For almost sixty years, the U.S. has dutifully delivered a top-down “Community Development” system, narrowly focusing on producing low-income rental housing with a mix of federal tax incentives, federally encouraged bank debt and direct federal subsidies.

Over the past decade, a new system has begun to emerge, focused on developing people rather than buildings, with a blend of public, private, civic and community leadership and capital. This system, which we label “Community Wealth,” is being raised bottom up, and is fundamentally committed to upgrading skills, growing entrepreneurs, increasing incomes and building assets. If codified and routinized, this system has the potential to bring hundreds of billions of market and civic capital off the sidelines into productive use and drive transformative outcomes for disadvantaged communities across the country.

This paper represents our initial effort to capture the transformation underway. We define Community Wealth as “a broad-based effort to build equity for low-income residents of disadvantaged communities.” In this paper, we seek to specify the systemic changes that need to occur in policy, practice and institutions if this aspirational definition is to be achieved and its potential fully realized.