Community Wealth Building
Liberating and Supercharging City Power to Address the Polycrisis
Nairuti Shastry (Center for Economic Democracy) and Neil McInroy (The Democracy Collective)
Introduction
As we write this introductory essay to the Community Wealth Bulding (CWB) special feature for the Urban Affairs Forum in the winter of 2026, we are deep in the throes of what Zen master and Indigenous Hawaiian activist Norma Wong (2024) calls “collective acceleration”: a sort of high-octane current whose bullish momentum drives us toward ever uncertain futures. In just the past year, we have seen the acceleration of climate events, an untenable rise in the cost of basic household items, a continued attack on the administrative state, and the ruthlesslessness of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in places from Minnesota to Los Angeles to our nation’s capital.
This context is a wider reaction to the polycrisis of climate, ecological, economic, social and democratic issues. And whilst universal, it is in the urban setting where these crises are most virulently experienced. As the crucibles of humanity that betray both the joys and ills of our world, cities bring to light the core of this crisis: an extractive political economy that concentrates wealth and thus power among the few at the expense of the many. The result? An economic system that degrades land, exploits labor, and extracts capital in unsustainable ways.
But, as researcher-practitioners who have operated for a collective several decades combating this very system — and building powerful alternatives — we are not without hope. We know that radical economic system change that moves us to a post capitalist future is not impractical nor utopian. As the co-founder of The Democracy Collaborative (TDC), Gar Alperovitz, foretold many decades ago, a rewiring of our economic system is already happening step by step in town halls, rec centers, and at dining tables around the world. The scaling of these responses is what we call Community Wealth Building (CWB), an economic development model that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets, namely land, labor, and capital. Leaders of CWB activity lean into this crisis, democratizing workplaces, commoning property, and moving money and other assets in more trust-based ways to birth an economy that truly serves us all.
History of CWB
CWB has a long history, rooted in innovative social and economic movements, strategies, and ideas (Abrenica n.d.) from the cooperatives of Ujamaa in Tanzania to participatory budgeting in Brazil to the demands for self-determination embedded in the Civil Rights Movement right here in the United States. Pioneered by TDC, and then taken forward in the UK by the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) and many others across the world, CWB is a model that rests on communities’ drive for a meaningful stake in the very wealth they helped to create.
The first manifestation of CWB and the coining of the term emerged in Cleveland, Ohio. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, following a period of relative prosperity, Cleveland endured dramatic deindustrialization and economic decay, plunging the city into widespread unemployment, dramatic depopulation, devastating levels of child poverty, and chronic underinvestment. In the mid 2000s — in what would go on to become known as the “Cleveland Model”— the Cleveland Foundation and other local institutions and community groups partnered with TDC to localize and retain the spending of anchor institutions (CLES n.d.) like the Cleveland Clinic. This gave rise to an ecosystem of worker-owned, green cooperatives known as the Evergreen Cooperatives that were firmly rooted in disinvested and predominantly Black communities, with a focus on employing and benefiting formerly incarcerated people.
Nearly a decade or so later, the City of Preston in the United Kingdom followed suit, unlocking the power of procurement in partnership with Preston City Council and a slew of other anchor institutions (CLES and Preston City Council 2019). While establishing the Preston Cooperative Development Network, Preston City Council became the first Living Wage-accredited council in the North of England. Between 2018 and 2019, four thousand extra employees were paid the real Living Wage in the city. Preston has also seen £70 million of anchor institution spend returned to the community and 4,500 jobs created. Once listed as one of the most deprived urban areas in England, Preston rated as PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC)’s most improved city in 2018 and 2019 and the “Best Place To Live” in the north of England. Other municipalities across the United Kingdom have taken note since, working to replicate Preston’s strategy and tactics.
Contextualizing CWB Within Urban Studies
To make sense of this moment, academics studying urban political economy have paid special attention to cities, working both to make sense of the unique manifestations of the crisis in urban settings and to illuminate the extent of cities’ power in addressing such economic, social, and environmental ills. Indeed, as our collective confidence in global institutions and the nation-state erodes, we find ourselves — physically, politically, intellectually — returning to the city, eager to believe in its altruism and efficacy. However, while we see the rise of some alternative urban political visions and the associated success of political movements (e.g., the election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City), universal change remains part thwarted and stymied by the momentum of economic deterministic constraints of urban capitalism.
Driven largely by Paul E. Peterson’s 1981 manifesto City Limits, proponents of this deterministic understanding of city power argue that a city’s primary interest is to attract productive labor and capital through a series of developmental policies (think: tax credits, tax-increment financing, public-private partnerships, municipal bonds, internal loans, etc.). In this typology, genuine allocational policies are negligible while redistributive policies (those that benefit the most economically disadvantaged) actively foment adverse economic effects. Hiding behind milquetoast and outdated understandings of national power and capital mobility, Peterson’s straightjacketing of cities is actually a narrow-minded view of a city’s residents, politicians, and institutions blindly operating under one de facto economic system: capitalism. But, to borrow from Richard Schragger (2016), it is a dangerous game to equate what is to what ought to be.
Since the mid-90s, the works of feminist economic geographers Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham and Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright have shown us that such a capitalocentric worldview, which maintains capitalism as not only the dominant but also the singular form of economy, is one that constrains theoretically and empirically. Indeed, in the quote attributed to Fredric Jameson by Mark Fisher, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Fisher 2009). In essence, what is conveyed here is that the dominance and power of urban capitalism makes the vision of its end futile, even as its sheer inadequacies and negative consequences mount.
Nevertheless, urban academic-activists like Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. and Stacey Sutton (with whom we work through TDC’s Global Academic and Researcher Network or GARN) have long contended that the United States’ legacy of racialized capitalism has manifested itself in the deep inequality we witness today in cities like Buffalo, NY or Chicago, IL. For example, in spite of a consent decree in 1997 intended to support Black homeownership after decades of redlining, Black Buffalonians in 2020 were denied home loans at twice the rate as their white neighbors over two decades later. Today, Buffalo is considered to be one of the most segregated cities in America (Lynn n.d.). The story of Chicago is no different. According to a recent report, “white families have the highest median net worth ($210,000) while Black families reported a median net worth of virtually no wealth ($0)” (Bhaskaran et al. 2024).
Political scientists Clarissa Rile Hayward and Todd Swanstrom, drawing on the works of Karl Marx and David Harvey, call these experiences demonstrative of a “thick injustice”: power relations so deeply unjust that they are often hard to see and, thus, change. They argue that the material outcomes of capitalism as described above, though deplorable, are not nearly as insidious as the impact of the entrenchment of this One-World-Worldview (à la Erik Olin Wright) on our expectations of our political institutions, both in terms of policy and governance (2011). When we understand a place to be nothing more than a byproduct of abstracted capitalist market forces, we put square cities into the round black hole of unadulterated, endless growth and accumulation (Schragger 2016). As a result, city policy falls prey to a sort of liberal expansionist thinking which imagines that to address poor economic outcomes, we must look outside of cities to attract new economic assets: land, labor, capital (Imbroscio 2010; Schragger 2016). Once such assets are secured, city governance is then limited to preserving this bed fellowship between the state and the market: an urban regime theory which privileges business interests over all else (Imbroscio 2010).
These limitations on our economic imagination are most palpable in our traditional practice of local economic development. Take the following example of tax-increment financing, or TIF, a popular tool used by city governments swayed by the mirage of capital attraction. In 2016, Kevin Plank (CEO of Under Armour) and his grand plans for a corporate campus in the Port Covington neighborhood of Baltimore, MD, were the talk of the town. Promising more jobs for city residents, the city council approved $660 million in financing for the project through TIF. Eight years later, with few new jobs and even more layoffs to show, residents and city leaders wondered if auctioning off four decades of tax revenue from the city’s most underserved population was the best way to grow the local economy (Shastry 2024). This example blatantly shows that pursuing “good developmental policy” (i.e. minimal redistributive taxation, low economic regulation, and attracting/subsidizing mobile capital) does not always correlate to positive economic outcomes. At the same time, by citing examples such as minimum wage laws and Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs), Schragger argues that “redistributive policies are no more inimical to the economic health of cities than so-called developmental policies are favorable to it.” Further, because cities are more able to influence the social welfare of their existing residents than outside investments through a series of potentially deleterious dog-and-pony shows, he urges local governments to doubly invest in the former over the latter (2016). Imagine what economic development unencumbered by neoliberal ideology could look like!
So, in order to move forward and step into a new system informed by a more liberatory ideology, we must first shed the theoretical and empirical skins of these Petersonian constraints and build a new practical consciousness. Schragger implores that “despite having become an urban nation in the last century, Americans still have yet to come to terms with the exercise of urban democratic power. To do so requires treating cities as something other than consumption preferences or as location providers for agglomeration-seeking firms, or as entities that are incompetent, corrupt, and in need of discipline. We have to think instead of the city as a process of economic development, as a generator of the middle class, and as the primary location for the exercise of robust self-government” (Shragger 2016, 259). So how might we foment a new consciousness and what might these new, let’s say, solidarity cities (Safri et al 2024) look like? What ethics might govern them? What strategies might they employ?
CWB as Non-Reformist Reform Towards Evolutionary Reconstruction
Over fifteen years ago, David Imbroscio foreshadowed that “...the people and institutions…on the ground in cities engaged in operating key elements of the LEADS themselves [already exist]...These institutions most often operate independent of one another, without any serious recognition of their kinship in organizational form, guiding philosophy, and programmatic goals. If linked together and united in a common purpose via umbrella organizations and the new oppositional ideology, they could form the nucleus of an emergent (and potentially formidable) political movement dedicated to augmenting the scope and scale of the LEADS” (Imbroscio 2010, 177). We believe that CWB is that ideology and movement.
Like Imbroscio, we, too, have been inspired by Gar Alperovitz. His vision and practice of plural ownership, democratic control, and institutional innovation espoused in his extensive work including America Beyond Capitalism (2004) and What Then Must We Do? (2013) remain essential reading for anyone serious about building a fairer, more democratic economy. Alperovitz’s idea of evolutionary reconstruction — building new democratic institutions within the shell of the old — has profoundly influenced the global CWB movement, including the underpinning of the Cleveland model and what it spawned. Evolutionary reconstruction is not about quick fixes or surface tweaks; instead, it is about deliberate, democratic transformation rooted in place. The unfolding of economic system changes through CWB will happen step by step, city by city, in a sort of series of non-reformist reforms in the way the economy operates which will then tip over into systemic transformation.
In this essay, like Imbroscio, we argue that in order to challenge the deep-rooted racialized capitalism and neoliberalism that captures our economic imagination, we must broaden ownership, democratize control, and relocalize economic activity so that place and community are of paramount importance. Three main components undergird this evolutionary reconstruction and guide the work of TDC:
Practice. To demonstrate the efficacy of CWB, designing, implementing, and evaluating a variety of strategies is key. These actions, activities, and/or approaches are called the elements of CWB.
Networks and movement building. CWB remains a relatively new concept. As such, a key part of catalyzing broader change is bringing together various networks of individuals and organizations who come together to share, learn, and advocate for CWB globally.
Policy and legislation. Strategic policy interventions and enabling legislation are key to codifying a jurisprudential landscape that eases both the design and proliferation of CWB activity.
The role of our organization, then, is to render visible and supercharge the connective tissue among these activities, people, and policies.
What is Community Wealth Building?
From our vantage point as researcher-practitioners operating within a transatlantic think-tank, we have been working alongside an ecosystem of social movements seeking economic systems change. Our humble offering — in partnership with and in addition to these movements — is what we term CWB.
CWB is an economic development model that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets, namely land, labor, and capital.
There are a set of universal principles co-articulated by TDC staff, fellows, and members of the USA Community of Practice that underpin CWB.
Community Wealth Building is all about shared power and collective ownership. In addressing structural inequality, CWB strategies redistribute power and collectivize ownership of all assets that generate wealth, including land and property, labor, finance, and enterprise. In this way, CWB is an economic development model that democratizes local economies.
The work of Community Wealth Building is done in partnership and in an ecosystem. CWB cannot happen in a silo; it requires authentic and sustained relationships in coalition with stakeholders from across the community working together, acknowledging and grappling with power dynamics, in a collaborative spirit from ideation to implementation.
Community Wealth Building is, ultimately, systems-level work. Though often place-based in practice, CWB does not simply tinker at the edges of the current economic system. Instead, it leverages a plurality of strategies to transform economic systems at the root. As such, CWB interventions must take individuals and institutions as well as systems into account.
Ecological sustainability and just transitions are at the core of Community Wealth Building practices and outcomes. We recognize that the current economic paradigm sees the natural environment and its resources as nothing more than a commodity. CWB strategies actively refute that paradigm, centering the natural world and ensuring a just transition to a green economy that democratizes ownership and places greater control of new sustainable economies in the hands of community.
Embracing opportunity within Community Wealth Building means fostering inclusive economic transformation. CWB is about dismantling barriers and creating pathways for all individuals to actively participate in and benefit from local economic endeavors. By prioritizing equitable access to resources and assets and ensuring that community owns and drives CWB efforts, we catalyze a dynamic shift towards prosperity for every member of our community.
Racial justice lies at the heart of Community Wealth Building, demanding deliberate action to dismantle systemic racism and ensure equity for all. CWB necessitates a commitment to uprooting the entrenched inequalities that perpetuate racial disparities in wealth, employment, and access to resources. Through intentional anti-racist policies, inclusive governance structures, and reparative initiatives that center the knowledge and talent of communities of color, we endeavor to create a society where every individual, regardless of race or ethnicity, has equal opportunities to prosper and thrive.
Wellbeing is the ultimate currency of Community Wealth Building, reflecting a commitment to nurturing the holistic prosperity of individuals and communities alike. CWB goes beyond mere economic indicators to encompass factors such as health, education, social cohesion, and cultural vitality. By fostering environments that prioritize human flourishing over profit-driven motives, we create pathways towards shared prosperity, where the collective wellbeing of all members serves as the true measure of success.
Community Wealth Building enables the mutual recognition of shared economic responsibility and solidarity. CWB requires the members of a community to self-consciously work together to co-create, build, and sustain economic institutions together for collective benefit. This enables individuals and communities to see the value in their work, in one another, and in their communities themselves.
How is CWB Practiced?
As referenced above, rather than modifying the margins of a model driving the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, CWB aims to seed economic system change at the local level through five key Pillars:
Fair work: Every worker should receive a living wage and real power in and control of their workplace to deliver decent work and conditions, and advance trade union rights.
Inclusive and democratic enterprise: Cities should have multiple forms of worker and consumer cooperatives, social enterprises, public ownership, municipal enterprise, and more, based on the recognition that the ownership and control of productive capital is at the heart of where power lies in any political-economic system.
Just use of land and property: Cities should mobilize land and property assets to build real wealth in communities, bring local land and real estate development back under community control, and combat speculation and displacement.
Locally-rooted finance: Cities and local institutions should redirect money in service of the real economy through public and community banks, credit unions, and targeted public pension investments.
Progressive procurement: Local governments and place-based “anchor institutions” should lead with procurement practices that re-localize economic activity, build local multipliers, and end leakage and financial extraction.
Central to CWB is the confluence of a unique, place-based set of enabling conditions: the right people, the organizations, and the right context. Ultimately, a successful CWB approach must nestle within the personal, political, cultural, and institutional context of a place, leveraging and augmenting — and ultimately transforming — what already exists (McInroy et al 2025).
CWB as a Global Movement
United States of America
More recently, inspired by the urban uprisings of 2020, CWB is a model increasingly used to deliver on cities’ anti-poverty and racial equity agendas. Indeed, in a country of over 340 million people, over half of the population is considered middle class (Kochhar 2024). In 10-15 years, the United States is expected to become a majority-minority nation, with over half of the country’s population identifying as a person of color (PolicyLink 2025).
Since the launch of the Evergreen Cooperatives, cities like Richmond, Virginia and Chicago, Illinois have taken the lead in advancing CWB as local governments. The City of Richmond’s Office of Community Wealth Building (OCWB) is the first office of its kind in the United States was established in 2014 by Former Mayor Dwight C. Jones. In 2021, as part of the Chicago Recovery Plan, the City of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development (DPD) and Office of Equity and Racial Justice (OERJ) made an historic $15 million seed investment using American Rescue Plan (ARP) funds in a pilot to advance enterprise, infrastructure, and capacity-building in line with a CWB approach.
For other urban metropolitan areas, like Denver, Colorado, St. Louis, Missouri, Seattle, Washington, and the Twin Cities in Minnesota, “intermediary organizations” — often non-profit organizations that play a sort of intermediary role between communities and municipalities — have emerged to advance CWB. Several of these organizations, such as the Center for Community Wealth Building (Denver), WEPOWER (St. Louis), and Nexus Community Partners (Twin Cities) have invested deeply in the pillars of fair work and inclusive and democratic enterprise by supporting entrepreneurs of color and incubating cooperative businesses. Others, like the People’s Economy Lab, are taking more of a sectoral approach, like democratizing utilities in Seattle, for example. Nonprofits like Kindred Futures in Atlanta are employing a regional strategy, working to address the racial wealth gap in the South through a diversity of CWB strategies.
Ultimately, there has been a lot of innovation across the various elements of CWB in the United States—from new forms of alternative financing to innovative approaches to democratizing ownership of land. Some states even have progressive legislation and policy that creates more enabling conditions for CWB activity, like Massachusetts’s 2022 Act to Enable the Massachusetts Center for Employee Ownership (Rosen 2022). However, there has yet to be a cohesive national commitment and/or strategy to scale CWB beyond individual states and localities. Because of this, practitioners often note that it is challenging to measure (and, thus, resource) the efficacy of CWB interventions and their correlation to communities’ overall wellbeing.
Scotland
Scotland, a nation of just under 5.5 million people, covers the northern part of Great Britain along with the Orkney Islands, Shetland Islands, and the Hebrides. Although part of the United Kingdom, it has a devolved parliament with authority over most public policy, while key areas such as defense, security, and aspects of energy remain reserved to Westminster. Wealth distribution in Scotland is hugely uneven, with the top 10% owning 200 times more wealth than the bottom 10% (median wealth of $1.3M compared to $6k). Alongside the need to tackle both the climate and cost of living crises, Community Wealth Building (CWB) has become central to Scotland’s ambition for a fairer economic system.
In 2020, North Ayrshire had taken the lead in Scotland by committing to become the country’s first CWB council, pioneering new approaches to local economic development. Adopting the full five‑pillar model and demonstrating how local assets and financial power can be harnessed for community benefit. From this early leadership, councils and regional partnerships across Scotland have increasingly embraced a place‑based economic model that shifts ownership, financial flows, and decision‑making into community hands. Many councils now operate with CWB action plans that embed these principles in local economic development practice.
Scotland has since developed a series of local council action plans, using a variant of TDC’s Five Pillars of Community Wealth Building. This variant, the Three Legged Stool, is based on the principles of practice, movement, and policy. Practice is visible in the progress made by the five CWB pilot regions: Clackmannanshire, Fife, Glasgow City Region, South of Scotland, and the Western Isles, with many more areas following suit. The movement has grown through networks of organizers, campaigners, economists, and business support organizations promoting democratic enterprise, social enterprise, employee ownership, and regional regeneration. Together, these actors have built a strong national narrative around economic democracy.
Policy and legislation have also advanced. In March 2025, the Scottish Government published the Community Wealth Building Bill, placing duties on ministers to prepare a national CWB statement that requires local authorities (working with public bodies) to produce and implement CWB action plans and mandates national guidance on embedding CWB in strategic planning. The Scottish Parliament endorsed the Bill’s general principles in November 2025, with the second stage – allowing amendments – scheduled for early 2026. Once enacted, the Bill will make CWB a statutory requirement for all local authorities and national public bodies.
Scotland is the tip of the spear globally on Community Wealth Building, combining on‑the‑ground practice with national legislative support, and has become the place where the model is closest to becoming the dominant paradigm for government policy on economic development. It is also where the new frontier of CWB is being trialed, looking at and operating within economic sectors rather than just at a local place or community. In Scotland, this is particularly pertinent in the “fledgling powerhouse that is the renewable energy sector.”
South Korea
South Korea is exploring and developing the means through which Community Wealth Building could be embedded within the country’s local and regional governments. Research work and a report conducted by Hope institute and The Democracy Collaborative positions CWB as a strategy to strengthen local economies, expand democratic ownership, and support long‑term social and economic transformation, while highlighting the role of anchor institutions, local policy innovation, and collaborative governance as enabling conditions. As a result, some South Korean municipalities have started to assess their existing policy landscapes and economic structures. This includes work that analyzes activities such as social economy, cooperatives, procurement systems, regionally rooted finance, land and property use, and fair work policies through the CWB Five Pillars framework, and identifies how these existing assets create fertile ground to advance a more democratic, inclusive economic system.
Future Opportunities to Deepen the Ideology and Grow the Movement
In the eight essays that follow, we will share some of the strategies, including enabling policy and legislation, to showcase how community wealth builders around the world are not only addressing the polycrisis defined above but also shaping a powerful — albeit nascent — new economic paradigm that prioritizes people and planet over growth and profit. The papers fall into three broad categories: theoretical contributions, case studies, and future directions for the field.
A growing number of academics and researchers across disciplines have been studying and working to advance CWB activity. Here, we showcase the perspectives of two: a sociologist, Ahmed Mori, and a historian, Gillian Murray. In making sense of community wealth building through these academic traditions, Mori and Murray bring us out of unavailing normative discussion of CWB into a more robust analytical understanding of the various dimensions of its practice.
As we know, theory is only as good as its practical application. To help bridge the gap, the majority of our pieces feature case studies of place-based practices of CWB: from Chicago, Richmond, and the Twin Cities in the United States to a more comparative approach in the United Kingdom. Each of these cases teaches us something new about the role of the government as an anchor institution in CWB activity.
Two final pieces bring to light the ways in which we may institutionalize some of the LEADS discussed above in the absence of formal legislation—either by mobilizing anchor universities or engaging community leaders and local government officials to deploy enabling policy.
Our hope is that these writings will inspire others, from researchers to practitioners to everyday citizens, to
explore the role of civil society (and other social institutions beyond the state) in buttressing CWB as a growing movement;
examine how we can practically address some of the greatest challenges of our time, especially climate change, through a CWB lens (much like our colleagues across the Atlantic, like Max Lacey-Barnacle and Martin Boucher, who have been examining the role of CWB in shaping new energy and climate infrastructure);
take a closer look at key economic sectors (e.g. manufacturing, retail, etc.) that drive our cities and see what a Just Transition rooted in CWB principles might look like within each community; and
redefine CWB within urban affairs beyond simply a community participation and/or development strategy or even a social movement, but as integral to the economic transformation of the urban.
We call upon our activist-academic colleagues to re-engage with the public purpose of their work and both shine light on and move beyond – to borrow from our comrade Davarian Baldwin (2021) – the shadow of the ivory tower. Only through interdisciplinary collaboration will some of the lines of academic inquiry we propose above come to fruition. Some of our colleagues through the GARN are already championing this work at their respective institutions: from Ben Manski and Next System Studies at George Mason University in the United States to Heather Hachigian and the BBA in Innovation & Sustainability program at Royal Roads University in Canada — and we know many others are following suit.
Ultimately, CWB is where activism meets policy meets governance. While not unique, it does hold a special place within both Leftist and progressive movements driving urban change, especially in our current moment of crisis. As such, we need not only deeper understandings of the relationships among those three elements, but a renewed commitment from institutions of higher education as more activist anchors in the work. Through such a powerful joining in forces, we hope that this will be the century in which we realize the overarching vision of CWB: economic transformation toward economic prosperity, racial equity, and ecological sustainability for all.
References
Baldwin, Davarian. 2021. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower. New York: Hachette Books.
Bhaskaran, Suparna, Fatimah Al-Khaldi, Ofronama Biu, et al. n.d. The Color of Wealth in Chicago. The Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School.
Fisher, Mark. 2022. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? London: Zero Books.
Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. The End Of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
CLES and Preston City Council. 2019.How We Built Community Wealth in Preston: Achievements and Lessons. https://www.preston.gov.uk/media/1792/How-we-built-community-wealth-in-Preston/pdf/CLES_Preston_Document_WEB_AW.pdf?m=1563809932893.
Imbroscio, David L. 2011. Urban America Reconsidered: Alternatives for Governance and Policy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kochhar, Rakesh. 2024. “The State of the American Middle Class.” Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/05/31/the-state-of-the-american-middle-class/.
Lynn, Denise. “Mapping Inequality.” Accessed January 23, 2026.https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/.
“Massachusetts Passes Employee Ownership Center Bill.” November 18, 2022. https://www.nceo.org/employee-ownership-blog/massachusetts-passes-employee-ownership-center-bill.
“People of Color | National Equity Atlas.” Accessed January 23, 2026. https://www.nationalequityatlas.org/indicators/people-color.
Peterson, Paul E. 1981. City Limits. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Safri, Maliha, Marianna Pavlovskaya, Stephen Healy, and Craig Borowiak. 2024. Solidarity Cities: Confronting Racial Capitalism, Mapping Transformation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Shastry, Nairuti. July 24, 2025. “Addressing the Ownership Question: An Unspoken Gap in Economic Thinking.” Nonprofit Quarterly | Civic News. Empowering Nonprofits. Advancing Justice. https://nonprofitquarterly.org/addressing-the-ownership-question-an-unspoken-gap-in-economic-thinking/
The Democracy Collaborative. “A Brief History of Community Wealth Building.” Accessed January 23, 2026.https://www.democracycollaborative.org/blogs/a-brief-history-of-community-wealth-building.
The Democracy Collaborative. “Enabling Conditions for Community Wealth Building.” Accessed January 23, 2026.https://www.democracycollaborative.org/whatwethink/enabling-conditions.
What Is an Anchor Institution? | CLES. n.d. Accessed January 23, 2026.https://cles.org.uk/what-is-community-wealth-building/what-is-an-anchor-institution/.
Wong, Norma. 2024. When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books.
Wright, Erik Olin. 2020. Envisioning Real Utopias. London: Verso.
Nairuti Shastry is the inaugural Director of Policy & Research at the Center for Economic Democracy, where she leads the organization’s translocal efforts to seed an economy that works for us all. Prior to joining CED, Nairuti spent eight years as a movement operative, supporting organizations and communities to hospice the old and birth the new in pursuit of more just economic futures.
Neil McInroy is TDC’s Global Lead for CWB, where he advances systemic economic reform and inclusive ownership strategies across the United States and internationally. With over 30 years of experience in progressive economic and public policy, Neil is widely recognized as a leading international figure in democratic economic development.