The Community Wealth Building Lab is an initiative led by 10C that advances education and research on community wealth building: the practice of building local economies where ownership, investment, and benefit stay rooted in community.
The Lab delivers courses, workshops, lectures, and community learning programs across a range of connected themes, including placemaking, arts, leadership, financial literacy, food systems, social enterprise, social finance, community real estate, and community development.
Since 2008, 10C has been building the infrastructure of a community wealth economy: affordable shared work and convening spaces, non-profit ownership of social purpose real estate, a commercial kitchen incubating food entrepreneurs, a weekly farmers’ market, and community bonds and social financing tools that let residents financially invest in what they believe in. This body of practice over nearly two decades offers a rich, living case study of how community wealth building takes shape at the hyper local level in a mid-sized Canadian city.
The Lab situates this local research within a wider field of study. It examines community wealth building work in other communities across Canada, is inspired by decades of work by the Democracy Collaborative, and looks internationally to Scotland (where past and emerging processes have led to the formalization in 2026 of community wealth building legislation) for lessons on how practice becomes policy and law.
Community wealth building works both at the local and national level.
Local economies too often leak wealth out of the places that generate it, with jobs, spending, and assets controlled by people with no stake in the community and decisions made far from the people who live with their consequences. We believe the community wealth building framework offers a pathway to strengthen local resilience and reshape our social and economic contract.
This is the work 10C has been doing in Guelph for years. The Community Wealth Building Lab seeks to carry it further, in collaboration with many networks and organizations leading the charge here in Canada and internationally. We are inspired by and grateful to the team at the Democracy Collaborative for developing and championing the framework, the practice, and the global movement.
Join us! Democratic engagement is what will bring forward community wealth building forward as a new norm.
If you are interested in what the Community Wealth Building Lab and 10C are cooking up, please reach out to [email protected].
September 2026 – As a first initiative of the CWB Lab, we are sharing these 10 Community Wealth Building questions (download as PDF) to ask your democratically elected representatives in the municipal electoral process. As an engagement tool of the Community Wealth Building Lab, 10C has sent these questions out to the candidates in our local election here in Guelph, Ontario. We encourage you to adapt these to your context. We will be hosting a Community Wealth Building TOWN HALL on Wednesday, October 14 6:00-8:00pm in person with hybrid options to have a community dialogue about community wealth and what role the municipality may have in advancing goals.
