Community wealth building

Few Americans are aware of the steady build-up of innovative community wealth building strategies throughout the United States.

The goal of Community-Wealth.org is to provide the web’s most comprehensive and up-to-date information resource on state-of-the-art strategies for democratic, community-based economic development.

Capitalism 3.0 is out. It’s about how to upgrade our economic operating system so that it protects the planet, shares income more equitably, and makes us happier, while preserving the strengths of capitalism as we know it. The key to the proposed upgrade is to rebuild the commons, that dwindling set of natural and social assets that benefit everyone.

In the spirit of enlivening the cultural commons, the book’s publisher, Berrett-Koehler, has agreed to an experiment. They are selling the book in the usual places — in bookstores and on-line — but they’re also allowing readers to download the book from this web site for free. Find the .pdf here


  • “People will acknowledge as just or fair only a social order that they themselves help to define.” Polsky, ’83 Democracy (winter)
  • “Local initiatives should have substantial content and communities should plan investments and administer services . Services in which would reassert the importance of places so people could rise with their communities not in spite of them.” Lockout, ’83 Democracy (winter)

Quotes I used in my policy presentations at a 1980’s ‘conference on the future’ at the College of Marin, California. I was a founding director of a 501(c)3 called Community Renewal Inc. operating a short time under a charter to assist California community leaders including infrastructure and development trends that encouraged local initiative and local sovereignty.