Community Wealth Building Project

When people talk about attaining or growing wealth in our society, it is often from the lens of individual wealth. We want to change that. We want people to think differently about wealth. We want people to start thinking about how to use wealth collectively to uplift our communities. To do that though working communities often through no fault of their own don't have “social capital” around finances. Our director in his trainings says that when you grow up poor like he did, you aren’t used to having money and when you finally get some, you don't know what to do with it. Within the context of capitalism this is especially problematic.

To begin with, people are paid and take home a very small portion of the value they actually produce. On top of this corporations spend over 250 BILLION dollars in advertising. That money goes to pay psychologists, marketing experts and an army of people all focused on convincing us we need to spend the little money we take home to purchase material products that we don’t really need and shouldn’t buy.

So as a young person he went out and learned by becoming a securities certified financial advisor (He is no longer certified). He used this knowledge to build this project. Our community wealth building project is a series of engaging workshops that help people learn about how capitalism works and of the importance of building not just wealth but community wealth. The workshops cover varied topics including, understanding the exploitative nature of capitalism, developing a financial philosophy to use the money we work hard for intelligently, strategies for paying of debt and saving money doing so, how to save money with investments, as well as introductory banking and budgeting. The goal of this project is to help people learn strategies to fight off all of those corporations seeking to take the money we earn but also to teach people how we can use our collective wealth to invest in our own community projects that fight off gentrification.

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