baltimore Sun

Jean Marbella writes for the Baltimore Sun about community land trust in Frederick. Marbella highlights the work of  Jarrid Green at The Democracy Collaborative: 

Jarrid Green is a research associate with the Democracy Collaborative, a think tank that originated at the University of Maryland with a focus on building community wealth and shared-ownership models. He said that while community land trusts comprise “a very, very small, bite-size piece of the homeownership spectrum,” interest is on the rise.

Green is researching land trusts for a paper he hopes to publish next year. He said he thinks the fact that the Baltimore trusts have joined forces should give them more leverage as they seek city funding.

“It’s going to take the community coming together around the affordable housing issue,” he said. “It’s going to take actual commitment from the politicians.”

Read more in the Baltimore Sun

NAACP Annual Convention

July 14th, 2018 to July 18th, 2018
San Antonio, TX

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Annual Convention of the Association Read more about NAACP Annual Convention...

Alperovitz speaks about U.S. wealth inequality

Ivy Truong
The Daily Princeton

 Ivy Truong writes for The Daily Princeton with the co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative Gar Alperovitz. Trong writes: 

Alperovitz is the co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative, a research institute that aims to develop a more democratized economy. He was a professor at the University of Maryland and has served as a fellow at the University of Cambridge, Harvard’s Institute of Politics, and the Institute for Policy Studies. He was also a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. On Wednesday Alperovitz gave a lecture about capitalism in the United States and potential efforts to change it.

Read more here 

 

Alternative Models Of Ownership

The Labour Party , Cheryl Barrott, Cllr Mathew Brown, Andrew Cumbers, Christopher Hope, Les Huckfield, Rob Calvert Jump , Niel McLnroy and Linda Show
The Labour Party

Exploring alternative models of ownership the UK Labour Party begins to see community wealth building as an alternative to the financial driven community development:  

...locally-led ownership is not necessarily as simple as ownership in the physical sense. More to the point, the term indicates that the economy in an area is not ‘owned’ by corporate interests, but rather it is ‘owned’ by the local community. As such, it refers to the localisation of economic control. This means that economic decisions, made locally, are used to try to advance the interests of the community as a whole, to strive to achieve ‘Community wealth building’. It is about empowering communities to address the challenges that they face.

The Return of Black Political Power: How 1970s History Can Guide New Black Mayors Toward a Radical City

Nishani Frazier
Truth out

Nishani Frazier Fellow at the Democracy Collaborative writes for Truth Out about the link between the return of Black Political Power and Cleveland model of community wealth building: 

The ascent of these new mayors is an opportunity to build real solutions for those left behind by decades of disinvestment and dispossession. Yet radical intentions and hard-hitting rhetoric is not enough to produce radical answers to economic problems. Black mayors must actively incorporate history and make it an essential part of this project to study the successes and failures of a previous generation. Historian Leonard Moore noted that Cleveland's Carl Stokes, the first Black mayor of a major urban city, entered politics to wreak havoc on this "corrupt machine," or rather the political structures that hindered black attainment of power in Cleveland and throughout the United States. However, he quickly learned he "didn't know where the buttons were." Not long into his tenure, Stokes not only found the buttons but began pushing them when he launched Cleveland NOW! The project combined private, state, federal, philanthropic and individual funding into a proposed $1.5 billion plan for housing improvement, employment, urban renewal, youth services and economic revitalization.

Read more from Nishani Frazier in Truthout 

Homeownership and the Racial Wealth Divide

Bill Emmons
Housing Market Perspectives

Written by Bill Emmons for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Housing Market Perspectives explores how HOE accounted for almost half of Black and Latino's families wealth: 

Homeowners‘ equity (HOE)—the market value of residential real estate minus the value of homesecured debt—has long been the single largest component of wealth for black and Latino families.2 On average during the past quartercentury, HOE accounted for nearly half of black and Latino families‘ wealth, compared with roughly a third for Asian or other families and about a quarter for white families (Figure 1).3 During peaks in 1989 and around the financial crisis starting in 2007, HOE accounted for more than half of the wealth of the average black and Latino family

Civic Engagement School #3: How To Build Community Wealth

Sarah Al-Khayyal
1812

Writing for 1812, Sarah Al-Khayyal writes an introductary article on Community Wealth development. In 1812, this article highlights the different stratgies proposed by the Democracy Collaborative: 

Community wealth building is “a systems approach to economic development that creates an inclusive, sustainable economy built on locally rooted and broadly held ownership.” The term was coined in 2005 by The Democracy Collaborative to describe a range of strategies that help anchor jobs in a community, democratize wealth and asset ownership, and make communities more economically stable.

Read more in 1812