Community Wealth Building: Narrowing the Gap Between Governance and Government

Written by Nairuti Shastry and Neil McInroy.

As we stare down the barrel of a second Trump administration and all the challenges it will bring, many practitioners in the United States are wondering what the future holds for progressive local economic activity. Specifically, what is the role of the state in enabling the work of Community Wealth Building (CWB)? Here at The Democracy Collaborative, a think-do tank supporting CWB activity on both sides of the Atlantic (and around the world), we are witnessing three sociocultural conditions which influence the success in driving broad-scale economic transformation within and beyond the state. Drawing on our experience working alongside Community Wealth Builders in the United States and Scotland, we argue the the following dynamics greatly influence the governance—and thereby expansion—of CWB: 

• an enduring sense of injustice, which may influence
• trust in the efficacy of the state; and 
• the presence of a robust civil society (also known as “the social economy”), that can assist, agitate, and morph into more active social movements. 

The details of historic injustice differ greatly between Scotland and the United States, leading to a very different perception of the state and its benevolence toward all people. As a result, in Scotland, civil society—though vibrant—is not as politicized as it has become in the United States (partially because it doesn’t have to be). In the absence of values-aligned government, movement leaders in the United States have relied more on collective governance and civil society organizations to meet their needs. But, to build and sustain true community wealth in a democratic economy, we must narrow the gap between governance and government (Agbo and Perez 2021). 

Long-standing injustice as a trigger for change

It is no secret that Americans—particularly those of color—suffer racialized economic injustice as a core aspect of their lived experience. In a 2022 poll, well over 60 percent of all BIPOC individuals questioned responded that systemic racism does indeed exist in the United States—a viewpoint likely reinforced by the uprisings following the murder of George Floyd and the unequal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic (Johnson 2022). Many practitioners believe that this profound sense of unfairness has helped give impetus to CWB efforts in urban centers like Atlanta, Chicago, Seattle, and St. Louis. Indeed, in all of these places, CWB activity was initially driven by community organizers and activists—an expression of solidarity in response to the urgency of meeting  the basic needs of underserved and disinvested communities. In Chicago, for example, low-income Black and Brown communities had worked for years to expand the cooperative sector as a wealth building opportunity before CWB was adopted by the City of Chicago as part of its economic development strategy under Mayor Lori Lightfoot. 

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in Scotland, CWB is, in part, rooted in unequal patterns of wealth extraction and land appropriation from the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Highland Clearances. Further, woes relate to Scotland’s deindustrialization of the 70’s and 80’s and more recent public sector austerity, resulting in high levels of poverty coupled with a potential unequal distribution of wealth from the country’s burgeoning renewable energy sector. Recent land reform activism to address these inequities has fueled a more radical mindset: that the energy Scots produce should be a collective endeavor and benefit, with the concern for the plight of others and the environment hotwired in.  

Level of trust and confidence in the state

In the United States, the legacy of organizing and activism is often also a response to an insufficient level of state intervention in addressing systemic inequalities. To be sure, American governance often reflects the interests of the top 1%, a species of corporate capture that many believe will only be exacerbated with Trump’s return to the White House (Whitehouse and Stinnett 2019). This oligarchy, coupled with decades of evidence of State violence against marginalized communities (Mapping Police Violence 2025), is one among many reasons that public trust in the government has eroded significantly over the past half century (Pew Research Center 2024). As a result, even with the increase of movement leadership in local, state, and national politics (Thompson 2005; Talton 2019), top-down efforts to scale CWB are often seen as an impediment at best or, at worst, insidious tactics of state control.

Take, for example, the city of Richmond, Virginia. The City’s Office of Community Wealth Building (OCWB) is the first office of its kind in the United States, established in 2014 by Former Mayor Dwight C. Jones. Despite the best of intentions and an all-star, mostly BIPOC staff, nearly a decade later, the work of CWB in Richmond is far from transformative, rooted in debt reduction and financial empowerment services and programming over a true renegotiation of community ownership of land, labor, and capital. 

The relationship between the Scottish people and the state is a bit different. For context, Scotland is part of the United Kingdom, but with its own parliament and set of devolved powers somewhat akin to those afforded an American state. Scotland has some similar trends with regard to public distrust of government, as evidenced in the United States and across many other Western democracies. However, some level of trust has been retained by a set of values and traditions which imbue the relationship that everyday people have with the state. There is an abiding cultural understanding of the importance of the collective, with a sort of place-based solidarity in the face of land appropriation and resource extraction. While this perspective is not universal—and does indeed bifurcate by class and place—it pervades both traditional left and social democratic as well as conservative politics. Therefore, actions by the state—though hotly debated and sometimes questioned—are not so readily seen as an impediment or a control tactic. 

Politicising Neighborliness

One final key distinction between the American and Scottish cases as it pertains to CWB, is the politicization of a civil society towards more activist, radical aims. Civil society is where everyday citizens meet each other’s needs independent of public and/or private interventions—neighborliness, if you will. But, in the United States, there is a certain activist nature to the institutions that make up American civil society: “institutions whose power [rests] on economic solidarity. That is the material that makes for a healthy civil society: not bowling leagues or debating societies, but institutions providing for the material needs of their members in ways that build solidarity,” writes Daniel Wortel-London (2025). In many cases, this politicisation was borne out of raw need—lived injustice and a state unwilling to support its people. For instance, the work of Cooperation Jackson was born out of a need to address food insecurity among Black communities in the South. Nexus Community Partners and the Ujima Project both originated from a need to support BIPOC entrepreneurship as a way out of poverty in the Twin Cities and Boston, respectively. In these cases (and many others across the country), civil society groups have morphed into power-building forces, arguing and agitating for greater economic system change.

In Scotland, however, the support of a seemingly benevolent state as a bureaucratic manifestation of the people’s will, can be an impediment to this sort of activation of civil society, precluding its need. However, more often than not, this state presence can create a sort of passivity within Scottish culture, in which issues on the surface are addressed, but the bigger underlying injustices are left to fester. In this case, issues of poverty, inequality and land ownership persist, while the political and social energy required to fuel CWB is diluted. Put simply, neighborliness remains just that: neighborliness. 

Across our analysis, it is evident that the patterns of change and scale of CWB is influenced by the power of the state and its relationship to its citizenry. On one hand, the relative absence and mistrust of the state fuels a grassroots activism that can serve to drive CWB. On the other hand, a state that is aware of and responsive to the people’s will, while being a driver of CWB, can also slow its pace and dilute its radical energy. Ultimately, as advocates for CWB, our job is to work in tandem with civil society institutions, states, and everyday people to narrow the gap between governance and government, so that ecological sustainability, racial equity, and economic prosperity may be broadly held.