This isn’t about one or two good projects, or a small corner of a procurement budget getting earmarked for local vendors while everything else remains business as usual. It’s about taking the first steps towards truly transforming our economy so that it works for the many, not the few.
Great graphical resources from The Next System Project (featuring the Preston Model) and Democracy Collaborative (with Community Wealth Building).
The Next System: The “Preston Model” is helping inspire a new conversation about the role of local government in catalyzing locally-driven economic revitalization and transforming patterns of ownership towards democratic alternatives. (We first featured a story about the Preston Model here in 2016.)
Today, the work in Preston to redefine how—and for whom—local economic development works is at the forefront of the agenda for local Labour councillors in the UK —and front and center at the “Alternative Models of Ownership” conference in London on 2/10, featuring, among many others, The Democracy Collaborative’s Ted Howard. Major coverage for the model has recently appeared in The Guardian in the inaugural story in Aditya Chakrabortty’s new series “The Alternatives” (and an associated podcast which explores the role that The Democracy Collaborative and the Evergreen Cooperatives played in inspiring Matthew Brown, the leading advocate behind the Preston Model.)
Because the Preston Model isn’t a simple one-element strategy, but a holistic framework for integrating community, cooperative, and public assets into a mutually supporting system of local economic prosperity, we thought it would be helpful to provide a visual representation of how the pieces of the model fit together to build community wealth:
Community Wealth Building: Eight Basic Principles
Based on Ted Howard’s remarks to the recent Alternative Models of Ownership conference, we’ve distilled the eight basic principles behind community wealth building—a transformative approach to local economic development—into this handy one page guide.
