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Community Wealth Candidates
Who We Are
Who We Are
Run by Canadian volunteers since 2021, Community Wealth Candidates works with and nominates candidates for offices at municipal, provincial, and federal levels of government who will support community wealth initiatives around Community Land Trusts, Worker Cooperatives, and the progressive use of Anchor Institutions.
Around the world, community wealth building work has saved lives, transformed struggling communities, and opened systemically different futures.
Community Wealth Building
Community Wealth Building
"If traditional economic development tends to be about attracting industry to a community, building wealth is instead about using under-utilized local assets to make a community more vibrant. It’s about developing assets in such a way that the wealth stays local. And the aim is helping families and communities control their own economic destiny."
-- community-wealth.org , 2014
Economic development based on attracting corporate business has lead to an increasingly precarious workforce, abandoned communities, environmental waste, extreme inequality, and a circular "race to the bottom" in which those at the top demand more from the rest as their power and influence grows. The enterprises are anti-democratic, the profits go to a small number of owners, and often get staved in offshore tax havens.
Community Wealth Building begins with resources that already exist, and uses them to build a locally-rooted democratic economy through different forms of community ownership.
These strategies--all with strong track records of success--can be taken one at a time: cooperative enterprise, employee-owned companies, neighborhood-owned land, and larger institutions like school and hospitals that choose to direct their purchases intentionally to local companies and social enterprises. They can also be brought together into a complex. Finance from governments, credit unions, and social finance institutions can be used to start inclusive enterprises like worker cooperatives. Anchor institutions can purchase goods and services from these worker cooperatives, putting the wealth into the hands of many local worker-owners who work, live, and spend in their community. As prosperity grows, a community land trust can control land values and provide permanent affordable housing so that citizens are cut in rather than priced out by gentrification.
Integrated models like these were first used to pull many people out of poverty in one of the poorest neighborhoods of Cleveland, Ohio, whose Evergreen Cooperatives continued to expand in number and employment right through COVID. They were then taken across the pond on a larger scale to Preston, England, which was subsequently named "The Most Improved City in the United Kingdom" by the Good Growth for Cities Index. In March 2026, after many successful local initiatives, the Scottish government signed Community Wealth Building into national law.
Over the years, Community Wealth Building has been refined into 5 core pillars to guide economic development:
Inclusive and democratic ownership
Progressive procurement
Fair work
Just use of land and property
Finance that works for local places
These 5 pillars and simple but ingenious methods for deploying them can be used in any community, and are expanding rapidly all around the world.
Becoming a Community Wealth Candidate
Community Wealth Candidates endorses candidates who support Community Wealth Building approaches and initiatives, especially those expanding Worker Cooperatives, Community Land Trusts, and the progressive use of Anchor Institutions.
City and Municipal Candidates
We will endorse candidates for city council, regional council, and mayor who pledge they will:
1) Champion a CWB approach to development.
2) Identify CWB action items they will prioritize implementing immediately after election.
Candidates must provide a short public statement championing CWB and their action items which we will share with our endorsement online. We are happy to provide samples of and assistance with crafting these statements as desired. We encourage candidates to consider these statements as both an opportunity to communicate opportunities for meaningful action to their constituents and a chance to highlight their own histories with inclusive and democratic economic development. Candidates are welcome to share our endorsement anywhere they see fit.
We also require candidates to confirm that they abide by principles of non-discrimination regarding age, race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and religion, and that they are committed to building an economy with meaningful opportunity, participation, and benefit for its vulnerable and marginalized members.
Key Municipal Community Wealth Building Practices Include:
1. Formally deploying the 5 pillars of CWB to guide economic development planning and evaluation.
2. Creating strong social, local, and living wage procurement policies and community benefit agreements.
3. Producing funds and resources for non-market ownership of land and property via community land trusts, housing cooperatives, and community non-profits.
4. Fostering cooperative and employee-owned business through education programs and loans.
5. Making social acquisition a strategy for addressing the silver tsunami of retiring entrepreneurs who account for 76% of our small and mid-sized businesses.
6. Organizing a network of local anchor institutions to craft shared community wealth building policies, strategies, and partnerships.
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