Chicago’s Community Wealth Building Initiative
An Inside–Outside Strategy Toward a Cooperative City
Stacey Sutton (University of Illinois-Chicago)
In September 2022, the City of Chicago announced the Community Wealth Building Initiative (CWBI)—a $15 million federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funded program to support community-owned and controlled businesses, land, housing, and commercial property, particularly in historically disinvested Black and Latine communities across the city. Although modest compared to former Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s $750 million INVEST South/West initiative, or the city’s nearly $2 billion ARPA allocation, the CWBI represents a substantial ideological, epistemological, and methodological departure from conventional economic development which have consistently failed to deliver economic benefits to Black, Latine, and low-income residents. Chicago’s CWBI offers a replicable framework for enabling community wealth. It is part of an ascendant movement for equitable development and solidarity economies that aims to expand the power of cooperative enterprises, normalize community ownership and control of neighborhood assets, and promote democratic governance and collective decision-making as viable alternatives to the extraction of neoliberal racial capitalism. After decades of public and private sector disinvestment from Chicago’s Black and Latine communities on the South and West Sides of the city, community wealth building (CWB) – through worker cooperatives, community land trusts (CLTs), permanently affordable housing cooperatives, community investment vehicles (CIVs) – is creating meaningful pathways to economic democracy, housing stability, revitalized commercial corridors, shared ownership, community planning and power building.
In a 2019 article titled “Cooperative Cities,” I examine how 12 major cities fostered enabling environments for worker cooperatives through legislation and budget initiatives, repurposing public assets, supporting cooperative education, and leveraging municipal legitimacy and social capital (Sutton, 2019). At the time, Chicago was notably absent from my Cooperative Cities typology, lacking legible municipal support for either longstanding or emerging grassroots-led worker cooperatives. Chicago’s pivot from a “growth-machine” city to a national leader in CWB warrants close examination [1]. This article draws on my positionality as researcher and activist involved in CWBI ideation and implementation to situate Chicago’s CWB model within urban governance literature—specifically, city -community policymaking co-design (Mintrom, 2019; Mintrom et al., 2024), inside–outside strategy (Imbroscio, 2010; Pettinicchio, 2012; Mische, 2020), and policy mobilities (Peck & Theodore 2010; McCann & Ward, 2011).
Background
When Lori Lightfoot assumed the mayoralty in 2019, she pledged to make Chicago a more equitable and inclusive city. Yet Chicago’s history is marked by discriminatory housing policies, such as redlining and restrictive covenants; cycles of “predatory inclusion,” through contract sales and subprime mortgages; and decades of deindustrialization and small business closures that further stripped Black and Latine neighborhoods of wealth and agency (Satter, 2010; Sampson, 2012; Rothstein, 2017; Taylor, 2019). Although INVEST South/West aimed to help address these inequities, its design and implementation reproduced trickle-down conventional economic development (Bartik, 1991; Wolman & Spitzley, 1996; Fainstein, 2010). INVEST South/West prioritized infrastructure investments in historically disinvested neighborhoods, leveraging city investment to attract private capital, operated with limited transparency, and generated short-term community employment while ultimately transferring public funds to private developers.
In contrast, the CWBI emerged during Lightfoot’s administration, but with markedly distinct design frameworks, operating assumptions, and assessment criteria. The CWBI employed a city and community co-design process centering equitable development, racial and economic justice, community ownership, and control of neighborhood assets, democratic decision-making, and sustainability by strengthening Chicago’s CWB ecosystem.
Inside–Outside Strategy from Co-Design to Implementation
The CWBI exemplifies an “inside–outside” strategy: an iterative process between grassroots organizers, practitioners, and city government (Imbroscio 2010; Pettinicchio 2012; Mische 2020). Rather than stemming solely from bureaucracy or civil society, CWBI was co-produced by a network of community practitioners, advocates, cooperative developers, technical assistance providers, researchers, and city staff through processes of dialogue, policy ideation, trust-building, and iterative negotiation.
Policymaking co-design is an emergent field in public policy studies (Mintrom et al. 2024). There is increasing evidence of ways that co-design can redound positively on policy development and implementation; however, the preponderance of literature underscores the risks and limits of exposing policy frameworks and proposals to public discourse and democratic decision-making (Howlett, 2020; Lewis et al., 2020). In the field of urban planning, the participatory paradigm has been a cornerstone of modern planning scholarship since the 1960s. Early voices on democratic planning, such as Jane Jacobs (1961), Paul Davidoff (1967), and Sherry Arnstein (1969) among others, emphasized collaborative decision-making — among residents, government and other stakeholders — for embedding accountability, transparency, and responsiveness to local needs in planning practice.
CWBI’s co-design process began in 2021 when the Mayor's Office of Equity and Racial Justice (OERJ) convened a 30-member Advisory Council of practitioners, researchers, and city representatives. Together, we defined CWB as “local, democratic, and shared ownership and control of community assets,” prioritized key models, and mapped existing efforts in Chicago.
After Mayor Lightfoot allocated $15 million in ARPA funds to CWB, the OERJ, the Department of Planning and Development, and the Advisory Council began a second co-design process to more clearly define CWBI’s operational and implementation frameworks (City of Chicago, 2023).
Throughout the co-design processes, Nneka Onwuzurike, former Chicago Recovery Plan Program Manager in the Mayor’s OERJ and First Deputy of Business and Neighborhood Development, exemplified the role of “institutional activists” (Pettinicchio 2012) bridging community vision for cooperative ownership and control with the political moment of opportunity, and bureaucratic levers and protocols. When city officials pushed for quantifiable outputs — jobs, housing units, wage increases — from the eighteen-month pilot program, the Advisory Council emphasized that sustainable cooperative development moves at “the speed of trust.” Onwuzurike balanced metrics with relationship-building, ensuring accountability while nurturing long-term capacity. The translation work was far from seamless. Some community organizations had limited experience negotiating bureaucratic hurdles and little patience for proving the inherent value of CWB work to bureaucrats. Other than Onwuzurike, most city officials had negligible knowledge of CWB models forms and functions.
An Ecosystem-Building Approach
CWBI employed an ecosystem strategy that combined support for infrastructure (technical assistance, coordination, research) with funding for CWB projects – worker cooperatives, CLTs, CIVs and limited equity housing cooperatives. It was rolled out in three phases.
Phase One: Building Infrastructure
The city issued multi-year grants to 17 capacity-building organizations focused on cooperative development, legal and governance, finance, fundraising and accounting. CWBI also incubated the Chicago Community Wealth Building Ecosystem (CCWBE) at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Center for Urban Economic Development to serve as a hub for grantee convening and coordination, knowledge sharing with grantees and city staff, CWBI documentation and research. As a staffer from the Department of Planning and Development (DPD) observed, “We knew from the literature that seeding co-ops without an ecosystem was a setup for failure, so we took the time to build the scaffolding first.”
Phase Two: Pre-Development Support
CWBI provided planning grants to 25 early-stage worker cooperatives, community land trusts, limited equity housing cooperatives, and community investment vehicles. The intention was to strengthen the CWB pipeline in Chicago by supporting market research, business planning, developing governance structures, and stakeholder engagement. Unlike traditional city funding models that prioritize capital-ready projects, CWBI supported initiatives still in formative stages located in historically marginalized communities. They often lack the up-front capital, technical expertise, or bureaucratic familiarity required to launch such projects.
In shifting the city’s development logic from “return on investment” to “first-cent in” investment, CWBI addressed both material and symbolic deficits. Financially, it de-risked early-stage experimentation that is often highly racialized. Politically, it conferred legitimacy on cooperative models long viewed as fringe or impractical. Institutionally, it positioned the city as a co-creator, not just a regulator, of economic alternatives. As a city official put it: “The goal wasn’t to launch a hundred co-ops tomorrow. It was to build the conditions where a hundred co-ops could be launched five years from now.”
Phase Three: Capital Deployment
CWBI launched the Community Wealth Building Fund, featuring the Shared Equity Investment Program (SEIP) and Worker Ownership and Wealth (WOW) Fund, to offer grants and low-interest financing to projects in late-stage development of physical space such as the buildout of a restaurant on the ground floor of a collectively owned building, and supporting a food manufacturing worker cooperative with the acquisition and rehabilitation of their building.
This move from ecosystem scaffolding to capital deployment reflects a sequenced strategy in which city infrastructure is not merely a conduit for funding, but an agent of political and economic realignment. CWBI’s phased approach challenges dominant paradigms of economic development that prioritize short-term outputs. Instead, CWBI embodies an ecosystem strategy, in which relational infrastructure, organizational capacity, and cultural legitimacy are treated as foundational to physical development and structural change. While no single cooperative enterprise or strategic intervention can bear the weight of transforming structural inequities of racial capitalism, non-reformist policy can be reoriented to maximize benefits for Black, Latine and other marginalized communities.
Lessons on Infrastructure, Ecosystem, Governance, and Pipeline
The significance of CWBI lies not only in its design or funding mechanisms, but in the ongoing infrastructure that supports, coordinates, and evaluates its implementation. Four core lessons emerge from incubating the CWB umbrella organization, CCWBE, which arguably are significant for scholars, policymakers, and movement actors seeking to build transformative municipal institutions that support a cooperative economy.
Strengthening Ecosystem Infrastructure
The first lesson underscores the critical distinction between funding individual projects and building the ecosystem infrastructure necessary to sustain them. CWBI’s early phases explicitly prioritized ecosystem scaffolding: legal clinics, technical assistance networks, cooperative educators, governance design consultants, and academic research. Rather than treating these functions as secondary or supplementary, the initiative placed them at the center of its strategic design.
This focus reflects a growing consensus that cooperative enterprises do not exist in isolation, and their success depends on a web of supportive relationships, regulatory clarity, and capacity-building resources. The CCWBE played an important role in supporting infrastructure by coordinating resources, facilitating shared vocabularies, creating accessible evaluation frameworks and platforms for shared learning. The Community WEB, led by Nneka Onwuzurike, is carrying this work forward.
Governance as Relational Practice
A second lesson from the CCWBE experience involves rethinking governance not as a top-down administrative task, but as a relational and collaborative practice. CWBI’s co-design practice is a model of co-governance, in which government entities and community stakeholders engage in iterative dialogue and design processes across boundaries of power, knowledge, and organizational form (Michels & De Graaf 2010; Mische 2020). The CWBI model shows that policy innovation is not only a technical task, but a cultural and relational one dependent on long-term partnerships, not transactional exchanges.
Building and Maintaining the Pipeline
A third lesson concerns the development of a robust, sustainable pipeline of cooperative projects—a challenge that many municipalities have failed to address. One of the most persistent challenges for CWB programs has been the lack of attention to the early stages of organizational development: visioning, legal incorporation, governance education, and feasibility analysis. CWBI and CCWBE addressed this directly by resourcing pre-development work, ensuring that community groups could move from aspiration to action without facing insurmountable capital or bureaucratic barriers.
Applying Pressure While Building Partnership
Lastly, the importance of maintaining critical pressure on municipal institutions even as partnerships deepen cannot be overstated. While co-governance can create powerful vehicles for inclusion, it also runs the risk of co-optation or institutional inertia. For this reason, many organizers involved in CWBI stress the need to sustain grassroots organizing, public education, and community mobilization alongside formal policy engagement.
CWBI was made possible in part because of this outside pressure: decades of organizing, coalition building, legal advocacy, and movement education. Pressure on the local state by organizers should not be abandoned. As a CWBI Advisory Council member noted, “The city’s listening, yes—but we need to keep talking. We need to keep showing up. This isn’t the end of anything—it’s the start.”
CWBI offers a model for how local governments can embrace non-extractive growth strategies. We quickly learned that sustained progress is not inevitable; it’s political. Through CWBI, Chicago demonstrates that it is possible for cities to act as incubators of solidarity, co-creators of policy, and stewards of democratic infrastructure.
In 2023, CWB organizers supported Brandon Johnson’s mayoral campaign, hoping he would institutionalize CWBI within the Department of Planning and Development. Yet no funding has been earmarked to extend CWBI beyond Phase Three. Despite political uncertainty, CWBI’s design offers a robust framework for cities seeking to confront racial capitalism, economic inequality, and democratic erosion.
Conclusion
The Chicago Community Wealth Building Initiative represents more than a funding stream or municipal program; it is an evolving experiment in economic democracy, participatory governance, and relational infrastructure. CWBI emerged not from a single office or moment, but from the convergence of grassroots advocacy, bureaucratic entrepreneurship, and trans-local policy learning. Its development illustrates that municipal transformation is not solely a question of political will or technical expertise, but of trust, timing, and co-production.
By adopting an inside–outside strategy, grounding its design in ecosystem logic, and investing in the relational work of governance, CWBI has redefined what is possible in urban policy. It moves Chicago toward the status of a true “cooperative city”—not merely by funding projects, but by restructuring the very institutional terrain on which community wealth is built. As cities across the United States confront overlapping crises of racial capitalism—economic inequality, democratic disaffection, and tribalism—the lessons from CWBI offer a powerful reminder: transformative change is slow, strategic, and always collective. And the work of building community wealth is inseparable from the work of building democratic institutions that can hold, nurture, and grow it.
Notes
[1] For a more detailed exploration of the CWBI’s mechanisms, infrastructure, entities and effects see Sutton and Hatcher’s (2025) Chicago Community Wealth Building Ecosystem Research Report.
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Stacey Sutton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois Chicago, and the Director of the Solidarity Economy Research, Policy & Law Project at UIC’s Center for Urban Economic Development (CUED). Stacey’s research focuses on “cooperative cities,” including economic democracy, cooperative ownership models, solidarity economies, and prefigurative politics, as well as on “punitive cities,” specifically the racially disparate effects of place-based city policies and practices.