Community Wealth Building: Democratizing the Economy

Bioneers | Published: August 29, 2024 Eco-NomicsJustice Podcasts

In this special episode of the Bioneers, guest host Laura Flanders explores “Community Wealth Building,” a model that democratizes the economy, creates more cooperative businesses, better care for communities, and builds wealth for the many, not just the few. This episode features American political economist, historian, and author Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, along with India Pierce Lee about her work with the Collaborative in Cleveland, Ohio; and John McMicken, Executive Director of Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperative Corporation.

This special Bioneers series is produced in collaboration with the Laura Flanders Show. For roughly a decade, Laura Flanders, a long time reporter on economic and social change, has been looking for alternatives. A new economic model that’s different from either state socialism or the kind of capitalism we’ve come to know. She found some serious experiments in what many are calling community wealth building from the U.S. to the U.K, the Netherlands and Australia. These economic models are also laboratories of democracy, because, of course, wealth is power.

Guest Host

Laura Flanders is the host and executive producer of Laura Flanders & Friends, which airs on PBS stations nationwide. She is an Izzy-Award winning independent journalist, a New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of the Pat Mitchell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Media Center.

Credits

  • This series is co-produced by Bioneers and Laura Flanders & Friends
  • Laura Flanders & Friends Producers: Laura Flanders and Abigail Handel
  • Production Assistance: Jeannie Hopper and David Neumann
  • Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel
  • Senior Producer: Stephanie Welch
  • Producer: Teo Grossman
  • Host and Consulting Producer: Neil Harvey
  • Program Engineer and Music Supervisor: Emily Harris

This is an episode of the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature series. Visit the radio and podcast homepage to find out how to hear the program on your local station and how to subscribe to the podcast.

Subscribe to the Bioneers: Revolution from The Heart of Nature podcast


Transcript

Neil Harvey (Host): Today’s economy is radically unequal, always in crisis, and destroying ecological systems we depend on. That’s no surprise, being that it’s organized to prioritize the interests of power, money and capital. How do we design a next economic system that centers the wellbeing, health and rights of people, communities and nature?

For roughly a decade, Laura Flanders, a long time reporter on economic and social change, has been looking for alternatives – new economic models that are different from either state socialism or the kind of capitalism we’ve come to know. She found some serious experiments in what many are calling “community wealth building” that are also laboratories of democracy, because, of course, wealth is power.

This special Bioneers series is produced in collaboration with Laura Flanders and Friends, the public TV and radio program that reports on social change experiments every week on PBS and online.

In this episode, we hear from American political economist, historian, and author Gar Alperovitz of the Democracy Collaborative, along with India Pierce Lee about her work with the Collaborative in Cleveland, Ohio; and John McMicken, Executive Director of Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperative Corporation.

This is “Community Wealth Building: Democratizing the Economy”, with guest host Laura Flanders, on the Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

Laura Flanders (LF): You don’t have to be an expert to know that the economy isn’t working for most people. Most of us are falling behind, running in place or working more than one job and a whole lot of us just aren’t happy.

The fight for $15 – ‘I’m tired all the time’ | Guardian Features | Film by Tom Pietrasik

When economists measure wealth – the U.S. is the top, or one of the top two wealthiest nations in the world, and has been for over 60 years. But measure happiness by looking at health, education, good governance, ecological diversity, or the ability to make really consequential choices in life – and this super rich nation isn’t even in the top ten.

So what’s the problem? Behind most social and ecological harms lurks an economic motive. So could there be a way to change those motivations by restructuring the economy, so as to put the health and happiness and rights of people, places and the natural world at the center?

One such approach is called “Community Wealth Building.” It’s a way to democratize the economy, create more cooperative and worker-owned businesses, care for our communities, and build wealth for the many in a way that’s good for us and the planet. One of the early thinkers behind this approach was political scientist and author/activist, Gar Alperovitz.

Gar Alperovitz

LF: Gar Alperovitz has spent his entire life, coming up with ways to organize people, property and wealth differently – so as to serve society and the planet better than the way we do it now. As a young person, he worked in government on programs like the War on Poverty. He also worked with outside advocacy groups like the Institute for Policy Studies, which he helped to found, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Over and again, he saw how getting good politicians elected, and even good government programs enacted wasn’t enough. The way the economy worked simply skewed things in favor of the rich and powerful. Here’s Gar at a Bioneers conference back in 2012.

LF: In 2012, when Gar was speaking, 400 Americans had more wealth than the bottom 50% of us. By 2019, just 7 years later, three billionaires – Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos – had more combined wealth than the bottom half of the population – that’s 160 million Americans.

During the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis years between 2020 and 2023, that trend just got worse. Almost two-thirds of all new wealth created in those years – a whopping $26 trillion dollars – went to the richest 1%. And it’s not as if they gave back.

Between 1980 and 2018, the Institute for Policy Studies reported the taxes paid by America’s billionaires measured as a percentage of their wealth went down, decreasing 79 percent.

LF: So the problem isn’t shallow, it’s structural, discovered Gar. Not the bad actions of a few greedy individuals, but an entire system designed to benefit those who are already wealthy. And that made it hard to fix.

Without a more fundamental overhaul, wealth and power would keep concentrating, and militarism and environmental extraction would keep society and our planet on a devastating track. What was needed wasn’t a tweak – a bigger trickle of money, say, from the top to the bottom through charity or taxes or short-lived government programs that are always on the chopping block, but a healthier way to build wealth in the first place, a way that thinks more about consequence, for people and the planet and spread resources and power more evenly around.

But all that would require a next system. The good news is, many of the elements of that system are already in place…

Gar Alperovitz speaking at a Bioneers conference

LF: From indigenous hunts and harvests, to collective colonial barn raisings, community based ways of getting things done should be as much part of the American story as the fictitious go-it-alone Horatio Alger myth. Under slavery, for example, Africans pooled funds to buy people’s freedom and Mutual aid societies paid for emergencies like ill health and burials.

Later, organized labor groups, such as the Knights of Labor and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, promoted worker-owned cooperatives as a way to keep resources and money in workers’ hands. And during the Great Depression, people came together in co-ops as a way to pool assets and cut costs to survive. In the 1960s, solidarity economics was a way to build Black, Indigenous and Chicano independence and power.

So too, today, coming together in cooperatives is bringing down the price of food, loans, equipment, and all of the things individuals have a hard time affording alone. Consumer coops like the well known Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, New York, enable members to buy groceries at lower bulk prices in exchange for contributing hours of volunteer labor.

Worker co-ops such as the Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx enable typically low-income home-health aides to negotiate contracts collectively and create training programs designed and led by fellow home care workers. Adria Powell serves as President and CEO.

Adria Powell

LF: In a cooperative, every member has one vote. Together they own the business, come up with the rules, and set the wages and share in its success. Cooperatives also commit to helping one another.

So it was in 2020, when the Covid pandemic hit, Opportunity Threads, a sewing cooperative in South Carolina, organized with the Carolina Textile District to re-tool their production in order to sew masks. That pivot enabled them to keep Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx supplied with Personal Protective equipment, when there were few masks to go around for healthcare workers on the front lines.

Cooperation, and putting community interests first, are core concepts to Community Wealth Building. To counter corporate globalization, which extracts wealth from a place, community wealth building approach, relocalizes wealth. To reverse the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, community wealth building strategies work to distribute assets and wealth widely, and democratize business structures so as to share decision making and value labor and land. In contrast to counting on short term profits, community wealth building takes the long view about what is best for a healthy economy, people and planet.

So where do we go from here? Again, Gar Alperovitz.

LF: To advance the practical work, in 2000 Alperovitz founded the Democracy Collaborative with his colleague Ted Howard. They call it a “think-and-do tank”. Theory is useful they say, but experiments making transformation visible are even more important.

One of the game-changing experiments The Democracy Collaborative has been part of is the Evergreen Cooperatives Project in Cleveland, Ohio.

LF: When we return, we’ll hear from one of the Democracy Collaborative’s key collaborators in the Evergreen Project, India Pierce Lee, who was then at the Cleveland Foundation. And from John McMicken, the executive director of Evergreen, on how the company helps its employees buy homes.

I’m guest host Laura Flanders. You’re listening to the Bioneers…

LF: Anchor institutions, deeply rooted in place, such as universities and hospitals, are key to community wealth building.

Starting in 2008, the Democracy Collaborative partnered with several of Cleveland’s most prestigious anchor institutions in order to develop a Community Wealth Building approach to buying stuff. Instead of contracting with a far-off, non-union laundry service, for example, the Cleveland Clinic agreed to contract with Evergreen, a cooperative laundry owned and run by its employees, the vast majority of whom are African-Americans living nearby.

Cleveland at the time was anything but evergreen. Having once been one of the great U.S. industrial cities, attracting workers from around the world and across the country, Cleveland’s boom began to slow in the 1960s and over the next three decades, the city lost 24 percent of its population.

By 1975, Cleveland ranked in the nation’s highest 20 percent in terms of poverty, unemployment, dilapidated housing, municipal debt and violent crime. As the century drew to a close, globalization, white flight and years of budget cuts only made things worse. And it wasn’t arbitrary who was left behind. Here’s India Pierce Lee.

LF: India Pierce Lee worked on community development for a community foundation, the Cleveland Foundation for 16 years, starting in 2006. Community wealth building, she says, provided a way to address historic wrongs, methodically, through policy, as methodically as the wrongs of systemic racism were committed in the first place.

I spoke with India Pierce Lee in 2022.

India Pierce Lee

LF: By putting community wealth building at the center of their concerns, the Evergreen Project was able to do more than just create jobs. The project prioritized hiring the most vulnerable – including people returning from prison and jail – and used the assets of the business and its relationships with other institutions to help people find and keep housing, so as to build wealth of their own. I had a chance to talk with the Executive Director of the Evergreen Cooperative Corporation, John McMicken, about the company’s accomplishments thus far.

John McMicken

LF: Since Evergreen launched its first cooperative business in 2009, the company has overcome growing pains, attracted multiple contracts and expanded its staff to nearly 200 people. Today Evergreen is not just a laundry service, it’s a parent company responsible for launching other new employee-owned businesses and helping privately owned small family businesses convert to employee ownership with its own dedicated loan fund.

Now several states are advancing employee ownership legislation that would make it easier for worker-owned businesses to get loans and technical assistance and government contracts. Many of these are also green businesses, another core tenet of community wealth building.

Evergreen Cooperative Laundry employees. Photo courtesy of Evergreen Cooperatives.

Can all these democratic experiments be woven together to create a “next system” – one that creates wealth that’s deeply rooted, widely shared and in the hands of local, forward-looking residents committed to a liveable planet and thriving local economies into the future? That’s the essence of community wealth building. It won’t be easy, but it’s the work of our times, believes author, activist Gar Alperovitz.

LF: The Democracy Collaborative produced a Community Wealth Building Handbook recently, a kind of field guide for policymakers, advocates and engaged citizens. We’ll post a link on this episode page. Go to Bioneers.org/radio.

These laboratories of economic democracy are spreading, maturing and reaching critical mass. For The Bioneers, I’m Laura Flanders.

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