Here's what you'll learn from Buffalo Co-Lab's latest research report, Erasing Red Lines - Part 3: Building Community Wealth...
(a) beliefs, values, and goals that define the current economic system;
(b) mental models that might underwrite a “next system”; and
(c) a public policy case study from Buffalo, NY, in which a City-run program was redesigned to be a vehicle for bottom-up community empowerment as opposed to a tool for top-down command-and-control.

The case study of Operation Clean Sweep shows how the program redesign implicitly reflects, and explicitly embraces, some of the “next system” mental models that are outlined in the report. For these and other reasons, the program has received (inter)national recognition, and researchers have argued that it might offer budding insights for how local governments can begin reorienting their existing policies away from goals of growth that support the status quo, and toward goals of equity and community wealth-building. The report concludes with a summary of the case study’s practical lessons for policy development moving forward.