We’re organizing neighbors, workers, business owners, creatives, and community leaders to build a people-centered economy where wealth, power, land, and business work for everyday people. A People-Centered Economy is one where families have what they need to thrive, workers have power and dignity, businesses are rooted in community, and wealth is built and kept locally. It means shifting the economy so it works for us—everyday people—rather than extracting from us.
This work is rooted in community wealth building: an approach to economic development that builds locally owned and controlled wealth and power. We want to shift from an economy that pulls wealth out of communities toward one that keeps wealth local, especially in communities that have been stripped of wealth over generations.
Our Action Priorities
Four Ways We’re Building a People-Centered Economy
The New STL Economy Playbook includes nearly 70 solutions. We are beginning with four connected priorities that can build momentum, organize people, and make an impact.
1. Win People-Centered Policy Change
Community wealth building requires policies that support the people who power our economy: workers, families, early childhood caregivers, small businesses, and neighborhoods. We’re organizing to win policy priorities, including paid sick leave, paid family and medical leave, and universal access to child care.
2. Convert Legacy Businesses to be Employee Owned
Too many local businesses have owners preparing for retirement without a succession plan; these businesses are at risk of closing or being sold to a new owner outside of our region. Employee ownership offers another path: one where businesses can stay rooted locally, and the workforce can build real wealth and decision-making power.
The St. Louis Employee Ownership Initiative is building a regional collaborative to expand employee and worker ownership, beginning with business conversions. The Initiative focuses on identifying and educating promising St. Louis-rooted companies, connecting businesses to financing and technical assistance as they transition to employee ownership, and building awareness across the region of employee ownership as a transformational economic development solution.
3. Shift the Story of What the Economy Can Be
To build a people-centered economy, we have to help more people imagine it. WEPOWER is growing public awareness of community wealth building through storytelling, art, education, public events, and cultural organizing. The Playbook names arts, storytelling, public education, and a future Speakers Bureau as core tools for growing support.
Creatives Cohort For Building a People-Centered Economy
For artists, storytellers, makers, performers, writers, musicians, designers, and cultural workers who believe art can help people imagine and build a different economy.
The Creatives Cohort is a year-long experience for four St. Louis-based creatives who will develop new work to shift the public narrative on community wealth building and the economy. Participants receive a $5,000 stipend and production budget, join CWAG, participate in learning sessions, and create work that is publicly accessible and rooted in St. Louis. Applications are currently closed for our inaugural cohort.
4. Grow a Regional, Sustainable Movement for Community Wealth
St. Louis has many people and organizations working to improve the economy. Too often, those efforts are fragmented, under-resourced, or disconnected from a shared vision. WEPOWER is working with partners to strengthen regional coordination around community wealth building so public, private, philanthropic, movement, and community leaders can move in the same direction towards shared outcomes. Stay tuned to learn ways to get involved.
The Community Wealth Action Group, or CWAG, is a coalition of St. Louis community members with a common goal: to build communities where we can all thrive. Whether you have lived here for decades, are a new neighbor, run a small business, create art, or work to build new spaces in the community, this is a place to listen, learn, and take action with others.
CWAG gathers monthly to bring the New STL Economy Playbook to life. It is a community learning and organizing space where people build power around issues like worker ownership, paid leave, child care, and shared wealth.
Current CWAG priorities
CWAG is focused on three connected goals:
- Build public awareness and shift the regional conversation about the economy.
- Build the power necessary to win policies that truly close the wealth gap.
- Build wealth together—learning how to shift the wealth of our families and our communities.
Attend Our Monthly Meetings!
We especially seek to support entrepreneurs with established businesses ready to scale and create living wage jobs with benefits for working people across St. Louis.
Business Membership connects locally owned businesses to coaching, workshops, potential capital opportunities, and a growing network of values-aligned business leaders. Members should generally have at least two years in business, a product or service in market, demonstrated customer demand, consistent revenue, and readiness to grow.
The New STL Economy Playbook
The New STL Economy Playbook is a community-led roadmap for transforming the St. Louis economy in response to the wealth crisis.
The Playbook was developed over a year and a half of research, 3,000 hours of community design, more than 1,000 stakeholder engagements, and support from 38 subject-matter experts. It offers a vision and a set of solutions to strengthen the local economy, thereby supporting the wealth and well-being of all families who call St. Louis home.
What is community wealth building?
Community wealth building is an approach to economic development that asks a different set of questions:
- Who owns the businesses in our neighborhoods?
- Who benefits from development?
- Where does public money go?
- Who controls land and housing?
- Do workers share in the wealth they help create?
- Are families able to care for themselves and each other?
Instead of measuring success only by growth, investment, or development, community wealth building measures whether people and communities gain power, ownership, stability, and well-being.
What is a people-centered economy?
A people-centered economy is an economy designed around care, dignity, shared power, and collective prosperity. It prioritizes the basic needs of every resident: quality housing, nutritious food, living wages, reliable transportation, quality public services, flourishing parks and green spaces, and quality education from birth.
What does the Playbook include?
The Playbook includes solutions across five areas:
- Family Well-Being
- Business & Labor
- Ecosystem Development & Coordination
- Capital & Taxation
- Land & Property
Together, these solutions point toward a St. Louis where community members have more control over the resources, decisions, and assets that shape their lives.