What does it take for meaningful change to move from promising local examples to something embedded in how institutions invest, how communities make decisions, and how resources circulate? As Community Wealth Building (CWB) gains ground around the world, we’re asking what it would take to bring it from the margins to the mainstream in Canada.
Author: Shikhank Sharma, Sector Lead, SI Canada
In downtown Toronto, the neighbourhoods of Parkdale and Chinatown are facing displacement pressures that have become a familiar story across Canada. In response, two hyper-local efforts have risen up to not only combat these pressures, but reimagine economic futures in a wider sense:
The Parkdale People’s Economy is a network of over 30 community-based organizations and hundreds of community members collaborating to build decent work, shared wealth and equitable development. Since 2018, its Community Benefits Framework has catalyzed Anchor Roundtables that bring together major institutions in the area around shared commitments to local hiring and purchasing — a model for redirecting the everyday spending power of large institutions toward the neighbourhood around them.
The Parkdale Neighbourhood Land Trust owns 86 properties that have been permanently removed from the speculative market and protected as affordable housing for more than 500 tenants.
The Toronto Chinatown Land Trust is one of the latest expressions of this growing movement of Toronto land trusts, founded in direct response to a wave of building sales and business displacement along Spadina Ave. Since 2023, it has brought together residents, workers, community organizations, and local institutions to keep land and cultural spaces in community hands and create new possibilities for collective stewardship and long-term affordability.
While different in form, these approaches point to the deeper possibility at the heart of the global Community Wealth Building (CWB) movement: by shifting from extractive economic models to locally-rooted ones, communities can become more democratic, more resilient, and more capable of building equitable, long-term prosperity.
Earlier this year, Scotland became the first country to embed CWB in national legislation. The Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act 2026 requires public bodies and local authorities to develop and implement CWB action plans and coordinate around local economic development. The legislation aims to make CWB a standard part of how public institutions operate, rather than a collection of voluntary projects.
For those of us in Canada engaged in the work of building strong communities, this milestone offers an opportunity to situate our work in the bigger picture: What would it take for our promising approaches to become widespread and embedded in the systems that shape community life? How do we establish community wealth building as a standard foundation for how communities, institutions, and economies work together?
What is community wealth building?
Community Wealth Building is an approach to local economic development centred on community ownership and control of assets — land, enterprises, capital, and institutions — rather than wealth flowing outward to distant shareholders. Democracy Collaborative highlights five interconnected levers CWB typically advances through: democratic and cooperative enterprise, locally rooted finance, fair work, community control of land and property, and progressive procurement that keeps spending circulating locally. Originating from work in Cleveland and developed further by practitioners in the UK and beyond, CWB offers a framework for putting residents, workers, and communities at the centre of economic decisions that are too often made far away from the places they affect.
Read more from the Democracy Collaborative.
Community wealth building is inherently local
Community Wealth Building sits at the intersection of community-led and community-centred approaches to wealth, equity, and prosperity. Its efforts are grounded in specific communities and neighbourhoods, emerging from local histories, relationships, and needs, and shaped by the people and institutions already present in a place: community organizations, cooperatives, anchor institutions, municipalities, local businesses, and residents themselves.
This local grounding is foundational, because community wealth building is not simply a technical policy agenda. It is about who owns and controls assets, where wealth goes, who benefits from it, and who gets to participate in shaping local economies. It is about building forms of economic life that are more democratic, equitable, and accountable to the communities they are meant to serve.
In Canada, much of the momentum around community wealth building has emerged through exactly this kind of local, place-based work. Many of these efforts don’t use the language of “community wealth building” at all, while still working toward many of the same goals: keeping resources circulating locally, building democratic ownership, shifting power, and creating more equitable local economies. Promising examples of practitioners and organizations advancing different dimensions of this work across the country include:
- Social Capital Partners on employee ownership policy
- Co-operatives First on cooperative development
- AnchorTO on social procurement in Toronto
- Catalyst Community Finance Initiative on community finance
- University of Waterloo’s Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR) on participatory budgeting
- Canadian Network of Community Land Trusts on community-led approaches to land and housing
- The Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCEDNet) on community economic development
- Social Economy through Social Inclusion (SETSI) on shifting narrative and building a more inclusive vision for the social economy
- Tamarack Institute through communities of practice and capacity strengthening for community wealth building and related fields
- Researchers and academics at institutions such as Royal Roads University, the University of Guelph, Saint Mary’s University and elsewhere are also helping deepen the collective understanding of community wealth building in Canada.
Together, these efforts point to a rich and growing landscape of community wealth building activity in Canada. They also reveal something important: while community wealth building is deeply local in how it is grounded, it is not only local in what it requires. Broader enabling conditions are necessary for both these targeted efforts and our collective ability to move from isolated wins toward coordinated, durable impact.
What community wealth building needs to take hold
Locally rooted efforts do not emerge or stall on the basis of local energy alone. They are shaped by the wider conditions around them. In the case of community wealth building, that can look like whether there is patient capital and community finance available; whether procurement systems can support local and social enterprises; whether public policy recognizes and enables cooperative or community-owned models; whether there are intermediaries and technical assistance providers who can help turn promising ideas into durable practice; and whether there are ways for communities to learn from one another rather than constantly reinventing the wheel in isolation.
Making community wealth building more mainstream in Canada means going beyond scaling individual projects or advancing one particular component of CWB. It means creating the conditions for a diverse range of community wealth building strategies to flourish — from cooperative development and employee ownership to social procurement, participatory budgeting, community finance, and land trusts.
Over the past several months, other illustrations of enabling infrastructure have emerged through our Building a Civic Economy International Learning Series, co-hosted with System Shift UK. Practitioners from Canada and beyond have highlighted democratic investing, anchor institution strategies, the role of local authorities, and the intermediary supports that help community wealth building move from isolated initiatives toward durable ecosystems of practice.
These conversations have reinforced that there is already substantial work happening in and around community wealth building in Canada — but it is not yet held by a cohesive network or supported by strong shared infrastructure. While most actors are understandably focused on the local and municipal level, Canada’s path to systematically building up these approaches remains open.
Bridging the local and the systemic
As social innovators, we are often grappling with familiar tensions: Do we take the time to build relationships and trust in communities, or act urgently in the face of systems that are already failing people and the planet? Do we work incrementally, building from what exists, or push for transformation from the outset? Do we focus on neighbourhood-level experiments, or on influencing policy, capital, and institutional behaviour at a national scale?
We can find ourselves torn between patience and urgency, pragmatism and vision, incrementalism and transformation.
A social innovation approach shows us how these different points of emphasis can — and must — work together coherently. Local leadership identifies what communities actually need. Shared learning and experimentation help us match the right solutions to need. And alignment of enabling conditions helps us embed solutions into the systems that shape communities at multiple levels.
At SI Canada, our role is not only to support social innovation in communities, but to connect what is happening in place with the broader systems that shape outcomes — policy, capital, and institutions. This means helping create a two-way flow: aligning national priorities with community realities, while ensuring that locally rooted solutions can inform and reshape systems at scale.
As community wealth building continues to take root in Canada, this work requires space for experimentation, disagreement, and multiple pathways forward. It will also require clear ways of seeing one another: understanding where promising approaches are already happening, where there is overlap and gaps, and where greater coherence might be useful.
If you are working to enable community wealth building at a municipal, regional, provincial, or national level — whether or not you use that language — we invite you to add yourself to our stakeholder map and share your reflections on the work ahead. Together, we hope to better understand what connective tissue, common agendas, and enabling strategies might be needed to help community wealth building flourish in Canada.
Key questions for advancing a systems-level approach to community wealth building in Canada right now:
- How do we support neighbourhood-level projects, community-led initiatives, and municipal-scale pilots while also building the connective tissue* needed to embed the ethos and practices of community wealth building more widely?
- How do local efforts and broader systems enablers** interact and bolster each other’s efforts?
- What does a systems-level approach look like if the goal is not simply to advance one element of CWB but to create the conditions in which many different community wealth building strategies can take root and flourish?
- What would it take to embed and institutionalize community wealth building principles across systems, policies, and sectors in Canada? What does scale look like for community wealth building in this context?
- How do we pursue systems-level influence without losing the core principles of community participation, democratic ownership, and community-led decision-making that sit at the heart of community wealth building?
*Connective tissue: the relationships, intermediary supports, networks, and shared mechanisms that help locally rooted efforts learn from one another, access resources, build collective power, and contribute to broader systems change.
**Systems enablers: the broader conditions such as infrastructure, policies, institutional norms, and flows of resources that shape whether community wealth building efforts can emerge, thrive, and sustain themselves over time.
