By Thad Williamson (University of Richmond)

What happens when the former capital of the Confederacy sets out to become a capital of community wealth building? This essay addresses that provocative question. First, I document efforts made in Richmond, Virginia since 2011 to develop and implement a coordinated strategy aimed at broadening socio-economic opportunity and reducing the city’s poverty rate, utilizing a “community wealth building” framework. Integral to this effort was the establishment of the nation’s first municipal Office of Community Wealth Building (OCWB) in 2014 by Mayor Dwight C. Jones, charged with leading “implementation of a comprehensive poverty reduction initiative for the City with the aim of improving access to educational and economic opportunities for residents of the city.”

By Max Lacey-Barnacle & Siobhan Stack-Maddox (Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex)

Community Wealth Building (CWB) has begun to ascend globally as an international ​​policy and practice movement promoting local development that advances economic democracy. At the heart of CWB lies five core pillars which inform a transformative political economy for broader economic systems change. These pillars are: [1] Inclusive and Democratic Enterprise, [2] Locally Rooted Finance, [3] Fair Work [4] Progressive Procurement, and the [5] Just Use of Land and Property. Place-based “anchor institutions” – such as local government, universities, hospitals, social enterprises, credit unions and housing associations – have a key role to play in advancing these principles by using their local and regional economic power to strengthen local supply chains, redirect procurement spend, and support cooperative and social enterprise ventures. Anchor institutions are large​,​ established organizations with ​​significant procurement budgets responsible for substantial local spending. They are also rooted and fixed in place by virtue of their organizational design. Using a CWB approach and drawing on the five pillars outlined above, anchor institutions can work with ​​organizations such as local, grassroots and community enterprises to switch their service contracts and partnerships from multinational to local supply chains. Simultaneously, capacity is built up in local cooperatives and other types of social enterprises, with an emphasis on more democratic ownership of and engagement with the economy. The broader aim here is to democratize the economy with the long-term support of anchor institutions, recirculating wealth and diversifying ownership.

By Ahmed Mori (Johns Hopkins University/Community Ownership Learning & Action Lab, University of Miami)

Over the past two decades, community wealth building (CWB) has emerged as an anti-neoliberal development paradigm: democratize control over land, labor, and capital so that wealth is (re)produced in place rather than extracted. Formulated and popularized by The Democracy Collaborative (TDC) through its work in Cleveland and later adopted in cities around the world like Preston (UK), the model reorients economic development around alternative infrastructure like cooperatives, community land trusts, and mission-aligned anchor institutions. In practice, CWB takes the form of worker cooperatives, community-owned real estate, anchor procurement strategies, and forms of community ownership and community governance of resources, such as municipal ownership of utilities, and public banking (Guinan and O’Neill 2019; Howard and O’Neill 2018). Many of the CWB model’s theoretical underpinnings derive from TDC co-founder Gar Alperovitz’s efforts to envision a “pluralist commonwealth,” which advocates for clusters of hyperlocal, ecologically minded, and cooperatively owned businesses, run by other community-owned enterprises or community-governed nonprofits (Alperovitz 2017; Alperovitz and Dubb 2013).

By Gillian Murray (Yunus Centre)

The Scottish Government’s commitment to a national Community Wealth Building (CWB) policy, including the passing of a CWB (Scotland) Bill in March 2025, has captured the attention of people working in Scotland’s social economy. Research exploring the potential for CWB in Scotland identified a common refrain among social economy practitioners, that they were “already doing community wealth building” (Mazzei et al. 2024). Elsewhere, the third sector support organization Scottish Community Alliance has showcased a series of case studies, This is Community Wealth Building, publicizing that “community wealth building isn’t new, Scotland’s been doing it for years.” This article explores these claims using writing on Scotland’s social economy past and present, arguing that engaging with these grassroots perspectives is crucial for CWB movement building in Scotland.  

By Heather Hachigian & Todd Thexton​ (Royal Roads University)

Universities have a critical role to play in bolstering community wealth building (CWB), an approach to economic development that seeks to transform local economies by giving communities direct ownership and control of their wealth-generating assets (CLES 2019). As large, place-based organizations, these anchor institutions can leverage their significant economic assets and academic missions to strengthen their surrounding urban communities (Hodges and Dubb 2012). Although universities often engage their economic levers, such as purchasing power, hiring practices, and real estate development (Taylor, Luter and Miller 2018), they rarely deploy research and teaching as deliberate anchor strategies (Harkay and Hodges 2017). These academic levers play a critical role in economic systems change required by the CWB movement, such as by creating spaces to imagine alternative and better futures and building community capacity (Jeffrey 2024). ​