What is WealthWorks?

WealthWorks is a 21st-century approach to local and regional economic development that belongs in every community and economic development toolkit. WealthWorks brings together and connects a community’s assets to meet market demand in ways that build livelihoods that last.

WealthWorks aims to advance a region’s overall prosperity and self-reliance, strengthen existing and emerging sectors, and increase jobs and incomes for lower-income residents and firms — all at the same time. It can work for people, firms and places of all sizes, shapes and success levels.

Why WealthWorks?

WealthWorks offers a systematic approach that identifies enterprising opportunities in a region and engages a wide range of partners in turning those opportunities into results that both build and capture wealth. It can complement or incorporate traditional economic development methods, but intentionally focuses on creating more value that becomes rooted in local people, places and firms.

The WealthWorks approach is designed to produce and sustain these results:

• Build a more self-reliant and robust area economy.
• Bring underutilized community assets — people, place, property and know-how — into fuller participation and production.
• Create wealth that sticks — because it is locally owned, controlled and reinvested.
• Increase upward mobility overall and advance the livelihoods of lower-income people, firms and places.
• Strengthen industry sectors that fuel the economy.
• Forge valued partnerships that can ably and flexibly connect again and again to power increasingly resilient regions.