Civic Development Experts Address Methods for Building Community Wealth

The Aspen Institute Nonprofit Sector and Philanthropy Program (NSPP) held a roundtable Wednesday, January 18, 2006, on "Building Community Wealth." NSPP director Alan Abramson led four experts in American civic development, including William Galston, senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program (pictured at right), in a discussion on asset-based approaches to solving social and economic problems; the roundtable also centered around the newly released NSPP book on the same topic, Building Wealth.

The featured speakers at the roundtable event were (pictured from left to right) Robert Borosage, president of the Institute for America’s Future and co-director of its sister organization, the Campaign for America's Future; Stephen Goldsmith, director of the Innovations in American Government Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and former mayor of Indianapolis; Alan Abramson, NSPP director; Gar Alperovitz, founding principal of the Democracy Collaborative at the University of Maryland and director of the Building Wealth project and report; and William Galston.

“Wealth is not only unequal but becoming more so,” said Galston, “and you do not have to be a liberal or radical of any kind but simply a reader of political theory and political history to believe at some point, that becomes a serious civic and political problem for any society, however it may be constructed.” The speakers and roundtable participants — including Marguerite Sallee, president and CEO of America’s Promise: The Alliance for Youth; Neal Peirce of the Washington Post Writers Group; John Nelson, co-director of Wall Street Without Walls; and Susan Sechler of the German Marshall Fund — used his point as a launch pad for examining the potential of employee stock ownership plans, community land trusts, and community development corporations, among other emerging trends in community development, to increase economic opportunity and community stability.