Community Wealth Building LibGuide

After a year of work, I’m pleased to announce the release of our Community Wealth Building (CWB) LibGuide (Library Guide). 

During my 2025-2026 research leave, I had the pleasure of working with the leadership of the Universities at Shady Grove (USG) in Montgomery County, Maryland. A primary objective of this placement was to help USG identify ways to advance its CWB strategic goal (below). [As an aside, USG is perhaps the only academic institution in the world – please correct me if I’m wrong – that has made advancing CWB a central part of its strategic mission. Other institutions that have centers, courses, or offices advancing CWB include the University of Central Lancashire, University of Illinois Chicago,  University of Birmingham, Washington University in St. Louis, New York University (course), Metropolitan State University, and University of Maryland, Baltimore, among others.]

Given USG’s strategic commitment to CWB, we decided that creating a resource on the topic for faculty, students, and partners would be essential to advancing the idea. The initial plan was to write an academic scoping review, but after working with the Priddy Library we decided that turning the scoping review into a library guide (LibGiude) would be more useful in the near term. The scoping review paper will come later. 

During the development of the LibGiude, we were fortunate to engage with members of The Democracy Collaborative’s Global Academic Research Network (GARN) who provided advice on how to structure the content for ease of access. One outcome of this engagement has been the creation of CWB case study pages documenting what has been happening in Cleveland (US), Preston (UK), Scotland (that just passed the first national CBW law), the UK (in general), and Northern Ireland. We are also tracking the emergent literature on CWB in Chicago and Richmond. In addition, the LibGuide captures the government entities, place-based organizations, and anchor collaboratives working to advance CWB. Please let me know who we have missed. 

The CWB LibGiude is a live site and will be updated as new content is published and from feedback we receive from CWB academics and actors. 

Finally, we decided to include an embedded spreadsheet that contains all of the material we have identified. This spreadsheet will be continually updated and can be downloaded by anyone interested in reading broadly on the topic. 

We (Franklin Ofsthun, Jaini Jogani, Sarah McKinley, and I) hope the CWB LibGuide is of value and would be happy to engage with anyone interested in learning more about the topic and website.