Community wealth is having a growth spurt in Canada. Community land trusts, housing co-operatives, worker ownership, living wage programs, and other flagship initiatives of the community wealth building (CWB) movement are all finding their way into government policy, with each promising to keep the wealth created by a community circulating in that community.
Yet there’s a catch.
As far as policymakers are concerned, CWB is little more than a reactive and targeted measure for combating poverty. In the federal government’s 2024 budget, for example, a single paragraph notes the connection between co-ops and housing affordability—and only for the 10 per cent of the population considered low income. Community land trusts are mentioned in neither the budget nor the new National Housing Strategy. Employee ownership and worker cooperatives are likewise missing, and while the budget expounds at length upon the problem of grocery monopolies, it makes no reference to food cooperatives, despite experts noting that such cooperatives have “demonstrated how to create an alternative to a monopoly more so than anywhere else in Canada.” As a result, CWB is framed as little more than a ‘bracketing off’ – a safe zone from broader, highly subsidized corporate forces that dominate economic considerations.
Now, it’s true that CWB can provide vital protections from precarity and exploitation. Where they exist, the affordability that housing cooperatives and community land trusts have provided has been truly life changing for precarious tenants. Research in Quebec, meanwhile, has found cooperative enterprise more than twice as likely to survive 10 years or more than traditional top-down business. These resiliency benefits are, of course, crucial to bring to the fore of our polycrisis moment.
But international practice shows there is so much more to CWB than just fighting poverty and precarity. At scale, it is a systemic framework for putting something back on the table missing since 2008: the possibility of handing a higher quality of life down to the next generation.
In this time of political pessimism, we should examine CWB with this ambitious and refreshing objective at the fore.
Agenda-izing community wealth building
CWB is a burgeoning and highly democratic method of economic development. It notes that inclusively-owned enterprises—like cooperatives, employee-owned companies, community non-profits, as well as core public utilities—not only tend to produce more equality and democracy; they are also sites of deeply practical economic multipliers. When, for example, the profits of a company go into the hands of many local worker-owners, the money tends to get spent in other local enterprises, circulating through the local economy rather than vanishing into offshore tax havens. There are thus both idealistic and pragmatic reasons for, step by step, expanding economic democracy.
This is, of course, not a new insight but one derived from important predecessors. In Italy, Emilia Romagna rose from one of the poorest regions in the country after WWII to the second wealthiest by the turn of the century on the back of a massive cooperative movement encompassing over 10,000 cooperative enterprises. In the Basque region of Spain, the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation employs over 70,000 workers in one of the largest and most innovative companies in the country with exceptional levels of pay, equality, and resilience. Around the world worker-owned companies are found to outperform top-down businesses by virtually every metric, and include very large companies like Publix Supermarkets, Bob’s Red Mill, and the John Lewis Partnership.
CWB builds on all this but adds a game-changing practical twist. It recognizes that the anchor institutions in a community—our entrenched local non-profit and public institutions—can help build and accelerate these practices by deploying more of their resources locally and prioritizing the best economic actors. First and foremost, they can shift their large-scale purchasing power (procurement) towards the local and ethical. Those with investment portfolios, meanwhile, can divert them away from the extractive economy and towards outlets like community bonds that raise capital for cooperatives and non-profits. For example, East Ontario United Way has developed its own CWB mandate and practices, including championing social procurement and investing in the Ottawa Community Land Trust.
This may not seem like rocket science—and indeed the simplicity is part of its effectiveness—but the addition of the role of anchor institutions has serious systemic implications. It means we can use what we already have in place to build wealth democratically. It means we can turn away from the race-to-the-bottom economics of competing for big business interests with bribe-like subsidies, investing in ourselves instead. It means we can quickly scale successful grass-roots initiatives through community partnerships.
In total, CWB offers a systemic but straightforward approach to development incorporating five core pillars: inclusive ownership, fair work, finance, land, and progressive procurement. Each pillar can be developed independently, while they can also be used to support each other and their surrounding communities.
There is evidence that CWB can spark an economic sea change for the proverbial 99 per cent.
Its practices came to prominence 20 years ago in a part of Cleveland where a combination of racist red-lining and deindustrialization had produced a Glendale neighborhood with a median household income of just $18,000. Though CWB started within the context of poverty reduction, a growing snowball of activity has moved beyond that jurisdiction. Investments to start eco-friendly worker-cooperatives were partnered with progressive procurement policies from anchor institutions that sought to “buy local, hire local, live local.” Though they began as a tiny microbusiness, the Evergreen Cooperatives today provide some 400 jobs paying 20-25 per cent above industry averages to democratic worker-owners. Many workers have graduated to home ownership and secure retirement, while the cooperatives help address racial, economic, and environmental justice at once. In recent years the cooperatives added a Fund for Employee Ownership to address the Silver Tsunami of retiring entrepreneurs, helping workers save existing Cleveland businesses by purchasing them and taking them under worker control. They have already aided five Cleveland businesses in making this transition.
Preston, England, has been even more aggressive with its city-wide CWB agenda. In 2011, Preston turned to CWB as one of the most desperate “rock bottom” communities in the U.K. After massively revamping its procurement practices and increasing supports for cooperatives and employee-ownership, Preston went on to be named the most improved city in the U.K in 2018, the best place to raise a family in the U.K. in 2023, and most recently the #2 city in Britain for small and medium-sized business. Over the span of a decade, and surrounded by an absolutely floundering U.K. economy, Preston has succeeded in creating a significant positive shift in the overarching quality of life for its citizens.
These demonstrations have turned CWB into an international movement, with initiatives popping up in places like Chicago, Amsterdam, Sydney, and even leading the Scottish government to appoint a Minister of Community Wealth Building.
CWB thus seems capable of both snowballing up from poverty reduction while also making existing sources of prosperity—like successful business with retiring entrepreneurs—more secure and effective. There is no clear reason to end its jurisdiction at poverty reduction. Its predecessors, like Emilia Romagna, Mondragon, and the broader employee ownership/cooperative movement, have demonstrated that massive sources of democratic prosperity are perfectly tenable. CWB has shown we can build such democracy even more systematically, that we can do so anywhere and everywhere, and that we can start and grow practical initiatives at speed.
At a time when neoliberal and corporatist forms of economic development are circling the drain, it makes sense to move this demonstrated and democratizing force to the fore. To do so, however, means moving it out of the realm of poverty reduction and putting it at the top of the agenda. This means coordinating policies from government for lending, spending, education, and public engagement. It means encouraging community partners to come out of the woodwork and develop CWB procurement and investment practices. It means shifting billions of dollars with democratizing intention.
Ultimately, it means a philosophical change. It means ditching supposedly “professional” evaluations of who is gaming a losing system the best. We must redefine a successful community more ambitiously as one that is moving upwards on a more democratic and environmentally sustainable basis. To reach these more democratic ends, we must embrace more democratic means.
It’s time to put community wealth first.
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