Community Wealth Practices

Community Wealth Techniques & Policies

Anchor Institutions: large institutions—often public, or semi-public—that can’t leave the community, and which purchase many goods and services from outside organizations. By directing a percentage of their purchases locally, they can “anchor” good jobs and livelihoods in the community. Popular examples include hospitals, universities, and cultural centres.

Partner Groups of Local Anchors: a community group, including members of different anchor institutions, that coordinate to purchase intentionally and locally for the community good. Perhaps most notably, the Cleveland Greater University Circle Initiative includes over 50 anchors, from the hospital to the orchestra.

Employee-Owned Companies: companies whose workers have an ownership stake, often through an Employee Stock Option (ESOP).

Worker Cooperatives: companies owned by its workers, who also have democratic participation in the company policy.

Cooperatives: one-member-one-vote structures, often owned by members or consumers. Popular examples include credit unions, housing cooperatives, food cooperatives, internet cooperatives, and solar cooperatives.  

Community Land Trusts: a city or community group purchases land on a 99-year lease and controls the land as a non-profit enterprise for community benefit. Often, land trusts are used to provide affordable home ownership. Owners get a significantly discounted rate since the land value is controlled, and agree to cap their profit when they sell, pouring excess profit back into the land trust for the next occupiers. Any kind of desired development, however, can take place on land trust property, including cooperative apartments, non-profit organizations, and consumer and worker cooperatives.  

Succession Planning to Employee Ownership: when owners are retiring or moving on, they often lack buyers and close down, or have their companies purchased by outside groups that fire the company’s workers. An increasingly popular alternative is to succession plan to transfer the company into employee ownership, and carry the legacy of the company forward in a way that is rooted in its community.    

Employee Ownership Technical Assistance Centres: often just “Employee Ownership Centres” for short, reach out to and offer education, business planning, and especially succession planning for companies moving to employee ownership. One of the most robust examples is the Ohio Employee Ownership Centre, which has transferred some 20,000 jobs to employee ownership since 1987.   

Worker Cooperative Development Centres and Cooperative Development Centres: offer business and strategic planning for starting new cooperatives, and succession planning for companies transferring to cooperative models. A leading example is New York City’s Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative (WCBDI), funded by the city, which quickly expanded worker cooperatives in New York from about a dozen in number to over a hundred.

Public Banks: a financial institution in which the nation, province, or municipality is the owner. Public banks can direct investment towards community goals, and with profits remaining in-house. Here in Canada, Alberta’s ATB Financial is a public bank over $50 Billion in scale and employs over 5,000 workers.

Land Funds: an annual granting body funding local community non-profits to purchase and steward land, usually as a Community Land Trust. The Scottish Land Fund provides £15,000,000 each year in such grants, and hundreds of parcels of land have been taken under democratic community control since its inception. 

Integrated Community Wealth Models: local finance, cooperatives, and anchor institutions join together to enrich a community. Local finance is used to start cooperatives, especially worker cooperatives, while anchor institutions purchase from these cooperatives, anchoring quality jobs in the community. Often there is a non-profit organization owning a minority share of each cooperative, which uses surplus accrued over time to add more cooperatives to the network. A community land trust, to keep prosperity from hyper-inflating housing costs, commonly accompanies this practice. The examples in Cleveland, Ohio, and Preston, England, are world renowned.

Pledge to Support Worker Cooperatives: many cities have openly pledged to support worker cooperatives, letting the public and cooperative entrepreneurs know what kind of community is being developed, and putting themselves on the hook for making financial and educational resources more available for interested parties.

Pledge to Prioritize Government Contracts: when governments give major contracts to standard corporations—often from out of country—the profits go into the hands of a few, much get placed in offshore tax havens, and the economy becomes beholden to companies that increasingly can leave for better tax deals in a race to the bottom. Conversely, the more we purchase from many local worker owners, the more economic autonomy and fair play we develop and produce. Governments can publicly pledge to increase contracts Canadian employee-owned companies, and put their success in doing so on the record.

Right of First Refusal: a simple law that gives the workers of an enterprise the first option to purchase it and take it under worker control when it is being sold or closed. Such purchase is entirely voluntary, and should the workers refuse, the enterprise can be opened for broader sale and sold to the highest bidder.  

Investment Banks for Worker Cooperatives: the number one obstacle worker cooperatives face is lack of start-up capital. Additionally, man workers want to purchase their enterprises, but have difficulty obtaining loans. Intentional investment banks offering low interest loans specifically for these purposes can remove this capital redlining and foster genuine equality of opportunity.

Direct Grants for Worker Cooperatives: governments can offer direct subsidies to help redistribute capital equitably and strengthen their economic ecology. Recently, the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy helped save businesses and jobs during COVID by helping fund their transition to worker cooperatives.