Loomio
Mon 18 Feb 2019 2:27PM

Community Wealth Building Expertise in/for California Town?

BC Bruce Caron Public Seen by 128

A group of us are looking to engage in an ongoing conversation about how to remold our downtown during the collapse of retail. We'd like to get more community wealth building ideas into the mix (instead of just feeding new revenue to private building owners). It would be great to get some real expertise about this transition. Any suggestions? We can pay for travel and treat them well.

BC

Bruce Caron Tue 5 Mar 2019 2:57PM

Thanks! I've applied to join the group.

G

Graham Tue 5 Mar 2019 3:51PM

The work already mentioned in this thread in Preston, that has over the last 7 or 8 years brought over £200M of spending back into the local region where it was previously being spent elsewhere, is in its turn inspired in part by the Evergreen Cooperatives project in Cleveland. In the UK a good source of information about what community wealth building is and how to go about it has been developed by CLES (the Centre for Local Economic Strategies) and is available on their website: https://cles.org.uk
CLES appear to be having a lot of success currently. Local government in the UK is under a good deal of pressure currently as central government funding to local govt has been severely reduced since the 2008 crash as part of the right wing austerity programme that is squeezing the life out of local communities across the country. The CLES approach is in part about leveraging the purchasing power of big local anchor institutions to relocalise procurement and also promote cooperative business solutions to fill supply chain gaps that pop up as a result. So they are working very much at that local government level. The Barcelona city administration is also doing great work led by their inspirational mayor Ada Colau.
Also very much worth your attention is Co-operation Jackson (https://cooperationjackson.org)