ABSTRACT
Community wealth building is an alternative economic development model centered on building and widely sharing wealth created from the assets, anchor institutions, and people already existing in a community. As a participatory process, community wealth building is a complex governance challenge, requiring stakeholder engagement to design local community wealth strategies. This chapter uses the lens of New Public Service to examine processes to engage stakeholders in community wealth building in Cleveland, Albuquerque, Richmond, and Rochester. Through interviews with key personnel involved in the four cities, we find that processes are propelled by facilitative leadership able to catalyze community anchors behind a locally defined concept and strategy. From there, community wealth building moves forward as structures consolidate to empower strategies and participation. To produce outcomes, leaders must invest in trust building and follow-through, and also create feedback loops between the top and bottom of a community’s class and race hierarchies so that community wealth concepts continue to push on inclusive economic development. Community wealth building is a long-term process that, in practice, has not yet tapped all of the possibilities yielded by the concept. Local efforts require periodic reinvigoration but, with time, expansion, and scale, existing examples suggest that community wealth building could deliver more community control of political economy, as opposed to the corporate control that now dominates in US urban policy models.
