Blog

Obama Urban Affairs Office begins national tour

2009-08-24T18:20:00-08:00

Philadelphia, Denver, Kansas City practices are highlighted

Following a kick-off event in Washington on July 13th in which President Barack Obama delivered these remarks, the White House Office of Urban Affairs began its tour of urban America ten days later with the first stop in Philadelphia. The listening tour, officially titled in this blog post by Director of Urban Affairs Adolfo Carrión a Conversation on the Future of American Cities and Metro Areas, aims to highlight community building efforts in urban areas and “advance a new federal vision that recognizes cities and metropolitan areas as dynamic engines for our economy, and develop federal policy built on these strengths.”

In his remarks on July 13th, Obama emphasized the importance of cities and metropolitan areas in the U.S. economy and highlighted the directive his administration had made to “the Office of Management and Budget, the Domestic Policy Council, the National Economic Council, and the Office of Urban Affairs to conduct the first comprehensive interagency review in 30 years of how the federal government approaches and funds urban and metropolitan areas so that we can start having a concentrated, focused, strategic approach to federal efforts to revitalize our metropolitan areas.” In his speech, Obama called attention to some key areas of new model practices that would be highlighted on the tour: urban agriculture in Philadelphia, rapid transit development in Denver, and an effort to “transform a low-income community into a national model of sustainability by weatherizing homes and building a green local transit system” in Kansas City. A news article on the event from the Washington Post is available here.

CFED announces first “innovators” class

2009-08-24T13:19:00-08:00

Awards offer snapshots of community wealth building innovation

This summer the nonprofit CFED (formerly, Corporation for Enterprise Development) launched its first class of Innovative Ideas Champions. The program aims to support “ideas and policies, products and practices that will help Americans build wealth, bring about greater social equity, alleviate poverty and lead to a more sustainable economy.” A conference highlighting the efforts of CFED’s first set of Innovators-in-Residence and Innovative Idea Champions will be held at its first annual Innovation Summit on October 29th (Registration costs $190). Some of those recognized are university professors or consultants, but a large number of those recognized hail from community-based organizations. A half dozen of the selected Innovators-in-Residence and Innovative Idea Champions (out of a total 16 so recognized, along with another 20 who are designated as Idea Engineers) are profiled briefly below.

Worker food co-op opens in West Oakland, CA

2009-08-21T14:26:00-08:00

Co-op forms key component of urban revitalization effort

As Ryan Van Lenning of Sustainablog writes, “Oakland may be on the list of the top 10 Greenest Cities, but certain areas like West Oakland are nearly bereft of healthy, local food, which is an important element of sustainability. Fortunately, an oasis has just appeared in West Oakland in the form of a worker-owned grocery store with a focus on healthy, organic, local food and community.” The Mandela Foods Cooperative, like many food cooperatives sells customers local and organic produce, but it also has some unusual features that make it stand out. Among these are: 1) worker ownership (for a rare example of an established U.S. worker food cooperative, see San Francisco’s Rainbow Grocery); 2) a sharing of the profits with members of the neighboring People’s Federal Credit Union, a local credit union that is a division of Self-Help Federal Credit Union; and 3) a direct link to a local nonprofit, the Mandela Marketplace, a “community leadership incubator that provides civic engagement, economic and entrepreneurial opportunity to low-income residents and minority farmers.” In other words, the co-op is part of a larger community revitalization effort.

California co-ops launch annual conference

2009-07-24T23:11:00-08:00

Statewide event to take place Aug. 15-16

A group of California cooperative organizations have come together to hold an event that is billed as the state’s “first annual” co-op conference. Organized by the California Center for Cooperative Development, the conference aims to teach co-op skills, foster connection among co-ops across the state, and build a statewide cooperative economy. The California Center for Cooperative Development is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that promotes and supports the myriad of cooperatives in California (housing, childcare, agricultural, arts and crafts, agriculture and energy) with start-up, management, and other technical assistance. Although the Center was founded in 2008, many staff and board members were previously employed or associated with the University of California at Davis Center for Cooperatives, an extension program that closed in 2004 due to budget cuts. The conference will take place at the Women’s Building in San Francisco (located in the Mission District at 3543 18th St) on August 15-16. General registration for the two-day event is $225-255 on a sliding scale. People who register after August 1st must pay a $20 late fee. A full schedule of conference topics is available here.

White House social innovation office takes form

2009-07-07T18:02:00-08:00

FY 2010 budget proposes $50 million social innovation fund

This past April, Congress passed the Serve America Act, a summary of whose provisions is available here. As philanthropic adviser Sean Stannard-Stockton outlines in his Tactical Philanthropy blog, the Serve America Act was a key policy recommendation of America Forward, a coalition of more than 70 nonprofit organizations, organized in part by New Profit, a venture philanthropy funder.

While the primary provisions of the bill concerned expansion of government service programs, such as the Corporation for National and Community Service, the bill also included a provision authorizing the creation of a Social Innovation Fund. If Congress appropriates the $50 million the Obama administration has requested, this would involve the first explicit federal effort to support the nation’s growing social enterprise movement of nonprofits that operate businesses both to raise revenue and to further the social missions of their organizations.

Mondragon co-op model gains U.S. adherents

2009-07-06T17:49:01-08:00

Midwest groups seek to emulate Mondragon worker co-op design

Among a narrow band of U.S. academics and activists, the worker cooperative model provided by the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation has long been attractive. See, for instance, this report from David Morris of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance dating from 1992. The story of Mondragón is told well by the late Vermont sociologist George Benello here. Some basic highlights: In 1943, Don José María de Arizmendi-Arrieta, a Spanish priest (better known as Father Arizmendi) who had narrowly missed being put to death by Franco as a result of his support of the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, founded a technical school in the small Basque city of Mondragón. In 1956, five graduates of that school helped found a worker cooperative, Ulgor, that employed 24 and produced kerosene stoves. Over the following 50-plus years, Mondragón has grown to become a worker-cooperative controlled holding company consisting of roughly 260 businesses and over 100,000 employees. In 2007, Mondragón reported 16.7 billion Euros in sales (which, depending on the Euro exchange rate, is roughly $US 22-24 billion).

By contrast, in the United States, worker cooperatives have been largely a niche movement. According to the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, “there are over 300 democratic workplaces in the United States, employing over 3,500 people and generating over $400 million in annual revenues.” Until now at least, the leading form of employee ownership has consisted of companies owned in whole or part by employee stock ownership plans or ESOPs. Here, the numbers are more impressive: the National Center for Employee Ownership reports that, as of 2006, 13.7 million workers in the United States had $928 billion in assets in these enterprises. In the wake of the current economic crisis, however, the worker cooperative model has become increasingly attractive, particularly, as notes blogger Bernard Marszalek here, in the Midwest.

New institute aims to develop CDC leaders

2009-07-06T14:06:00-08:00

Massachusetts groups establish Mel King Institute for Community Building

Since 2003, in the state of Massachusetts alone, community development corporations (CDCs) have help build or preserve 7,811 homes, created 11,609 job opportunities, supported 6,211 local businesses, served 123,556 families, and attracted $1.362 billion worth of investment to struggling neighborhoods, report Chuck Grigsby, former president of the Massachusetts Community Development Finance Corporation and Joe Kriesberg, president of the Massachusetts Association of Community Development Corporations (MACDC), the leading trade association for Massachusetts-based CDCs. Yet as Grigsby and Kriesberg note in a Boston Globe op-ed, CDCs today face new challenges. “Demographic, social, economic, technological, and political changes require new, innovative solutions that build on the lessons we have learned but break free from old orthodoxies and stale strategies. The successful CDCs of the future will be those that most effectively adapt and respond to these changes,” write Grigsby and Kriesberg. The Mel King Institute for Community Building, which Grigsby and Kriesberg helped create, represents an important effort to create the educational infrastructure necessary to meet these challenges.

Book spurs dialogue on wealth

2009-04-30T17:47:00-08:00

Unjust Deserts highlights social nature of wealth

We call this website Community-Wealth.org, but we rarely discuss the nature of wealth on this site itself. An interesting paradox, however, of our age is revealed in a debate stirred by a recent book, featured on this website but until now not commented on by this blog, called Unjust Deserts. Co-authored by Lew Daly of Demos and Community-Wealth.org’s own Gar Alperovitz, the book is receiving increasing attention. Ezra Klein in American Prospect notes that typically the debate over the $1.57 trillion owned by the world’s 400 wealthiest individuals (as estimated by the 2008 Forbes 400 list) comes down to a single question: Is the wealth “earned” by these individuals a matter of “skill” or just “dumb luck”?

The argument of Daly and Alperovitz is different. As Klein notes in his review of the book, the argument goes beyond the question of “skill or luck” to look more fundamentally at how wealth is generated.

As Daly and Alperovitz highlight in their book, for decades leading economists have realized that most wealth is in fact socially generated. For example, Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow calculated that 88 percent of output growth between 1909 and 1947 could not be explained by changes in land, capital, or labor. Rather, Solow found that it was technical change—which is to say, advances in knowledge and technique and capability—that powered growth. In other words, it is society — from the literal contribution to knowledge of those who came before we were born — that is responsible for most of our wealth. This finding makes current trends of growing inequality—the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently reported that 2006 was marked by “greater income concentration at the top [in the United States] than at any time since 1929"—very hard to justify.

Social enterprise summit takes policy turn

2009-04-28T17:04:00-08:00

Highlights include new policy track, L3C forum

More than 350 people from social enterprises across the United States and beyond came to the tenth Summit of the Social Enterprise Alliance, held in New Orleans earlier this month. This year’s Summit featured a new policy track that explored federal, state, and local policy options. Organized by Public Innovators, a project of the Massachusetts-based nonprofit Root Cause, the policy track aimed to encourage exploration of ways government can work with the p expand the power and impact of social enterprise. In particular, four areas that were featured at the conference was the creation of a state Office of Social Entrepreneurship in Louisiana, the expansion of the Corporation for National and Community Service through the Serve America Act (signed into law by President Obama last week), the formation of a White House Office of Social Innovation, and the growing number of state efforts to create a new corporate category, the L3C or Low-Profit Limited Liability Company, a legal entity in which the company through its articles of incorporation may earn profits, but subject to meeting its charitable mission constraint, as stated in its articles of incorporation. A year ago, as profiled in this blog, Vermont became the first state in the nation to pass such legislation. Other states have now followed suit, including Michigan, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Utah. The nonprofit Americans for Community Development maintains a listing of these and other state legislative efforts here.

California microenterprise conference nears

2009-04-20T16:18:01-08:00

Statewide event to take place May 28th

Two months ago, this blog profiled the upcoming Microfinance California 2009 conference, California’s first statewide conference on domestic micro-finance. Held at the Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, the May 28th event aims to:
• Introduce participants to the nuts and bolts of domestic microfinance
• Provide small group tours of Bay Area microfinance borrowers
• Explore the impact and future of microfinance in California
• Facilitate small group dinners with practitioners, leaders, and investors