GCPH Seminar Series 19: Lecture 2 - Sarah McKinley

Community wealth building as health building: how a local democratic economy can create healthy, thriving communities

Sarah presented community wealth building as a means to democratise local economies so that they produce wellbeing and positive health outcomes for people in their daily lives. Community wealth building action is already happening in communities across the world. But in this moment of compounding crises, it is more urgent than ever to intentionally connect, scale, and resource these actions to move them from the fringes to the mainstream of economic development practice. 

As people and communities struggle under the rising cost of living – the result of an extractive economic system that is destroying our environment while creating scarcity and precarity – Sarah argued that we cannot simply tinker around the edges to offer relief. Instead, we must structurally reset our local economies to build more resilient and equitable communities by design. Community wealth building does this by centering democratic ownership and control of local assets in place, setting self-and-collective determination into our local economies so that they better meet the needs of people and place while producing greater wellbeing by their natural functioning. Using concrete examples to showcase the art of the possible, Sarah made the case for overhauling economic development practice and show that it can be done now.