What We Do

The Democracy Collaborative is an action-oriented think-do tank seeking to build a democratic economy through political-economic system change from the bottom up.  We do this both through our on-the-ground practice—the body of work we call community wealth building, which is the practical expression of our commitments—and through interventions in the ideas system and at the level of policy and politics, organized around the larger frame of a democratic economy as our contender to become the next system of political economy.

Our discipline is political economy—the recognition that the institutions and relationships at the heart of our economic system are the essential drivers of many of the outcomes we are seeing today, whether it is climate destruction, social atomization, waning faith in democratic politics, or deep-seated problems of racism and other forms of structural violence.  For us, the preeminent question is the central one of the early political economists: Who owns and controls capital—and for whose benefit?