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.
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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.


  • May 25, 2023

We’re proud to support the powerful grassroots People's Budget Cleveland coalition in their fight for economic democracy.

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  • May 15, 2023

Cleveland Owns and Cleveland Solar Cooperative kicked off May by attending RE-AMP Network’s Energy Democracy Summit here in Cleveland.

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  • Apr 1, 2023

We are thrilled to welcome Craig Ickler to the Cleveland Owns team as the Energy Democracy Organizer!

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  • Mar 29, 2023

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

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  • Feb 6, 2023

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

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  • Feb 6, 2023

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.

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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!

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  • Cleveland, Ohio