[Community wealth building initiatives are taking hold in cities
across the world, strengthening worker pay, local economies and
democracy. ]
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HOW WORKER OWNERSHIP BUILDS COMMUNITY WEALTH AND A MORE JUST SOCIETY
 
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Pamela Haines
February 3, 2023
Waging Nonviolence
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_ Community wealth building initiatives are taking hold in cities
across the world, strengthening worker pay, local economies and
democracy. _

Evergreen Laundry,

 

A recent help-wanted ad for a laundry worker in Cleveland contained
some unusual language, asking prospective candidates: “Have you ever
wanted to work for a company that is 90 percent employee-owned? What
about a company that offers a program to help you become a
homeowner?” The ad went on to identify Evergreen Cooperative Laundry
as the only employee-owned commercial laundry firm in the country,
citing a commitment to building the wealth and careers of its
employees.

Founded in Cleveland in 2009, Evergreen laundry lies at the heart of a
movement that has now spread around the world. This attention to
community wealth building is providing a 21st century model for
Gandhi’s “constructive program,” which — along with nonviolent
direct action — powered his overall campaign to overcome the
political and economic oppression of colonialism.

The cooperative movement in the Rust Belt city of Cleveland has deep
roots in community struggle for shared wealth. Its earliest origins
are in the Mondragon co-op movement of the Basque Country in northern
Spain, where tens of thousands of workers are organized into a vast
co-op network that has flourished since the 1950s. Here in the U.S.,
when steel companies were closing down throughout the Ohio Valley in
the 1970s — and moving to non-union, lower-wage regions in the
south, and then overseas — a small band of activists promoted the
idea of worker ownership.

Gar Alperovitz, a key player in that campaign, traces
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its origins to the 1977 shuttering of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube
steel mill, which threw 5,000 steelworkers onto the streets, with
little retraining help and no other jobs available. A plan by an
ecumenical religious coalition for community-worker ownership of the
giant mill captured widespread media attention, significant bipartisan
support and an initial $200 million in loan guarantees from the Carter
administration.

According to Alperovitz, “Corporate and other political maneuvering
in the end undercut the Youngstown initiative. Nonetheless, the effort
had ongoing impact, especially in Ohio, where the idea of
worker-ownership became widespread … because of all the publicity
and the depth of policy failures in response to deindustrialization
throughout the state.”

Now, nearly half a century later, the Evergreen laundry and its sister
solar and greenhouse coops are at the heart of the model around which
the theory and practice of community wealth building have grown.
Developed by the new economy research center Democracy Collaborative,
the model is a simple one: First, identify anchor institutions —
hospitals, universities, seats of government — that are not going to
relocate in search of higher profits and incentivize them to do their
procurement of supplies and services locally, so that those dollars
stay at home. Then, make regulatory, financing and policy changes that
support the growth of cooperatives to supply their needs, so that the
business profits stay with the workers. This model has been quietly
gaining attention and putting down roots in other places — starting
with a jump across the Atlantic Ocean.

COMMUNITY WEALTH BUILDING IN THE UK

In 2012, it seemed like the run-down industrial city of Preston, in
northern England, had come to the end of the road. Its economic base
had been bleeding away for years, and the last gasp attempt — a deal
to lure in a mall developer — had fallen through. Fortunately, a
deep-thinking member of the Preston City Council, Matthew Brown, had
heard of an innovative model of community wealth building based in
Cleveland, Ohio.

“Crucially, we need to have more democracy in Preston’s economy
— we can’t be at the whims of outside investors who’ll want to
extract as much wealth from our community as possible,” Brown told
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_the Lancashire Post_. He reached out to Ted Howard from the Democracy
Collaborative and, looking back on the last 10 years, the resulting
collaboration can be seen as transformative.

Preston City Council started by working with its own anchor
institutions, getting them to prioritize contracting with local
companies. It began creating worker cooperatives and paying a real
living wage. The city’s government pension fund is now investing
locally
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Plans for a community bank are in the works. Employment and affordable
housing rates are up; child poverty is down.

Procurement dollars that stayed within the city have risen from $46.8
million to $138.4 million; anchor institutions are more connected to
the local economy; and its residents and experience in supporting the
development of new businesses and cooperatives have grown. According
to Ted Howard
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of the Democracy Collaborative, the impact and potential of these
combined efforts is “creating an ecosystem of change that will be
the engine for a new, fairer economy.” 

In a stunning turnaround, Preston was named the most improved city in
the U.K. in 2018, and the “Preston Model
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has become a household word. The Centre for Local Economic Strategies,
or CLES
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which was active in Preston, is now working with dozens of local
authorities, anchor institutions, and U.K. nations to develop
community wealth building approaches that are appropriate to the
context of their place. At the same time, it is also supporting
similar efforts across Europe and as far afield as Australia and New
Zealand.

KEEPING SMALL BUSINESSES ALIVE IN DENVER

Back in the U.S., where similar models are spreading,
Denver’s Center for Community Wealth Building
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a $360,000 economic development grant for a three-year initiative to
launch six to nine new cooperatives in Denver and neighboring Aurora.
Such worker cooperatives can stabilize jobs and income for those who
might otherwise be displaced by gentrification, while also help to
keep small businesses — the heart of these communities — alive.

CCWB Executive Director Yessica Holguin was first hired as a fellow to
work on building opportunity in low-income neighborhoods. Coming from
a community organizing background, her first step was to go out and
talk to the community. “I wanted to understand the experience of
gentrification from the perspective of the residents. And I wanted to
hear what solutions resonated with them,” Holguin explained
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their jobs, when they own their businesses, own their lives, the
ripple effects are felt throughout the community.”

Worker co-ops clearly resonated, and she jumped in to help launch two
of them — both of which remain successful today: Mujeres
Emprendadores, a catering service started by immigrant women, and
Satya Yoga Cooperative, a yoga school run by and for people of color.

CCWB’s three-pronged strategy is modeled on the Evergreen co-ops:
democratize ownership through worker co-ops, strengthen
entrepreneurial opportunities for people of color and encourage anchor
institutions to become local economic engines. To help the University
of Denver shift its spending on catering from national chains, for
example, CCWB organized a tasting event where over a hundred
university event planners met and began building relationships with 11
community caterers.

To ensure that cooperatives can flourish, CCWB has developed a roadmap
to guide various city departments to support awareness, skills and
access. “It’s not just potential worker-owners who need to see the
benefits of cooperative businesses” Holguin said
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“We want the community to understand how widespread democratic
ownership will benefit everyone.”

AN ECONOMY LIKE A LITTLE STREAM

This approach is proving flexible, resilient and effective. It is
putting down roots and beginning to have an impact not only in
Cleveland, Preston and Denver, but in an ever-growing number of cities
around the world. It consistently supports both political and economic
democracy, while also addressing the needs for better pay and a
sharing of our common wealth.

We can use the analogy of water to think about how money moves in an
economy. One model is like a storm water system, efficiently gathering
water from many small sources, with the goal of consolidation and
steady movement toward a central location. A very different model is
like a little stream meandering through a wetland, cleansing and
nourishing everything it touches — an integral part of the
ecosystem, not trying to get anywhere else.

In our current economic system, money functions like the former,
steadily being siphoned from the hands of individuals and communities
into those of great financial interests. Community wealth building is
all about the latter — circulating and recirculating money in the
local economy, in no hurry, allowing its benefits to serve all.

By offering a powerful framework and lever for moving toward greater
local control over wealth, community wealth building is simply another
way of getting to the roots. It provides an alternative to moneyed
interests being in control and their bottom line trumping the common
welfare.

Reflecting on the role of the Evergreen Laundry — established in a
neighborhood of Cleveland where the average income is lower than 93.4
percent of U.S. communities — Howard told _The Guardian_
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“A job is not enough. For people to stay out of poverty they need to
be able to acquire assets.” Along with a job, the co-op offers
pension payments and profit sharing, and has brought the possibility
of home-ownership within reach.

From a new homeowner in Cleveland, to growing connections between
university staff in Colorado and local catering co-ops, to the
turnaround of a struggling city in northern England and beyond, the
promise of community wealth building appears boundless. Bringing
together Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent direct action to confront
injustice with a constructive program of steadily diverting resources
from the powers-that-be back to the people, this model offers a
powerful framework for reclaiming our democracy and our economy.

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Pamela Haines is a writer, workshop leader and speaker with a common
theme of demystifying the connections between economics and daily
life, while challenging people to claim their power and act on their
values. Lead author of "Toward a Right Relationship with Finance;
Interest, Debt, Growth and Security," her latest book is "Money and
Soul." She is also active in building leadership capacity in early
childhood education, has a passion for the earth, loves repair of all
kinds, and blogs at pamelalivinginthisworld.blogspot.com
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