As the case study progresses, wider community meetings with people interviewed as well as other stakeholders will be conveneed for feedback and validation of findings. Washington University’s Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation (SEI) Lab and WEPOWER have regular public facing events where research will be disseminated and questions discussed.
Both partners also sit on regional and national boards and organizations focused on these themes at the practitioner level where we can share questions and results with policy makers, investors, entrepreneurs and wider community stakeholders.
Over the three years of the project life cycle, we will visit premier national sites and host virtual meetings with a variety of practitioners and policymakers to create feedback loops, sharing strategies and learnings to accelerate the work. We will create a university-level, 8 hour online course which will explain the history, theory, and case studies of entrepreneur-centered community wealth building, with a focus on key elements distinguishing these approaches to entrepreneurship. We will co-create a toolkit with community wealth building practitioners, which will be available as a digital resource and a downloadable pdf.
Our commitment to ensuring the findings are accessible and actionable for non-academic audiences is also evident in our choice of primary work products: a free, high quality course and an action-oriented toolkit, which are significantly more accessible to the general public than conventional academic papers.
Critically, the outputs of this project will provide clear, actionable information and advice for civic leaders, including policymakers, funders, and grassroots practitioners and advocates, on how to advance inclusive prosperity by restructuring key systems and structures currently exacerbating inequality.