Dear Colleague,

• We are pleased to announce the re-launch of our Community-Wealth.org website. Our redesign highlights various opportunities to foster democratic ownership and build community wealth. To mark the re-launch, we have also released a new animated film explaining the community wealth building approach to building collaborative, inclusive, and locally controlled economies. Read more below. We maintain the Community-Wealth.org website free of charge as a resource to advocates and practitioners everywhere. Help us keep the site thriving with a tax deductible donation.

• Interested in joining our team? The Democracy Collaborative is hiring for the following positions: Office Administrator, Communications Associate, Special Assistant to the Co-Founder, and National Coordinator of Teach-Ins on the Next System. More information is available on our blog. 

• In The Leap, the companion blog to Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything, Gus Speth, Co-Chair of the Next System Project and a Senior Fellow with The Democracy Collaborative, speaks about the imperative of taking a systemic approach to confront the environmental crises facing us today. The Next System Project also released the latest installment in our video series, featuring MIT Associate Professor of Urban Politics Phillip Thompson, who discusses the historical fight for civil and economic rights and reminds us that “the true intent of the thirteenth amendment was not just to eliminate chattel slavery, but to eliminate all forms of economic oppression.”

• We’d like to congratulate our partners in the Northwest Area Foundation-funded Learning/Action Lab for Community Wealth Building on several important milestones: Thunder Valley Community Development Corporation recently broke ground on their Regenerative Community, an affordable housing community that brings together job creation, ecological sustainability, and traditional Lakota values. Read press coverage, view photos, and listen to audio recordings from the ground breaking in Thunder Valley CDC’s newsletter. Little Earth of United Tribes in Minneapolis celebrated the launch of a new social enterprise, the Tatanka Truck, a food truck featuring indigenous and locally sourced dishes. Read press coverage in The Guardian and Twin Cities Daily Planet. 

• We would also like to congratulate the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area’s Community Wealth Building Initiative for the launch of its first employee-owned company, the Community CleanWater Management Group. In May, I had the pleasure to speak at the launch of the business. My presentation and a fact sheet about the initiative are available online. 

• Community wealth building continues to gain traction internationally. In an article in New Start Magazine, Matthew Jackson, deputy chief executive at the U.K.-based Center for Local Economic Strategies, which is helping to advance a Community Wealth Building Initiative in Preston, England, examines critical success factors in the development of Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives. Economist Borys Cieślak interviewed Manager of Community Development Programs Sarah McKinley for the Polish publication Magazyn Miasta (Cities Magazine) where she discusses “Clevelandzkim” and community wealth building strategies as an alternative to “business as usual.” 

• Democracy Collaborative Co-Founder Gar Alperovitz contrasts American and European urban challenges in City by City: Dispatches from the American Metropolis, a collection of essays co-published by the culture and politics magazine n+1 (an excerpt of which appears in Next City).