Dear Colleague,

• Produced on behalf of the City of Jacksonville, Florida, The Democracy Collaborative is pleased to share our latest report, Building Community Wealth: An Action Plan for Northwest Jacksonville. See below for more on this publication and video highlights of the Community Wealth Building Roundtable that we co-organized with the Mayor’s office and Interfaith Coalition for Action, Reconciliation, and Empowerment (ICARE) in March 2014. Jacksonville is one of a number of cities where mayors are taking a lead on community wealth building initiatives.

• Last month, I discussed best practice approaches for measuring the impact of anchor institutions in a webinar hosted by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC). The recording is available here. I also moderated a plenary panel at CleanMed 2014 on the Cleveland anchor institution framework. A video of the discussion, which featured top leadership from the Cleveland Foundation, the City of Cleveland, University Hospitals, and the Cleveland Clinic is available here. Research Director Steve Dubb’s Leveraging the Power of Local Institutions presentation at the American Independent Business Alliance’s 2014 Go Local, Grow Local conference is also available.

• Working with the Northwest Area Foundation and Native American community development leaders from across the northwestern United States, The Democracy Collaborative recently wrapped up the first year of our “Learning/Action Lab for Community Wealth Building” with a two-day training in Winnipeg, Manitoba. This intensive co-learning process seeks to build community wealth and support enterprise development in Native communities. Find out more here and on the project website. 

• Senior Research Associate Thomas Hanna and Andrew McLeod of Collective Seeds Consulting Cooperative guest edit Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO)’s blog series, Scaling-Up the Cooperative Movement. The series includes essays from The Democracy Collaborative’s Gar Alperovitz, Joe Guinan, and Thomas Hanna, as well as several co-op experts, including Hilary Abell author of Worker Cooperatives: Pathways to Scale.

• Our co-founder, Gar Alperovitz spoke on the keynote panel at the New Economy Coalition’s Commonbound Conference. Gar also gave the closing keynote address at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The video is available here. Gar discussed the growing support behind democratizing wealth in an interview with New Start Magazine and joined BALLE co-founder Michael Shuman in a conversation on how to build sustainable communities. In an Al Jazeera article, Gar presents a critical perspective of Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century— emphasizing how democratizing ownership of capital can address the vast wealth inequalities that Piketty so powerfully documents.