Dear Colleague,

• We hope you will join us on June 5 at 1pm EST for a free webinar on “Measuring the Shared Value of Anchor Community Engagement,” hosted by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC). I will discuss the Anchor Dashboard, alongside Kim Zeuli of ICIC and Anthony Sorrentino from the University of Pennsylvania.

• Our staff continues to promote community wealth building across the country. Last month, I had the honor to speak at the City of Memphis’ 2014 Neighborhood Redevelopment Conference on “Building Healthy Communities from the Inside Out.” At the end of April, I delivered the keynote address on “Closing the Wealth Gap: the Community Wealth Building Paradigm” at the German Marshall Fund’s Strong Cities, Strong Communities National Network Workshop in Cleveland. Our research director Steve Dubb presented on anchor institution strategies and equitable development for a PolicyLink webinar and at the 25^th anniversary conference of the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development. Steve and research associate Dave Zuckerman were featured presenters at the MedStar Health Roundtable at Georgetown University. Dave and research associate Sarah McKinley discussed impact metrics for anchor institutions at the Community-Campus Partnership for Health Conference along with David Perry of the University of Illinois, Chicago and Leif Elsmo of the University of Chicago Medical Center. 

• In its newest Field Guide to Investing in a Regenerative Economy, the Capital Institute outlines Cleveland’s Evergreen model and provides overviews of the three enterprises: Evergreen Cooperative Laundry, Evergreen Energy Solutions, and Green City Growers. Also, in a DiversityInc interview, Orlando Santaella, a worker-owner of Evergreen Energy Solutions, talks about the transformative role that Evergreen has had on his life as part of a profile on University Hospitals’ procurement efforts with women- and minority-owned businesses.

• Last month in Montreal, at the Social Transformation through Social Innovation conference, hosted by Colloque International du CRISES, Democracy Collaborative co-founder Gar Alperovitz presented a keynote address on how public policy can support social innovation and community wealth building. Back in the United States, Gar discussed the merits of a guaranteed minimum income in this CNN article and appeared in a featured video on Upworthy, where he reiterated the importance of local and democratic ownership as a means to build wealth. Gar also questioned the assumption that economic growth is universally good in a recent Al Jazeera America article.

• Thanks to Gale Publishing, a free download of The Democracy Collaborative's chapter "Economic Democracy", featured in the new anthology Achieving Sustainability: Visions, Principles & Practices, is now available on community-wealth.org.