Community Wealth Building In The News
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- Nexus Community Partners, one of our partner organizations located in St. Paul, Minnesota, was recently featured in the Minneapolis Star Tribune for their work around supporting business conversions to employee ownership.
- Nineteen of New Jersey’s higher education institutions released a joint-declaration around their role as anchor institutions. Read more about the initiative, which includes Anchor Dashboard member Rutgers University, on NJ.com.
- A few weeks ago, we featured a powerful series by James Causey that highlighted the lived realities of disinvestment in Milwaukee, ending with a call for solutions like the Evergreen model in Cleveland, Ohio. Now, these solutions are on the way to becoming city policy. Read about new developments in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
- Bon Secours Richmond Health System has helped support the creation of the first land trust in Richmond, Virginia in order to increase access to affordable housing for residents in Church Hill, a rapidly gentrifying area. Read more in Richmond Magazine
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New from The Democracy Collaborative
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New Report on Opportunities for Impact Investors to Scale Employee Ownership
With income inequality in the United States at historically high levels, employee ownership is increasingly being lauded as a potential opportunity to disperse wealth more broadly. This new report by Mary Ann Beyster, president and trustee of the Foundation for Enterprise Development (FED), published by the Fifty by Fifty initiative of The Democracy Collaborative, explores the role of investment in bringing this solution to scale. The report synthesizes six months of research, and finds that while the opportunities for impact investors are currently limited, an investing infrastructure is beginning to emerge across asset classes.
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New CW City: New Haven, CT
The forty-second in our CW City series is New Haven, CT. New Haven has a high degree of economic inequality, with the top 20 percent of households earning 6.5 times more than the bottom 20 percent. To address this and other concerns, anchor institutions, non-profits, and the City government, among others, are developing various strategies to build community wealth. For example, the Small Contractor Development Program provides minority and women-owned businesses with technical assistance, mentoring, networking, and loans. All city construction contracts of $150,000 or less are reserved for contractors registered with the program.
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New Book Explores the Devastating Health Effects of Inequality
Authored by Dr. David Ansell, Senior Vice President of Community Health Equity at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, The Death Gap dives into the drivers of the thirty-five-year difference in life expectancy between the wealthiest and poorest communities in the U.S. In order to make headway and eradicate these alarming health inequities, Ansell argues we must address the systemic drivers of inequality and structural violence. Health equity can be achieved by building up the capacity and autonomy of local communities, and Ansell discusses the role that health systems and other anchors can play in doing this.
Read more here>>
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Employee Ownership Associated with Greater Household Wealth, Job Stability, and Employment Quality
This report from the National Center for Employee Ownership synthesizes research on the impact of employee ownership on economic outcomes for young workers, ages 28-34. The authors find that compared to non-employee owners, these workers have higher household net wealth, higher median incomes, increased job stability, and greater access to benefits such as childcare, retirement plans, and tuition reimbursement.
Read more here>>
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Up & Go
Launched earlier this month, Up & Go is a web app that connects New York residents to worker-owned cleaning cooperatives. Noting that larger competitors have been able to get more business through app platforms, Up & Go will connect co-ops to consumers while allowing workers to get more take-home pay than they would with other apps. Read more about the development of the platform in Fast Company
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