Steve Dubb
Steve Dubb is senior editor of Nonprofit Quarterly. Formerly, he was director of special projects at The Democracy Collaborative.
The Community Land Trust Movement Imagines Its Future
The 50th anniversary of New Communities was an opportunity for celebration and reflection—some of it critical—about the CLT movement.
Can We Ditch Tax Incentives and Support True Economic Development?
Because recent advocacy has succeeded in achieving a change in government accounting standards that led many cities and states to disclose the total costs of the tax abatements they provided last year for the very first time, we now are gaining a better sense of just how much these abatements take away from education and other public services.
In Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Seeks to Be a Good Neighbor
The current HopkinsLocal effort, a three-year program launched in September 2015, is also clearly a response to the death of Freddie Gray and the events that followed.
In Troubled Times, Taking Stock of Our Community Wealth
In thinking about how to face the current federal environment, it might be helpful to take stock of where gains have occurred. Among these growth areas are:
Universities Step Up and Commit to Challenging Inequality
Campus Compact—a group that brings together 1,100 colleges and universities to advance civic responsibility—held its 30th annual conference where it called on member campuses to develop Civic Action plans to embrace a set of five community commitments.
Co-ops Gain Ground in Communities of Color
Since 2010, 60 percent of new cooperative worker-owners are people of color and more than two thirds of total worker-owners are women. Worker co-ops are ...
Can We Build a Movement for Structural Economic Change? We Must
This July, the New Economy Coalition (NEC), a coalition of over 140 organizations from across North America, will convene in Buffalo for its biennial...
Health Care Confronts Challenge to Shift from “Volume to Value”
Health care, as we all know, is a big business. U.S. hospitals alone have $782 billion in total annual expenditures, which is roughly five...
Can Community Wealth Building Redefine City Economic Development?
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Social Enterprise Movement Faces Growth and New Challenges
In September, I attended the Social Enterprise Alliance (SEA) annual conference in Denver, Colorado. At the closing session, Tamra Ryan voiced a key conference...
Employee Ownership: A Solution that Preserves Retiring Owners’ Businesses
Reflecting growing enthusiasm for worker co-ops, the Eastern Conference for Workplace Democracy—held last month in Worcester, Massachusetts—attracted a record 300-plus participants.
One item on the...
Making Sense of the New Economy: Rethinking Community Economic Development
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What If Community Developers Held a Congress and Everyone Showed Up?
The question we pose captures some of the feeling emanating from the People & Places conference, which took place in Washington, D.C. earlier this...
Community Foundations Move to Adopt a New Anchor Mission
According to the Foundation Center’s 2014 Key Facts report, community foundations today have nearly $65 billion in assets, more than 9 percent of all foundation assets ($715 billion). As noted at a recent White House conference, over 700 community foundations operate nationwide. Yet while the first community foundation in Cleveland was founded in 1914, their […]
City Halls Help Plant Seeds for Community Co-ops
What do Austin, New York City and Denver have in common? All three cities voted to support the development of cooperatives for the first time this year. The amounts are modest, but the trend is clear—mayors and economic development leaders are beginning to add cooperatives and community wealth building to the economic development toolbox. In […]
Does Richmond Show the Future of Community Wealth Building?
Richmond’s creation of the nation’s first Office of Community Wealth Building marks a reimagining of community economic development policy.
How Much Outside Help Do Worker Co-ops Need to Get to Scale?
Though they end up as owners and decision-makers, workers in low-income communities often don't start off doing all the work of developing and growing...
Will Co-ops Spark a New Civil Rights Movement?
While the words “co-op” and “civil rights” do not commonly appear in the same sentence, with more than 300 cooperative and social justice activists...
Rethinking Community Economic Development Beyond “Rent or Own”
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Building a 40-Year Vision for Community Development
With this month marking the 50th anniversary of the “War on Poverty,” we have seen a number of retrospectives....