At the Center for Economic Democracy (CED), our work is animated by a simple but radical question: What would it mean to be in right relationship with the planet and people – and to design an economy that reflects that?
We have a vision at the heart of our answer – it's what many call realizing a solidarity economy. In its simplest terms, the solidarity economy is a way of being in right relationship – a system rooted in care, cooperation, and reciprocity rather than extraction and exploitation. It’s sometimes called a regenerative economy or living economy, but at its core, we’re talking about creating the conditions where people can experience economic democracy – where communities directly shape, own, and benefit from the resources that sustain life.
Understanding the Solidarity Economy
During our recent Confluence Philanthropy panel, our colleague Penn Loh beautifully described the solidarity economy as not just a new set of investments, but a different paradigm altogether – one where economic activity is grounded in interdependence and justice.
Building on that framing, we see the solidarity economy as both an ecosystem and a practice:
- A network of institutions, cooperatives, and movements that grow community wealth and power.
- A practice of aligning our resources and governance with shared values – mutuality, democracy, and sustainability.
- A strategy for creating shared prosperity, not individual accumulation.
This means centering those most impacted by economic injustice in designing, governing, and benefitting from new systems. It’s about creating shared infrastructure – community land trusts, cooperative businesses, pooled funds, and participatory governance models – that can scale while staying accountable to local leadership and collective benefit.
Opportunities to Build and Practice the Solidarity Economy
Collectively, our work is to cultivate the enabling conditions and to shift our collective practice around core concepts of risk and return for a solidarity economy to thrive. This is going to require experimentation and will likely challenge us in new ways as we seek to shift the dominant norms and practices around economy and investment. And if we are serious about a just transition and just economy, we must move capital differently – even when it’s hard. That means rethinking governance, return profiles, risk tolerance, and what ‘success’ looks like.
Below are concrete, field-tested ways we can experiment to build and practice together, for economic democracy to take root.
- Support community-led stewardship of land, labor, and capital. Prioritize and resource community-governed funds, community land trusts (CLTs), and cooperative structures where residents and workers hold real decision rights over resources and infrastructure.
- Embed power-shifting questions and values into the due diligence process. Alongside financials, ask: Who decides? Who benefits? What shifts in control, ownership, or accountability will this investment produce?
- Reimagine and redistribute RISK in this era. Use guarantees, first-loss capital, and longer tenors so communities aren’t absorbing volatility created upstream.
- Redefine ‘return’ and build a practice of shared prosperity. Track power shifts, governance quality, community balance-sheet health, and intergenerational resilience – not only ROI. And explore how an investment can return a financial benefit that is EQUAL or greater to the community as it does to the capital holder and investor.
- Fund interdependence, not just innovation. Prioritize maintenance, shared infrastructure, and operating reserves that make collective ownership durable.
- Learn in the open. Set learning agendas with community partners; publish terms, misses, and course corrections so others can build on them.
A Call to Philanthropy and Investors
To the members of Confluence Philanthropy: many of you are already moving capital with purpose. The next frontier is to move capital in right relationship – where investments and grants flow through community hands, guided by governance that reflects shared values.
We invite you to:
- Explore how your portfolio could engage directly with community and movement-governed funds, cooperatives, and land-based projects.
- Integrate power-shifting criteria into your investment diligence using frameworks like SMI along with our Expected Power Rubric to help investors assess not only financial outcomes, but how power shifts through the investment and decision-making process.
- Partner with the Center for Economic Democracy to co-design community-governed investment models and help build the infrastructure our movements need.
This moment demands courage, creativity, and connection. The solidarity economy is not just a concept – it’s a living experiment in democracy, care, and collective abundance.
We can answer the call to build the bridges between movements and markets, between people and power. Join in on this experiment to practice what it means to be in right relationship with people and planet.