Cleveland Owns

Cleveland Owns is a nonprofit incubator of cooperative enterprises. We organize multiracial, grassroots cooperatives that enable member owners to build wealth and power because we know that in racial capitalism, ownership matters.

We believe we'll live in an equitable city only when ownership is distributed in an equitable way.

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.

27 organizations sign new electric contracts through the purchasing cooperative in Cleveland

7/23/2021 04:23 PM

This week Cleveland Owns and our partners Greater Cleveland Congregation and CPA took a big step towards founding a purchasing cooperative for houses of worship and other nonprofits when we completed a group purchase of electricity!

Participatory budgeting in Cleveland and the solidarity economy

5/28/2021 02:53 PM

We're proud to be part of a coalition of awesome grassroots groups calling for participatory budgeting in Cleveland.

Congressional briefing with the Energy Democracy Project

4/27/2021 02:33 PM

Last week we joined our allies at the Energy Democracy Project, a national formation of grassroots energy democracy groups, to present our ideas for federal policy related to energy democracy to Senator Merkley of Oregon and other members of Congress at a briefing.

Wrapping up the Energy Democracy Summit in Northeast Ohio

4/20/2021 02:43 PM

It was a pleasure to spend the weekend with some 50 local activists as we explored the principles and practice of energy democracy at the Energy Democracy Summit in Northeast Ohio!