Vision
Rhode Island families and communities control their own economic destiny.
Mission
Our mission is to build community wealth in Rhode Island through ownership and investment, particularly in neighborhoods that have experienced historical disinvestment.
Community wealth-building is creating and using local assets to make our communities more vibrant, developing assets in such ways that the wealth stays local, and helping our families and communities control their own economic destiny. We take a systems approach to community wealth-building, as articulated by the Democracy Collaborative, which involves:
- Progressive procurement that localizes economic activity, builds local multipliers, and ends leakages and financial extraction.
- Just use of land and property.
- Fair work that provides workers with living wages and real power in control of their workplaces.
- Inclusive and democratic enterprise, including cooperatives, social enterprises, municipal ownership, and more.
- Locally rooted finance.
(Our gratitude goes to Marjorie Kelly and the Democracy Collaborative for their exceptional framing of these concepts. Learn more at the above links.)
Activities
We do this by:
- Building the local community investment ecosystem
- Advocating for local policies and practices that support a vibrant and just local economy
- Increasing community awareness and capacity
Our current priorities include:
- Urging state and local government officials to use American Rescue Plan Act recovery funds to advance community investment and ownership
- Creating a pilot Community Investment Fund for Rhode Island
- Leveraging existing ecosystem resources to weave stronger support for models that promote wealth, resilience, and regeneration
- Raising the public’s consciousness around economic choices