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Local Return DCIF

Why Wealth

Community Wealth

What is Community Wealth?

A community’s wealth comes from the assets that it collectively owns or controls, and which the community uses to care for its place and one another. Community wealth is not just about monetary value that exists or is generated in a place. It involves:
  • Multiple forms of capital — financial, yes, but also social, intellectual, natural, cultural, built, and political.
  • Local ownership of these capitals, so that control and benefits remain in the place.
  • Shared ownership, so assets are stewarded by and for the community and not just a few members.
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Wealth in Rhode Island Event

Money flows and asset ownership may not be the first things that come to mind when you think about Rhode Island’s history, but they have had major, long-term implications for our communities — making some people and places more prosperous and resilient and others less so.

Learn more about the history of wealth in Rhode Island, and contemplate your own wealth stories.

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Why does Community Wealth Matter?

Community wealth matters because it leads to community resilience (in the same way that personal wealth leads to personal resilience), a place’s ability to withstand challenges and persist, adapt, and transform itself. 

So how do we increase a community’s wealth? We like this definition of community wealth building from Marjorie Kelly of the Democracy Collaborative: creating and using local assets to make a community more vibrant, developing assets in such a way that the wealth stays local, and helping families and communities control their own economic destiny.

Individual vs Community

What about individual wealth?

That matters, too. And we’re not talking about the gross accumulation of billionaires; we mean the ability of every household to build up enough assets that they can take care of themselves and withstand the challenges that life throws at them.

We don’t have good local wealth data, but we know from the national data that there are tremendous disparities in wealth across race and ethnicity. In its 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances, the Federal Reserve Board found that White families have a median family wealth of $188,200, compared to $24,100 for Black families and $36,100 for Hispanic families.
Source: Opportunity Atlas
Community Wealth

Addressing the Problem

Inequality exists in every single Rhode Island community, and it is stubbornly consistent. Across systems (education, economic, healthcare, criminal justice, etc.), we see enormous disparities of outcomes based on race and zip code.

Consider just three indicators (household income, poverty, and the average household income at age 35 of a child who grows up in that area) across three pairs of closely-located census tracts in Rhode Island.

Systems approach to Wealth-Building

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.)