ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Marjorie Kelly, Executive Vice President, The Democracy Collaborative
Marjorie Kelly, lead author on this book, is executive vice president at The Democracy Collaborative and a nationally recognized expert in enterprise and financial design for social mission. She comes from a business family, where her father owned a small business and her grandfather founded Anderson Tool and Die in Chicago. Her social activism began at Earlham College, where she studied English and protested the Vietnam War. While pursuing a master’s in journalism at the University of Missouri, her real political awakening occurred with the discovery of feminism. It was an eye- opening exercise in questioning received wisdom and recognizing invisible bias, which informed her later concept of capital bias, explored for the first time in this book.
A youthful enthusiasm for collectives was tempered as she served as president of the board of Williamson Street Grocery Cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin, at a time when sales doubled. Marjorie helped initiate a shift to differential pay at that cooperative where the manager of the $1 million operation was paid the same as a person hired a week earlier to stock shelves.
Marjorie co- founded Business Ethics magazine, known for its listing of the “100 Best Corporate Citizens,” Russell 1000 firms excelling at serving multiple stakeholders, not just stockholders. Over 20 years as president of that publishing company, she watched the corporate social and environmental responsibility fields grow, even as corporate practices worsened, with corporations initiating massive layoffs, fighting unions, ending traditional pensions, and moving operations overseas to evade regulation. She had started the publication believing good business people could change the world, but she saw how even CEOs are powerless against the real force in the system, Wall Street’s mandate for perpetually growing profits. She explored this analysis in The Divine Right of Capital, named one of Library Journal’s 10 Best Business Books of 2001.
In search of solutions, Marjorie joined Tellus Institute, a Boston think tank, where with Allen White (cofounder of the Global Reporting Initiative), she cofounded Corporation 20/20, gathering hundreds of leaders from business, finance, law, labor, and civil society to explore corporate design that integrates social, ecological, and financial aims. She consulted to the Ford Foundation’s WealthWorks project, developing innovations in rural development for the Deep South and Appalachia, later serving on a rural policy council for Senator Bernie Sanders. Marjorie worked with Cutting Edge Capital, doing hands- on design for social mission for private company clients. She published Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution and has also written for publications including Harvard Business Review, New England Law Review, Chief Executive, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
At The Democracy Collaborative, Marjorie has worked on projects from aiding community foundations with place-based impact investing to working with Native American leaders on inclusive development. With Jessica Rose and others, she cofounded the Fifty by Fifty initiative to help catalyze 50 million worker- owners by 2050, perceiving that employee ownership is the democratic economy model most ready for scale. She lives in Salem, Massachusetts, with her wife Shelley Alpern.
Ted Howard, President, The Democracy Collaborative
Ted Howard’s road to becoming an internationally sought- after expert in the reconstruction of equitable local economies and strategies for building community wealth has been a long and winding one. Born in Ohio, he grew up in Los Angeles in the 1960s, spending much of his time body surfing in Santa Monica and taking advantage of his nearly seven-foot-tall frame on the basketball court. He headed to Washington, DC, in September of 1968 to attend the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service with the intention of becoming an American diplomat—but wound up majoring in anti-war organizing instead. After the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State, he helped pull off the May 1970 student strike that shut down Georgetown for the first time since its founding in 1789, and, realizing the moral bankruptcy of a career in the Vietnam- era State Department, he dropped out of Georgetown, moved back to California, and threw himself into organizing, helping galvanize so much opposition to President Nixon’s planned 1972 GOP convention in San Diego that they moved it at the last minute to Miami Beach on the other side of the country.
Back on the East Coast, he began working with Jeremy Rifkin as co-director of the Peoples Bicentennial Commission, a radical alternative to the Nixon/Ford celebrations planned for 1976. With Rifkin, he coauthored a number of books on emerging technological developments and economic alternatives before switching gears in the 1980s to work with several UN agencies and The Hunger Project on poverty and international development, spending time in India and Africa. While working abroad, Howard’s exposure to traditional communal models and postcolonial experiments confirmed his intuition that extractive corporate capitalism was far from the only way to organize an economic system. Bringing this perspective back in the 1990s to the US, Howard connected with historian and political economist Gar Alperovitz, first as the executive director of Alperovitz’s National Center for Economic Alternatives, then as cofounders in 2000 of The Democracy Collaborative.
At The Democracy Collaborative, where Howard currently serves as president, he helped design and oversee the implementation of Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives, a pathbreaking experiment in inclusive local economic development that leverages the purchasing power of local anchor institutions like hospitals and universities to foster democratic ownership of industry, benefiting some of the city’s most excluded and marginalized communities. His commitment to this project, and his belief that the most promising solutions for a better future often find more fertile soil in the places left behind by the present, brought him back to Ohio in 2007, where he continues to reside today. Identified in the Guardian as “the de facto spokesperson for community wealth building” internationally, Howard’s expertise in transformative local economic development has been sought out by leading healthcare systems and universities and city governments from Albuquerque to Amsterdam, multiple regional branches of the Federal Reserve system, the British Labour Party, and England’s Royal Society of Arts.
The Democracy Collaborative
The Democracy Collaborative is a research and development lab for the democratic economy. Celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2020, The Democracy Collaborative was launched as a special initiative at the University of Maryland by cofounders Ted Howard and Gar Alperovitz. The organization now is an independent nonprofit that has grown into a national and international hub for the development and implementation of transformative economic solutions. Its staff of 40 is based predominantly in Washington, DC, and Cleveland, Ohio, with other staff and fellows in places like Boston; Preston, England; and Brussels, Belgium. We work in theory, policy, and practice to create models and strategies for a community- sustaining economy.
The Democracy Collaborative works for systems change in the political economy, designing models and strategies that address the drivers causing the crises that make the headlines. The organization was one of the architects and codevelopers of Cleveland’s Evergreen Cooperatives, a network of three employee- owned companies supported by purchasing from large anchor institutions, such as nonprofit hospitals and universities. That model is one example of a community wealth building approach to local economic development, using strategies around worker cooperatives, community land trusts, and other forms of democratic and community ownership. This approach, pioneered by The Democracy Collaborative, has begun to move decisively into the toolbox of municipal governments and community advocates. Key to this framework is developing existing place-based assets—especially those of large nonprofit anchor institutions—to support and scale inclusive local economic development that benefits the disadvantaged.
Beyond the neighborhood and community level, The Democracy Collaborative has launched multiple programs, platforms, and networks to catalyze larger- scale shifts toward a democratic economy that creates broad well-being. The Next System Project, launched with the support of more than 300 leading scholars and activists, is building a comprehensive platform to promote systemic solutions for an age of systemic crisis. Fifty by Fifty, launched by a network of players in employee ownership, is working to catalyze 50 million employee owners by 2050; the project is strategic advisor to the Fund for Employee Ownership at Evergreen. The Healthcare Anchor Network is convening the nation’s leading hospitals and health systems to advance the anchor mission of healthcare across the sector. The Democracy Collaborative also consults on the ground in communities, helping local leaders in places like Albuquerque, Miami, Atlanta, and Washington, DC, work together to build wealth that stays local and is broadly shared.
Connect with The Democracy Collaborative at democracycollaborative.org.