Cleveland Owns

Power through collective ownership

About Us  image
Cleveland Owns is a economic democracy incubator that builds cooperative businesses and leads campaigns for community control of resources.

We know that in racial capitalism, ownership matters, so we're organizing multiracial, grassroots cooperatives that enable member owners to build wealth and power. We're working towards a Cleveland owned by its residents.
What we do image
We support groups of workers and neighbors as they seeks to turn what they have into what they need to demand their share of the region’s prosperity.

Today we support five cornerstone cooperatives working in clean energy, food access, and digital access, and collective purchasing. We also work for deeper democracy in the public sector, where we co-lead PB CLE, a coalition of 50+ organizations calling on Cleveland City Council to enable residents to allocate $30 million in ARPA funds using participatory budgeting.

The common thread for all our work is deep democracy through collective ownership and, in the case of the PB CLE, collective stewardship of public money -- economic democracy.


The other week our ED, Jonathan, presented about Cleveland Owns' work incubating Cleveland Solar Cooperative, Ohio's first community-owned solar development company.

  •  3/29/2023 08:08 AM

Cleveland Owns is proud to be a founding member of PB CLE, a grassroots campaign to bring a People’s Budget (PB), or participatory budgeting, to Cleveland. Here's the latest on the campaign

  •  2/6/2023 02:32 PM

This spring, in partnership with our allies at Co-op Cincy and Co-op Dayton, we’re launching our first co-op incubator, a 15-week program for groups looking to launch worker-owned businesses.

  •  2/6/2023 02:22 PM

Today we're releasing a new case study about our work building community owned solar with Cleveland Solar Cooperative.  In the case study, authored by our friend and ally Will Cuneo, we describe our early days in library basements hammering out the who, how, and what about our vision for community solar in Cleveland.

  •  1/12/2023 11:26 AM

Happy New Year! Our staff, board, and volunteers at Cleveland Owns have a lot to be thankful for in 2022, and even more to look forward to in 2023. Here’s a preview of how we’re building economic democracy in the new year.

  •  1/5/2023 02:10 PM

Cleveland Owns is hiring a full-time Energy Democracy Organizer to lead our Energy Democracy Initiative, a portfolio of projects that promote community control over our energy system. The Energy Democracy Organizer will organize with residents impacted by energy injustice and the climate crisis, and develop community-owned solar projects.

  •  11/27/2022 08:19 PM

Today Cleveland Owns joined our partner ConnectedNEO in submitting an RFP to build a community-owned broadband mesh network across Cleveland.

  •  8/26/2022 04:27 PM
We're able to do this work because of people like you who believe in economic democracy. Thank you for being a supporter of Cleveland Owns!

Click here to make a donation.

To make a one-time donation via PayPal, click here (we pay no fees!)
Support image
  • Cleveland, Ohio