Upholding Community Values
Deepak Bhargava and Seth Borgos, Center for Community Change
Interdependence, mutual responsibility, shared fate—this communal ideal has deep roots in American culture, where it has lived in creative tension with the ideal of self-reliance that is also a part of our national heritage. All of our best moments as a nation have reflected a marriage of these two ideas—personal liberation and collective uplift.
Community Ideas
- Require larger corporate boards to include community and worker representatives
- Develop rewards and sanctions for business code of ethical conduct
- Provide systemic support for employee ownership, cooperative ownership, and other accountable business structures
- Expand community health centers for delivery of low-cost, preventive health care
- Establish a superfund to invest in projects to improve community health outcomes
- Require community health assessments for all major public policies
- Create a comprehensive program for bringing the unemployed into the workforce
- Set up a national housing trust fund to produce affordable housing in low-income neighborhoods
- Redirect transportation and infrastructure investment to older, higher-need communities
- Take measures to include immigrants already in the U.S. in our democracy
- Create a regulated system of labor migration and transparent labor markets for future migrant workers
- Target infrastructure investments in communities worldwide that generate high rates of migration to the U.S.
Excerpted from Thinking Big: Progressive Ideas for a New Era, our shared agenda for Congress and the Administration.
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