PLANTING + GROWING OUR COLLECTIVE WEALTH
A Community-Led Response to the Wealth Crisis
“I think it is healing behavior, to look at something so broken and see the possibility and wholeness in it.”
adrienne
maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds 1
I
t’s spring 2025, a season traditionally of rebirth. Raindrops nourish blossoming plants, the sun shines brighter, and birds return to greet us. But this year, the birds’ songs seem quieter. The light feels dimmer. The signs of renewal seem far too distant. The wind has felt relentless, the rain colder, and the skies darker. The natural world mirrors our social, political, and economic world – an unpredictable and unsettling climate.
What we experience today isn’t the result of mere neglect over months or years, but centuries of strategic and organized malnourishment. We see this erosion in the dismantling of democracy, rising inflation, a growing racial wealth gap, stripped social services, and the degradation of our environment.2
In St. Louis, our social soil's past and present pollution has allowed alarming disparities to grow.
37% of Black households have zero or negative net worth, meaning they own no assets or they owe more than they own, compared to 16% of white households.3
“A child born in 63106 near the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood can expect to live 18 fewer years than a child born in 63105 (Clayton).” Jeff-Vander-Lou is majority Black, while Clayton is mostly white.4
St. Louis is one of the few metro areas in the country where the city is separate from our county. St. Louis County has fewer than one million residents, yet it comprises 88 municipal governments, over 50 police departments, and 23 school districts. These boundaries do more than divide. They weaken our shared sense of responsibility and possibility.5
Our history, from the Dred Scott Decision to the erasure of Indigenous communities and the destruction of Black neighborhoods like Mill Creek
Valley, lingers in our soil. It continues to shape our present and threatens our future.678
At the intersection of these challenges lies an economy rooted in preserving and maximizing the profit and well-being of a select few through top-down, corporate-focused economic development approaches at the expense of caring for the collective, all who call St. Louis home.
If we want a different future, we must confront our past honestly, dismantle old systems, and create an economy that nurtures the wealth and well-being of everyday people on the land we know as St. Louis.
In December 2023, we were 14 strangers. By January 2024, we answered a call: re-design the entire St. Louis economy with imagination, ambition, and a commitment to plant new seeds. To us, the task felt urgent. A calling we couldn't ignore.
A selection team reviewed nearly 100 applications and chose us as the Design Fellows of the community design process to reimagine St. Louis's economy. Over several months, our task was to steward a diverse community of St. Louisans to create a roadmap for a thriving and just economy.
We recognized our distinct differences — our countries of origin, ages, professional backgrounds, economic experiences, heights, genders, skin tones, and sexual orientations. Yet, we found our differences to be nourishment for building the vision and roadmap towards a just, care-based economy.
We knew that serving as Design Fellows depended on understanding the current economic system and uprooting our unjust history and reality. This meant exploring relationships, power dynamics, policies, practices, resource flows, and more. We gathered seeds to nurture into solutions to feed our liberation.
After dedicating thousands of hours to this process, we are no longer strangers. Now, as a beloved community, we are united by our differences. Amidst the tragedy of understanding the economy as it is, we found joy. We have felt the magnetism of a new economy on the horizon. The economy we have dreamed up together.
This work demanded reckoning. We spent long days reading, researching, and facilitating hard conversations. We filled rooms with post-its reflecting heartbreaks, hopes, critiques, and solutions. We found restoration through storytelling and listening.
As we imagined together, we saw clearly the interconnectedness of our systems. How mental models around money, land, labor, and business, and our policies and laws, all shape the quality of our lives. In designing a new economy, we knew we must address five key levers:
1. Family well-being and public infrastructure
5. Ecosystem development, coordination, and governance
Our economy is like a river that has been dammed and diverted, forced into channels that serve extraction over collective well-being. But when obstacles are removed, rivers find their way back and life returns: fish spawn, plants root, wetlands breathe. We can restore the natural flow of a St. Louis economy that nourishes rather than depletes, that heals rather than harms.
But, this is no overnight feat. This is lifelong, long-term work to tend to the soil and roots, so we can one day harvest the crops that give us life instead of taking it, build our wealth and resources instead of stripping them, and provide us with joy and community instead of despair and isolation.
Like vast mycelium (fungus) networks, those building a liberated future must stay deeply connected by sharing wisdom, coordinating, and moving from survival to sustainability. What might surface as a sudden revolution to some, we know will be the hard, generational, collaborative work of us who believed that we could seed a future of light, love, resource, and wellness in today's darkness, cold, wind, and rain.
Today, we are honored to share the culmination of our design work. This Playbook is critical in the growing work that aims to liberate us from our restrictive economy. As a beloved community and an ecosystem of change agents, we declare the vision, values, outcomes, and solutions of a new economy that will better care for us and those to come. We are proud of the vision we created in collaboration with 1,000 other St. Louisans, and we hope you will join us in realizing it.
“Movements must envision a different economy altogether, and organize to put it into place. So, what comes next? What does a more democratic economy look, taste, and feel like?“
– Steve Dubb and Rithika Ramamurthy9
Grappling with our history is hard but necessary. In our analysis of the history of the economy, we confronted ugly truths that sparked deep sorrow. We better understood how the exorbitant wealth of a few has come at the expense of shared prosperity for the many. Grappling with this history together, while painful, also created spaces for healing. We were better able to understand the root causes. That analysis of the past equipped us to disrupt the harms of our economy that we still experience today, while charting a course to a different future.
A new economy requires a different kind of process and “product.” We began this process because we recognized that the status quo approaches to economic development, inclusion, and growth are insufficient and incredibly unjust. That truth is echoed in the data and in the stories of everyday St. Louisans. So, we set out to honor and practice the values of the world as they should and can be, instead of repeating the patterns of the world as it is.
And so, in the Reimagining STL’s Economy community design process, we were as thoughtful about the elements and people that shaped the design process as we were about the contents of this Playbook.
“E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G—is connected. The soil needs rain, organic matter, air, worms and life in order to do what it needs to do to give and receive life. Each element is an essential component.”
– Dara Cooper1
The process was open to the public. We asked community members to make two commitments to foster an imaginative process. First, we called on community members to recognize the reality that the economy isn’t working for enough people. Second, we asked community members to
commit to reimagining the economy, grounded in principles of collective well-being and democracy.
We did our best to make the space accessible by providing childcare, meals, transportation, and stipends. We adapted month-to-month based on feedback.
We engaged in political education, learning, and dialogue as much as we engaged in ideation. We paired research with lived experiences. And, we convened unlikely stakeholders and institutions, who didn’t always agree, yet they embraced the power and possibility of being in a shared space to ask tough questions about who we are and who we can become as a region.
We acknowledged the economy's complexity by continuously applying a systems change lens. We explored policy solutions, programmatic solutions, narrative change solutions, and more. We consistently practiced democracy. We voted online, used dot stickers, took surveys, and even voted on who won the famous 2024 rap battle between Drake and Kendrick. We shared the results openly with everyone.
The process we engaged in was evidence at the small scale of who and what St. Louis as a region can be when:
• We commit to taking a hard look at the data (both stories and numbers) and inequities,
• We commit to hard conversations that honor each other’s brilliance and full humanity,
• We recognize everyone’s human right to wellness and wealth, and
• We see the interconnectedness of every family, neighborhood, and institution.
Let’s be honest. There’s no simple solution to a complex, multi-century-old problem. As much as we attempted to make cuts and deliver a neatly packaged and “manageable” set of prioritized solutions, we continued to arrive at the same conclusion. For centuries, many kinds of economic harms have permeated the soil of St. Louis and America more broadly. Slavery, exploitation, theft, and violence have poisoned the social crops, gardens, and lands meant to care for us. More recently, this has widened the wage gap, tilted tax laws to benefit billionaires over working people, and stripped everyday workers of the power and benefits they create through their labor.
“Change is rarely straightforward. Sometimes it’s as complex as chaos theory and as slow as evolution. Even things that seem to happen suddenly arise from deep roots in the past or from long-dormant seeds.”
-Rebecca Solnit10
As a result, the Playbook proposes nearly 70 essential solutions because there are no shortcuts to liberation. This is sophisticated, complex, revolutionary work, and we won’t dare waver from that as we transition from dreaming to doing. We know we can accomplish it together, if we see this as generational work.
As we shift our economy from extraction to collective benefit for everyday workers, we can learn a lot from nature. The natural world teaches us about interdependence, mutual benefit, and the complexity of changing social systems. All of these lessons apply when transforming a local economy: the roots and the seeds, the rain and streams, the sun and wind, fungi and flowers, trees and seasons.
They all are unique yet connected. Each serves a purpose and works in coordination to sustain life. They change and transform to adapt to current and future conditions.
In modern society, we are deceived to believe we are not connected to the natural world. But we are all part of the same complex web of life as all other living beings on the planet. Today’s economy fails to reflect that interconnectedness and instead isolates and exploits the majority to benefit a few.
So, we state our solutions throughout this Playbook with an honoring of the natural world. Making this connection challenges and reminds us that coordination, organizing, adaptability, care, nourishment, and revolution are both natural and necessary for lasting economic change that serves the majority instead of the minority.
The solutions in this Playbook seek to tilt the scales towards the well-being of workers as powerful and collective shapers of our economy.
We hope you read this Playbook with curiosity — Post-its and highlighters by your side. We hope you reflect and discuss the contents of this Playbook with others.
We hope you feel both challenged by and willing to challenge the ideas and theories articulated in this Playbook. And we hope you feel compelled to act, that you see where your community is calling on you to be part of the change. Then, we hope you get into the weeds with us. Dig in to dismantle harmful economic practices and structures from the roots. Improve the health of the soil so that it can better sustain life. Plant seeds of a just and sustainable economy. Then nurture and sustain those seedlings throughout the changing seasons, because transformation work is hard, long-term, work.
And we, St. Louis, need you more than ever. No matter who or where you are.
“After a rain, mushrooms appear on the surface of the earth as if from nowhere. Many come from a sometimes vast underground fungus that remains invisible and largely unknown. What we call mushrooms, mycologists call the fruiting body of the larger, less visible fungus. Uprisings and revolutions are often considered to be spontaneous, but it is the less visible long-term organizing and groundwork – or underground work – that often laid the foundation. Changes in ideas and values also result from work done by writers, scholars, public intellectuals, social activists and participants in social media. To many, it seems insignificant or peripheral until very different outcomes emerge from transformed assumptions about who and what matters, who should be heard and believed, who has rights.”
-Rebecca Solnit10
Our economy is failing to meet the needs of the majority of St. Louisans.
of St. Louis households have a net wealth of zero or negative, meaning they own no assets or they owe more than they own.
Nearly 70% of all households with children in St. Louis City have an income below $75,000 and do not earn enough to afford everyday living expenses.
When the families who call St. Louis home don’t thrive, our region’s collective prosperity is hindered. It is time we uproot centuries of economic harm and replace it with an economy rooted in care, repair, justice, and wellbeing.
According to The Democracy Collaborative, Community Wealth Building “is an economic development model that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets. It challenges the failing approaches that have been widely accepted in economic development for too long, and addresses wealth inequality at its core.”
While this is a newer term, it grows out of the wisdom and practices of indigenous communities and communities of color, which have modeled collective approaches for generations.
After approximately a year and a half of research, 3,000 hours of community design, and over 1,000 stakeholder engagements, WEPOWER and its partners release The New STL Economy PLAYBOOK: Planting + Growing Our Collective Wealth, with a focus on transforming St. Louis’ local economy in response to the racial-wealth crisis. The Playbook offers a community-designed and research-informed vision and roadmap for transforming the local economy to support the wealth and well-being of all families who call St. Louis home.
Review the full Playbook beginning June 25th, 2025.
We envision an economy that prioritizes the dignity, well-being, and basic needs of every resident of St. Louis. Every family in every neighborhood feels safe and has access to quality housing, nutritious food, living wages, a robust transit system, quality and consistent municipal services, flourishing parks and green spaces, and quality education from birth.
St. Louis will be reborn as an economy that cares for its people, especially reflected in the experiences offered to protect and nurture our children. St. Louis will be celebrated for its new economy because we have abandoned our fierce protection of divides and fragmentation, and instead, maintain an unwavering commitment to our collective prosperity.
The New STL Economy PLAYBOOK: Planting + Growing Our Collective Wealth offers 20 solutions across five categories and nearly 70 sub-solutions to achieve lasting, systemic change in our region.
• FWB-1: Ensure everyone’s basic needs are met
• FWB-2: Resource basic public infrastructure equitably and consistently
• BL-1: Increase worker power and ownership
• BL-2: Increase community ownership, accountability, and progressive procurement
• BL-3: Increase and diversify the capital and support available to businesses
• BL-4: Reimagine workforce readiness and job access supports to equip workers of all kinds to thrive
• EDC-1: Coordinate and resource the region’s transition to Community Wealth Building
• EDC-2: Grow public awareness and understanding of Community Wealth Building
• EDC-3: Provide technical assistance, training, and support to residents and initiatives
• EDC-4: Build political power to achieve Community Wealth Building policy and systems changes
• EDC-5: Track progress and conduct ongoing research to inform future efforts
• CT-1: Repair harm to historically exploited communities through structural and policy changes, including an equitable city-county merger and reparations
• CT-2: Adopt progressive taxation to reduce the burden on low-wealth households
• CT-3: Reallocate public resources to invest in community wealth and well-being, divesting from harmful or ineffective areas
• CT-4: Prioritize community-led approaches to capital management and distribution
• LP-1: Center and resource marginalized neighborhoods, developers, and residents to enable equitable land use, development, and ownership
• LP-2: Shift policies on management of land, property, and housing to prioritize community needs and expand access to ownership
• LP-3: Modernize and coordinate equitable land use planning and development policies
• LP-4: Ensure accountability of developers and decision-makers on land use, making use of resources transparent
• LP-5: Promote environmentally sustainable land use and development
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
-James Baldwin11
Pre-1800s
The economy we experience today can feel overwhelming, but is rooted in a long history of events, practices, behaviors, and culture that we can trace together. To begin our transformation of the St. Louis economy, we must analyze the environment that some of our ancestors created yet we all inherited. What has rotted and what has blossomed all originate in the story of our region and country.
Below is a brief and partial timeline that highlights examples as a glimpse into a larger web of events, connections, actors, and traumas that set the foundation for the ground we walk on today. We aim to show how a set of events that caused economic harm and resistance shaped the problem statements, vision, and solutions we charted in this Playbook to guide a different future.
• Founding of St. Louis (1764): on land originally cared for by Mississippian native tribes, the city is established by fur traders after the land transferred from French to Spanish ownership.12
• Smallpox Epidemics (1780–1782): “Nearly as soon as Europeans arrived, disease began to ravage Native tribes. Indigenous people had never been exposed to such diseases and had no immunity.” Smallpox was one of the most deadly diseases that impacted Indigenous communities, and led to an extreme decrease in their population and power in Missouri.”13
• Louisiana Purchase (1803): “The Louisiana Purchase, an 1803 land deal between the United States and France, doubled the size of the United States and made the future state of Missouri a part of the American nation.”
• The Missouri Compromise (1820): was a legislative trade allowing Missouri to enter the union as a slave state in exchange for Maine entering as a nonslave state and barring slavery in the northern portion of the Louisiana Purchase.14
• Dred Scott Case, 1857: Considered by many scholars as the worst decision ever handed down by the Supreme Court. Dred Scott petitioned for his freedom as an enslaved person who had resided in both slave and free states arguing he therefore had rights as a former Illinois resident. The decision ruled “that African Ame1800'sricans were not and could never be citizens of the United States and that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.”15
• The Great Divorce (1876): A voter ballot initiative, following a contested Board of Freeholders process, that separated the city from the county, drastically shaping the region’s future.16
• St. Louis General Strike (1877): A railroad worker strike in St. Louis that emerged from the national Great Strike of 1877, which had profound effects on American business and politics.17
• East St. Louis Race Riot (1917): Due to labor tensions around growing Black populations during the Great Migration from the South, white residents killed hundreds of Black workers and families, causing over 6,000 residents to flee out of fear.18
• Shelley v. Kraemer, 1948: When the Shelleys, a Black family, bought property in a north St Louis City neighborhood, they did not know about a 1911 restrictive covenant that limited the neighborhood to people “of the Caucasian race.” The Kraemers and other white neighbors sought to enforce the covenant and the case went to the Supreme Court who ultimately ruled that the restrictive deeds violated the 14th amendment.19
• Urban Renewal (1950s-1970s): The Housing Act of 1949 launched 25 years of federal grants to seize and clear “blighted” or “slum” neighborhoods in the name of modernizing infrastructure. In St. Louis this included the destruction of majority-Black communities in Mill Creek Valley and the West End.20
• White Flight (1940-2000s): White families fled the City of St. Louis for the inner and then outer suburbs, partly aided by federal policy, leaving behind a fragmented landscape of municipalities orginally used to aid segregation.21
• Jefferson Bank Protest (1963): The local coalition of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) led a protest against the lack of Black employees at the bank and other major employers in the region. Hundreds of demonstrators were arrested for their roles in the protest.22
• Percy Green Scales Arch (1964): In the midst of hiring discrimination at construction companies, two Black activists scaled the half-constructed arch in protest, which led to the National Park Service pressuring firms to hire more Black workers and contractors.23
• St. Louis School Desegregation (1980s): The Supreme Court’s “with all deliberate speed” directive in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case actually took about 30 years to become real in St. Louis where a court case led to the creation of a desegregation program.24
• Fight for $15 (2010s): The movement began with fast food workers in New York City, but soon became a rallying cry in cities all across the county. In St. Louis City, leaders succeeded in securing a $15 minimum wage for government workers and (contested) increases to the state minimum.25
• Ferguson Uprising (2014): On Saturday, August 9th—just weeks after his high school graduation—Michael Brown Jr. was gunned down by a police officer in his grandmother’s apartment complex. This killing ignited the global Black Lives Matter movement. 26
• Minimum Wage and Paid Sick Leave (2024-2025): The 2024 voter-approved proposition A guaranteed workers paid sick leave and would increase the minimum wage to $15/hour within two years. However, in the following legislative session, Missouri republicans overwhelmingly voted to repeal the will of the voters.27
* This is a high-level, non-exhaustive list of key events and policies that shaped St. Louis’s economy. Many other resources can support a deeper understanding of local and national economic history, such as Mapping Decline, The Road to Zero Wealth, Dismantling the Divide, The Broken Heart of America, and more.
These events have shaped the region we live in today. Many of these events resulted in people being stripped of their inherent dignity and rights. They cut countless lives short prematurely, leaving legacies of massive and unresolved injustices and trauma. At the same time, it shows a rich lineage of people who wanted a better, more just system. They pushed to make it a reality. It’s a legacy we are working to continue.
>50%
The richest 0.1% of Americans own $11.95 trillion worth of businesses. That’s more than the total business assets held by the bottom 90% combined.30 21% 0.1%
21% of St. Louis households have a net wealth of zero or negative, meaning they own no assets or they owe more than they own.28
More than half of Black households have an annual income below $35,000 in the City of St. Louis.29
*Note: The median represents the middle value, with half of the data above and half below.
This Playbook arrives at a time when many major plans have been released over the past few years and framed as guiding roadmaps for achieving regional economic growth, inclusion, and justice. These plans come from municipal governments, civic and economic development institutions, and grassroots coalitions.
On top of that, there have been shifts in the structure and leadership of major institutions that especially shape our economic conditions and resource allocations. This includes new leadership and short-lived tenures in elected, civic, and philanthropic roles. It also includes the formation of collaboratives like the Anchor Action Network and the merging of previous economic development organizations and chambers of commerce into Greater St. Louis (GSL).
Not only are there plans, but there are resources flowing to, throughout, and away from, and our region. These include the tail-end of federal COVID relief dollars, other large spending bills, Rams settlement funds, and more recent efforts to cut government spending.
A strategic plan from the City of St. Louis’s economic development arm with the goals of strengthening neighborhoods, closing the wealth gap, expanding the tax base, and growing the city population.31
A regional strategic plan commissioned by Greater STL Inc., a business league representing many of the largest businesses in the region, focused on boosting economic growth, increasing the number of quality, livingwage jobs, and reducing racial disparities in employment and wealth-generation.32
A comprehensive policy agenda was developed and endorsed by more than 40 grassroots organizations. It focused on promoting universal housing, environmental justice, and livability for all St. Louisans. It aimed to build inclusive democracy, ensuring equitable taxation and adequate funding for youth and education, and transforming public safety.33
Between 2020 and 2024 there was a massive increase in the availability of public funds, including the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the funds from the lawsuit against the Rams football team, and more. Now, we see a shift in the opposite direction with a focus on limiting taxes and government spending.
Energy works best when it’s focused and aimed at a shared goal.
Residents (especially those on the margins) deserve nothing less than a transformational approach. For the recent shifts in the region’s structures, resources, and leadership to positively impact the life outcomes of everyday people who call St. Louis home, we must ask and answer a series of questions focused on accountability and power.
• What’s our region’s economic theory of change—vision and outcomes, assumptions, challenges, and approaches—that analyzes and centers the well-being of the many over the profits of a few?
• What shifts of power must occur to ensure we don’t have the same types of leaders in power driving the same behaviors?
• How do we support and sustain daring and community-centered leadership that will most experience retaliation for disrupting the existing economy?
• What are the systemic action steps—policy changes, resource allocations, narrative shaping, coordination, and more—we must commit to?
• How do we continually hold ourselves accountable knowing this is multigenerational work to accomplish the outcomes articulated in this Playbook?
This Playbook begins to answer these questions. We activated everyday people, created space to embrace our wildest imaginations, and aligned on a shared set of values for a more collective and democratic economy.
Only by upending the power dynamics of the past can we chart a different, more just path for a thriving economic future. The solutions that emerged from this Community Wealth Building design process make the vision of community wealth and well-being possible. They lay out the practices and structures for a transformed economy with greater local control for neighbors and residents.
For the past several years, WEPOWER, a St. Louis-based social change organization, has supported Black and Latinx entrepreneurs with business growth and activated community members to design and organize for a very specific, handful of policies that advance economic justice. Over these years, WEPOWER also became familiar with several important existing initiatives and organizations working to build community wealth, including Solidarity Economy STL, Cooperation St. Louis, North Sarah Food Hub, A Red Circle, and more.
WEPOWER came to the realization that support for entrepreneurs of color is often held up as a silver bullet solution to the racial wealth gap. Yet, in reality, it’s an insufficient idea sometimes described as “Black capitalism.” In the wake of the uprisings for racial justice in the summer of 2014 and again in the summer of 2020, more and more advocates challenged this approach, identifying that it fails to solve the fundamental flaws in our economy and often diverts attention away from the need for deeper systemic change. 37
These experiences led the WEPOWER
community to realize that a comprehensive regional strategy, grounded in a systems change approach, is needed. It will steward our region toward a far greater level of impact than individual organizations can achieve through direct service or single-issue policy campaigns. Regional economic transformation will take all of us. We need a dynamic, long-term vision and a focused yet robust set of strategies to improve the lives of everyday St. Louisans across the entire region.
“The radical imagination is not just about dreaming of different futures. It’s about bringing those possibilities back from the future to work on the present, to inspire action and new forms of solidarity today. Likewise, the radical imagination is about drawing on the past, telling different stories about how the world came to be the way it is, remembering the power and importance of yesterday’s struggles, and honoring the way they live on in the present. The radical imagination also represents our capacity to imagine and make common cause with the experiences of other people. It undergirds our ability to build solidarity across boundaries and borders, real or imagined. In this sense, it is the basis of solidarity and the struggle against oppression, which are key to building [...] robust, resilient, and powerful movements.”
A dynamic set of stakeholders showed up across six months to develop “The New STL Economy PLAYBOOK: Planting + Growing Our Collective Wealth,” and determined the essential next steps to move from dreaming to action.
Through a rigorous selection process, 14 community leaders were selected to co-facilitate the Playbook creation, particularly the four Design Days. Design Fellows co-chaired each of the Solution Teams (the work groups) convened at each event.
Open to the public with the expectation of consistent attendance, members participated in one of the five Solution Teams. These work groups met across four eight-hour Design Days to engage in community design work.
An advisory board served as thought partners on the process. They supported the synthesis of what emerged from Design Days and helped inform critical steps postPlaybook release. The Council was made up of institutional representatives from diverse sectors including philanthropy, government, civic, grassroots/movement-building, economic development (banks, community development organizations, Community Development Financial Institutions also known as CDFIs, etc.), and nonprofits.
A team of behind-the-scenes staff who provided the capacity and infrastructure for a successful process, focusing on:
• Research and synthesis of Design Day insights
• Logistics, project management, and administration
• Training and supporting Design Fellows
• Facilitation of Design Council and other meetings
Aira Durham
Brittany Raji Alberty
Morgan Bond
Casey Stinemetz
Charles Owens
Cheyenne Green
Christopher Willcox
Dwight Cox
Jason Eccker
Jess Bellomo
Jessica Moore
Kisha Jackson
Lavinia McCoy
Leslie Hernández
Lorine Pattin
Marilyn Green
Mellarie Thomas
Onisha Winston
Raeann Benavente
Sarah Kaplan
Shanda Bonner
Stephen Cowap
Susan M Armstrong
Tashara Earl
Tiaraa Nicholson
Tyree Thomas
Vivian Williams
Diamond Gordon
Julie Nicolai
Lamarr Futrell
Lavon Royal-Reed
LySyin Lobster
Markeitta Alicia Jordan
Mercedes Jacobs
Phyllis Robinson
Shaneal Rashun Clayborne
Shelia Pargo
Tepra Wells
Todd El
Alexis Creamer
Anna Asiedu
Curtis Stuesse
Deitra Colquitt
Lee Furnace
Pamela Greiner
Gurlovleen Rathore
Jane Vita
Kacie Smart, PhD, LPC
Kayla Moore
Keba Jones
Krystal Barnett
Philip Deitch
Rachel Deffenbaugh
Tammy Tate
Amen Ra
Arlice Mcelroy Thompson
Basmin Red Deer
Christie Holland
Daniela Velazquez
Deanna Jones
Ebony Washington
Justin Idleburg
Mackenzie Money
Malik Morris
Markus A. Haskins
Marsha Nelson
Luisa Otero
Reina Stovall
Saida Cornejo Zuñiga
Sandra Keely
Alisa Morris
Amaya Reynolds
Carrie Oliver
Deborah Rice Carter
Elizabeth Embree
Iva Torres
Johnnie Day II
Kathryn Beskrowni
Keisha Sain
Lanor Payne
Marsha' Reynolds
Sheila McCoy
“But just as roses can grow in concrete, together we can drive new life out of seemingly barren systems.”
W
e reimagined a new St. Louis Economy through 3,000+ hours of collective time, 1,000+ community conversations and engagements, and six months of community gatherings.
Solutions Team members worked across five areas. These areas eventually evolved (and, in some cases, combined) to analyze and align on specific challenges and develop specific solutions for them. Through our co-creation process for this Playbook, we eventually honed in on five core priority areas for local economic transformation.
• Business and Labor addresses the need to increase the power and ownership of working people, democratize and localize the business ecosystem, and make the economy work for workers.
• Capital and Taxation addresses advancing policies that repair harm for communities that have suffered from capital extraction and exploitation. This includes how we design taxes, how public resources are managed, and the availability of community-centered approaches toward capital management and flow.
• Land and Property addresses the underlying conditions that inhibit equitable development, land ownership and use. It shifts power dynamics to center communities of color and increases accountability among developers.
• Family Well-Being and Public Infrastructure ensures that everyone’s basic needs are met and that basic public infrastructure is resourced in an equitable and consistent fashion.
• Ecosystem Development and Coordination involves building the region’s capacity to coordinate and fund our economy’s transition towards community wealth building, and advancing public awareness and capacity around the ideas in this Playbook.
• Visioning: Community visions and values were crowdsourced through one-on-one conversations and a survey.
Phase Zero 2022-2024
Phase One February 2024
Phase Two March 2024
• Analysis of Economic Models: Completed an analysis of various economic models and considered the context of St. Louis.
• National & Global Community Wealth Building Network Building: Grew the ecosystem of subject matter experts, partners, and advisors through joining and engaging in local and national networks and communities of practice focused on community wealth building.
• Political Education: Introduction to the history of the economy, popular narratives about the economy, alternative local economic change models, development of shared definitions, introduction to the concept of systems change and tools to support system analysis.
• Result from Design Day One: Defined problem statements.
• Political Education: Deepened understanding of problems and introductions to community-wealth building-centric solutions through presentations and conversations with 20+ global subject matter experts.
• Result from Design Day Two: Refined problem statements, research questions, and brainstormed ideas to respond to problem statements.
Phase Three
April 2024
Phase Four
May 2024
Phase Five
July 2024 - 2025
• Political Education: Introduction to the purpose and elements of a theory of change (ToC), reviewed a draft ToC, and analyzed research aligned to ideas generated during Phase Two.
• Result from Design Day Three: Refined ToC, reviewed solutions, and ranking of them against agreed-upon criteria.
• Political Education: Re-grounded Solutions Team members in the key concepts introduced throughout phases one, two, and three.
• Result from Design Day Four: Further refined the Theory of Change and solutions and prioritized potential policies, pilots, and investments to pursue during the first phase of implementation after Playbook release.
• Soft launch of Playbook for feedback from critical stakeholders.
• Identification of potential partners for pilots, advocacy campaigns, and more.
• Development of an ecosystem, coordination, and governance strategy to steward the long-term implementation of the Playbook.
A Note About K-12 Public Education:
We consistently hear about the important role of K-12 Public Education in our economy’s history and future. We agree. However, we also know that K-12 public education deserves its own focused, wellresourced, and thoughtful community design process. Having a dedicated K-12 process should honor the sacredness of formal public structures and ensure deep consideration of the approaches that support young people’s education and nurturing. Instead, this Playbook mentions the need to engage, educate, and support young people in building Community Wealth and achieving a thriving local economy.
A Note About the Environment:
Our country’s prioritization of profit above all else has led to our natural environment bearing the brunt of insurmountable harm. So much so that our sustainability as humans on this earth is at risk. As a result, we cannot reimagine an economic system that does not honor and care for our natural environment. We sought to apply an Environmental Justice and Sustainability lens to our solutions outlined in this Playbook.
We were often asked “How is community defined?” This is a valid and complex question. In response, we believe Community has multiple layers. At the core of this process, we centered the wellbeing of marginalized Black and Latinx community members across St. Louis City and St. Louis County. Throughout the design process and reflected in many solutions, there’s a focus on how neighborhoodlevel economic change must center Black and Latinx residents. We also recognize the value and role of a broader set of stakeholders who drive and are impacted by the economy. Targeted Universalism best describes our thinking around this question: the approach “supports the needs of the particular while reminding us that we are all part of the same social fabric."39
We used resources like the Six Conditions of Systems Change to analyze what’s holding problems in place and what variety of solutions can transform our economic system. These conditions include mental models, power dynamics, relationships and connections, policies, practices, and resource flows.40
We consistently engaged in Human-Centered Design activities that honored the brilliance of community members. We documented thousands of Post-Its filled with challenges, ideas, and questions. Then we organized these Post-Its into themes and collective insights.41
We introduced, discussed, and practiced the principles of collective impact to disrupt the pattern of a single entity or set of traditionally powerful actors shaping the vision and strategy for economic change. Collective impact emphasizes starting with a common agenda, establishing shared measurement, fostering mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and a strong backbone team focused on alignment and coordination.42
We recognize the necessity and beauty of collective learning – the exchange of wisdom and the making sense of our insights as a community of committed and curious St. Louisans. Each Design Day had a Political Education element that preceded our discussions and decisions.
“Leaders who do not act dialogically, but insist on imposing their decisions, do not organize the people--they manipulate them.” (Freire 2017) We embraced the complexity, healing nature, and emergence of ideas only possible through dedicated time for shared reflection and discussion.
We used multiple ways to make decisions, from digital votes to physical dot stickers as our ballots. We leaned into the essence of who we want to become in a reimagined economy.
Organizing takes humility and selflessness and patience and rhythm while our ultimate goal of liberation will take many expert components. Some of us build and fight for land, healthy bodies, healthy relationships, clean air, water, homes, safety, dignity, and humanizing education. Others of us fight for food and political prisoners and abolition and environmental justice. Our work is intersectional and multifaceted. Nature teaches us that our work has to be nuanced and steadfast. And more than anything, that we need each other—at our highest natural glory—in order to get free.
- Dara Cooper43
Community Wealth Building actively creates collective well-being by building community-owned and controlled wealth and power.
According to The Democracy Collaborative, Community Wealth Building “is an economic development model that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets. It challenges the failing approaches that have been widely accepted in economic development for too long, and addresses wealth inequality at its core.”44
While this is a newer term, it grows out of the wisdom and practices of Indigenous communities and communities of color that have modeled collective approaches for generations.
At its core, Community Wealth Building is about shifting our economy:
From One That
pulls wealth away from communities and concentrates it in the hands of a small group of individuals
racially unjust and socially inequitable
environmentally unsustainable
To One That
builds and keeps wealth in local communities of ordinary people, especially communities that have historically been stripped of wealth
racially just and socially equitable
environmentally sustainable - (i.e. meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of those in the future to meet their needs)
• Economy - The system of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services within a region or country that affects the overall well-being of residents.
• Capitalism - An economic system characterized by private ownership of the means of production, where individuals and businesses operate for profit in a competitive market with minimal government intervention. The essential feature of capitalism is the motive to make a profit.
• Racial Capitalism - The idea that capitalism developed in the context of the exploitation of certain racial groups and immigrants—leading to gaps in economic opportunities and outcomes for those groups that continue today.
• Black Capitalism - The assumption that “the path to racial equality is paved with Black business success.” This worldview argues that if racism has left Black Americans with less capital than white Americans, then the solution is to help Black Americans eventually own businesses as large and profitable as those of white Americans (Coleman 2019).
• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - GDP is a traditional way to measure the overall size and health of an economy. It adds up the total value of all goods and services that are produced and sold in a region or country over a certain period of time, like a year (Callen 2008).
• Neoliberalism - A political and economic set of beliefs that advocates for free-market capitalism (where prices are determined by unrestricted competition and monopolies on a market are possible), including limited government intervention, deregulation, and privatization, often associated with a focus on individual responsibility and reduced social welfare programs.45
• Racial Wealth Gap - The gap in wealth accumulation between different racial and ethnic groups.
• Solidarity Economy - An approach to building a just and sustainable economy that prioritizes people and the planet over endless profit and growth.
• Policies - Government, institutional and organizational rules, regulations, and priorities that guide the entity’s own and others’ actions.46
• Practices - Adopted activities of institutions, coalitions, networks, and other entities targeted at improving social and environmental progress. Also, within the entity, the procedures, guidelines, or informal shared habits comprise their work.46
• Resource Flows - How money, people, knowledge, information, and other assets such as infrastructure are allocated and distributed.46
• Relationships and Connections - Quality of connections and communication occurring among actors in the system, especially among those with differing histories and viewpoints.46
• Power Dynamics - The distribution of decision-making power, authority, and both formal and informal influence among individuals and organizations.46
• Mental Models - Habits of thought—deeply held beliefs and assumptions and taken-forgranted ways of operating that influence how we think, what we do, and how we talk.46
• Collective Impact – The commitment of a group of actors from different sectors to a common agenda for solving a specific social problem, using a structured form of collaboration.46
• Movement-Building – The process of building community-based power among people and organizations to achieve radical social change.47
We envision an economy that prioritizes the dignity, well-being, and basic needs of every St. Louisan. Every family in every neighborhood feels safe and has access to quality housing, nutritious food, and living wages.They benefit from a robust transit system, quality and consistent municipal services, flourishing parks and green spaces, and quality education from birth.
St. Louis will be reborn as an economy that cares for its people, especially reflected in the experiences offered to protect and nurture our children. St. Louis will be celebrated for its new economy because we abandon our fierce protection of divides and fragmentation. Instead, we will keep an unwavering commitment to our collective prosperity.
On the road towards and in a transformed St. Louis, we value an economy that is nourished by:
• Thriving neighborhoods. We believe neighborhoods should be thriving ecosystems that are full of joy and pride, a sense of belonging and community. We envision neighborhoods as places where dollars are continuously circulated among neighbors, businesses, local anchor institutions, and through art and cultural experiences. Every street corner is a testament to our shared values, history, and culture.
• Collective care and well-being. We believe our economy must be designed to center the collective care and well-being of people— including our babies, young people, and families—and the land and environment in which we live, work, and play. Instead of protecting the wealth of a few at the harm of the many and the land that we share, we
have a shared responsibility to ensure every resident’s well-being and basic needs are met in a care-based economy.
• Repair as the path to healing. We recognize systemic violence and harm to Black and Indigenous people are deeply part of the St. Louis story and the history of our economy. And beyond that direct harm, this extractive system hasn’t worked for working class people across all races. So, we work to repair the harm through truth-telling, art, reparations, and healing.
• Collective power and community ownership. We value an economy where everyday people in every neighborhood have the opportunity to build and wield power toward their needs, dreams, and well-being. We recognize that our economy continues to concentrate power in a few hands, which has led to a lack of wealth for the many.
• Mental Models and Power Dynamics: The popular beliefs and narratives about the economy preserve the status quo and allow power dynamics that lead to wealth hoarding and prevent economic mobility. These mental models include, but are not limited to, valuing individualism, consumerism, and growth and profit no matter the harm to our people and planet.
• The Flow of Capital: Access to resources and investment is vital for the creation of wealth. In our current economy, that access is heavily privileged toward those that already have wealth. And beyond that, it funnels resources (through taxes, wage theft, and more) from working class people towards people with high net worths. This imbalance prevents widespread access to the resources necessary for community well-being and puts a financial burden on those already experiencing the most harm.
• Businesses Benefit A Few: The benefits of business and economic productivity are concentrated among a small class of owners. At the same time, businesses rely on large
numbers of workers who don’t share in the wealth their labor generates. These economic disparities prevent a resilient local economy where prosperity is created for all members of the society.
• Lack of Worker Rights and Family Wellbeing: Our economy undermines workers’ ability to secure fair wages, ensure safe working conditions, grow wealth, and support their families. This zero-sum approach (where one person’s gain is another person’s loss) limits the overall economic potential and quality of life in the broader St. Louis community.
• Land Exploitation, Exclusion, and Extraction: Unfair, profit-centered practices—like harmful land use and property laws—have pushed families out of their communities and made it harder to build regions that work for everyone. These actions have also seriously hurt the environment, causing loss of plants and animals, and accelerating climate change.
A shift from unprecedented funding becoming available for local-level projects and partnerships to improve the economy (including a wide range of federal funding, money from the Rams lawsuit, etc.), to an organized state and federal effort to cut funding for programs and initiatives that can especially support our most marginalized communities.
A robust network of anchor institutions with significant resources—jobs, dollars, land, etc.—is beginning to align efforts around equitable economic development.
Extreme regional fragmentation was created by and has been sustained in large part because of racism. Unlike most cities, which sit within a larger county, St. Louis City and St. Louis County are separate entities (In contrast, for example, Chicago sits within Cook County). Making this worse, St. Louis County, with a population of less than one million, has approximately 88 municipal governments, nearly 50 police departments, and 23 public school districts.
A new round of visions and plans focused on rebuilding the region’s economy has emerged, including, but not limited to, the Economic Justice Action Plan (2021), the People’s Plan 2.0 (2024), and the STL 2030 Jobs Plan (2021). St. Louis City and County both have comprehensive plans in development that will address land use and development, among other critical economic issues. These new and emerging plans imply a burst of energy across the region to address economic stagnation and injustice. Yet, they have a variety of values and theories of economic change, many of them without a focus on policy change – a critical lever for achieving community wealth and systems change.31 33 32
Pockets of community wealth building projects, programs, organizations, and collaborators exist across the region, including, but not limited to, Solidarity Economy St. Louis, Cooperation STL, the North Sarah Food Hub, FNRO / A.C.R.E.S. working to create a community-owned grocery store, and the North County Community Nexus. These demonstrate an appetite for cooperative approaches to uprooting the harm done to Black and other marginalized communities. This presents the promise and the need to better resource, coordinate, and scale existing and new Community Wealth Building (CWB) efforts to achieve population-level shifts across the entire region. 48 49 50
Coordinate and educate: Advance regional coordination toward a community-sourced community wealth building vision and agenda.
• Build and wield political power to shift policies at all levels of government by electing, appointing, and holding accountable our public officials.
• Form and align a broad coalition and governing body of residents, workers, businesses, groups, and anchor institutions to implement, measure, and assess progress.
• Advance continuous public awareness, education, and capacity building for people of all ages.
• Generate and leverage the resources and power of anchor institutions (e.g., hospitals and universities) to accelerate CWB coordination and impact.
Shift power and rights to workers and residents.
• Create new and convert existing businesses to be worker- and community-owned.
• Democratize the governance and ownership structures that drive key elements of our economy to shift how capital flows, businesses operate, and how land is used. This can be done by pursuing or enacting models like Community Investment Trusts, Community Controlled Investment Funds, Community Land Trusts, Community Holding Companies, and Community Benefits Agreements.
• Advance policies to ensure family well-being: universal healthcare, universal childcare/early childhood education, housing for all, universal living wage minimums, guaranteed income, and guaranteed jobs.
• Localize the economy to ensure access to services, goods, opportunities, and resources exist at the neighborhood level.
Divest and invest: Divest from extractive/wealth hoarding and harmful policies, practices, and institutions, AND reimagine and invest towards community wealth and well-being.
• Turn the taxing systems upside down. Limit the burden on poor people and increase the responsibility of the wealthiest residents.
• Increase transparency of where our tax dollars flow,how they are invested, and who intends to benefit.
• Pivot our tax dollars towards policies, programs, investments, and practices that support our well-being, especially through approaches that build community wealth and power.
• Apply an environmental sustainability lens to all economic decisions, policies, programs, and practices.
Repair and reparations: Provide reparations and commit to regional healing and reconciliation. Leverage art, storytelling, and awareness building of our racial and economic history in response to the systemic, historical, and pervasive harm and violence done to Black St. Louisans.
Because of the deep, multi-century, and pervasive harm that has resulted from slavery, racialized violence, theft, and exploitation, determining the best and most transformational approach to reparations is complex. Various value systems, proposals, and perspectives have shaped a robust and dynamic national dialogue about the future and path toward reparations.
To be thoughtful and respectful of the history of harm and the approach to repair harm, we do not seek to expedite what must be an intentional process of defining reparations. As we grapple with the complexity and many alternatives to be considered and imagined, what is clear is the inevitable necessity of reparations for our region and the country to redeem themselves and be guided by a moral compass toward a truly thriving and community-driven economy.51
Outcome #0: Healthy regional coordination towards CWB.
• 0.a Increased # of institutions who adopt CWB Theory of Change and Playbook solutions
• 0.b Increased positive public perception of the economy shifting to focus on CWB (via polling)
• 0.c Increased % of stakeholders involved in CWB efforts report quality coordination
• 0.d Increased membership of CWB coalition(s), coordinating entities, chambers of commerce
• 0.e Increased # of $ that flow to CWB Playbook solutions and CWB-aligned solutions
Outcome #1: Increased democracy and community power.
• 1.a Increased voter turnout
• 1.b Increased # of policies influenced, passed, or halted aligned to the CWB playbook
• 1.c Increased # of $ in community-controlled funds
• 1.d Increased community representation, diversity, engagement, and participation in CWB efforts
• 1.e Increased # of CWB champions elected into office and appointed to boards and influential institutions
• 1.f Increased # of workers who influence company policies
• 1.g Increased # of worker-owners (of their places of employment)
• 1.h Increased amount of land and properties collectively owned by communities
Outcome #2: Equitable distribution of wealth and resources.
• 2.a Close the racial wealth gap
• 2.b Increased # of high-wage jobs filled by (previously) low-wage workers and people of color.
• 2.c Increased median revenue generated by local small businesses and people of colorowned businesses
• 2.d Increased median # of tax $ invested/allocated to (community well-being practices across) neighborhoods with low socioeconomic status / Decreased % of dollars invested in harmful practices (police, oil, gas)
• 2.e Increased % of families with improved wealth-building skills
• 2.f Increased revenue and profitability of small businesses, people of color owned businesses, and worker-owned businesses
Outcome #3: Improved family and community well-being.
• 3.a Increased life expectancy for families of color/neighborhoods that are majority people of color
• 3.b Increased % of people who access affordable healthcare
• 3.c Increased % of families who access quality and affordable childcare
• 3.d Increased % of families who access universal basic income
• 3.e Increased % of families who access living/middle-class wages
• 3.f Increased % of families with access to quality and affordable food within X miles of their home
• 3.g Increased % of families who access affordable and quality housing
• 3.h Increased % of people who access quality retirement benefits, especially pensions
• 3.i Increased % of people who access paid family leave
• 3.j Creation of an affordable transit system that is accessible across all areas of the region
• 3.k Increased % of residents satisfied with municipal services and infrastructure
• 3.l Decreased % of residents experiencing housing instability
• 3.m Increased % of community members who feel safe
• 3.n Increased % of families with access to quality green spaces and public art within X miles of their home
Theme #1: Ensure everyone’s basic needs are met
1A. Advance state and local policies to support universal healthcare (including mental, dental, vision), while recognizing the role of federal legislation.
1B. Advance state and local policies to support universal access to childcare, age zero through five, while recognizing the role of federal legislation.
1C. Make housing a civil and human right. Provide guaranteed, quality, and well-maintained housing for all.
1D. Advance government policies that guarantee a universal basic income without penalizing working people or reducing wages.
1E. Continually increase the local and state minimum wage to be a living wage and steadily increase it to account for increases in the cost of living.
1F. Advance state and local policies that ensure universal access to high-quality retirement benefits and programs.
1G. Advance state and local policies that guarantee family leave and paid leave.
1H. Ensure everyone has access to quality, affordable food within their neighborhood.
1I. Support families experiencing poverty with healing from the negative impacts and traumas of our economic system by providing access to free, holistic, and culturally responsive services.
Theme #2: Resource basic public infrastructure equitably and consistently
2A. Invest in consistent and equitable public infrastructure.
2B. Invest in ensuring everyone has access to quality, affordable transit options.
Theme #1: Increase worker power and ownership
1A. Create new and convert existing businesses (that owners want to sell) to be workerowned and governed—especially in high-wage industries and industries that meet key community needs.
1B. Protect and strengthen worker centers’ and unions’ capacity to equitably increase worker power and rights, particularly those that represent marginalized groups.
1C. Reduce pay disparities by incentivizing companies to implement a maximum pay ratio.
Theme #2: Increase community ownership, accountability, and progressive procurement
2A. Form and/or acquire community-owned assets, such as holding companies and land, that businesses can lease.
2B. Strengthen and shift procurement (i.e. purchasing) policies and practices of anchor institutions and local governments to build community wealth by increasing local purchasing from Black and Latinx owned companies, small businesses, especially those that are workerowned and those that follow high road practices like paying living wages.
2C. Shift government policies and standards to fund and encourage businesses to focus on community wealth building (e.g. through preferential tax policies, providing grants or loan guarantees, etc.).
Theme #3: Increase and diversify the capital and support available to businesses
3A. Create and promote non-traditional funding sources that are accessible and share risk, while preserving local ownership of businesses (e.g. through local investment funds and financial institutions that maintain founder and/or worker ownership, rather than out-of-state private equity or venture capital investment).
3B. Increase access to and awareness of supports, trainings, and funding for small businesses.
3C. Increase access to space for small businesses to locate, especially at the neighborhood level.
Theme #4: Reimagine workforce readiness and job access support to equip workers of all kinds to thrive
4A. Reimagine and redefine what it means to be career or job-ready for living and highwage jobs to broaden access to opportunities for systemically excluded communities (including Black and Latinx people, people with disabilities, and people who were formerly incarcerated), starting at the company level and eventually policy/government level.
4B. Increase alignment and coordination between K12 schools and businesses to ensure career readiness, especially in high wage industries.
4C. Improve access to effective career and worker readiness opportunities (including apprenticeships) and remove barriers to work and career opportunities, especially for groups that face systemic barriers to high quality employment, such as people with disabilities and formerly incarcerated people.
4D. Reform compensation and incentive policies to make promotions and raises equitable and based on objective measures of performance to decrease racial and gender pay disparities, help fill vacancies, and retain workers.
Theme #1: Center and resource marginalized neighborhoods, developers, and residents to enable equitable land use, development, and ownership
1A. Build the capacity of and provide resources for Community Development Corporations (CDCs) and neighborhood associations to ensure they are community-centric and serve as neighborhood-based anchors throughout development projects and processes.
1B. Increase access to funding, support, and opportunities for Black developers and investors in real estate and propert projects, using an equity lens and especially focusing on those who are from and/or working in disinvested communities.
1C. Localize resources, services, and amenities like pharmacies, doctors’ offices, grocery stores, and libraries as much as possible at the neighborhood level to enhance community accessibility and convenience.
1D. Invest equitably in the repair, renovation, and preservation of existing housing stock.
1E. Restructure ward capital to be distributed equitably, rather than equally, to account for the legacies of systemic racism and disinvestment as well as the disparate levels of needs across neighborhoods today.
Theme #2: Shift policies on management of land, property, and housing to prioritize community needs and expand access to ownership
2A. Identify and pursue strategies to mitigate insurance and taxes as a financial barrier to housing security and upkeep.
2B. Increase access to diverse forms of homeownership, including individually and collectively owned single and multi-family housing, removing barriers that overwhelmingly limit opportunities for families of color and those without inherited wealth.
2C. Advance and scale Community Investment Trusts (CIT), Community Land Trusts (CLT), and similar models as ways to shift power and wealth to residents.
2D. Establish a community fund for various neighborhood-based projects, infrastructure, and education about land, development, and housing efforts.
2E. Pass an ordinance enabling current tenants as well as place-based and community-based organizations to have a right to purchase property prior to sale.
Theme #3: Modernize and coordinate equitable land use planning and development policies
3A. Develop comprehensive land use, zoning, and development plans, centering equity and intentional involvement of community-based organizations and residents from disinvested areas of the region.
3B. Reorganize and consolidate municipal development, land, and housing agencies and departments to foster stronger collaboration and simplify navigating planning and zoning processes.
3C. Implement policies that promote an equitable distribution of development projects across neighborhoods, focusing on revitalizing underinvested areas with quality resources and practices to prevent displacement.
Theme #4: Ensure accountability of developers and decision-makers on land use, making use of resources transparent
4A. Develop more rigor and standardization in determining which developers access land, by re-distributing some of the decision-making power beyond government to also include community.
4B. Create a publicly available database of development projects, government funding and subsidies accessed for those projects, and information on their compliance or lack thereof with regulations and community benefits.
4C. Reform the TIF, abatement, and subsidy processes, ensuring more government accountability and rigor around distribution to developers.
4D. Pass an ordinance requiring Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) for all developments seeking public subsidy and incentives over $1 million.
Theme #5: Promote environmentally sustainable land use and development
5A. Equitably develop, activate, maintain, and improve parks, green spaces, and green corridors beyond the “Central Corridor,” using Community Land Trusts wherever possible.
5B. Ensure development is environmentally sustainable.
Theme #1: Repair harm to historically exploited communities through structural and policy changes, including an equitable city-county merger and reparations
1A. Provide reparations, including (but not limited to) for slavery, housing discrimination, and land loss / theft.
1B. As part of providing reparations, deploy more capital towards agricultural programs and efforts led by Black and other marginalized communities that have historically experienced exploitation and stripping of land and wealth in relation to agricultural efforts.
1C. Create a system where local governments provide funding for political campaigns, using taxpayer money to help reduce the outsized role of wealthy donors and make running for office more accessible and equitable (i.e. “public financing” of campaigns).
1D. Pursue an equity-centered approach to a city-county merger to repair the fragmented governance structure in our region.
Theme #2: Adopt progressive taxation to reduce the burden on low-wealth households
2A. Reform the tax code to ensure an equitable distribution of wealth and income, including but not limited to property and income tax reform.
2B. Negotiate PILOTs (payments in lieu of taxes) or pursue a ballot measure to ensure that well-resourced, large non-profits like universities and hospitals pay their fair share and contribute more to building community wealth.
Theme #3: Reallocate public resources to invest in community wealth and well-being, divesting from harmful or ineffective areas
3A. Change how local and state government capital (i.e. deposits and investments) is managed, including potentially starting one or more public banks, to build community wealth and maximize public benefit with a focus on our most disinvested communities.
3B. Reimagine budgeting allocations and earmarks in St. Louis City, County, and Missouri to shift public spending to invest much more in solutions that build community wealth, while divesting from areas that worsen racial disparities.
Theme #4: Prioritize community-led approaches to capital management and distribution
4A. Advance policies that allow for participatory budgeting to shape allocations and appropriations of government budgets.
4B. Fund, launch, and scale more community-driven investment funds, prioritizing people of color-led projects and businesses that support the well-being of our most dis-invested neighborhoods and communities.
4C. Increase access to and capacity of CDFIs to increase access to capital for more businesses and community-centered and/or based projects.
4D. Create a trust fund that residents and communities can access for rapid response and emergencies.
4E. Support existing mutual aid networks in expanding and developing improved infrastructure to build more community self-reliance and resilience in the face of emergencies of all kinds.
Theme #1: Coordinate and resource the region’s transition to Community Wealth Building
1A. Create or strengthen a group to lead regional coordination around efforts to build community wealth. This group should develop a regional strategy and action plan centered on community-driven, systemic changes.
1B. Provide capacity-building and training opportunities for community members and businesses to adopt CWB practices and new ways of thinking related to capital, land and property, and business and labor.
1C. Activate and support an alliance of businesses in adopting community wealth building approaches and advocating for community wealth building policies.
1D. Activate hospitals, universities, and other large, place-based organizations (aka “anchor institutions”) across the region to engage in and resource systems-level coordination towards CWB.
1E. Raise significant (financial and non-financial) assets to resource the region’s transition to community wealth building, ensuring sufficient resources to execute the communitydeveloped vision, agenda, and action plan, especially through donor organizing.
2A. Launch comprehensive public and institutional awareness and political education campaigns about community wealth building.
2B. Integrate learning experiences for young people into existing activities/programming to build awareness, (historical) analysis, and capacity around different levers (land and property, business, etc.) for advancing community wealth, civic change, and economic power.
Theme #3: Provide technical assistance, training, and support to residents and initiatives
3A. Provide free legal services and other technical assistance to community members as they work to build wealth and power.
4A. Train community members to lead policy advocacy and power building, activating a broad base of St. Louisans to champion CWB policy and systems change.
4B. Cultivate, support, and endorse CWB values and vision-aligned candidates for public office.
4C. Develop and advance strategies to protect St. Louis from state preemption related to policies that advance community wealth building.
conduct
5A. Build the research and data infrastructure to continuously track and assess the impact of CWB efforts and their alignment to closing the racial wealth gap and increasing community well-being (especially in alignment with outcomes and indicators articulated in the Theory of Change), including building a public, regional data dashboard.
5B. Research and design policies to support building community wealth.
Design Fellows, Solutions Team members, and a diverse set of St. Louis community members came together to put in thousands of hours towards understanding our economy and then developing solutions across five areas to respond to the challenges, urgency, and possibility of building a transformed future where wealth is redefined, wellness is the priority, and with a deep care for the majority over the financial gain of a minority.
“I was sold a dream that wasn’t for sale.”
Marissa Brooks moved to St. Louis to pursue her Ph.D. in Medical Family Therapy. While working on her degree in 2023, she conducted therapy sessions primarily with Black women from lowincome communities in the city. She noticed a recurring pattern among her clients: many of them were mothers dealing with a multitude of chronic stressors.
"These stressors were not only affecting their mental health, but in some cases, were beginning to impact their physical well-being."
"I kept hearing stories, over and over again, about my clients being exhausted, overwhelmed, feeling depressed, and some expressed suicidal ideation," she recalls.
Over time, Brooks realized that the mothers she spoke with dealt with similar underlying problems. They were facing chronic stressors that were beyond their control. "I could provide them with tools and resources in the therapy room, but a lot of what they were dealing with was systemic in nature."
Brooks asked herself how she could help her clients. “I can’t control their environment. I
can't control their finances. I can't control their access to childcare.” Unclear on what to do next, Marissa started looking into public health. This led to her training as a behavioral healthfocused community health worker specializing in perinatal mental health.
“My focus within the Community Health Worker space is supporting families impacted by perinatal mental health and infant and early childhood mental health and development,” she says. “The goal is to strengthen Black families so that parents have the capacity to raise healthy families in today’s world. Through my lived experience, I have learned the value of a supportive family, especially when growing and raising a family of my own.”
The St. Louis region is home to deep racial and economic disparities that prevent families and individuals from having their basic needs met. In the healthcare space, one major disparity is access to highly skilled, culturally competent healthcare providers.
Brooks knows this from experience. When she was pregnant with her second child, she was ignored by a doctor who failed to see that she was near birth. “In medical spaces, a lot of times Black women are dismissed, and that contributes to a lot of the Black maternal deaths that we’re seeing here in America,” she says.
Brooks left her Ph.D. to work on the community level and currently works with MOMS Line, an SSM Health peer-supported telephone line that caters to moms who are in the throes of baby blues, postpartum depression, or anxiety disorders.
According to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, mental health conditions are the
leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths in Missouri, contributing to nearly a third of those deaths. MOMS Line provides a caring and experienced voice on the other end of the phone to help new mothers heal. They listen and connect mothers to resources like counselors and doctors.
For Brooks, it’s part of the ethos of being a community health worker. “Community health workers utilize their lived experience to connect with their clients,” Brooks says. “Due to our shared lived experiences, we have an innate ability to relate to our clients on a different level. We speak the same language.”
Ultimately, she sees a larger need for public policy reforms that drive family health and well-being. A child’s development is affected by many things, including the mental health of their parents, which is in turn affected by financial stressors and other social determinants of health.
“I want to see access to middle-class wages; funding for high-quality childcare for all; affordable health care; and access to highquality mental health services for parents and families.”
She also calls for better wages for community health workers. “Community health workers experience low wages but do high-impact work,” she says. “The salaries are not sustainable.”
It all starts with involving everyone’s voices. As she says, “It is imperative that we practice building collective power by creating decisionmaking tables inclusive of the people who are impacted by racism, oppression, and health inequities, using a shared lens that highlights commonalities instead of differences.”
Limited access to fundamental services and opportunities:
Too many neighborhoods lack consistent access to opportunities that meet their basic needs, which limits family well- being, safety, and financial economic mobility.
Family well-being relies on employment,
yet too many employers do not provide a worker or family-centered wages and benefits.
of Missourians do not have paid family leave through their employer.
10% of people in St. Louis do not have health insurance.
Note: Paid family leave refers to policies that enable workers to receive compensation when they take extended time off work for qualifying reasons, such as bonding with a new child, recovering from one's serious illness, or caring for a seriously ill loved one.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics via National Partnership for Women and Families
“I've
worked with many mothers who are impacted by chronic stressors that are beyond their control. I could work with them all I wanted in the therapy room, but in the end a lot of what theywere dealing with is systemic in nature.”
Theme #1: Ensure everyone’s basic needs are met
Theme #2: Resource basic public infrastructure in an equitable and consistent fashion
1A. Advance state and local policies to support universal healthcare (including mental, dental, vision), while recognizing the role of federal legislation.
Healthcare is a fundamental human right. Access to healthcare is a critical component of building community wealth and collective wellbeing.
Countless studies have found that people with greater wealth generally live longer and have lower rates of chronic disease; other studies have found longitudinal associations between greater wealth and decreased risks of obesity, smoking, hypertension, and asthma.53
Moreover, “households in the bottom fifth of income groups pay an average of 33.9% of their income toward health care, while families in the highest-income group pay 16% of their income toward health care.”
healthcare require action at the federal level. While that is ultimately the most realistic way to ensure healthcare is available to all, there are several things that can be done at the state and local level, including:
• Expanding Medicaid coverage further at the state level. For instance, by enrolling people based on their enrollment in other federal programs and/or enrolling parents based on their children’s Medicaid eligibility.55
• Capping the price of life-saving drugs, building on policies like the Inflation Reduction Act’s insulin cost cap.
We call for government policies that guarantee universal access to comprehensive healthcare.
• Establish cost commissions that set industry-wide standards and goals for containing and curbing costs.
• Provide more funding for community health workers to address the severe therapist shortage caused by burnout and high costs of licensing and education.
IHN; Generate Health; Missouri Foundation for Health
We call for government policies that guarantee universal access to comprehensive healthcare – covering medical, dental, vision, and mental health services. By alleviating the burden of healthcare costs on individuals and families, we can improve overall well-being and quality of life.54
Most proposals for advancing universal
1B. Advance state and local policies to support universal access to childcare, age zero through five, while recognizing the role of federal legislation.
Early childhood education (ECE) is a critical piece of family well-being. It is critical for laying the foundation for lifelong learning and success, while also providing support for working families by addressing childcare needs.
Studies have shown that low-income children benefit the most from investments in high quality early learning. They often lack access to the amount of enrichment experienced by their wealthier peers. Yet the price of child care and early childhood education programs is continuously increasing.56
We call for government policies that ensure universal access to early childhood education, starting from birth, regardless of socioeconomic status.
Want to learn more about early child education?
In 2020, WEPOWER and partners published the Early Childhood Education Playbook. This playbook laid out community-designed solutions as a blueprint to build a better tomorrow for kids and families across our region.57 Read the playbook, which was published with the input of more than one thousand St. Louisans, here:
View the Early Childhood Education Playbook
“The St. Louis ECE ecosystem is a complex web of provider types, licensure and accreditation status, and funding streams. There are 89,132 children ages 0-5 in the City of St. Louis City and St. Louis County, yet licensed child care facilities only have the capacity to serve 47,219 children. Service gaps are most pronounced for families facing the challenges of poverty.”
(WEPOWER57, page 31)
“In order to close the annual funding gap between what is currently being invested in St. Louis children ages 0-5 and what it would cost to provide truly high-quality, universal ECE is $356.7 million for St. Louis City and $961.4 million for St. Louis County, totaling $1.3 billion. While generating $1.3 billion of public funding annually is not politically feasible, the St. Louis region can make strides to increase public investment."
(WEPOWER57, page 33)
Kids Win Missouri; WEPOWER; Gateway Early Childhood Alliance, United 4 Children; Generate Health; Missouri Foundation for Health; S.T.A.R.
1C. Make housing a civil and human right. Provide guaranteed, quality, and wellmaintained housing for all.
H
ousing is a human right, but that fact is not reflected in the availability of housing today in St. Louis. Race has sculpted St. Louis’s social geography and physical infrastructure, dividing Black and white families both physically and economically.
Approximately 53% of Black renters in both St. Louis County and City are rent-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. Many other residents also feel the squeeze of high rent. This limits the ability to build wealth in a meaningful way. Meanwhile, the unhoused population continues to grow.
One path to guaranteed housing is social housing. As the Alliance for Housing Justice explains, “Social housing is a public option for housing. It is permanently and deeply affordable, under community control, and most importantly, exists outside of the speculative real estate market.” Social housing can be owned by public entities, residents or mission-driven nonprofits and occupied by renters or homeowners.58 It includes public housing, community land trusts, new construction, existing affordable housing, and conversion of current market-rate housing. Polling from 2020 shows social housing has majority support across Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.59
or investors. This is important because when housing is sold on the speculative, profitseeking, maximizing market, it often results in prices going up faster than incomes, leading to housing becoming unaffordable for many people.
60
Some approaches to decommodifying housing, such as shared equity housing, can resolve the tension between housing being a wealth building tool and being affordable for all, enabling homeowners to build wealth while also keeping housing permanently affordable.61
Approximately 53% of Black renters in both St. Louis County and City are rent-burdened.
As mentioned above, a key feature of social housing is that it is decommodified, meaning it is not used to provide profits to landlords
Barcelona’s Right to Housing Plan & Cooperative Housing: Barcelona adopted the Right to Housing Plan in 2016, emphasizing affordable housing cooperatives on city-owned land. This initiative allows cooperatives to develop and own buildings on cityowned land through 75-year leases, with government support including technical assistance, subsidies, and tax credits. Early outcomes include projects like the LaBorda housing cooperative, providing homes at half the market rate.62
Vienna’s "Gemeindebau" Social Housing System – Municipal Ownership + Subsidized Housing: Vienna, Austria is renowned for its "Gemeindebau" social housing, which provides homes to a large portion of the city’s population, regardless of income level. The key features include high-quality construction, affordability, and community amenities. Vienna's model is funded through a dedicated
housing tax and emphasizes long-term sustainability and social integration. The city administers and manages over 220,000 apartments within approximately 1,800 housing estates, making it the largest municipal housing provider in Europe.
In total, around 50% of the city’s population lives in either municipal flats or subsidized dwellings. Moreover, the model supports approximately 20,000 jobs in the construction sector.63
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Action St. Louis, Empower MO; St. Patrick Center; House Everyone STL; Beyond Housing and SLDC (Home:STL) ; Missouri Foundation for Health; The "We the Tenants" campaign, anchored by Action St. Louis, Arch City Defenders, and Homes 4 All
Related Reads and Resources
• A National Homes Guarantee Briefing Book
• Liberation in a Generation Policy Brief
1D. Advance government policies that guarantee a universal basic income without penalizing working people or reducing wages.
Universal basic income, or UBI, is an increasingly popular and validated approach to fighting extreme poverty and helping people build a base for creating economic stability.
UBI programs provide individuals with regular cash transfers, regardless of employment status or other conditions. Amounts vary, but proposals emphasize that they should be enough for individuals to meet their basic needs and to live with dignity without earned income.
No country has fully implemented UBI on a national scale. However, programs similar to UBI have been offered in many places. Many UBI supporters propose $1,000 per month as a cash transfer amount that is high enough to cover basic needs. Other supporters suggest starting with $500 or less per month and increasing over time, since even small amounts could be significant for those living in extreme poverty.
Experts recommend maintaining or expanding UBI as a complement to other programs. For example, UBI and reparations have been proposed together as a multi-component initiative to reduce the racial wealth divide.64
Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration: A high-profile universal basic income experiment in Stockton, Calif., which gave randomly selected residents $500 per month for two years with no strings attached, measurably improved participants' job prospects, financial stability, and overall well-
being, according to a study of the program's first year.
The program was run by a nonprofit founded by the mayor that gave $500 a month to 125 people who lived in census tracts at or below the city's median household income. An independent study found that participants were more likely to find full-time employment than members of the control group. Recipients spent the biggest share of their cash on food, followed by other merchandise, utility bills, and gas and car maintenance. Less than 1% of the total allotted funds were used to buy tobacco or alcohol” (County Health Rankings & Roadmaps 2024).64
City of St. Louis Guaranteed Basic Income pilot program
City and St. Louis County.
“Under the provisions of Proposition A, Missouri’s minimum wage rose to $13.75 an hour on Jan. 1[2025], up from $12.30 an hour. It will increase again to $15 an hour on Jan. 1, 2026, with future adjustments tied to inflation." 65
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a Living Wage Calculator to help individuals, communities, employers, and others estimate the local wage rate that a fulltime worker requires to cover the costs of their family’s basic needs where they live.
As of June 2024, the living wage in the St. Louis metropolitan region for an adult with no children is $21.10. Explore further.66
San Diego’s living-wage law, adopted in 2005, has had positive effects on businesses and workers. Covered employees have reported higher standards of living and reduced economic pressure (PolicyLink n.d.). Employers have reported better retention and improved quality of service, which makes contractors more competitive for future projects and keeps workers motivated.
1E. Continually increase and protect the local and state minimum wage to be a living wage and account for increases in the cost of living.
In 1994, the faith-based coalition Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD) led the nation’s first successful living wage campaign to ensure that workers hired by private contractors on city-subsidized projects earned above-poverty wages.
Since then, more than 120 cities and counties across the country have passed living-wage ordinances, which set wage standards for city employees, government contractors, and companies receiving public subsidies to ensure that public spending creates good familysupporting jobs.
We call for living wage ordinances in St. Louis
In Dallas, a living wage ordinance has posted overall job growth and public sector job growth far above the national average.67
Los Angeles serves as a case study of a city where wage laws have been successfully strengthened to ensure that workers on public construction projects are paid fair wages and enjoy decent working conditions.68
Missourians for Healthy Families and Fair Wages; Jobs with Justice
1F. Advance state and local policies that ensure universal access to high-quality retirement benefits and programs.
Workers in St. Louis have real challenges around economic stability, especially in their later years. We call for enhanced access to retirement benefits, so workers can protect against poverty in old age. Improving the quality and access of these programs ensures that retirees receive adequate support and can maintain their standard of living after leaving the workforce.
A study by the Schwartz Center for Policy Analysis found that universal access to retirement savings could reduce elder poverty by 26% by 2045.70 Some potential strategies for achieving this solution include:
• Establish or Strengthen Public Pension Systems, i.e. expand pension coverage to all workers, including part-time, short-term, and self-employed workers, or ensure a guaranteed minimum benefit for all retirees.
• Incentivize Small Business Retirement Plans, i.e. offer tax credits or deductions to small businesses that establish retirement savings plans for their employees, reducing barriers to offering such benefits.
• Expand Access to Public Retirement Savings Programs, i.e. support the creation and expansion of state-facilitated retirement savings programs for workers without access to employer-sponsored plans, with automatic enrollment and opt-out provisions.
RetirePath Virginia: RetirePath was created by Virginia state law to expand access to retirement savings and provide more Virginians with a path to economic security. State law requires Virginia employers to register and facilitate RetirePath if they have 25 or more eligible employees, have been operating for two or more years, and do not offer a qualified, employer-sponsored retirement plan. The program features a default contribution amount of 5% per pay period with an auto-escalation clause, though employers cannot contribute traditional matching funds.69
Missouri Foundation for Health
1G. Advance state and local policies that guarantee family leave and paid leave.
We call for policies that guarantee family leave and paid leave, so workers can take time off from work to care for their families during significant life events, such as the birth of a child.
Guaranteeing family leave and paid leave promotes work-life balance, supports family well-being, and fosters a more compassionate and equitable workplace culture.
Paid parental leave can have benefits across the spectrum. For instance, it can reduce the share of low weight births by over 10% and decrease the likelihood of early-term birth by nearly 7%. In one study, four-fifths of respondents who took paid leave reported
they were better able to care for a new baby. Another study found that women who take paid leave after a child’s birth are more likely to be employed the following year and report increased wages compared to women who do not take leave.71
California's Paid Family Leave: California’s program allows employees to take time off from work to care for a seriously ill family member or to bond with a new child, including adopted and foster children. Californians initially received up to 6 weeks of partial wage replacement — 55% of their usual weekly wage, up to a maximum benefit of $987. The legislation has since been expanded.72
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
MO-PFMLA Coalition: Jobs With Justice, Missouri Budget Project, and WEPOWER
More than 160,000 St. Louisans are food insecure, meaning they don't have enough to eat.
community wealth without acknowledging that this “food apartheid” is severely limiting community health and wealth.75
Other solutions in this Playbook are expected to help address some of the factors that contribute to food insecurity, such as unemployment and poverty wages. However, there are also factors related to the geographic accessibility of food, especially quality food, that need to be addressed directly.
For instance, investing in neighborhood-based food systems, such as urban agriculture, farmers' markets, cooperatively owned grocery stores with sliding scale prices, and communitysupported agriculture programs, can help address food apartheid and improve nutrition.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
A.C.R.E.S.; Operation Food Search; Empower MO; Food Outreach; North Sarah Food Hub / HOSCO; Urban Harvest; WeGrowSTL; New Roots Urban Farm; Heru Urban Farm; Growing Food, Growing People; Missouri Foundation for Health; A Red Circle; Ujima Stl; Rustic Roots Sanctuary; Fit and Food Connection; Fresh Harvest 365; BJC HealthcareCommunity Health Improvement priority
1H. Ensure everyone has access to quality, affordable food within their neighborhood.
Currently, 18.2% of the population in St. Louis City and 10.9% of the population in St. Louis County – more than 160,000 St. Louisans – are food insecure, meaning they don't have enough to eat and don't know where their next meal will come from.73 Black residents are nearly twice as likely to live in areas with low access to healthy food.74
While comprehensively laying out solutions to this problem is beyond the scope of this Playbook, we cannot talk about building
1I. Support families experiencing poverty with healing from the negative impacts and traumas of our racist economic system by providing access to free, holistic, and culturally-responsive services.
Supporting families experiencing racialized poverty involves more than just addressing financial dimensions. It requires addressing the emotional and psychological wounds caused by centuries of economic harm and instability.
We call for free access to a range of holistic and culturally-responsive services, including therapy, health care, restorative practices, and educational programs. When paired with other solutions that address people’s material needs, these services can help families heal, enhance their well-being, and build paths to wealth.
ARCHS-funded programs; Empower MO; MOMS Line- SSM Health ; Washington University’s Perinatal Behavioral Health Services; IHN-ELEVATE; FlourishSTL; Generate Health; Missouri Foundation for Health; BHR. The BRIC (The T); Community Mediation Services; Family Forward; Black Healers Collective; Freedom Community Center
public infrastructure
and consistently 2A. Invest in consistent and equitable public infrastructure.
The impact of public infrastructure on wealthbuilding is enormous. Outdated utility systems in certain parts of our region interfere with businesses’ operations. A lack of public transit limits access to job opportunities. Poor road maintenance and street lighting deter investors from marginalized neighborhoods.
We call for investment in consistent and equitable public infrastructure, including but not limited to road repair and maintenance, sidewalks, collection of trash and recycling, street lighting, utility systems, and neighborhood beautification.
These investments would ensure that all neighborhoods receive adequate services, and provide a strong basis for building community wealth.
Great Rivers Greenway - brickline program and various other pedestrian pathways; Seed STL - community gardening as neighborhood infrastructure; Operation Brightside - neighborhood beautification; Community Builders Network - a coalition of neighborhood associations and other community development organizations; Trailnet; Great Rivers Greenway; American Cancer Society; SLACO; Greater St. Louis Inc.; Next St. Louis; 4TheVille; Main Streets; 636 St. Louis Urbanists
2B. Invest in ensuring everyone has access to quality, affordable transit options.
Quality, affordable transit options are essential for connecting residents to jobs, education, and services.
Transportation equity is a particular problem in our community. In one recent study, the disparity between Black and White no-vehicle households in St. Louis was among the highest of our peer regions, with Black households being 3.57 times more likely to not have access to a vehicle than White households.76
The Ferguson Commission report issued several calls for action around equitable transit. These included developing a state-supported funding plan for public transit, implementing a ridership program that educates individuals on using the system for work or education, and enhancing amenities among current and future bus routes, like bus shelters and benches.77
In the same spirit, we call for policies that ensure every neighborhood across the city and county has access to quality, affordable transit options. These should include Bus Rapid Transit, light rail expansion, greenways, and protected bikeways infrastructure. We call for a phase one prioritization of transit access in areas with high populations of people of color and people living in poverty. Priority should also be given to areas where accessible living wage jobs and retail shopping exist to meet families basic needs and opportunities to build financial security. These investments would repair past transit harms and disinvestment, and enhance accessibility and reliability.
Citizens for Modern Transit; Bi-state Development/Metro Transit pilot programs (e.g. Via Metro STL); Missouri Foundation for Health; Metrolink expansion; Ferguson Commission Report
The tagline for Garrity Tools is that “your tools should inspire you."78 It’s a reference to the high-quality, handmade wooden tools that the St. Louis company sells for use in pottery. But, for those who know more about the business, they may also be inspired by the fact that the company is one of the city’s most prominent worker-owned cooperatives.
Jenny Murphy is an artist and solidarity economy activist who helped Garrity Tools make that transition. In 2019, she was working for the company when she read a book about cooperatives in Latin America and began looking into what it would take for the five-person company to transition to a worker-owner model.
After discussing it with the employees, Murphy and founder Collin Garrity began working with the Law Clinic at Washington University to explore the legalities of becoming a co-op. After two years of developing a formal operating agreement and structuring the sale, they made the full transition in 2022.
“It was a big learning curve,” Murphy says. “But what I love about cooperatives is that you can structure your co-op in so many different ways.”
These days, the worker-owners vote on things like how fast the company should grow, what to do with surplus revenue, or whether they should move to a new location. They have set living wage pay rates for workers and strong benefits.
“We saw that if everyone had a stake in the game and everyone was excited about the company, it meant the team had more buy-in in the company’s success.”
In 2023, Murphy started meeting with other cooperative leaders around the city to share best practices and learn from one another. The group formalized into Cooperation STL, which is now working to develop and support a thriving ecosystem of cooperatively owned businesses and organizations in the St. Louis region.79
“Cooperation STL will both provide technical assistance to other co-ops, and also be a co-op ourselves,” Murphy says.
One thing that makes the Garrity Tools story unique is that, unlike many businesses that transition to become worker-owned, this one didn’t have an owner who was retiring. Instead, founder Collin Garrity, who started the company out of a passion for woodworking, went back to working with his hands.
Murphy says that Garrity was excited to share the responsibility of being an owner as the company grew. “These days, Collin doesn’t have any management role in the organization anymore beyond his role in governance,” she says. “He spends his days making tools.”
No infrastructure for community wealth-building approaches:
• There is no engagement, support, value proposition, or accountability for business owners, investors, capital providers, or elected leaders to collaborate with residents and workers at the neighborhood level to ensure businesses meet their needs and center their well-being.
• There is a lack of coordination and collaboration to ensure the wealth generated by businesses stays local and recycled at the neighborhood level, especially in areas that are most impacted by poverty.
Limited access to resources: There is too little access to resources (especially capital) and
There is insufficient infrastructure to ensure visibility, availability, and enforcement of job readiness opportunities and resources aligned to
The ownership of businesses is extremely concentrated in the United States, meaning the wealth generated by these businesses accumulates in the hands of a minimal number of people.
The richest 0.1% of Americans own 11.95 trillion dollars worth of businesses (in stocks, mutual funds, and privately owned businesses), more than the combined total owned by the 90% of Americans with the least wealth.
Throughout the country, 50% of households with the least wealth own just 1% of business assets (privately owned businesses, stocks, and mutual funds).
If there were only 100 households in the US and all of the stocks, mutual funds, and privately held businesses they owned were worth $100,000, the richest household would own $47,000. The next nine richest households would own $37,000. The next 40 richest households would own $15,000. And the 50 households with the least wealth would own just $1,000 between them or $20 per household.
“We saw that if everyone had a stake in the game and everyone was excited about the company, it meant the team had more buy-in in the company’s success.”
Theme #1: Increase worker power and ownership
Theme #2: Democratize and localize the economy through community ownership, progressive procurement, and community accountability
Theme #3: Increase and diversify the capital and support available to businesses
Theme #4: Reimagine workforce readiness and job access supports to equip workers of all kinds to thrive
Theme #1: Increase worker power and ownership
There has been momentum on this in Missouri on the state level. Legislation passed in 2023 that reauthorizes the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) tax deduction at the state level.82
There are many benefits to worker ownership,
Median wage income is 33% higher at
Median household net worth is 92% higher for employee owners overall, 79% higher for employee-owners of color, and 17% higher
ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans) have been shown to significantly shrink racial and gender wealth gaps, often helping workers of color build over $100,000 in
Employee ownership has been shown to offer greater protection against layoffs, increased mobility for workers, and, at scale, upward
Targeted public and private investment, policy changes, and public initiatives can support conversions to worker ownership. This approach offers benefits to the workers, retiring owners, investors, and the broader community, with lower investment risks compared to startups.
• A worker cooperative (or worker co-op), is a business owned and controlled by its workers. Each member (worker) has one equal share of the business.
• An employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) has a different ownership structure: a separate entity, called a trust, acquires part or sometimes all of a company’s stock and holds it for the benefit of employees.
• Democratic ESOPs, also sometimes called “ESOP-eratives,” blend ESOPs with cooperative principles for more democratic control.87
There are over 8,000 employee-owned companies in the US, including ESOPs (normally used at companies with over 100 employees) and cooperatives (often with under 100 employees).
Apis and Heritage: Apis & Heritage Capital Partners (A&H) assists small and mid-sized businesses, particularly those with diverse workforces, in transitioning to employee ownership to address the racial wealth gap.
A&H converts companies with significant numbers of workers of color into fully employee-owned enterprises, potentially allowing these workers to accumulate $70K to $120K each in savings upon retirement. Their investment strategy targets essential-service businesses with $1-4M EBITDA, healthy margins, strong cash flow, and 30+ employees, of which at least one-third of the workforce are BIPOC and 50% low income.88
Portfolio companies include a plumbing and a landscape contracting company, with a combined 170 workers who will now own 100% of each firm.89 90 In addition to the cited sources, more information on Apis & Heritage Capital can be found on their website.
Ohio Employee Ownership Center: The Ohio Employee Ownership Center (OEOC) facilitates succession planning for retiring small business owners, transitioning businesses to employee ownership, thus preserving jobs and ensuring financial benefits for employees. With support from the State of Ohio and philanthropic foundations, OEOC has created resources and provided consultation, training, and outreach services since 1987. Between 1987 and 2011, their work created 15,000 new employee owners and added an average of $40,000 to the individual wealth of these worker-owners, at an average cost of $772 per job created or retained.91
Cooperation STL; Missouri Center for Employee Ownership (MOCEO)
Related Reads and Resources
• The Case for Employee Ownership
• How Employee Ownership Can Address the Racial Wealth Gap
• Can Employee Ownership Meet Its “Silver Tsunami” Moment?.
• Democratizing Work: The Role, Opportunities, and Challenges of Worker Cooperatives in the US video
• Employee Ownership for Black Workers: Closing the Racial Wealth Gap
• Strategies to Advance Black Employee Ownership
• Right to Own: A Policy Framework to Catalyze Worker Ownership Transitions
• Should local governments double down on their support of employeeowned worker models?
• Policy Strategies to Build a More Inclusive Economy with Cooperatives
• The Municipal Playbook for Employee Ownership
• Becoming Employee Owned maintains a list of “policy supports” various cities and states have passed to support worker cooperatives
1B. Protect and strengthen worker centers’ and unions’ capacity to equitably increase worker power and rights.
Union membership has been in steady decline since the early 1980s and now stands at 10% of the population across the United States. While regional union membership has increased recently by a small amount, it still hovers around 10%.92
We call for deep investment in the power and capacity of worker centers and labor unions to equitably enhance worker power and rights, particularly those that represent systemically marginalized groups.
Union membership has been in steady decline since the early 1980s and now stands at 10% of the population across the United States.
Strengthening worker centers and unions gives workers collective bargaining power. This enables them to negotiate better wages, benefits, and working conditions with employers. This approach not only safeguards workers' rights but also promotes economic justice by ensuring fair treatment and representation in the workplace.
Worker Centers: As the Economic Policy Institute explains, “Worker centers provide low-wage workers a range of opportunities for expressing their “collective voice” as well as for taking collective action. Worker centers are community-based and communityled mediating institutions that provide support to low-wage workers”.93
Missouri Workers Center; Greater St. Louis Labor Council; Jobs with Justice; Metropolitan Congregations United; SEIU; CBTU
• Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act
• Economic Policy Institute
As explained in A Union Toolkit for Cooperative Solutions, “Labor unions and worker-owned businesses share the objectives of generating better jobs and giving workers control over their workplaces. The scaling of worker ownership paired with unionization offers pathways to expanded worker power and wealth-building for working people“.94 The resources below have more information on the ways these approaches can work together to achieve these goals:
• Unions and Worker Co-ops: Why Economic Justice Requires
1C. Reduce pay disparities by incentivizing companies to implement a maximum pay ratio.
A n equitable, sustainable economy requires people to be paid fairly for their work. Yet everyday working people are paid far too little to make ends meet, while those at the top are paid far more than they need – and more than people in similar roles were paid in the past.
In 2017, federal law required public companies to disclose their CEO-to-worker pay ratio, and the results were clear: many companies pay senior leadership far more than the average worker, with the average ratio in 2021 being 324:1. Several years later, this problem remains, as CEO pay increases have outpaced the median pay increase of workers.95
Pay ratios have skyrocketed in our communities. We call for companies to adopt a maximum pay ratio between the highest-paid and lowestpaid employees and/or other approaches with similar goals. We can encourage values-aligned companies to implement such policies voluntarily while, in the long term, pursuing government policies like a surtax on excessive executive compensation.
Lawmakers in at least nine states and in the U.S. Congress have also introduced tax proposals based on pay ratios. We call for a similar tax in St. Louis. Recent national polling (from April 2024) shows that 80% of voters support taxes on corporations whose CEOs make at least 50 times more than their median worker, including large majorities across the political spectrum.96
Recent national polling (from April 2024) shows that 80% of voters support taxes on corporations whose CEOs make at least 50 times more than their median worker.
The following criteria, adopted from a policy memo by the Center for Hungerfree Communities at Drexel University, should be considered when designing and implementing “new legislation to address disparities in worker compensation:
• Calculations should be based on lowest (not median/average) and highest paid worker data to truly address disparity.
• Calculations of CEO compensation must include wages, benefits, and stock options.
• Policies must apply to both public and private companies (including both nonprofit and for-profit where pay inequity exists) in order to have a substantial impact.
• Policies must use language that specifies the highest compensated managerial position to be used for calculations, as CEO or president may not be the highest paid in some organizations.
• Additional disincentives must be included for companies who reduce lowwage jobs without reduction in CEO and top-level compensation.97
Portland, Oregon’s Pay-Ratio Surtax: In 2016, Portland, Oregon adopted a surtax of 10% on companies operating in the city that have CEO-worker pay gaps of 100 to 1 or higher and 25% if the ratio is 250 to 1. In the first year following the enactment of the law, the city expects the tax on companies with high-paid chief executives will bring in between $2.5 million and $3.5 million, in line with forecasts from when the city approved the law."98
Tax (Proposition L, 2020): 65% of San Francisco voters approved a measure to impose a gross receipts tax or payroll tax on businesses with high pay disparity, depending on the type of tax a business currently pays. Rates are graduated on ratios from 100 to 1 (0.4%) to more than 600 to 1 (2.4%). Unlike Portland, San Francisco will impose this tax on both public and privately held companies and collect pay data directly from them, not the federal government. The tax will take effect in 2022 and is expected to bring in $60 to $140 million annually.99
2A. Form and/or acquire community-owned assets, such as holding companies and land, that businesses can lease.
We call for the formation or acquisition of community-owned assets, such as holding companies and land, and the use of those assets to build community wealth (e.g. by leasing the land to small businesses).
According to NextCity, community real estate initiatives emerge when traditional development models fail to meet community needs due to financial constraints or speculative practices, seeking a middle ground that prioritizes sustainability and affordability over maximizing financial returns.100
By establishing these assets under community ownership, communities can ensure small businesses are able to access land and buildings at affordable rates. Any profits generated by these activities stay local and build community wealth.
Kensington Corridor Trust: “The Kensington Corridor Trust (KCT) is in the northern part of Philadelphia, and its mission is ‘to help the Kensington community reclaim control over a once thriving commercial corridor by reactivating real estate, fostering local entrepreneurship and reinvesting capital in the neighborhood.’ KCT focuses on 1.4 miles of the North Philly neighborhood’s commercial corridor. This model works by strategically acquiring assets, both vacant land and commercial mixed-use buildings,
and putting them into a trust for the neighborhood, so that local ownership, local decision-making power, and affordability are all preserved.
KCT was co-developed in 2019 by four organizations: a community development corporation, the city’s public-private partnership for economic development, a mission-oriented private developer, and a small business incubator. The Kensington Corridor Trust now has 15 properties in its portfolio, all along Kensington Avenue (Yale IEDL n.d; Next City 2023).101 100
You can also read about the East Portland Community Investment Trust in solution 1C in the Land & Property section.
St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative; SLDC; Dutchtown South; InvestSTL; UMSL South Campus Expansion
Related Reads and Resources
• Investment Cooperatives
• Community Investment Trusts - Small Business Anti-Displacement Network (SBAN)
• Community Ownership Through Real Estate
• New Models for Community Shareholding
• “The emerging solidarity economy: A primer on community ownership of real estate”
2B. Strengthen and shift procurement (i.e. purchasing) policies and practices of anchor institutions and local governments to build community wealth by increasing local purchasing from Black and Latinx owned companies, small businesses, especially those that are worker-owned and those that follow high road practices like paying living wages.
L ocal governments and anchor institutions, including hospitals, universities, museums, zoos, have significant and consistent purchasing power. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Anchor Economy Dashboard, 115 hospitals in the St. Louis region have 82,800 employees, generating more than six billion dollars in income, while the region’s 71 institutions of higher education have 38,100 employees and generate nearly two billion dollars in income (Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia n.d.). 175
We call for the procurement policies of these institutions to prioritize local purchasing from Black and Latinx-owned businesses, small enterprises, worker-owned cooperatives, and businesses that employ community wealth building approaches.
These institutions can stimulate economic growth within underserved communities by implementing policies that favor local vendors. This approach creates jobs and ensures that wealth generated within the region remains local.
Public Procurement in Preston, U.K: Preston, U.K., transformed its public procurement to prioritize local businesses, resulting in a substantial increase in local spending and enhanced economic outcomes for the city. In 2013, only 5% of the city's £750 million annual budget was spent locally, but by 2017, local spending tripled to £111 million, comprising 18% of the reduced £616 million budget. This shift involved six public bodies adopting new procurement practices, including considering social and environmental factors in bids and breaking down large contracts to benefit local suppliers. Local suppliers won contracts for school meals, injecting an estimated £2 million boost to the county. Preston's initiative, recognized in 2018
as the most improved city in the U.K., emphasizes social and environmental considerations in procurement, tailors solicitations to local firms, and encourages private companies to commit to local purchasing. Additionally, Preston plans to earmark a portion of their investments £1 towards new worker cooperatives and establish a cooperative bank with lending capacity to support small businesses (Wylde and Abdessalam 2020). 62
St. Louis Anchor Action Network; Supply STL at GSL; Equity Business Alliance powered by BJC and Washington University
• The Bottom Line: The Power of Procurement
• Progressive Public Procurement Toolkit: Building local democratic economies through public community partnerships
• Progressive procurement of goods and services
2C. Shift government policies and standards to fund and encourage businesses to focus on community wealth building (e.g. through preferential tax policies, providing grants or loan guarantees, etc.).
Governments can play a crucial role in democratizing and localizing the business ecosystem to accelerate community wealth building and collective well-being. They can use a number of strategies (see below for details) to encourage businesses to invest in ways that benefit both their bottom line and the communities they serve, promoting sustainable development and equitable wealth distribution.
One particularly powerful way governments
can encourage community wealth building is through the promotion of inclusive ownership models. These include housing cooperatives, worker-owned businesses, and credit unions. These models increase access to asset ownership and wealth generation, helping reduce household wealth disparities.
Seoul, South Korea, and Italy provide examples of government interventions that can scale inclusive ownership models. Seoul's Comprehensive Social Economy Support Plan led to the creation of over 15,000 cooperatives in a relatively short window, significantly boosting employment and business revenue. In Italy, regions with supportive worker-cooperative policies have lower unemployment and poverty rates (See case studies for details).
Governments can support community wealth building businesses through various strategies, including:
• Providing grants, loans, and loan guarantees (i.e. a promise to assume the debt of a borrower if that borrower doesn’t repay their loan) to businesses adopting community wealth building approaches, especially worker-owned businesses
• Taxing large non-local businesses to provide dedicated funding for community wealth building projects
• Creating legal statuses for firms that are inclusively owned (such as cooperatives) and/or prioritize social and environmental benefits (such as public benefit corporations, also known as B-corps)
• Establishing standards for businesses prioritizing community wealth, like fair wages and local hiring, and using scorecards to allocate subsidies and incentives
• Providing tax exemptions to inclusively owned businesses and public benefit corporations that create social value and build community wealth
• Requiring community wealth building businesses (e.g. inclusively owned businesses and/or public benefit corporations) to
reinvest a portion of their profits for their own long term benefit and also contribute a portion of their profits to the growth of the regional ecosystem of community wealth building businesses (see case study on the Italian system for details)
• Pursuing place-based strategies that prioritize support for community investment funds, trusts, and cooperatives focused on areas with significant disinvestment and systemic racism
• Aligning government investment policies with community wealth building principles and practices
These strategies can foster healthy relationships between government, businesses, and the broader community, reduce disparities in health and wealth, strengthen democracy, and protect and restore the environment.
Municipal Policies for Community Wealth Building includes 15 case studies related to inclusive ownership, including (Wylde and Abdessalam 2020):
The Italian System: Italy has a distinct legal, regulatory, and tax system focused on supporting cooperatives. Italian cooperatives operate under laws that restrict profit distribution and non-member employment while offering tax advantages to ensure their continued social purpose and financial sustainability. These laws mandate reinvestment of profits into an indivisible reserve and contribution to solidarity funds for cooperative development, with tax benefits provided to incentivize growth, particularly for social cooperatives providing essential services.
Italian cooperatives provide broad social benefits, contributing significantly to regional economies and lowering unemployment and poverty levels. In
areas of Italy that have deeply embraced cooperatives, such as Emilia Romagna, cooperatives account for roughly a third of the regional Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Unemployment is also 4.7 percentage points lower than in Italy as a whole, and the percentage of people at risk of becoming impoverished is 14 percentage points lower than the national average.
Seoul, South Korea’s Comprehensive Social Economy Support Plan: The Comprehensive Social Economy Support Plan has spurred the rapid growth of over 15,000 cooperatives and social economy organizations. It used a multifaceted approach encompassing direct subsidies, borough-level support centers, management consulting, and a social investment fund. Introduced in 2012 alongside municipal ordinances, the plan has significantly boosted employment, particularly among vulnerable populations, and increased revenue to $1.9 billion USD annually. Key features include fostering support networks, providing direct assistance for enterprise development. These efforts increase public sector procurement from social enterprises, and build community-centric ecosystems. They are overseen by the Seoul Social Economy Policy Council in partnership with government, industry, and community organizations.62
3A. Create and promote non-traditional funding sources that are accessible and share risk, while preserving local ownership of businesses (e.g. through local investment funds and financial
institutions that maintain founder and/ or worker ownership, rather than outof-state private equity or venture capital investment).
We call for the development of funding sources that serve as alternatives to the oftencelebrated venture capital and angel investment funds that prioritize businesses seeking fast, large-scale growth.
These alternative funding options should be designed to support small businesses in opening and sustaining operations within the community. They should encourage businesses to prioritize sustainability and longevity over the typical goal of seeking large profit in the short term.
By promoting access to funding that supports the ongoing operation and growth of everyday businesses rather than solely focusing on exit strategies, we can contribute to a more stable and resilient local economy.
There are a wide range of approaches that would fall under this solution, including, but not limited to:
• Expanding Community Development Credit Unions and other CDFIs, which tend to structure investments in ways that are not focused on maximizing growth or exits.102
• Developing and expanding community investment funds and investment cooperatives that take in investments from everyday community members and invest in local, values-aligned businesses.103 104
• Supporting workers in acquiring businesses before they’re sold or shut down, both through creating and scaling investment funds focused specifically on this (e.g. establishing a public & privately funded “Local Economy Preservation Fund”) and through passing legislation implementing a “Right to Own,” which would give workers the opportunity to put together financing to collectively buy the business when it is being put up for sale.105 106
• Expanding the availability of supply chain financing, which provides financing options for businesses to access working capital by using existing customer orders, instead of conventional collateral typically required by banks.107
• Creating and expanding the availability of patient capital, revenue-based financing such as WEPOWER Capital, and profitsharing-based investment funds that allow entrepreneurs to raise money without requiring them to give up significant equity (i.e. ownership) of their business. 108 109 110 111
• Reducing the need to raise money by implementing alternative currencies, such as time banking, which allows members of the time bank to trade an hour of their time for an hour of someone else’s
• Activating more high-net-worth families in the region to become impact investors (investors who seek both profit and social impact)
WEPOWER Capital: Founded in 2020, WEPOWER Capital is a St. Louis-based investment fund started and owned by WEPOWER that makes revenue-based investments between $50,000 and $200,000 into Black and Latinx-owned companies in St. Louis. It has raised over $1M and invested in four companies to date, including two graduates of the WEPOWER Business Accelerator. The fund was designed to generate returns for shared political, economic, and social priorities, as determined by a communitycontrolled process (WEPOWER n.d.).
Seed Commons: Seed Commons is a “community wealth cooperative” (of which WEPOWER is a member) that brings together a national network of locally rooted, non-extractive loan funds seeking
to bring the power of big finance under community control. (Seed Commons n.d.)
“Non-extraction is defined simply as the returns to the lender not ever exceeding the wealth created by the borrower using the capital. Seed Commons never wants borrowers to be worse off than before working with them. Wealth can be shared between Seed Commons and the business when a borrowing business makes a profit, but at least 50% of the profit stays with that business. Seed Commons uses profit sharing to cover losses from other loans, pay its staff, and help the fund be selfsustaining” (Middleton 2022).
Between 2012 and 2024, Seed Commons loaned over $100M across 200+ loans to cooperatives that are 93% owned by people of color and 97% owned by lowincome workers (Seed Commons, 2024). By taking business investment guidance from cooperative member(s) that operate at the local level and sharing capital and resources to support cooperative local businesses in that member’s geographic footprint, Seed Commons is building the infrastructure necessary for a truly just, democratic, and sustainable new economy.
For other relevant examples in this Playbook, see the case studies on The Boston Ujima Project’s Ujima Fund (see solution 1C in the Ecosystem Development & Coordination section) and the REAL People’s Fund (see solution 4B in the Capital & Taxation section).
Anchor community investment strategies (e.g. BJC and Washington University), Seed Commons, WEPOWER, Coop STL, Solidarity Economy STL, St. Louis Community Credit Union
3B. Increase access to and awareness of supports, trainings, and funding for small businesses.
Small businesses are the backbone of any local economy. Nearly half of Americans (46%) are employed by a small business. Yet small businesses often lack consistent, well-resourced, and coordinated support to scale and sustain in the ways that are needed.112
We call for increased support, training, and funding specifically tailored for small businesses. This should include increased resources for existing programs, such as incubators and accelerators (i.e. programs that help businesses start and grow), to scale and improve impact. Additionally, there must be the resourcing of businesses to access cost-effective and highquality technical services such as accounting, HR, and marketing support.
Further details about this solution can be found in the St. Louis Small Business Ecosystem Assessment (published winter 2020). It contains an assessment of St. Louis’s small business ecosystem and “highlights the barriers that entrepreneurs and small business owners of color in St. Louis face and the additional support they and those serving these entrepreneurs need to succeed, as gathered from data analysis, interviews, and local stakeholder convenings.”113
Several of the organizations involved in this research process formed the St. Louis Inclusive Small Business Ecosystem (ISBE) to champion the work of implementing many of these solutions. They have been working since 2021 to bring ecosystem partners together, build deeper familiarity, and increase connectedness among entrepreneur support organizations to improve referrals and expand access to capital. The St. Louis Anchor Action Network, SLDC, Greater St. Louis Inc, and Tech STL are also all doing work to implement some of the above recommendations. Specific strategies proposed by Solution Team members related to this recommendation
include:
• Develop or update an ecosystem map of resources available for small businesses to access and ensure awareness of this tool
• Advance policies that provide funding for small businesses that want to open and operate at and in service of the neighborhood level
• Establish infrastructure for larger, established businesses to support and mentor smaller businesses
• Build the capacity of place-based community economic development entities (e.g. CDCs and neighborhood associations) to better support the businesses in their communities, including leveraging Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) and Special Tax Districts.
TechSTL; SCORE, MO Small Business Development Center; Venture Ready MO; St. Louis Small Business Empowerment Center; Better Family Life; SLDC; BJC Healthcare and Washington University, WEPOWER, GSL, Cortex, CDFIs and Credit Unions such as Justine Petersen and St. Louis Community Credit Union, Beyond Housing, this could be a very long list (ISBEE), BioSTL, St. Louis Action Network, UMSL Accelerator, BALSA Foundation, CDCs such as Park Central Development
3C. Increase access to space for small businesses to locate, especially at the neighborhood level.
Small businesses are often among the first to be displaced by gentrification. We call for an effort to identify underutilized or vacant spaces and repurpose them for small business use. This may involve initiatives such as converting vacant lots into pop-up markets, repurposing abandoned buildings into shared workspaces, or creating micro-retail spaces in mixed-use developments. Ultimately, the goal should be for businesses to have long-term, accessible, and cost-effective
space at the neighborhood level.
Municipalities can support local entrepreneurship by increasing access to space for small businesses. This strategy helps revitalize commercial areas and creates vibrant and inclusive communities. This solution could also make entrepreneurship more accessible by reducing the cost of a retail or office space for entrepreneurs starting a small business or moving from pop-up to brick and mortar.
Several cities have taken steps to address this through government action. For example, New York City has instituted a requirement for cityfunded developments to include affordable retail spaces that meet community needs and the City of Austin mandated that a portion of the retail spaces must be given to local businesses for its 2nd Street District redevelopment project.114 115 116 Detroit’s Motor City Match program helps small businesses find suitable space to locate and grow. This includes matching business owners with vacant commercial properties and providing grants to support them in renovating the space and financing up to 50% of the project.117
InvestSTL; HSSU-CIE; Crown Square Development; Urban Eats / The Neighborhood Food Hall, Beyond Housing / 24:1 Community, Park Central Development
4A. Reimagine and redefine what it means to be career or job-ready for living and high-wage jobs to broaden access to opportunities for systemically excluded communities (including Black and Latinx people, people with disabilities, and people who were formerly incarcerated), starting at the company level and eventually policy/ government level.
Across the economy, talented and creative people are kept out of steady employment because they lack traditional credentials – even though they may have deep informal credentials and skills. For example, a 2017 study led by researchers at Harvard Business School found that over 60% of employers turned down candidates who were qualified in terms of skills and experience, solely because they lacked a college degree.118 This reliance on a bachelor's degree as a proxy for qualification resulted in negative effects for both employees and businesses. Because there are large racial disparities in access to higher education, these practices also reinforce racial disparities in access to job opportunities.119
>60%
Over 60% of employers turned down candidates who were qualified in terms of skills and experience.
There is a need to expand the definition of career or job-ready across industry, by looking beyond traditional measures such as academic qualifications or technical skills, to include things like soft skills, adaptability, creativity, and resilience.
We call on businesses to rethink hiring practices; they can start by:
• Implementing Skills-Based Hiring: Focus on specific skills and competencies required for the job rather than on formal educational qualifications. This can be achieved through skill assessments, practical tests, and project-based evaluations.
• Emphasizing Work Experience: Prioritize work experience and achievements over formal credentials. Candidates who have demonstrated their abilities through previous roles, internships, or volunteer work should be given due consideration.
• Removing Degree Requirements: Where possible, eliminate strict degree requirements for job postings. This opens opportunities for those who have gained relevant skills through alternative education pathways or real-world experiences.
We also call for more funding for apprenticeships and internships that provide hands-on experience and training. These programs bridge the gap between education and employment, allowing individuals to develop practical skills in real-world settings.
Finally, it is also necessary to make it easier for people who have immigrated here to get jobs related to what they’ve studied in their country of origin, particularly those who have obtained specialized training and credentials.
Per Scholas; LaunchCode; NPower; Cyber Up; Cortex Missouri Tech First Initiative; BioSTL; STEMSTL; St. Louis Community College & Employment Connection; Access Point; Claim Academy
4B. Increase alignment and coordination between K12 schools and businesses to ensure career readiness, especially in highwage industries.
We call for improved coordination between K-12 education systems and business sectors to strategically prepare students for future careers, especially in industries such as green energy, high-tech, and infrastructure. By teaching foundational skills in math, science, and technology alongside work-based learning opportunities, students can acquire the necessary knowledge and skills for high-demand jobs in well-paying industries.
Schools should do this by creating and expanding programs that blend classroom learning with real-world experience, such as pre-apprenticeships, dual enrollment, and career and technical education, especially in industries with high wages and projected growth. Examples from other states, such as Rhode Island, where coding skills are honed with industry mentors, or Indiana, where students earn certifications through hospital rotations, can serve as models to learn from.120 These initiatives not only tailor education to meet industry standards but also ensure students from diverse backgrounds gain equitable access to these opportunities, overcoming barriers like transportation and scheduling conflicts.
Furthermore, regional initiatives should consider piloting and expanding innovative pipeline programs specifically tailored to sectors of significant community importance, such as early childhood education, through "learning and earning" models. This approach not only equips students with practical skills and certifications but also reduces the financial and time burdens associated with advancing in their careers. By implementing these types of programs, we can open up better career opportunities for students, ensuring they are well-prepared and qualified for well-paying opportunities today and tomorrow.
StemSTL; TechSTL; BioSTL; MyPath; BJC Healthcare Nine Network, community colleges, K12 public schools; universities, DESE
4C. Improve access to effective career and worker readiness opportunities (including apprenticeships) and remove barriers to work and career opportunities, especially for groups that face systemic barriers to high quality employment, such as people with disabilities and formerly incarcerated people.
We call for increased investments in the creation and scale of effective training programs and educational opportunities across a wide variety of career pathways, including specialized K-12 programs and paid training opportunities such as apprenticeships. By making such investments and providing equitable access to these opportunities, we can address barriers to entry, such as limited access to education and training, and enable people to thrive in their chosen fields.
To foster a more equitable St. Louis economy, it's also crucial to eliminate barriers to work for all, especially for groups that face significant barriers to high-quality employment, such as people with disabilities and those who were formerly incarcerated. According to the Second Chance Business Coalition, roughly a quarter of the US population, more than 80 million Americans, have a criminal record, and almost 90% of employers require background checks, which can reduce the chances of a second interview for people with records by 50%. These practices are part of the reason why nearly 75% of people who were formerly incarcerated are still unemployed a year after being released.121
Policies such as expunging criminal records and adopting blind hiring processes—where assessments exclude personal details like age,
race, criminal history, or disability—can help. These changes ensure hiring decisions focus solely on qualifications, improving job access and reducing recidivism by allowing individuals to reintegrate successfully into society.
Green Jobs Initiative: In 2020, St. Louis City launched the Solar Workforce Development Pilot, a paid green jobs training program focusing on solar installation, emphasizing sustainability, equity, and workforce diversity. Supported by multiple organizations, this program aims to bridge the job gap and provide equitable access to green jobs for underserved residents, aligning with the city's sustainability and economic goals.122
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Per Scholas; LaunchCode; NPower; Cyber Up; Cortex
Missouri Tech First Initiative; BioSTL; STEMSTL; Washington University apprentice program; St. Louis Anchor Action Network; Urban League; Mission St. Louis; Green Jobs Initiative at Employment Connection; Dream Builders 4 Equity; Construction Career Development Initiative (CCDI)
4D. Reform compensation and incentive policies to make promotions and raises equitable and based on objective measures of performance to decrease racial and gender pay disparities, help fill vacancies, and retain workers.
There are large pay disparities across race and gender across the United States, in part due to disparities in promotions and raises. For example, “Black workers continue to face significant gaps in the labor market when it comes to promotion, pay and opportunity, costing the U.S. economy trillions of dollars. If the Black wage, education, housing and investing gaps had been closed 20 years ago, it would have added an estimated $16 trillion to the economy, according to a report by Citi, with the Black pay gap alone accounting for $2.7 trillion."123
If the Black wage, education, housing and investing gaps had been closed 20 years ago, it would have added an estimated $16 trillion to the economy, according to a report by Citi, with the Black pay gap alone accounting for $2.7 trillion.
We can ensure a more level playing field by reforming compensation and incentive policies to make promotions and raises equitable and based on objective measures. These reforms also eliminate cronyism and biased decision making, reducing inequality. Further, by aligning incentives with desired outcomes, employers can foster a culture of excellence, productivity, and commitment, leading to improved performance and overall success in their industries.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
BioSTL; STEMSTL; MyPath
“Our organization exists because the community asked for it.”
For Jennifer Allen, the STL Art Place Initiative is an important tool to prevent displacement of artists due to rising rents – but it’s also a great example of participatory community development.124
Allen is Co-Director of the St. Louis Art Place Initiative (known locally as API), a project to prevent artist displacement beginning in Gravois Park, a south St. Louis City neighborhood with a long history of both creativity and disinvestment.
St. Louis Art Place Initiative builds wealth and equity for artists through permanently affordable homeownership, and transforms vacant land into arts and cultural assets with communities. The artists live in and own their homes, partnering with API to create art spaces throughout the neighborhood. It’s a vision to help artists build wealth by owning equity in
their homes – and also a way to improve the value of homes in the broader neighborhood through the transformation of vacant land into vibrant centers of art.
The genesis for the idea came in 2017 and 2018, when Dutchtown South Community Corporation – a local, 50-year-old community development corporation (CDC) in South City – convened a planning process that produced the Gravois Jefferson Historic Neighborhoods Plan. In it were calls for permanent housing for artists, affordable housing options for housing-insecure residents, non-profit housing models that could preserve long-term affordability, and arts and cultural amenities to honor the deep influence of the arts in the region.
Two of the leaders in the room were thenAlderwoman of the 20th ward, Cara Spencer, and Bridget Flood of the Incarnate Word Foundation (IWF). Bridget, also an artist in the community, began having conversations with Cara about possibilities for addressing artists’ needs in a meaningful way. Cara convened a conversation with the Land Reutilization Authority and the IWF, and introduced Bridget to Chris Hansen of the Kranzberg Arts Foundation. Conversations eventually led the Incarnate Word Foundation to join forces with the Kranzberg Arts Foundation and the Regional Arts Commission to create API.
In 2019, API secured 24 parcels of vacant and deteriorating properties from the city, chosen with the aim to build homes for low- to moderate-income artists and create green and arts spaces. They have built and sold two homes, three more will be complete in summer 2025, and an additional ten are in development.
After building equity in the home, if an artist wishes to sell the house, the home must be sold to API or its designee. The idea is that API will designate the next low-to-moderate income artist approved to purchase the home. "The new cost of the home equals the original home price plus the change in the neighborhoods’ median
income during the artist’s ownership. This practice builds the artist’s wealth by offering them profit based on increased incomes in the neighborhood while also building community wealth by creating housing stock that isn't subject to speculation. The formula prevents the home price from rising much faster than the income of the area, maintaining affordability in the community.
This model shifts how the housing market works at a fundamental level and raises the impact from an individual to a community level.
For Allen, the process that led to API was an example of how development should happen in St. Louis. She recalls a session called “Ice Cream and Ideas” where API shared popsicles on a hot day while asking residents to share their vision for the neighborhood.
“A big part of our story is that we were founded out of best practices in planning,” she says. “You should ask the community what they want and what they need. You should listen to them. And then the work is finding out how to make those things a reality.”
It also shows what can happen when missiondriven organizations partner to achieve a vision by combining their strengths. API partners with Habitat for Humanity for the home builds, and works closely with the Dutchtown South Community Corporation. “ neighborhood CDC that's been around for 50 years,” Allen says. “Their mission is very community-based, and they have a lot of neighborhood relationships, so we work with them on community engagement. It’s a really cool mutually-beneficial relationship.”
API plans to create a formal land trust to help it manage the community art and green spaces it plans to create, currently being envisioned through its Block Dreams project. The trust’s governing board will have seats for API, but will otherwise be governed and managed entirely by residents and stakeholders. It’s a model
for shifting power dynamics in development to ensure decisions are made by those most impacted by them. It’s also a way to address the underlying conditions and history that prevent equitable development, ownership, and land use.
“Other neighborhoods are asking us to bring our model to them,” Allen says, “and we believe it truly can have great impacts beyond Gravois Park.”
• Development exclusion: There is not enough accountability for developers and the government to prioritize and sufficiently resource high-quality development in historically disadvantaged areas, particularly in ways that avoid displacement and involve existing residents as collaborators.
• Profit-driven development: There is too much focus on profiting from land and development, which de-centers people's well-being and causes unaffordable housing, displacement, unhoused people, and the decline of neighborhood infrastructure.
• Government planning and fragmentation: City and county governments' approach to land and development planning is too fragmented, not community-informed, and lacks intentional cross-collaboration among departments (SLDC, LRA, zoning, etc.).
Approximately 53% of Black renters in both St. Louis City and County are rent-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their income on rent. 53%
Rent burden disproportionately affects people of color. (Approximately 53% of Black renters in both St. Louis City and County are rent burdened, compared to 34% and 38% of white renters in St. Louis City and County, respectively.)
Of all Black households who rent in St. Louis, approximately one in three are severely rent-burdened, meaning they spend more than half of their income on housing (31% of Black renters in St. Louis City, 27% in St. Louis County).
Note: Federal housing affordability guidelines say housing should cost less than 30% or less of one’s income to ensure people have enough money for other important expenses.
“You should ask the community what they want and what they need. You should listen to them. And then the work is finding out how to make those things a reality”
Theme #1: Center and resource marginalized neighborhoods, developers, and residents to enable equitable land use, development, and ownership
Theme #2: Shift policies on management of land, property, and housing to prioritize community needs and expand access to ownership
Theme #3: Modernize and coordinate equitable land use planning and development policies
Theme #4: Ensure accountability of developers and decision-makers on land use, making use of resources transparent
Theme #5: Promote environmentally sustainable land use and development
Theme #1: Center and resource marginalized neighborhoods, developers, and residents to enable equitable land use, development, and ownership
1A. Build the capacity of and provide resources for Community Development Corporations (CDCs) and neighborhood associations to ensure they are communitycentric and serve as neighborhood-based anchors throughout development projects and processes.
C
ommunity Development Corporations and neighborhood associations are vital for fostering local governance and empowering communityled development.
Well-resourced and well-run neighborhood associations play a critical role in engaging residents of a particular neighborhood and enabling residents to convey their priorities collectively. Meanwhile, CDCs play a distinct but complementary role by enabling communities to manage resources and pursue development projects that align with the priorities of the local
Well-resourced and well-run neighborhood associations play a critical role.
residents, rather than outside developers. Investing in the capacity of these organizations strengthens St. Louis’s ability to effectively represent and advocate for neighborhood interests, particularly in development projects.
Community Development Funders Forum in partnership with Invest STL; Vacancy Collaborative
1B. Increase access to funding, support, and opportunities for Black developers and investors in real estate and property projects, using an equity lens and especially focusing on those who are from and/or working in disinvested communities.
Funding programs specifically tailored to support Black developers and investors in real estate and property can create pathways for economic mobility, reduce wealth disparities, and foster inclusive and thriving neighborhoods for generations to come. These programs
should prioritize equitable access to capital and maximize community benefits, recognizing historical barriers such as discriminatory lending practices and limited access to traditional financing options. The funding for Black developers should be flexible, offering a range of financial instruments such as grants, low-interest loans, and equity investments. This helps meet the diverse needs of Black entrepreneurs and investors in real estate and property development.
SLDC; Rise Community Development; US Bancorp Impact Finance; ULI
• Access to Capital: Solutions for Black Developers to Overcome Funding Challenges (2024)
Capital Impact Partners: Capital Impact Partners has launched a national program, Equitable Development Initiative, to empower developers of color to lead revitalization efforts in their cities. The program provides training and mentorship to program participants as they design their development efforts and connects them to financing options to carry out their design plans.126
Black Developer Capital Initiative (BDCI):
This is an initiative of the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF), a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI).
The BDCI comprises two products: the Line of Credit offered through LIIF, which provides early-stage project financing at a favorable interest rate; and the LowIncome Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) Equity Fund offered by their affiliate National Affordable Housing Trust (NAHT). The Equity Fund solves for the variability in pricing and terms for LIHTC deals caused by perceived risks of smaller or less-resourced developers. $20 million was deployed in the first round of funding with plans to deploy another $20 million in the second round.127
1C. Localize resources, services, and amenities like pharmacies, doctors’ offices, grocery stores, and libraries as much as possible at the neighborhood level to enhance community accessibility and convenience.
Currently, many neighborhoods that have experienced systemic disinvestment do not have equitable access to quality-of-life resources, services, and amenities at the neighborhood scale.
We call for the localization of resources and services needed for everyday life. By ensuring that essential amenities are available within all neighborhoods, we can ensure that residents can access what they need without the barrier of extensive travel, supporting neighborhood-scale economies and reducing climate pollution.
Delmar DivINe, Beyond Housing / 24:1 Community, Dutchtown Main Streets
1D. Invest equitably in the repair, renovation, and preservation of existing housing stock.
The housing stock in our region needs deep repairs and renovations, often saddling residents in disinvested communities with outsized burdens. We will not see equitable development and housing justice unless we prioritize resources for low-income and underserved neighborhoods, including more funds to stabilize historic and vacant homes.
By focusing on these efforts, we can preserve the beauty and quality of historic homes, prevent cycles of neighborhood decline and gentrification-induced displacement, maintain affordable housing options, and strengthen community bonds.
Healthy Home Repair Program - City of St. Louis; Rebuild Together STL; Community Builders Network membership affordable housing programs; Home Repair Network; Gateway Neighborhood Fund
1E. Restructure ward capital to be distributed equitably, rather than equally, to account for the legacies of systemic racism and disinvestment as well as the disparate levels of needs across neighborhoods today.
Currently, the alderperson for each of St. Louis City’s 14 wards receive the same amount of funds annually to support local improvements and infrastructure projects, such as repairing sidewalks, filling potholes, and installing speed bumps.
Distributing these funds equally among the city's wards is not equitable. Different wards have varying levels of need, with some requiring more extensive repairs and upgrades than others.
Different wards have varying levels of need.
For example, Northside wards have experienced decades of disinvestment, often because of government policies and practices. As a result, these wards consistently need more significant improvements compared to other areas. Areas that have greater need often do not have enough to address those needs.
Furthermore, the current system puts decisionmaking power in the hands of each alderperson, which can lead to incremental, inconsistent, and fragmented approaches to solving problems rather than comprehensive, city-wide improvements.
There are multiple options for how this could be remedied. One approach to implementing this solution is to leave alders in control of the spending but allocate ward capital according to a formula based on equity and need. Another approach could involve centralizing the funding structure and basing it on comprehensive studies of infrastructure needs, demographics, and other factors.
2A. Identify and pursue strategies to mitigate insurance and taxes as a financial barrier to housing security and upkeep.
In St. Louis City, over 50 owner-occupied homes are lost annually to tax foreclosure, often over unpaid real estate taxes as low as $400 (RETAF). This leads to loss of housing stability and equity for homeowners, and contributes to neighborhood decline through population loss and increased vacancies.128
Addressing the financial barriers posed by insurance and taxes is crucial for enhancing housing security and affordability. High costs can make home maintenance and ownership untenable, particularly for lowincome families. This solution seeks to explore policies and programs that could alleviate these financial burdens. By advocating for tax relief, negotiating community-based insurance discounts, or implementing subsidies for these expenses, we aim to ensure that homeowners are not overwhelmed by costs that could jeopardize their housing stability.
In St. Louis City, over 50 owner-occupied homes are lost annually to tax foreclosure.
St. Louis Real Estate Tax Assistance Fund (RETAF): Formed in 2021, RETAF provides immediate financial assistance to homeowners facing imminent tax foreclosure, utilizing philanthropic funds to benefit not just individual homeowners but also their communities. By helping to settle unpaid taxes, RETAF not only preserves homes but also supports local government budgets—funding schools, parks, and essential services—while preventing the rise in vacant properties that can exacerbate health issues, crime, and lower property values.128
Washington University's Live Near Your Work program; RETAF; SLDC; Senior Property Tax Freeze programs in St. Louis City and County
2B. Increase access to diverse forms of homeownership, including individually and collectively owned single and multifamily housing, removing barriers that overwhelmingly limit opportunities for families of color and those without inherited wealth.
To ensure that all families, especially those of color and without inherited wealth, can own homes, we propose expanding access to diverse forms of homeownership. This includes both single-family and multi-family housing options that can be owned individually or collectively.
This will involve a multi-faceted approach. Government and community-based financial assistance programs should provide down payment assistance, low-interest loans, and subsidies to help families overcome financial
barriers to homeownership. It’s important that any efforts to increase access to homeownership also include collective approaches, such as community-owned or stabilized affordable single-family and multi-family housing approaches that build community wealth.
Access to education and counseling services are another complement to homeownership initiatives. These services ensure individuals and families have the knowledge and skills needed to navigate the homeownership process successfully. This includes financial education, homebuyer education, and ongoing support to promote sustainable homeownership and prevent foreclosure.
We also call for measures to help families protect their inherited properties. We aim to address the challenges of heir's property, which often leads to property loss for families of color due to unclear titles and fragmented ownership. To prevent this, we support the use of transferon-death deeds (TODDs), which allow property to pass directly to heirs without probate, preserving family wealth. We also advocate for increased funding for legal services that assist with estate planning and title clearing. Successful models, like the Center for Heir's Property Preservation and programs in cities like Philadelphia, show how these efforts can help families secure and retain their property for future generations.129
Combined, these supports can help families achieve homeownership and build wealth for future generations.
BJC Healthcare; All CDCs and housing developers, particularly Art Place Initiative, Park Central, Dutchtown South Community Corporation, and St. Joseph Housing; Tenant Opportunity to Purchase
St. Louis City and County have both recently launched down payment assistance (DPA) programs to support homeownership across our region. The City of St. Louis is using funds from a federal COVID-19 relief bill to provide down payment assistance to homebuyers (Lloyd 2024). Information on St. Louis County’s program is available here.130
• Urban Institute’s Five-Point Framework
• Urban Institute’s Closing the Gaps: Building Black Wealth through Homeownership
• Brookings Homeownership, racial segregation, and policy solutions to racial wealth equity
2C. Advance and scale Community Investment Trusts (CIT), Community Land Trusts (CLT), and similar models as ways to shift power and wealth to residents.
Community Investment Trusts (CITs) are community-owned investment vehicles that pool resources from residents, local businesses, and other stakeholders to invest in community development projects.
Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are nonprofit organizations that acquire and hold land for the benefit of the community. They separate land ownership from property ownership, typically offering long-term ground leases to homeowners or businesses. Residents and stakeholders often have representation on CLT boards, giving them a voice in decision-making related to land use and development.
Both models can significantly contribute to shifting power and wealth to residents. They can preserve affordable housing, prevent displacement, and promote neighborhood
Both models can significantly contribute to shifting power and wealth to residents.
stability. Ultimately, they empower residents to have a direct say in how land and investments are managed and utilized within their communities. By retaining ownership or control over land and property, communities can capture the value created by development activities.
East Portland’s Community Investment Trust (CIT): This model is an innovative approach to shifting wealth and power to residents. CIT was developed by Mercy Corps and located in a 29,000-square-foot mid-century commercial retail mall in outer Southeast Portland with approximately 26 to 30 businesses and nonprofit tenants. Three hundred to five hundred nearby residents within four zip codes were given the option to follow a long-term path to collective ownership of this building in their neighborhood for as little as $10 and up to $100 per month – a low-dollar, lossprotected investment opportunity. 131
As NextCity writes: “the East Portland Community Investment Trust recently celebrated its fifth anniversary. While it has only one property, a small shopping plaza on the far east edge of the city, the property has 29,000 square feet of retail and office space, much of which is below ground. Five years ago, when the trust acquired it, it was around two-thirds leased up and in distress. Today it’s almost 100% leased up, with more than 30 tenants, including an immigrant-owned local taxicab service, several other immigrant- and refugee-
serving organizations, a large hair salon, and a mental health services provider for transgender youth." 100
“The Community Investment Trust (CIT) is a solution that utilizes a wealth-building approach to invest in people and places by helping residents to grow their wealth in assets, specifically those that are located in their own neighborhoods. CIT’s community ownership model—which was designed for working-class people who make low wages—puts community economic development in the hands of the community by giving residents the opportunity to “buy back the block” in an affordable way."132
Webster Groves Community Land Trust; Dutchtown South Community Corporation (DSCC) / the Mixed Income Neighborhood Trust (MINT); Tenants Transforming Greater St. Louis
2D. Establish a community fund for various neighborhood-based projects, infrastructure, and education about land, development, and housing efforts.
We call for the creation of a community fund for various neighborhood-based projects, infrastructure, and education related to land, development, and housing efforts.
This fund can serve as a catalyst for transformative change and equitable development, and advance principles of social and economic justice in neighborhood revitalization efforts.
The fund should empower residents and community stakeholders to actively participate in decisions about land use, development projects, and housing initiatives. For instance, it
can use democratic governance structures that ensure diverse community representation.
The fund could be financially supported through contributions from developers as part of community benefit agreements, government grants or subsidies, philanthropic donations, crowdfunding campaigns, or revenue generated from community-owned assets.
Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program: From 1991 to 2011, the Minneapolis Neighborhood Revitalization Program empowered residents with decision-making and budgetary control for local revitalization.
With $290 million, it supported affordable housing, education, small businesses, and public safety enhancements. Over 20 years, 67 neighborhoods implemented communitycreated plans. Many neighborhoods used the program's resources to create a revolving loan fund—a pool of money lent out to small businesses specifically for commercial projects that address the specific needs of the community.62
Neighborhood Leadership Academy (UMSL); Community Development Funders Forum; Invest STL - CDC technical assistance fund
2E. Pass an ordinance enabling current tenants as well as place-based and community-based organizations to have a right to purchase property prior to sale.
Who gets a first shot at buildings up for sale in a neighborhood?
This solution proposes an ordinance that would grant current tenants and community-based organizations the right to purchase properties before they are offered on the open market. This right of first refusal aims to empower residents and local groups, giving them a chance to secure and develop properties within their communities, thus fostering local control and community-driven development.
Who gets a first shot at buildings up for sale in a neighborhood?
Key steps in implementing this ordinance would include:
1. Identifying Eligible Properties: Properties subject to this ordinance would typically be those that come into city possession through mechanisms like tax sales, or are otherwise unclaimed or underutilized.
2. Establishing Purchase Procedures: Clear guidelines would need to be established for how these properties can be purchased, including setting fair pricing and timelines for purchase that give community members a realistic opportunity to organize funding.
3. Supporting Community Buyers: Providing assistance to potential community and tenant buyers is crucial. This could involve help with navigating legal requirements, accessing financial assistance to cover the appraisal gap, and technical support for property development.
4. Prioritizing Community Benefits: Proposals from community-based organizations should be evaluated based on their potential to meet
local needs, such as providing affordable housing, stimulating economic development, creating green spaces, or preserving cultural heritage.
This ordinance would prevent the displacement of existing residents. It would also counteract the negative impacts of speculative buying and investment that can lead to gentrification. By prioritizing those who are already part of the neighborhood, this approach ensures that development benefits those who call the area home, reinforcing local economies and social fabric.
Washington D.C.'s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA): TOPA has significantly empowered tenants with the opportunity to purchase their rented buildings and convert them into cooperatives or condominiums. The act mandates landlords to offer tenants the first right to buy the property before selling it to another buyer. This policy aims to prevent displacement and promote neighborhood stability by allowing tenants to become homeowners.133
The Department of Housing and Community Development (DHCD) provides crucial support to tenant groups through financial assistance like seed money and technical help in legal and organizational aspects. For instance, DHCD has helped preserve over 1,000 affordable housing units since 2002 by assisting tenant groups in acquiring their buildings.
San Francisco’s Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA): “In 2019, San Francisco instituted the Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA) to address the city’s residential displacement crisis. When a multi-family or mixed-use building goes up for sale, COPA gives the
right of first refusal to “qualified nonprofit organizations” that must keep the residential units permanently affordable as rentals or convert them to a limited-equity co-op.
While the law does not require commercial space be kept affordable, nonprofit buyers like the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA) have preserved or created affordable commercial space in these buildings for BIPOC- and immigrant-owned local businesses. MEDA’s work focuses on the Mission District, a longstanding Latinx neighborhood that has been subject to decades-long fights over the displacement of the Latinx community. By preserving small businesses alongside affordable housing, MEDA keeps both residents and community-serving businesses in place. As of 2022, COPA had preserved at least 39 small commercial units within mixeduse buildings across all of the qualified nonprofits."134
SLDC Land Reutilization Authority (LRA)
3A. Develop comprehensive land use, zoning, and development plans, centering equity and intentional involvement of community-based organizations and residents from disinvested areas of the region.
Traditionally, the region has lacked a shared, strategic comprehensive plan for how the city and county should engage in development to achieve economic growth or build community wealth. However, there have been recent efforts to address this.
Moving forward, there should be consistency in ensuring modern, coordinated approaches respond to today’s housing, climate, and infrastructure challenges in a way that promotes shared prosperity.
Comprehensive land use, zoning, and development plans are also traditionally developed without sufficient opportunity for mostimpacted communities to have a voice.
This voice is crucial for creating inclusive and sustainable urban environments, particularly in areas with a history of disinvestment. Intentional involvement of grassroots and communitybased organizations will not only ensure more equitable development, but can also be a good way to maintain transparency and accountability of local governments and developers.
3B. Reorganize and consolidate municipal development, land, and housing agencies and departments to foster stronger collaboration and simplify navigating planning and zoning processes.
The current planning and zoning process is obscure and opaque and benefits no developers, but especially creates hardship for smaller and least-resourced developers. A streamlined public-facing mechanism for planning and zoning would help diversify who builds in this region. This would reduce unnecessary gatekeeping.
Streamlining would be essential for fostering stronger collaboration, enhancing accountability, and aligning processes with the municipality's overarching vision for sustainable and equitable development.
Another potentially fruitful area of focus for consolidation and/or reorganization is code enforcement, which is currently scattered across too many departments (e.g. the building division, health department, forestry, towing, etc) in St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and within county municipalities. Some of these changes may require charter amendments, though further research is required to determine that with more certainty.
The degree of current consolidation and coordination (or the lack thereof) depends on the area of St. Louis in question, as it varies by municipality.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
St. Louis City’s SLUP; STLCO2050; St. Louis City’s Planning & Urban Design Agency; InvestSTL
In St. Louis City, real estate development, particularly larger scale development, is largely already consolidated under the St. Louis Development Corporation, with the Community Development Administration (CDA) having some authorities as well (one insider interviewed for this brief suggested that the system may already be as consolidated as it can get).
The charter is currently being amended in St. Louis City, but this has not been an area of focus or prioritized in that process, as there are many other areas that have been deemed more pressing.
The current planning and zoning process is obscure and opaque and benefits no developers.
3C. Implement policies that promote an equitable distribution of development projects across neighborhoods, focusing on revitalizing underinvested areas with quality resources and practices to prevent displacement.
S t. Louis has a long history of disinvestment and neglect in certain neighborhoods, particularly along lines of race and class, leading to disparities in infrastructure, services, and economic opportunities.
St. Louis has a long history of disinvestment and neglect in certain neighborhoods.
We call for policies that ensure that all communities, especially those historically disinvested or marginalized, benefit from development projects while mitigating the risk of displacement.
St. Louis City’s SLUP; STLCO2050; St. Louis City’s Planning & Urban Design Agency; InvestSTL
4A. Develop more rigor and standardization in determining which developers access land, by re-distributing some of the decision-making power beyond government to also include community.
The current process of real estate development happens without the voice of the vast majority of the city; but these decisions affect everyone.
We call for a more rigorous process to ensure development projects align with the needs, preferences, and priorities of local residents. Involving the community directly in decisionmaking ensures development benefits the broader public.
The process of real estate development is complex, and varies across the region; the process for doing a development in St. Louis City differs from the process in St. Louis County, and different municipalities within St. Louis County have their own rules and regulations related to development.
The process of real estate development is complex, and varies across the region.
In St. Louis City, one important entity is the Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority, also known as the LCRA. The LCRA consists of a fivemember board that oversees many aspects of public and private real estate development in the city – for instance, reviewing requests for public assistance in the form of tax abatement or taxexempt revenue bonds."135
In general, governments have far less legal authority to regulate real estate transactions between private parties than they do to influence real estate development involving publicly owned land (e.g. land that St. Louis’s land bank, the LRA, owns) as well as real estate development receiving significant public incentives. Accordingly, the spirit of this recommendation is likely to be most easily implemented by focusing on publicly owned land.
Potential strategies for implementing this recommendation include:
• Audit St. Louis City and St. Louis County economic development agencies and their boards’ (LCRA, Port Authority, etc.) community engagement policies and practices and compare them to best-inclass standards for authentic community engagement in the realm of development. Make all results of the audit accessible online for public review, including a press release sent to all local news outlets.
• Develop better systems for balancing power and creating checks and balances between developers, the government, and the community.
Ǯ Reform the LCRA to be more participatory and accountable to public input from all residents, with a particular focus on residents in the neighborhood where development is happening.
Ǯ Sunset municipal development boards OR radically remodel all development and land boards and commissions with urgency, mandating community leadership at LRA, LCRA, and other boards and commissions that inform land and development decisions;
• Create consistency in the assessment of and consequences for developers in regards to
the quality, compliance, equity, and ethics of their projects;
• Require SLDC to maintain a publicly accessible database online showing the results of all projects scored on the Community Benefits Scorecard, including any revisions in scores over time.
The above strategies focus primarily on St. Louis City; further research is required to understand the context in St. Louis County and determine strategies that would be appropriate there, though many of the same themes / areas of focus may be transferable.
Vacancy Collaborative Registered Neighborhood Organization initiative
4B. Create a publicly available database of development projects, government funding and subsidies accessed for those projects, and information on their compliance or lack thereof with regulations and community benefits.
Transparency matters—but too often decisions about development projects are made behind closed doors, leaving communities in the dark.
We call for policies that make information about development projects transparent and accessible to the public. This includes information on any government funding and subsidies accessed for those projects, as well as information on their compliance with regulations and community benefits agreements.
With more transparency will come accountability – stakeholders
Transparency matters—but too often decisions about development projects are made behind closed doors.
can track the use of public funds, monitor compliance with regulations, and assess the impact of development projects on communities. Ultimately, it will enhance trust, promote informed decision-making, and ensure that development projects align with the needs and priorities of the community.
Ensure the data is available digitally and leverage libraries and other public institutions to ensure accessibility.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
SLDC; Greater St. Louis Inc.
4C. Reform the TIF, abatement, and subsidy processes, ensuring more government accountability and rigor around distribution to developers.
Tax Increment Financing, abatements, and subsidies are financial incentives provided by governments to encourage development in certain areas or industries – generally by reducing or eliminating property taxes.
These incentives are often tilted far in favor of developers over community. Critics of the current system argue that these property tax breaks benefit large corporations and nonprofits (e.g. hospitals and universities), real estate developers, at the expense of the public school systems, which rely on property taxes for most of their funding. In fact, a 2024 analysis of all 24 St. Louis County and St. Louis City public school districts found that economic development tax abatements, especially TIF, have cost students more than a quarter of a billion dollars in just the past six years.136
We call for stricter oversight mechanisms, transparency requirements, and criteria for awarding incentives. This will ensure that government leaders can prevent misuse of public funds, promote equitable distribution of incentives. It also ensures that development projects align with community priorities and goals, including building community wealth.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Team TIF; SLDC, City’s Board Bill 64I
• Overarching Disparities: How Black and Poor Students are Disproportionately Impacted by St. Louis-Area Tax Abatements
• Washington University’s Brown School of Social Work Webinar: Who Benefits from Tax
4D. Pass an ordinance requiring Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) for all developments seeking public subsidy and incentives over $1 million.
A Community Benefits Agreement (CBA) is a contract signed by community groups and developers to ensure that local projects provide specific benefits to the community, such as jobs, housing, or environmental protections.
We call for the implementation of a Community Benefits Agreement ordinance, which would require CBAs to be negotiated for all developments seeking public subsidy and incentives over $1 million.
This is a proactive approach to increasing accountability among developers and decisionmakers in development. It ensures that shared resources are used transparently, equitably, and for maximum community benefit.
The Equitable St. Louis CBA Guidebook names three principles any community considering an agreement should make sure they incorporate into the CBA process and final document:
• Community representation leading the negotiating process.
• Mutual benefits for the neighborhood, region, and developer.
• Legally binding agreements that are enforceable by the community.
Additional elements related to this recommendation include:
• Ensure CBAs are enforceable: develop and implement clawbacks (such as tax penalties) when they are not honored by developers or government.
• Community benefits examples include affordable housing, high-speed internet
access, funding of youth services, distribution of land/resources to descendants of enslaved people, technical or financial contribution to transportation management plans (TMP) to upkeep streets.
• CBA policies also often require developers to disclose detailed plans for their projects, including the intended use of public subsidies and incentives. This transparency fosters accountability as it allows stakeholders, including community members and local authorities, to review and monitor how resources are being utilized.
• As land, property, and developments get sold to new owners, there must be mechanisms to ensure the new owner is also accountable to the CBA.
A related consideration when exploring a CBA ordinance is how to ensure that funding for public schools is not negatively impacted by the issuance of incentives. Quantifying the potential impact a CBA ordinance could have on education funding would depend on the amount of incentives issued alongside CBAs; estimating that requires further research and policy analysis.
Detroit’s CBA Ordinance: “In 2016, Detroiters (MI) voted to pass the first-ever community benefits ordinance (CBO), a law that requires developers to negotiate with a council of local residents to agree on a set of community benefits. Drawing from the goals and the structure of community benefits agreements that have become popular since the 1990s, this ordinance has won Detroit communities benefits like locally sourced jobs, affordable housing, green space, and streetscape improvements.
Scholars have evaluated many cases of community benefits agreements, and some authors claim that codifying community benefits agreements through policy is the next step to ensuring their political viability and stability. Using Detroit’s CBO as a case, I aim to uncover the successes and challenges of implementing the ordinance. I answer this question through a qualitative analysis of policies and interviews with residents, planners, developers, and activists (n = 45). I find that the ordinance is successful in its establishment of agreements for 10 projects where communities have secured more than 160 distinct benefits. However, just as with traditional community benefits agreements, the formalization of community benefits through planning policy is still subject to several shortcomings. These include a negotiation timeline that often favors developers and uneven access to development and policy knowledge.
CBOs can be opportunities for inclusion in development decisions and can bring important resources to communities. However, cities should note the need to provide training to neighborhood advisory council members and allocate the resources to do so. They should also reconcile the timeline for negotiations preferred by communities with the often hurried timelines of developers."137
For more, listen to this podcast with the author of the above case study: The Move to a CBA Ordinance-Case of Detroit | Yale School of Management and/or read this additional case study, Fighting for Equity in Development: The Story of Detroit's Community Benefits Ordinance, from the Building Movement Project.
Recognized Neighborhood Organizations database; Board of Aldermen; Equitable St. Louis CBA Policy Guidebook
5A. Equitably develop, activate, maintain, and improve parks, green spaces, and green corridors beyond the “Central Corridor,” using Community Land Trusts wherever possible.
Communities of color experience “nature deprivation” at three times the rate of white Americans. We call for green infrastructure to change this.
Urban green spaces create jobs, address climate change, and encourage physical activity. Green infrastructure, like The High Line in New York, can revitalize neighborhoods and promote economic growth by attracting investment and raising property values. In 2019, local public park and recreation agencies in the United States generated nearly $218 billion in economic activity, up from $140 billion six years earlier.138
Communities of color experience
“nature deprivation” at three times the rate of white Americans.
Green spaces and green corridors can also be very useful in terms of reducing heat due to urban heat island effects and climate change; reducing runoff and water pollution; improving air quality and more.
Milwaukee’s Restoration of Playfields: Milwaukee found over half its playfields in fair to poor condition, with those in communities of color and low-income areas being the worst off. Addressing this inequality, officials launched a $25 million, 10-year plan to renovate these spaces, prioritizing areas based on race, income, poverty, and crime, alongside park conditions. The first five renovations are done, with six more underway.139
Green Corridors in Medellin, Colombia: Medellín faced a severe urban heat island effect, prompting the city to launch the three-year ‘Greener Medellín for You’ program, which marked a significant shift in urban design. As part of the $16.3 million initiative, 75 citizens from disadvantaged backgrounds were trained by Medellín’s Botanical Garden to become city gardeners and planting technicians. These individuals have assisted in planting 8,800 trees and palms across 30 corridors spanning 65 hectares. In one of the city's busiest thoroughfares, 596 palms and trees, along with over 90,000 lesser plants, have been planted.
In addition to creating green jobs for people from disadvantaged backgrounds, these Green Corridors provide numerous ecosystem services for Medellín: they reduce average city temperatures by 2°C (3.6°F), facilitate carbon uptake through plant growth, capture particulate matter (PM2.5) to improve air quality, and enhance urban biodiversity by creating more wildlife-friendly habitats.140
Brickline Greenway; Great Rivers Greenway; Green City Coalition; BiodiverseCity St. Louis; Seed St. Louis
5B. Ensure development is environmentally sustainable.
Development that cuts corners to prioritize profit over the environmental health of the places we call home will ultimately backfire, harming long-term community wellness and wealth.
We call for policies that promote the development of sustainable housing options, such as energy and water efficient buildings and accessible design features. This will involve collaborating with architects, urban planners, and housing experts to design and implement innovative housing solutions that address diverse needs while prioritizing environmental sustainability. For new affordable housing developments, environmental sustainability efforts should be made as efficient and costeffective as possible in order to ensure increased costs don’t unintentionally limit supply.
Local Initiatives and Institutions
St. Louis Strategic Land Use Plan
My job at Action St. Louis is to be the nimble policy wonk,” says Marcel Hagens.
Hagens is the Policy Coordinator for Action St. Louis Power Project, a grassroots racial justice organization that was founded by activists politicized after the killing of Michael Brown Jr. and the Ferguson Uprising. Their mission is to fight to build political power for Black people in St. Louis. They do this through a variety of tactics: organizing, communications, advocacy, and direct action to mitigate harm against the Black community while fighting for long-term transformation.141
Hagens joined in 2021 as the first full-time person leading policy at the organization. “I’m responsible for doing the policy research, having direct conversations with city officials, and directly advocating for specific policies on the local level and state level.”
The Power Project is committed to driving more equitable tax and capital policies across St. Louis. One of the major projects they help lead is The People’s Plan. Anchored by 50 local organizations, the People’s Plan is a comprehensive policy agenda designed to build power and redistribute resources in
St. Louis City. One pillar of the plan, Funding our Future, calls on the city to commit to a number of policies, including funding for youth and education and equitable taxation.142
“One of the goals of our work is to provide the political education to help people build a better understanding of the budgeting process at the city level and the county level,” Hagens says. “We are pushing for a more transparent, community-oriented process so the community has a chance to weigh in on tax policy and budget priorities.”
Hagens is proud of some notable progress that Action St. Louis and their coalition partners have made. Last year, St. Louis became the twentysecond jurisdiction nationwide to implement a right-to-counsel policy for tenants facing eviction. They have also seen victories around workplace safety and funding for community clinics.
One of the campaigns that Hagens is focused on now is educating community members around participatory budgeting. A core value of Action St. Louis is self-determination – “the right of a people to determine their own vision and govern themselves in service of that vision” – and getting citizens involved in tactical decisions about the budget is a way to advance that value.
They are starting with the police budget. “A large portion of the city’s general revenue goes to the St. Louis Police Department budget year after year, unexplained,” Hagens says. “So what we are asking is: the budget includes money for things like new vehicles, but how is that actually translating to an overall safer community?”
Another main focus area is how developers interact with the city. Currently, developers get significant tax abatements without much oversight. “We are asking what it looks like to empower a neighborhood association to create a process to have a conversation with residents.
Investment priorities harm communities, instead of supporting communities:
Too little capital, particularly from the government and via taxes, goes back into communities to support wellness and access to equitable resources and opportunities to thrive.
Lack of transparency and accountability in how public funding gets spent:
There is a lack of transparency, accountability, and trust in how the government and public leaders spend and invest (our) capital.
of St. Louis households have a net wealth of zero or negative, meaning they own no assets or they owe more than they own. 21%
Households in St. Louis with a net wealth of zero or negative:
Black: 28-48%, Hispanic/Latino: 12-35%, White: 6-26%
“We are pushing for a more transparent, community-oriented process so the community has a chance to weigh in on tax policy and budget priorities.”
Marcel Hagens
Theme #1: Repair harm to historically exploited communities through structural and policy changes, including an equitable city-county merger and reparations
Theme #2: Adopt progressive taxation to reduce the burden on low-wealth households
Theme #3: Reallocate public resources to invest in community wealth and well-being, divesting from harmful or ineffective areas
Theme #4: Prioritize community-led approaches to capital management and distribution
Theme #1: Repair harm to historically exploited communities through structural and policy changes, including an equitable city-county merger and reparations
1A. Provide reparations,— including (but not limited to) for slavery, housing discrimination, and land loss / theft.
S t. Louis, like many American cities, has a deeply rooted history of slavery, racial segregation and economic disenfranchisement that directly harmed Black families. From the infamous “Delmar Divide” to racially restrictive covenants and redlining, to the destruction of Black neighborhoods like Mill Creek Valley, to the closing of Homer Phillips Hospital, systemic racism has been a pervasive force in shaping the city's economic and social landscape.
These historical injustices, as well as specific
instances of violence like the East St. Louis 1917 Massacre, have resulted in significant wealth gaps and reduced economic opportunities for Black residents. These are tangible harms that deserve repair.
We call for policies that provide reparations to Black residents and communities in the St. Louis region. Reparations programs acknowledge and address harms caused by human rights violations such as slavery, segregation, or the systematic denial of fair housing, education, food, or employment opportunities. They can take various forms, such as financial compensation, access to resources and opportunities, or initiatives aimed at restoring dignity and addressing systemic inequalities.
The United Nations identified five components to an effective reparations plan: restitution, compensation, rehabilitation, satisfaction, and guarantees of nonrepetition."143
Systemic racism has been a pervasive force in shaping the city's economic and social landscape.
St. Louis City has a Reparations Commission that released a report in 2024.144 Former Congresswoman Cori Bush also introduced a reparations bill at the national level.145
Reparations is a complex topic with a significant body of work around it, and there are more proposed reparations plans than space allows for summarizing. For more, see:
• City of St. Louis Reparations Commission Report
• Reparations for Black descendants of people enslaved in the U.S.
• Housing reparations
• The Movement for Black Lives’ Reparations Platform
• National African-American Reparations Commission’s 10-point reparations plan
• The California Reparations Report
1B. As part of providing reparations, deploy more capital towards agricultural programs and efforts led by Black and other marginalized communities that have historically experienced exploitation and stripping of land and wealth in relation to agricultural efforts.
The stripping of farmland from Black Americans is a particular wound in the country's history of racial injustice, with 98% of Black agricultural landowners having been dispossessed of their land across the last century.146
We call for a prioritization of investment in agricultural initiatives especially led by Black communities, in
order to restore ownership, economic power, and cultural heritage. This approach seeks to rectify past injustices by providing resources and opportunities for these communities. It creates the opportunity to reclaim control of agricultural resources, build wealth, and revitalize disinvested communities.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Reparations Generation; Urban and Indoor Ag (BioSTL, Danforth Center); Seed St. Louis; Known and Grown; FoodCorps
1C. Create a system where local governments provide funding for political campaigns, using taxpayer money to help reduce the outsized role of wealthy donors and make running for office more accessible and equitable (i.e. “public financing” of campaigns).
We call for policies that provide public dollars, like matching programs, to fund political campaigns and level the playing field for candidates. Under this framework, the government would provide public funds to amplify the voices of everyday residents. This makes candidates more responsive to their constituents and ensures transparency and fairness in the electoral process.
This approach aims to reduce the influence of money in politics from wealthy donors, empowering candidates from diverse backgrounds to participate in elections.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Honest Elections Coalition (Show Me Integrity, A Red Circle, Forward Through Ferguson, Empower Missouri)
1D. Pursue an equity-centered approach to a city-county merger to repair the fragmented governance structure in our region.
The fragmented governance structure of St. Louis City and County creates significant barriers to building community wealth and advancing collective well-being. In 2016, the St. Louis region was served by over 100 separate local governments and special districts, leading to duplicative administrative expenses and costing taxpayers more per person than comparable peer metro areas like Louisville and Indianapolis.147
Beyond inefficiency, the patchwork system contributes to stark disparities in service quality between affluent and poorer areas. The complex governance landscape also hampers regional planning and collective action, while reinforcing racial and economic segregation.
The St. Louis region was served by over 100 separate local governments and special districts.
An equity-centered merger could streamline governance, reduce duplicated spending, and harmonize public services. It could also lead to more equitable distribution of resources, support coherent regional strategies on housing and infrastructure, and help dismantle the institutional barriers reinforcing segregation and disinvestment.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Ferguson Commission Report, Arch City Defenders, Beyond Housing / 24:1 Community
2A. Reform the tax code to ensure an equitable distribution of wealth and income, including but not limited to property and income tax reform.
Ensuring equitable income and wealth distribution through tax code reforms is critical for St. Louis. This solution includes preserving and strengthening the earnings tax in St. Louis City by extending it to capital gains, closing tax loopholes benefiting the wealthiest families (e.g. by expanding the earnings tax to include interest, dividends, and capital gains), ensuring property tax assessments are equitable, as well as other changes informed by additional policy research.
These reforms aim to ensure that wealthier residents contribute fairly to public expenses.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
People’s Plan St. Louis – Funding our Future platform; MO Budget Project
2B. Negotiate PILOTs (payments in lieu of taxes) or pursue a ballot measure to ensure that well-resourced, large non-profits like universities and hospitals pay their fair share and contribute more to building community wealth.
The City of St. Louis has one of the smallest total areas of taxable property of any major city in the United States.
Ensuring that large non-profit institutions contribute to the community is essential. Institutions like universities and hospitals are major landholders and influential economic entities. They traditionally do not pay property taxes despite benefiting from city services and infrastructure. According to a 2018 estimate, St. Louis City and the St. Louis Public School District forgo approximately $59 million annually due to tax exemptions for large tax-exempt entities such as universities and hospitals.148
According to a 2018 estimate, St. Louis City and the St. Louis Public School District forgo approximately $59 million annually.
Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTs) or similar measures can help make sure these institutions contribute their fair share to the community. These contributions alleviate financial pressures on the city and support vital public services, such as education. They directly enhance community wealth and stability. Additionally, the funds should prioritize investment in community wealth solutions over traditional, individualistic approaches.
Theme #3: Reallocate public resources to invest in community wealth and well-being, divesting from harmful or ineffective areas
3A. Change how local and state government capital (i.e. deposits and investments) is managed, including potentially starting one or more public banks, to build community wealth and maximize public benefit with a focus on our most disinvested communities.
Governments collect and spend very large amounts of money. They typically rely on private banks and financial institutions to hold this money for them in the course of their everyday business. These banks are then allowed to lend out a multiple of the amount they are holding, making money on the deposits – often without benefiting the community.
We call on governments to use their financial power to influence financial institutions to do more to build community wealth – through establishing depository scorecards and establishing public banks. A public bank is a financial institution owned and operated by the government or a public entity. Public banks differ from private banks, which are owned and operated by private individuals or entities; a public bank is owned and operated by a state or city government in the public interest.
Public banks can be used as a major lever of economic power.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
The People's Plan; Green New Deal for Public Schools; University City
Public banks can be used as a major lever of economic power to advance community wealth building by making loans to projects that have significant social and environmental benefits. Solutions such as worker co-ops, communityowned land and property initiatives are often not served well by large banks.
Bank of North Dakota: The country's oldest public bank is based in North Dakota and has been in operation since it was founded in 1919. "According to available data, the bank has turned a profit every year since its founding. [...] The bank is the only legal depository for all state funds. The state and its agencies are required to place their funds in the bank, helping it hold 15% of the total deposits of banks operating within the state. Profits from the bank are either deposited in North Dakota's general fund, or are used to support economic development in the state. $585 million of profits have been deposited into the North Dakota general fund since the bank's inception."149
"The state-owned Bank of North Dakota [...] has had a stellar return on investment in recent decades, outperforming even J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. In its 2020 Annual Report wrapping up that crisis year, BND still reported a profit of $141.2 million and a return on investment of 15%. While its 16-year streak of record-breaking profits was broken in 2020, BND’s ability to respond quickly to the crisis enabled the state to distribute unemployment benefits faster than any other state and small businesses secured more Payroll Protection Program (PPP) funds per worker than in any other state."150
The Public Banking Institute has many useful resources related to public banking, including a legislation tracker, studies and reports, details on legal issues and approaches to overcome obstacles, advocacy toolkits with brochures, infographics, slide decks, etc., and much more.
• Primer on Public Banks
• Next City report on existing Public Banks
• Campaigns for public banking in Chicago, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New Jersey, Michigan, New York City & New York State, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington State
• NYC campaign for a public bank
3B. Reimagine budgeting allocations and earmarks in St. Louis City, County, and Missouri to shift public spending to invest much more in solutions that build community wealth, while divesting from areas that worsen racial disparities.
We call for a comprehensive audit and analysis of the budgeting processes and approaches to appropriations, allocations, and earmarks within St. Louis City, County, and Missouri. Following this assessment, the goal is to reimagine these processes to ensure that capital is allocated in a manner that prioritizes the needs and aspirations of the community.
The People’s Plan (TPP) in New York: They began in mid-2020 as a collaborative policy platform project leading into the 2021 city-wide elections. In late 2021 and 2022, after the election of NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who had ranked at the bottom of many progressive mayoral scorecards, advocates shifted focus to advocacy against Mayor Eric Adams’ regressive policy agenda and harsh budgeting. Since Spring of 2022, TPP has focused on the People’s Budget campaign to fight against Mayor Adams’ gutting of the City’s social safety net.154
The People’s Plan: St. Louis
4A. Advance policies that allow for participatory budgeting to shape allocations and appropriations of government budgets.
Participatory budgeting is a democratic voting process in which community members decide how to spend part of a public budget. Participatory budgeting mechanisms are a powerful approach to giving communities direct input and decision-making power over how public funds are allocated to address local needs and priorities.
Participatory budgeting is now used in over 7,000 cities around the world and has existed in St. Louis as well.
Participatory budgeting is now used in over 7,000 cities around the world and has existed in St. Louis as well. Communities use it to decide budgets from states, counties, cities, housing authorities, schools, and other institutions.151
There are also multiple local precedents for participatory budgeting. For example, St. Louis ReCAST was funded by a 5-year, $4.7 million grant that was awarded to the St. Louis County Department of Public Health, the City of St. Louis Department of Health, and the St. Louis Mental Health Board in 2016 by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). ReCAST stands for Resiliency in Communities After Stress and Trauma. Each project was designed and funded through a participatory budgeting process—meaning that residents themselves were involved in deciding how grant funds were allocated in their community.152
There is also a growing movement for Participatory Policy Making. “Participatory policy-making (PPM, for short) focuses explicitly on ways the community can inform and decide on policy. More specifically, it refers to a policy-making process that invites community members to identify, develop, and decide directly on policy proposals.”
153 See this one-pager for an overview and this toolkit for more details.
New York City: In November 2018, close to one million New Yorkers voted in a citywide referendum proposed by the 2018 Charter Revision Commission for a ballot initiative creating the CEC and mandating it to implement a yearly citywide participatory budgeting program utilizing mayoral expense funding, which was branded as "The People's Money (New York City Civic Engagement Commission 2024)." This mandate can be found in Chapter 76 of the NYC Charter. In 2018 alone, nearly 100,000 New York City residents allocated more than $36 million to 124 community projects in what the Participatory Budgeting Project calls “the largest local civic engagement program in the US,” with participants as young as 11 years old. Since 2012, $210 million has been allocated through PBNYC, which the Participatory Budgeting Project says has sparked an additional $180 million in spending through the traditional appropriation process.157
steward local community-serving properties and businesses."155
We call for the funding, launch, and scaling of more community-driven investment funds. This approach channels capital directly into initiatives driven by and benefiting the communities themselves. It empowers marginalized groups, fosters economic resilience, and addresses systemic inequalities.
These funds would prioritize projects and businesses led by people of color and support the well-being of the most disinvested neighborhoods and communities.156
4B. Fund, launch, and scale more community-driven investment funds, prioritizing people of color-led projects and businesses that support the well-being of our most dis-invested neighborhoods and communities.
A Community Investment Fund (CIF), sometimes called community investment trust/ vehicle or community impact fund, is a financial structure that builds wealth and promotes selfdetermination for local residents and community members by pooling investments, often lowdollar and protected, to acquire and collectively
REAL People’s Fund: Several organizations came together and leveraged their areas of expertise to launch and run The REAL People’s Fund. “The REAL People’s Fund (RPF) is a $10 million fund that invests in BIPOC-owned businesses in the East Bay of California. Community Vision, a CDFI, underwrites and administers [the] larger loans [of the fund]; Uptima Entrepreneurship Cooperative provides technical assistance to [the] businesses; and the Runway Project gives access to early-stage financing. The REAL People’s Fund doesn’t rely on credit scores or personal assets to make investments. With community-based and BIPOCfocused leadership, RPF is incorporating the expertise and perspective needed to maximize the empowerment of marginalized communities.
Grassroots Design: The fund was initiated by the Solidago Foundation, but direction of the project was quickly passed to a coalition of six grassroots organizations. These organizations designed most aspects of the fund,
including the decisions to bring on core partners for loan underwriting and business assistance.
Grassroots Governance: The fund’s governing board is controlled by the founding grassroots organizations, along with one seat for non-founder community organizations and one for community investors.
Grassroots Investment: The wider community has an opportunity to invest in the fund at a minimum of $100, at 3% interest. Community investors elect a member to the board."158 159
Other relevant examples of communitydriven investment funds include Seed Commons (see solution 3A in the Business & Labor section), the East Portland Community Investment Trust (see solution 1C in the Land & Property section), and The Boston Ujima Project’s Ujima Fund (see solution 1C in the Ecosystem Development & Coordination section).
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
SLDC Economic Justice Plan; Invest STL; WEPOWER and partners via Seed Commons
4C. Increase access to and capacity of CDFIs to increase access to capital for more businesses and community-centered and/or based projects.
We call for deeper support of Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) in the region, particularly in low-wealth markets. This will allow more businesses and communitycentered projects to gain access to capital.
“CDFIs create a multiplier effect by leveraging $8 in private sector investment for every $1 in public funding."
A CDFI is a financial institution that provides credit and financial services to underserved markets and populations. Different types of CDFIs include a community development bank, a community development credit union (CDCU), a community development loan fund (CDLF), a community development venture capital fund (CDVC), a microenterprise development loan fund, or a community development corporation.
“Grants are vital for helping CDFIs build capacity, grow net assets, and leverage debt."162
“CDFIs create a multiplier effect by leveraging $8 in private sector investment for every $1 in public funding."163
Filene: Filene is expanding on its 15+ year successful track record of testing and scaling solutions by partnering with Urban Strategies, Inc. and Native Women Lead to create the Racial Economic Equity (REE) Incubator. The REE Incubator takes a unique approach to addressing wealth gaps by inviting a small group of credit unions already partnering with community organizations to apply together and participate. As a cohort, they will help create a framework for incorporating racial equity into financial programs, products, services, and strategies with an explicit focus on reducing the racial wealth gap.160
CalCORE: CalCORE is a five-year statewide initiative that brings together cohorts of community-based developers, with a focus on Black, Indigenous, people of color-led (BIPOC) real estate organizations, particularly Community Development Corporations (CDCs) and Community Land Trusts (CLTs). These deeply rooted organizations often serve as a buffer between the commercial real estate market and their communities while navigating capacity and capital barriers for wider community impact. CalCORE’s third cohort focuses on housing and will help eligible nonprofit organizations prepare for the Foreclosure Intervention Housing Preservation Program (FIHPP). Over the next few years, FIHPP will provide approximately $400 million in grants and loans to nonprofits to acquire, rehabilitate, and preserve affordable housing in foreclosure or at risk of foreclosure. This CalCORE cohort will provide training and resources for community-based developers to help them prepare to leverage this opportunity.161
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Community Builders Exchange Network; St. Louis CDFI Coalition;Transformation Fund; Community Development Funders Forum; St. Louis Community Credit Union (Community Impact Deposit program); JSMF; Red Circle; ULI
4D. Create a trust fund that residents and communities can access for rapid response and emergencies.
A trust fund is designed to hold and manage assets on someone else's behalf, with the help of a neutral third party. Trust funds are often invested to generate financial returns on an ongoing basis.
This approach creates collective systems of care and financial relief to safeguard the wellbeing of residents within a community. This fund would allow communities to gain access to financial resources to address urgent needs and respond swiftly to crises.
Redistribute resources in a manner that acknowledges the extractive origins of philanthropic wealth (family or institutional).
The concept of a “trust fund” for broad-based, rapid response relief on an ongoing basis is new, even though there have been many mutual aid/relief programs that have existed and continue to exist in various forms. In a sense, a philanthropic foundation with an endowment that provides “rapid response grants” to nonprofits is a “fund providing cash relief to non-owners of the fund,” but for organizations, not individuals.164
Increasingly, philanthropic foundations are exploring reparative philanthropy. This approach involves the redistribution of resources in a manner that acknowledges the extractive origins of philanthropic wealth (family or institutional), and how colonization, slavery, and other forms of oppression have facilitated the accumulation of wealth, which philanthropy can often protect and grow. Foundations are also considering broader possibilities for redistributing the wealth that they have amassed.165
4E. Support existing mutual aid networks in expanding and developing improved infrastructure to build more community selfreliance and resilience in the face of emergencies of all kinds.
Mutual aid is when people come together to help each other meet basic needs, especially in times or places where systems fall short. It’s based on solidarity, not charity. Everyone gives what they can and takes what they need.
Strengthening mutual aid networks enhances community self-reliance and resilience, especially during emergencies. Investing in infrastructure and support for these networks helps communities respond better to crises and maintain stability. Efforts to implement this solution should begin by identifying and engaging with current mutual aid efforts in St. Louis, and potential areas for infrastructure improvement.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Mental models and narratives:
There is a lack of shared analysis including awareness and understanding of the violent and harmful history and beliefs that have shaped and currently drive our economy and its impact on people of color and poor people.
Power dynamics:
The inequitable power dynamics of the current economy limit our ability to move towards an inclusive vision and effective coordination and accountability to community wealth building.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
African proverb
Theme #1: Coordinate and resource the region’s transition to Community Wealth Building
Theme #2: Grow public awareness and understanding of Community Wealth Building
Theme #3: Provide technical assistance, training, and support to residents and initiatives
Theme #4: Build political power to achieve Community Wealth Building policy and systems changes
1A. Create or strengthen a group to lead regional coordination around efforts to build community wealth. This group should develop a regional strategy and action plan centered on community-driven, systemic changes.
Theme #5: Track progress and conduct ongoing research to inform future efforts to inefficient use of resources and duplicated efforts. Moreover, existing coordination efforts at the regional level do not focus on community wealth building but rather on more traditional economic development and economic justice approaches. A coordinated approach with a priority of advancing community wealth building can ensure impactful progress towards a set of transformational outcomes that center our most marginalized communities while also shifting the purpose and use of capital, land, labor, and enterprise.
Community Wealth Building (CWB) “is an economic development model that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets (Democracy Collaborative n.d.).44 While it is distinct from other economic models, this Playbook articulates a belief that solutions such as those named in the Family Well-Being & Public Infrastructure section, like raising the minimum wage and ensuring universal access to childcare, strengthen the feasibility of CWB.
To achieve the “North Star” of closing the racial wealth gap, there must be the creation or strengthening of a group dedicated to leading regional coordination. Currently, many efforts to shift and improve the economy are fragmented and single-issue focused, leading
This solution aims to bring together various stakeholders from public, private, and nonprofit sectors to collaborate on developing a coordinated and mutually reinforcing approach to economic transformation. This group would work towards creating a cohesive strategy and set of priorities year-to-year: sourcing and allocating resources, creating a landscape analysis and power map, building public awareness, coordinating implementation of the solutions in this Playbook, and measuring impact. This work should
To achieve the “North Star” of closing the racial wealth gap, there must be the creation or strengthening of a group dedicated to leading regional coordination.
ground itself in the principles of the collective impact framework and also apply a movementbuilding lens.42
There must be strong infrastructure at the governance level of this regional coordinating group to ensure it is able to:
• Foster the inclusive participation of a broad and diverse set of individual and institutional stakeholders;
• Avoid duplication of efforts;
• Distribute power and resources;
• Monitor inputs and outputs;
• Understand and build on best practices and continuous improvement;
• Ensure continuity with aligned and equitable past and current efforts.
Montreal/Quebec Chantier: After a period of approximately a decade of research and collaboration to develop ways to build more equitable economies, in 1996 a working group of economists, activists, and organizers in Quebec, Canada developed an agenda for economic and social change and created an organization to advance their agenda and goals. They called this organization the Chantier de l’économie sociale. Its purpose is to diversify and democratize the economy and promote a development model based on the values of solidarity, equity, and transparency in the Quebec region, which includes Montreal and other cities.
Today, cooperatives and social economy organizations together make up 8-10% of Quebec’s GDP. More than 7,000 of these
so-called “social economy” enterprises ring up $17 billion in annual sales and hold $40 billion in assets (Canadian dollars). They account for about 215,000 jobs across Quebec.169
Chicago Community Wealth Building Ecosystem (CCWBE): The Chicago Community Wealth Building Ecosystem was initiated in 2019. It led to the establishment of a community advisory panel that was then seeded with $15 million in federal recovery dollars to resource a network of community wealth building partners and efforts.
The work of the CCWBE includes funding a network of advisors to provide specialized and culturally-responsive technical assistance services at no cost to eligible non-profit and for-profit start-ups and businesses advancing community wealth building practices such as worker cooperatives, limitedequity housing cooperatives, community land trusts, and community investment vehicles.170
1B. Provide capacity-building and training opportunities for community members and businesses to adopt CWB practices and new ways of thinking related to capital, land and property, and business and labor.
Community wealth building work involves both new (and Indigenous) ways of thinking and specialized legal, financial, or other technical knowledge and skills that are not normally accessible to many. Training and capacitybuilding are essential for enabling our region to collaboratively and equitably turn our vision for community wealth building into a reality.
We call for funding of projects and programs to provide the tools, knowledge, skills, and capacity necessary for businesses, communities, and families to engage in practices that support local economic power building, sustainability, cooperation, and the well-being of the entire community.
1C. Activate and support an alliance of businesses in adopting community wealth building approaches and advocating for community wealth building policies.
Businesses play a central role in our economy and hold significant power, especially when they unite around a common set of interests and priorities. We call for the development of a mechanism for businesses that align with community wealth building values to organize themselves as they advocate for policies and resources to advance their shared interests in building community wealth.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Neighborhood Leadership Academy at UMSL; Solidarity Economy STL; Cooperation STL Sustainable Backyards Tour; The St. Louis Green Business Challenge; EarthDay365 & The Green Dining Alliance; OneSTL / Sustainability Labs; WEPOWER's Power Building Academy and Tomorrow Builders Fellowship; Community Wealth Action Group (CWAG); Sow Joy Peoples
There are a number of ways to carry out such a solution, including forming a Solidarity Economy Chamber of Commerce, and/or working with existing chambers and business support groups to activate businesses to be sufficiently equipped to adopt community wealth building approaches.
Clear standards should be established to ensure accountability to community wealth building values. The Ujima Good Business Alliance (see case study below) provides a good example of one way to do this.
This business alliance should coordinate with the larger CWB coordinating body. This could be achieved by incorporating it directly within the same body, similar to how the regional business chamber is part of Greater St. Louis Inc. Another option is to ensure representation in the governance coordinating body itself.
The Boston Ujima Project: The Boston Ujima Project, launched in 2015, is a democratic, member-run organization aimed at building cooperative economic infrastructure in Boston, particularly in working-class communities of color (Ujima Boston n.d.).171 Named after the Kwanzaa principle of collective work and responsibility, Ujima seeks to establish an alternative economy rooted in solidarity and community control of capital.172
Ujima Good Business Certification & Community Standards Committee: Central to Ujima's strategy is its Good Business Certification, which encourages shifting collective spending towards businesses that align with community values and foster an environment of economic well-being. Businesses seeking certification must adhere to Ujima’s Good Business Standards (36 practices across eight categories: Good Faith Effort, Community Ownership, Good Local Jobs, Worker Power, Health & Safety, Customers & Vendors, Environment, and Community Power) developed and approved by its voting members (Ujima Boston n.d.).171 The Community Standards Committee (CSC), elected by Ujima members, works directly with businesses to uphold these standards, providing support and accountability.
Ujima Fund: In 2018, Ujima launched the Ujima Fund, the first democraticallycontrolled investment fund in the U.S. The fund provides investments of up to $250,000 with interest rates as low as 3.5% per year (Abello 2018). By mid2023, the Ujima Fund had surpassed the milestone of investing over one million dollars in eight companies. The fund’s investment process is community-driven, with businesses nominated and voted on
by Ujima members through assemblies and an online platform, ensuring investments reflect community priorities.173
Ujima Good Business Alliance (UGBA): To qualify for investments, businesses must join the Ujima Good Business Alliance (UGBA). Membership in the UGBA is contingent on compliance with the Good Business Standards. In addition to being eligible for investment from the Ujima Fund, UGBA members gain access to various benefits, including technical assistance, customer loyalty, sales advocacy, and public support.171 These benefits enhance business visibility, community support, and market access. For example, UGBA-member Cero, a composting company that is workerowned, secured a contract with Boston University through Ujima’s advocacy. 174
Additionally, Ujima engages in direct procurement of goods and services from UGBA businesses, fostering community relationships and providing continuous support. A notable initiative includes their purchase of holiday gift boxes from a business called Comfort Kitchen, which helped strengthen ties between businesses and consumers.
Through its Good Business Certification, investment fund, and business alliance, Ujima is fulfilling their mission of “rewriting the rules for our local economy, inspired by grassroots organizing principles, small business and cooperative leadership, and the lived experience of working class residents of color.”
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions Solidarity Economy STL; The WEPOWER Founders’ Commitment to Community
1D. Activate hospitals, universities, and other large, place-based organizations (aka “anchor institutions”) across the region to engage in and resource systems-level coordination towards CWB.
Hospitals, universities, museums, zoos, and local governments are often called “anchor institutions.” They are “anchored” to the community (i.e. they aren’t going to move elsewhere, like corporations sometimes do) and they also “anchor” the community by employing many people.
These anchor institutions have significant and consistent purchasing power. Collectively, they also have multi-billion dollar investment portfolios and spend billions of dollars a year on goods and services, much of which could be sourced locally. According to The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia’s Anchor Economy Dashboard, hospitals and higher educational institutions in the St. Louis region are responsible for hundreds of thousands of jobs and more than 9% of the region’s income (a total of $15B).175
We call for these institutions to leverage their resources, purchasing power, and influence to foster a regional transition towards community wealth building by accelerating more economic opportunities, supporting small businesses, and investing in communityowned, -governed, and -led initiatives. Some levers to achieve this include changes to anchor institutions’ policies and practices related to procurement, investment, and workforce. How anchor institutions engage in this work matters as much as what they actually do. Key elements of how these large, place-based organizations engage in and resource this work include:
acknowledge strengths, areas of growth and commit to behavior change; share power and shift their plans for the benefit of the region; and shift mental, legal, and financial models;
• Being accountable to community wealth building values and principles;
• Ensuring internal incentives support shifts in behaviors, rather than preserve the status quo.
These anchor institutions have significant and consistent purchasing power.
The Cleveland Model / The Evergreen Cooperatives: ”In Cleveland, The Democracy Collaborative worked with partners in local government and the philanthropic community to help set up the Evergreen Cooperatives network of worker-owned companies. The network currently consists of three ecologically sustainable worker cooperatives with a total of 200 workers, and was consciously set up to meet the procurement needs of large anchor institutions in the local community ($3 billion annual spending on goods and services). The network currently includes a large-scale green laundry cooperative, a solar panel installation and energy retrofit cooperative, and one of the larger urban greenhouses in the United States.
• Showing up with a willingness to
This strategy is beginning to bear fruit, with the cooperatives winning contracts from the anchor institutions and workers–owners enjoying good paying jobs with benefits including a home-ownership program. In May 2018, the laundry cooperative announced a
massive expansion when it was awarded a contract to take over operations from the Cleveland Clinic. As a result, more than 100 workers at the new facility are on an expedited path to ownership.”176
The Preston Model: “In the United Kingdom, leaders on the Preston City Council were partly inspired by the Evergreen Cooperatives model described above and are working with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) to respond to the failures of the extractive financial system. [...] In 2013, seven local anchor institutions (including the Preston City Council, the University of Central Lancashire, Preston’s College and Cardinal Newman College) collaborated to spend £38 million in Preston and £292 million in the surrounding county (Lancashire). By 2017 this was up to £111 million and £486 million respectively, with new local contracts covering everything from school lunches to largescale construction projects”.176
This shift involved anchor institutions adopting new procurement practices, including considering social and environmental factors in bids and splitting up larger contracts to benefit local suppliers. Preston's initiative also encourages other private companies to commit to local purchasing, further strengthening the local economy.
The Preston City Council also helped establish the volunteer-led Preston Cooperative Development Network (PCDN) and provided funding (along with a grant from the Open Society Foundation) to support the development of 10 new worker cooperatives.62 “In early 2019, the network helped launch a worker-owned restaurant with a socialbenefit mission located in a publicly owned property."176 PCDN succeeded in developing these 10 new cooperatives
by May 202.177 In 2018, a study by PWC and Demos named Preston the 'Most Improved City in the United Kingdom.'178 Further information on the Preston Model is available here.179
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
St. Louis Anchor Action Network; Supply STL; Key Strategic Group; BJC Healthcare, Washington University, SSM Healthcare
Related Reading
• The Democracy Collaborative's Anchor Mission Playbook
• The Hospital Toolkit
1E. Raise significant (financial and nonfinancial) assets to resource the region’s transition to community wealth building, ensuring sufficient resources to execute the community-developed vision, agenda, and action plan, especially through donor organizing.
We call for the mobilization of financial resources from a variety of sources, including government grants, private donations, and philanthropic investments, as well as nonfinancial resources and assets from a wide range of stakeholders, to resource and support projects and programs that drive community wealth building.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Resource Generation
2A. Launch comprehensive public and institutional awareness and political education campaigns about community wealth building.
B eliefs, knowledge, and attitudes shape the behaviors of individuals and communities, which is why ensuring people and institutions are familiar with and understand the benefit of community wealth building is so important. If people and institutions do not know about community wealth building, they cannot be part of the changes laid out in this Playbook.
We need comprehensive awareness campaigns around CWB that use a well-being and community healing lens.
These campaigns should also not be limited strictly to building individual awareness. They should also include building institutional awareness of community wealth building and increasing participation in community wealth building initiatives.
We also need to ensure that public education and public awareness campaigns use a trauma-informed approach, center mental well-being and restorative justice, and commit to truth-telling about the history and harm of the economy.
Specific priorities and initiatives within this solution could include:
• Popularizing the terms solidarity economy (SE), collectivism, pluralism, cooperation, and sustainability in place of the capitalism/ socialism binary;
• Launching a regional Community Wealth Day
• Partnerships with (educational) institutions to advance the SE and CWB narratives
• Building relationships with local leaders to engage them in the CWB efforts;
• Hosting workshops, seminars, immersion experiences, podcasts, and publishing documentaries and op-eds
• Especially leveraging the power of storytelling to support the transition to CWB
• Partnership with the arts and activation of public visual art installations across the region
The Boston Ujima Project has several different educational tools, in its work around Cultural Organizing, Narrative Shifting, and Political Education Projects.
We need comprehensive awareness campaigns around CWB that use a well-being and community healing lens.
Yours, Mine, Ours: A podcast dedicated to all things Good Business, by the Boston Ujima Project. In each episode, host Joel Edwards takes listeners behind the scenes of the businesses of the Good Business Alliance. This podcast gives a voice to the businesses that create opportunities for themselves and their communities by adhering to Ujima's Good Business Standards.
Fortunately Magazine: Fortunately Magazine is a print and online publication that redefines the norms of lifestyle journalism, exploring the intersections of art, culture, and economic democracy. Published by Boston Ujima Project, Fortunately Magazine emerges as a
catalyst for conversations around postcapitalist living, providing a platform for voices that challenge the status quo.
Read, Listen, Watch: Boston Ujima Project develops study guides, organizes reading groups, and hosts events to support their community in learning about and gaining a deeper understanding on a number of politically relevant topics.
Arts & Cultural Organizing Programs:
”Ujima’s arts & cultural organizing programs seek to steward the wisdom, leadership, and visions of an alternative future created by the BIPOC artists, and thinkers, of all generations through online and in-person offerings, funding opportunities, and workshops.” These programs include the Ashe Ashe Cultural Assembly & Cultural Assembly Grant, a residency, a fellowship, and a lecture series.180
2B. Integrate learning experiences for young people into their existing activities/ programming to build awareness, (historical) analysis, and capacity around different levers (land and property, business, etc.) for advancing community wealth and economic power.
We need to reimagine public schools' role and responsibility to include preparing students as social justice leaders who work to advance a new economy, one that benefits all young people. These students should also participate in this new economy not only as workers but especially as democratic owners of businesses, land, and capital in ways that support their ability to build wealth and achieve well-being.
This approach is supported by research on education for sustainable development, which
emphasizes the integration of social, economic, and environmental education to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and values to contribute to a sustainable future. Implementing such curricula, as seen in the Eco-Schools program operating in over 59,000 schools in over 60 countries, has shown to enhance student understanding and engagement with local and global sustainability challenges, reinforcing the role of education in community wealth building.181
We need to prepare students as social justice leaders who work to advance a new economy.
3A. Provide free legal services and other technical assistance to community members as they work to build wealth and power.
The community wealth building efforts described throughout this Playbook are designed to push past the status quo. They will face resistance from those who have traditionally held, and continue to hold, power.
We call for free legal services and other technical assistance to support community members and organizations working to build community wealth such as starting worker-owned
These services will help them navigate complex and often-expensive legal frameworks related to land ownership and inheritance.
companies, community investment funds, shared equity housing cooperatives, and more. These services will help them navigate complex and often-expensive legal frameworks related to land ownership and inheritance, real estate development processes, investing, financial and estate planning, and much more.
This support should help community members effectively advocate for and advance their interests, participate in development processes, and protect our rights.
Planning Aid Scotland: Planning Aid
Scotland (PAS) is an educational charity and social enterprise dedicated to helping individuals and communities shape the future of their places through engagement with the planning system. They aim to support an inclusive, positive, and innovative planning system where communities and individuals can contribute to the shaping of their environment in an open and inclusive manner. PAS provides a range of services including free, impartial, and confidential planning advice by specialist volunteers who are chartered planners. They also offer skills training and support for community groups, planners, elected members, public bodies, and often excluded groups that traditionally lack the ability to readily engage in the planning system.182
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Legal Services of Eastern Missouri; SLU LAW Legal Clinics; St. Louis Bar Association
4A. Train community members to lead policy advocacy and power building, activating a broad base of St. Louisans to champion CWB policy and systems change.
We call for capacity building initiatives such as workshops, fellowships, summits, universitybased certification programs, and coaching. These initiatives should aim to enhance the skills of individuals and groups in policy advocacy and power building. This kind of support will help community wealth building advocates be better equipped to engage with policymakers, mobilize support, and influence decision-making processes, ultimately building a broad-based movement capable of effectively advocating and organizing for and implementing necessary policy reforms.
Community members and groups must engage in continuous lobbying, organizing, and advocacy efforts.
Not only is it important to provide training opportunities, but it is also critical to provide backend infrastructure and resources for trained community members to engage in advocacy, power building, and coalition work. This includes communications support, legal and electoral support, and connections to other aligned coalitions and movement groups.
Community members and groups must engage in continuous lobbying, organizing, and advocacy efforts at both the local and state levels. By strategically advocating for CWB-aligned policies and opposing anti-CWB measures, stakeholders can shape population-level change. Through targeted campaigns, coalition building,
electoral activities, and direct engagement with policymakers, this approach aims to advance the CWB policy agenda while opposing detrimental policies.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Missouri Foundation for Health; WEPOWER; Neighborhood Leaders Fellowship’; Action St. Louis’s BOSS Fellowship
4B. Cultivate, support, and endorse CWB values and vision-aligned candidates for public office.
The ideas in this report will require public officials to champion, sponsor, and pass community wealth building aligned policies and resource allocations at the local and state level. While there are a few such leaders currently in office, there is a need for more, and a need for them to work toward a coordinated and transformational CWB agenda.
We call for advocacy, power-building, leadership development, and candidate readiness groups to actively cultivate, support, and endorse candidates for public office who understand and align with values and visions aimed at advancing the economic well-being of marginalized communities and achieving community wealth. We can influence the election and appointment of public leaders by identifying and promoting candidates who share the values and vision articulated in this Playbook. These leaders should champion policies that advance the collective welfare and benefit of communities.
One idea is to leverage a rubric and questionnaire to assess alignment to this Playbook’s community-sourced vision for the economy, especially focusing on candidates’ vision for using and allocating public capital.
The New Majority NYC: In NYC, the political group “21 in ‘21” aimed high and still overshot its goal. The organization focused on electing 21 women to the City Council in 2021 and instead saw 31 women get elected to the 51-member body. The hailed nonprofit rebranded and changed its name to The New Majority NYC. The New Majority isn’t a political action committee, and doesn’t donate to candidates, but it does provide services, including mentorship from current and former City Council members.183 Progressive homes like The Working Families Party support values-aligned candidates through their endorsements, which require filling out extensive questionnaires on a candidate’s experience and policy viewpoints.184
Chisholm’s Chair Fellowship (CCF):Chisholm’s Chair is a program within WEPOWER that supports Black and Latina women interested in potentially seeking public office. CCF has been successful in cultivating candidates who now serve in public office. The Fellowship focuses as much on political education on social systems as it does on preparing to effectively seek public office.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Neighborhood Leadership Academy; WEPOWER’s Chisholm’s Chair Fellowship
4C. Develop and advance strategies to protect St. Louis from state preemption related to policies that advance community wealth building.
“S tate preemption” is when a state government prevents local governments from passing certain policies and laws on their own, such as raising the minimum wage in their city to be higher than the state minimum wage. Preemption often undermines the ability of localities to address unique economic conditions and needs within their jurisdictions.
One example of state preemption was Missouri’s crackdown on St. Louis City after the city passed a minimum wage law, undermining the opportunity to create economic mobility for many families. State leaders have also threatened and (in 2025) succeeded in their effort to strip local power over police.
Through public awareness, legal action, lobbying legislators, and electoral efforts such as ballot measures, we must work to protect St. Louis City and County from state preemption. A constitutional amendment would be one path to override the state legislature’s ability to pre-empt local governments from setting their own policies. This avenue is currently being explored by some l organizations across Missouri.
We must work to protect St. Louis City and County from state preemption.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions Empower Missouri; Jobs for Justice; Coalition that includes Missouri Workers Center, SEIU, Action St. Louis, and others are working with a national partner, Local Progress
Protecting the region from state preemption is critical to advancing many of the community wealth building policies named for in this Playbook.
Related Reads and Resources
• Confronting Preemption
5A. Build the research and data infrastructure to continuously track and assess the impact of CWB efforts and their alignment to closing the racial wealth gap and increasing community well-being (especially in alignment with outcomes and indicators articulated in the Theory of Change), including building a public, regional data dashboard.
Robust research and data infrastructure is critical for measuring the effectiveness of community wealth building initiatives. The data infrastructure developed should include a public, regional data dashboard that is consistently updated. Additionally, we call for the data strategies and tools to be aligned with the outcomes and indicators articulated in this Playbook’s Theory of Change.
Through partnership between educational institutions, government, philanthropy, an emerging coordination group, and community groups like WEPOWER and Cooperation STL, the data infrastructure can be responsive, coordinated, and drive accountability and impact.
The data infrastructure can be responsive, coordinated, and drive accountability and impact.
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Regional Data Alliance; Community Innovation & Action Center; Brown School of Social Work and Social Policy Institute at Washington University; JSMF
5B. Research and design policies to support building community wealth.
Many of the solutions in this Playbook are innovative and require further research and refinement to ensure their effectiveness. We call for ongoing policy research and design aimed at supporting and advocating for the necessary changes.
This proactive approach ensures that CWB and systems change efforts are directed toward creating an environment where policies reflect the needs and aspirations of the community and are rooted in emerging and best practices. It also draws on promising practices in other areas while considering our local legal and policy environment. This ultimately leads to positive societal outcomes.
Research and policy design should include but not be limited to addressing:
• Untapped sources of public funding available at the local, state and federal levels
• Potential sources of new public revenue
• Current public spending and budgeting processes at the local and state level
• Equitable approaches to streamlining regional governance and resource use, including an equitable approach to a city-county merger
Developing research and data infrastructure to track and assess the impact of CWB efforts will enable stakeholders to monitor progress, identify areas for improvement, and make informed decisions that further the goals of building community wealth and closing the racial wealth divide.
• Equity and result-based approaches to shift land, labor, business, and capital’s role in achieving CWB
Relevant Local Initiatives and Institutions
Social Policy Institute at Washington University; STL 2030 Jobs Plan; Missouri Budget Project; Cooperation STL
At the final design day—after months of research, discussion, and solution crafting— community members spent time voting on the most important first steps to create a St. Louis economy that centers Community Wealth Building (CWB) and collective well-being. In addition to the solution team members, votes and feedback were gathered from the Design Fellows, Design Council Members, and surveys.
These initial steps and priorities don’t replace the depth and richness of the roughly 70 community-developed solutions. Still, they reflect our best collective thinking so far about where to begin.
Solutions that build a strong and aligned movement ready for action
• EDC – 2a – Launch awareness and political education campaigns about Community Wealth Building
• EDC - 1a – Create and strengthen regional coordination group to develop regional strategy and action plan
• EDC - 5a - Secure research and data infrastructure to track and assess impact
• EDC - 1c - Launch and grow an alliance of businesses committed to building community wealth (e.g. a Solidarity Economy Chamber of Commerce or Good Business Alliance
Three criteria were used to help inform phase one priorities. These priorities will be advanced beginning in 2025.
1. Do they set the foundation for the rest of the solutions?
2. Do they provide for early wins to build momentum and proof of concept?
3. Do they build on existing momentum and active efforts?
Solutions that prioritize support for residents and advocates
• EDC - 1b - Offer capacity-building and training for community and businesses
• EDC - 3a - Offer free legal and technical assistance for residents implementing CWB approaches
• B&L- 3b - Increase access to and awareness of support and funding for small businesses
• B&L- 2a - Help communities buy and manage businesses (e.g. via a holding company)
• L&P - 2c - Help communities buy and manage land and property (i.e. housing and business real estate)
Solutions that have existing momentum or opportunities for pilots and policy change at the local/state levels
• B&L - 1a - Create worker-owned businesses and support the conversion of existing businesses
• B&L - 4c - Improve access to effective career and worker readiness opportunities
• FWB - 1b - Win new, sustainable public revenue streams at the local level and increased funding at the state level to advance the goal of establishing universal access to childcare
Solutions that reprioritize or create new flows of capital and investment
• C&T- 4b - Create community-driven investment funds
• B&L- 3a - Develop non-traditional funding sources that share risk and promote local ownership
• L&P - 1b - Increase funding for black investors and developers
• C&T - 4c - Increase capacity of CDFIs and community access to resources
• L&P - 1d - Invest in repair, renovation, and preservation of existing housing stock
• L&P - 1c - Localize essential resources and services in neighborhoods
Solutions that secure core economic rights and redefine metrics of a thriving economy
• FWB - 1a - Secure universal healthcare
• FWB - 1c - Establish universal basic income
• FWB - 1e - Establish a living wage with raises indexed to the cost of living
• L&P - 2a - Make housing a civil/human right, provide housing for all
• FWB - 1i - Ensure all have access to quality and affordable public transit
• FWB - 2a - Maintain consistent and equitable public infrastructure (roads, sidewalks, trash, etc.)
• FWB - 1g - Ensure access to nutritious food for all
Solutions that reform government to be more equitable and accountable
• C&T - 2a - Reform the tax code to ensure an equitable income and wealth distribution
• C&T - 1c - Implement public financing of elections (e.g. matching programs) to reduce the excessive influence of wealthy donors and corporations on elections
Dear Reader,
“The New STL Economy PLAYBOOK: Planting + Growing Our Collective Wealth” was imagined and written before the May 2025 tornado devastated a substantial portion of St. Louis City, particularly North St. Louis. It felt incomplete to publish the PLABYOOK without an acknowledgement of the natural harm that has nearly obliterated an area in St. Louis City that has experienced generations of systemic and human harm and neglect. North St. Louis isn’t just a part of St. Louis, it is the only home I’ve known until a few years ago. The place my great grandma, my grandparents, my mom and her siblings, my cousins, and I have all known as home. Growing up, I woke up each morning and fell asleep every night on Moraine, Sacramento, Concord, or Athlone. My childhood was filled with days where I played in O’Fallon Park, where I scrounged up enough spare change from family members to buy a bag of chips from Carrie’s Corner, and where we had chalk in hand for a game of hop scotch with my friends—who were the children of my mom’s childhood friends. I spent my Saturdays playing tennis at Fairground Park right around the block from what remains of the street my mom and aunt still call home.
The origin story of WEPOWER is rooted in both nostalgia for and a bold future where North St. Louis City is thriving, well-resourced, and bountiful with businesses. A future where Black people are safe, cared for, and in deep community with one another. It is both the past and the possibility of the future of North St. Louis City that has anchored WEPOWER and me during the tumultuous times of the pandemic, unsettling shifts in our local, state, and federal political landscape, and targeted attacks against our mission and integrity. To stand in recognition of this place—its pain, its neglect, and yet its resilience. To recognize the beauty and brilliance of the people in this place. To see forward and upward as the only options.
Then, to be confronted with a tornado that laid the devastation of a natural disaster over the human-made devastation of disinvestment. The impact we are all witnessing in real time. There’s a heart break I am amidst that cannot be explained in words, but is what I have felt deeply in my body every day since May 16th. A heart break I know is shared by thousands of St. Louisans in this moment.
As we approached the publishing of this Playbook, we worked to tie loose ends,
make final edits, dot our “i’s” and cross our “t’s”. I re-read each page, reviewed each solution with a critical eye, and my hope and clarity were restored. While my heart is heavy, my arms are ready to lock with each of your arms as we move our feet in the same direction and act in coordination to rebuild a beloved community with people power aligned towards a new type of economy. One that is resilient enough to defend against systemic harm and withstand the natural harm that is inevitable amidst a global climate crisis. Perhaps it was divine timing or simply coincidence, but the vision, values, and solutions developed by the People of St. Louis and laid out in this Playbook provide us with a transformational path towards and beyond tornado recovery.
This Playbook truly grasps at the roots of St. Louis’ economic history and harmful relationship with North St. Louis City and with the Black people like my family who have chosen North City as our home. It equips us with the seeds to plant and grow a movement that honors our past and lays out the recipe for making our wildest hopes for the future a reality. Uprooting, planting, and growing is hard work, across many seasons, across many years. But, with all that we’ve been through, St. Louisans, there’s nothing we can’t do. Because unlike the forces of the tornado that were beyond our control, what we do in response is a matter of choice. I believe in our potential to make the right choice.
With love and hope,
Thanks so much to the Elevate Initiative (a partnership between Frontline Solutions and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), the Kauffman Foundation, the Kataly Foundation, and the Missouri Foundation for Health for resourcing the process of democratically reimagining the St. Louis economy and publishing, "The New STL Economy PLAYBOOK: Planting + Growing Our Collective Wealth."
Design Team
• Yoni Blumberg
• Charli Cooksey
• David Dwight IV
Operations + Production Team
• Sherrell Hendrix
• Allison Gibbs
• Kevin Lashley
• Ben Wrobel
• SLAM Agency
Design Council
• Jackie Bernstein – BJC HealthCare
• Brandi Brooks – Harris-Stowe State University
• Salena Burch – Solidarity Economy St. Louis
• Jason Chretien – Washington University in St. Louis
• Cristina Garmendia – Board of Aldermen, President Green’s Office
• Colleen Hafner – Rise Community Development & CDFI
• Marcel Hagens – Action St. Louis
• Demetria Hunter – Legal Services of Eastern Missouri
• Jessica Payne – Key Strategic Group
• Justin Raymundo – BioSTL
• Vivian Renee Tyler – Greater St. Louis
• Kristen Wagner – Native CDFI Network
• Janet Wilding – University of Missouri–St. Louis
• Erica Williams – A Red Circle
• Michelle Witthaus – Invest STL
• Paul Woodruff – St. Louis Community Credit Union
• Ben Zeno – Missouri Foundation for Health
• Kristen Barker – Co-op Cincy
• Paul Bindel – Center for Community Wealth Building
• Amy Blouin – Missouri Budget Project
• Heather Cameron – Washington University in St. Louis
• Evan Casper-Futterman – Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative
• Ra Criscitiello – SEIU UHW
• Andrew Delmonte – Cooperation Buffalo
• Steve Dubb – Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ)
• Nahuel Fefer – City of St. Louis Community Development Administration
• Faduma Fido – People’s Economy Lab
• Deborah Frieze – Boston Impact Initiative
• Njuguna Gishuru – People’s Economy Lab
• Julian Gross – Law Offices of Julian Gross
• John W. Haines – Community Investment Trust (CIT)
• Yessica Holguin – Center for Community Wealth Building
• Eric Horvath – Untapped Capital Consulting
• Lisa Hubbard – New Economy Coalition
• Bruce Katz – Drexel University & New Localism Associates
• Emily Kawano – US Solidarity Economy Network
• Neil McInroy – The Democracy Collaborative
• Sarah McKinley – The Democracy Collaborative
• John McMicken – Evergreen Cooperatives / The Fund for Employee Ownership
• Francisco Perez – Center for Economic Democracy
• Tony Pickett – Grounded Solutions Network
• Jasmine Rashid – The Financial Activist Playbook
• Sarah Rose – Dutchtown South Community Corporation
• Janice Shade – Capital Innovation Lab
• Nairuti Shastry – The Democracy Collaborative
• Aaron Tanaka – Center for Economic Democracy
• Ellen Vera – Co-op Cincy
• Patty Viafara – Nexus Community Partners
• Kristen Wagner – Native CDFI Network
• Jessica Ciccone – St. Louis University
• Kaliff Davis – Reinvestment Fund
• Anand Jahi – Dual Power
• Sarah LaPlante – Washington University in St. Louis
• Jennifer Near – JMN Consulting
• Hayling Price – Alignment for Impact
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