What’s the project about:
How do you democratise the economy? How do you ensure that the value people create together stays within their community? Community Wealth Building (CWB) is a system-changing approach to community economic development that works to produce broadly shared economic prosperity, racial equity, and ecological sustainability through the reconfiguration of institutions and local economies on the basis of greater democratic ownership, participation, and control.
Activities:
Commons Network is working with governments, universities and civil society actors to spread the word. Our mission is to help countless municipalities and regions kickstart their own Community Wealth Building plans. We are also publishing blogs, essays and reports about this method as it finds its way from the UK and the US into the Netherlands. And finally, we developed a toolkit for Dutch institutions, together with the municipality of Amsterdam, which contains five concrete steps, many tips and lessons learned from both our own research and from others around the world.
Project lead: Florine Zegers
Run time: June 2020 – Present
Publication: Toolkit ‘WijkWelvaartsWerk’
Talks: Video presentation and interview
Other resources:
Interview at Cities for Change Conference
Essay at De Helling (in Dutch)
Essay at the Green European Journal: A Wealth of Opportunities
Blog at Cities for Change Conference
Partners:
MeentCoop, Aouaki Concepts, Municipality of Amsterdam, Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken, Stichting Doen, Oranjefonds.