Small, independent businesses are the backbone of our economy. Unfortunately, they’ve become harder to start and struggle to compete with large chains. We’ve been inspired by owner-owned cooperatives that help small businesses thrive.

“Research suggests that COVID-19 is accelerating the greatest wealth transfer in the history of retail, worsening the already unequal distribution of ownership in our society.”


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Strategies and democratic practices to build community wealth

Building on lessons from a roundtable at DemocracyXChange 2026, this joint report from the Atkinson Foundation, Social Capital Partners, and DemocracyXChange provides strategies and democratic practices to build community wealth.

BANC committee submission on SME financing

Canada can continue treating its financing monoculture as inevitable, or it can follow the lead of peer jurisdictions and intentionally build the institutional diversity required for a different outcome. The status quo produces predictable, cumulative exclusions that compound over time into lower productivity, narrower entrepreneurship, weaker community resilience and entrenched inequity.

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