Community Wealth Building: From the Margins to the Mainstream

As the White House makes a welcome announcement on Community Wealth Building and underserved communities, we ask: but what about the wealthy overserved, and an economic system that maintains fundamental racial and social injustices?

This week the White House announced that ‘building community wealth’ is to be one of a suite of ‘community focused and driven’ policy initiatives that President Biden is promoting to deliver greater equity.  The Democracy Collaborative (TDC) applauds this important development, which acts as a welcome boost to the growing Community Wealth Building (CWB) movement across the United States.  

It is nearly twenty years since we first coined the term Community Wealth Building to represent a radical set of new approaches to transforming local economies through changing the ownership and control of capital from the bottom up.  Making resources available to and encouraging policy development in support of Community Wealth Building and other community-driven development efforts is an important step in creating the conditions and building a robust ecosystem of support for a more just and equitable economy in the United States after decades of growing inequality.

It is important, however, to view this is just one small step among many that the President and federal agencies must now take to go much further in transforming both economic development policy and practice and, far more importantly, local and regional economies across America.  

Activities to democratize the economy through Community Wealth Building must not reside solely within the confines of ‘community’ development, alongside or outside of the central operations of our economic system.  Rather, these approaches must be seen and used as a powerful corrective to the wider economy—integrated into all aspects of our economic thinking and planning to offer deep system change in the face of the compounding crises of climate, economic inequality, racial injustice, and the health of our political democracy.

There is little doubt that we must act now to address the climate crisis while also dealing with long-standing racial and economic injustices.  With wealth inequality deepening across the United States, and poverty an unacceptable reality for millions, we must make a rapid economic step change—offering hope where there is fear and a positive future where there is everyday misery.  Essential to making this change is that more Americans be given control over their economic lives: we must democratize our economy so that everyone has a genuine stake in the wealth we produce and so that we can collectively steward planetary resources for future generations.  

At TDC, we believe that Community Wealth building is an important way to deliver this.  In partnership with local government and institutions, intermediaries, and community organizations across the country, we are helping to spread awareness of CWB and advance practical action on the ground in communities. 

The CWB movement is here and growing.  Every day, we are working with and learning of new places and organizations who are taking a CWB approach to make progressive and radical step changes and start to deliver system change from the ground up.  Much of the energy for this work is driven by an awareness that the root causes of inequality and poverty are grounded in an unjust economic model where a powerful few benefit enormously from unprecedented levels of wealth concentration and resource extraction, while many of the rest of us struggle to make ends meet.

The White House’s announcement this week sits alongside the wider ‘Bidenomics’ agenda including the American Rescue Plan, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), CHIPS and Science Act, and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). This latest announcement specifically highlights an intent to ‘prioritize development that generates and retains wealth in a community by investing in the needs of both current and future residents, businesses, and institutions; mitigating displacement pressures; and supporting the long-term economic mobility of people and vitality of places.’ 

Taken together, these efforts are a step forward in acknowledging the intrinsic inequalities we face, including an implicit acknowledgement of wealth extraction from historically underserved and disinvested communities.

However—and this is where it grows difficult—to truly address these issues, we cannot focus simply on the ‘underserved’, we must also focus on the ‘overserved’ and tackle unjustifiable concentrations of wealth and power in our political economy head on. Wealth and poverty are two sides of the same coin—as they have always been in America.

To genuinely address economic inequalities and build community wealth we are going to have to reject the accepted conventions of economic development which favor the overserved, including large multinational corporations who still receive tax breaks and  locational incentives, and the legal and regulatory frameworks geared towards generating shareholder profit and massive returns on investments.  Rather we must replace these expectations with new progressive values and goals: democratic ownership, justice, stewardship, and wealth that is broadly shared. 

Community Wealth Building, done right, represents a deep system-level change to the economy.  Rather than simply renewing or revitalizing communities devastated by structural inequalities or attempting to alleviate the worst impacts of an agglomeration- and growth-oriented economy, the CWB movement seeks to replace extraction and exploitation with an economy that produces equity as part of its everyday, natural functioning.  Positioning CWB only within community development in underserved communities risks limiting its power to transform the wider economic system—a problem we must now urgently face for climate and other reasons, too.  

To achieve a United States where everyone flourishes, Community Wealth Building and associated efforts to democratize the economy must move from the margins to the mainstream of policy development and practice.  While this announcement from the Biden White House is a positive step, and one which we welcome wholeheartedly, it remains just that: one step among many more that must be taken to reshape America’s economy so that it truly can deliver “liberty and justice for all” within a democratic polity and the boundaries of a livable planet.

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For more information on TDC’s Community Wealth Building work, please contact Sarah McKinley smckinley@democracycollaborative.org and Neil McInroy nmcinroy@democracycollaborative.org.