Community Wealth Building approach takes root in Northern Ireland
Contact: Sili Recio, (202) 559-1483 ext. 3035
Communities Minister Hargey Embraces CWB Recommendations from Panel Led by Democracy Collaborative’s McKinley
Belfast, Northern Ireland – In a watershed moment for the Community Wealth Building movement, Northern Ireland’s Communities Minister Deirdre Hargey yesterday embraced a set of 26 recommendations aimed at driving what she described as “real and sustainable change” for Northern Ireland’s economy. The recommendations were developed by a five-member independent advisory panel, convened by Hargey, made up of experts in aspects of community wealth building, alongside The Democracy Collaborative’s Sarah McKinley and Joe Guinan. McKinley chaired the panel.
Community Wealth Building (CWB) is an economic development model that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets. It challenges widely accepted but failing economic development approaches, and addresses wealth inequality at its core. First articulated by The Democracy Collaborative (TDC) in 2005, CWB takes progressive elements like community land trusts, worker cooperatives, public banking, and more – elements that have previously only existed as one-offs – and supercharges their power, systemically connecting and scaling them to change people’s lives and the economic future of communities. It does so in coordination with local governments, economic development teams, anchor institutions, and community leaders and organizations.
“It has been an honor to serve on Minister Hargey’s Advisory Panel on Community Wealth Building,” said McKinley, “to help think through the important role that central government has to play in supporting and growing the good work of communities across Northern Ireland to root and recirculate their great wealth for the benefit of those who live there. I look forward to seeing Northern Ireland take this agenda forward and join other places across the world in taking the movement forward. Community wealth building is a powerful tool for Northern Ireland to create resilience in this period of crisis, to address economic inequalities and imbalances, and to ground peace-building efforts by giving communities greater control of their economic futures.”
“I established an independent panel to review how we can grow and scale our Community Wealth Building approaches through a set of cross-cutting recommendations to deliver real and sustainable change,” said Hargey. “I welcome the publication of the report which is ambitious and shines a light on how Executive Departments and Local Government can achieve the fundamental shifts we need to properly address poverty and the structural inequalities that exist in our communities…. The publication of this report marks an important milestone in our journey and sets out a clear pathway for the next steps in implementing Community Wealth Building approaches here.”
The report, available online at https://www.communities-ni.gov.uk/publications/independent-report-advance-community-wealth-building-northern-ireland, offers recommendations in five areas:
Plural Ownership, creating business enterprises in multiple forms, including worker and consumer cooperatives, social enterprises, municipal enterprise, and more.
Locally Rooted Finance that leads government and local institutions to invest money in service of the real economy of production and consumption—rather than financial speculation and extraction—through public and community banks, credit unions, targeted public pension investments, and more.
Fair Employment and Just Labor Markets, providing every worker a living wage and real power in and control of their workplace to ensure decent work and conditions, and advancing employment rights.
Socially Productive Use of Land and Property, so that land is deployed to build real wealth in communities, bringing development decisions back under community control.
Social Commissioning, Sourcing, and Procurement of Goods and Services, designed to re-localize economic activity, build local multipliers, and end financial extraction and leakages that effectively take money out of the economy.
The panel was appointed in March of 2022 to produce a report and recommendations on the most effective and sustainable approach to embedding the principles of Community Wealth Building into departmental investment, policy and practice. In addition to McKinley and Guinan, panel members included Harry Connolly with Fáilte Feirste Thiar; David Hunter former CEO of Access Employment Limited (AEL); and Brendan Murtagh with Queen’s University Belfast.
The principles of community wealth building have begun to be applied in a number of communities in recent years, including in Chicago, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio; Preston, England. In Scotland, the approach is embedded in the national economic plan, and all 32 local municipalities in the country are developing tailored CWB action plans. In addition, the national government now includes a Minister of Community Wealth Building.
NOTE: More info on community wealth building is available here: https://democracycollaborative.org/cwb
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The Democracy Collaborative is “a research and development lab for the democratic economy” and has worked with communities around the world on strategies that, by enabling people and communities to have more ownership and control over their economic lives, fosters equity, sustainability, and collective wellbeing.
