Dear Colleague, 

We are pleased to welcome Valerie Piper as the new Vice President of Engaged Practice at The Democracy Collaborative. Prior to joining our staff, Valerie served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Development at HUD, where she led the development and launch of President Obama’s Promise Zones Initiative. Her distinguished career has consistently focused on advancing practical, cross-sectoral collaborative strategies at scale to make a genuine difference in low-income communities, and we anticipate that her knowledge and experience will play a key role in taking our work in the community wealth building field to the next level. More information about Valerie can be found here.
 

We are also pleased to announce that our colleagues Executive Vice President & Senior Fellow Marjorie Kelly and Chief Financial Officer & Director, Employee Ownership Programs Jessica Bonanno, have recently been honored by the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations with fellowships to further their research on employee ownership. Marjorie has accepted a J. Robert Beyster Fellowship and Jessica has been named as a Rutgers Research Fellow, allowing them to join a prestigious community of scholars and practitioners working to promote this key strategy for economic democracy. This announcement comes at a time of many exciting developments in the field of employee ownership. Senators Bernie Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand recently put forward a pair of federal bills to make employee ownership more accessible. Read more in Common Dreams and In These Times. The Colorado State Legislature recently passed a measure to embed technical support programs for employee ownership in the State’s Small Business Assistance Center, and Rochester, New York's Market Driven Community Corporation has launched its first enterprise which will be worker-owned. Read more about the launch below and further coverage in Next City and Democrat and Chronicle.
 

In an article in The Nation, Democracy Collaborative Co-Founder Gar Alperovitz, Next System Project Executive Director Joe Guinan, and Research Director Thomas Hanna put forward the idea of “quantitative easing for the planet,” in which the government would buy out fossil-fuel companies in order to keep unburnable carbon in the ground. Such a measure would break the political opposition of large fossil fuel corporations to climate saving measures and help to shift the resources needed to transition towards a just and renewable energy economy. The groundwork for this new energy economy is outlined in The Next System Project’s Climate Energy Deck, which was used to workshop pathways and possibilities with partners in the run up to the People’s Climate March in April. The Next System Project also announced the winners of the “What’s Next?” essay contest, which drew hundreds of submissions suggesting alternatives to our current political economic system. Read more below. 
 

Building up our Rolling Back Inclusion tracker, we have added a feature that maps which appropriations subcommittee is responsible for each of the community economic development programs included in the tracker. Each program includes links to the Members of Congress from both parties in each of those subcommittees, providing their phone, email, and social media contact information. Our hope is that this will be a resource to help those concerned about federal support for community development learn how to make their voices heard. The tracker was recently featured in an article in Yes! Magazine.

Sincerely,
Ted Howard
President & Co-Founder, The Democracy Collaborative