Innovators in Rural Community Economic Development
Every so often I find myself thinking about the WealthWorks framework in new or expanded ways. I share these thoughts with the WealthWorks community on the chance that they can add value to your work and to our shared understanding and ability to articulate the framework. I would welcome your feedback. I also invite you to share your own thinking.
I'm thinking now about the stages that our work goes through and how those connect to discussions about institutionalizing the WealthWorks approach in our communities. From my perspective, it appears that there are four stages or phases that WealthWorks goes through on the ground. As with everything else about this work, they are not always strictly sequential, there are no hard and fast lines between them, and some parts or chainlets may get to a certain stage before others.
The first stage is exploration. This is where coordinators explore their options with respect to where to focus by sector and by product or service and then dig deeper to try and figure out what conditions actually look like on the ground, what is feasible, who the stakeholders might be on the demand and supply sides and why they should care (their value propositions). I think exploration stage activities continue during subsequent stages as well. I don’t think we’ve been at this long enough to know if and when exploration actually tapers off.
The second stage is WealthWorks value chain construction. I think of the construction stage as proof of concept. During this stage, products and services actually move to market through the WealthWorks value chain, but not at scale. The construction phase builds the case for investment required to get to scale.
The third stage is implementation. This is where the WealthWorks value chain gets to scale.
The implementation stage may or may not include the fourth stage, which I think of as institutionalization. Institutionalization means that the functioning of the WealthWorks value chain is no longer dependent on specific individuals (and maybe not a coordinator either – but we don’t know that yet). It is substantially if not totally market driven. There is enough redundancy and resilience in the system that it can continue to function because it has been built into various stakeholder organizations and the marketplace as the “new normal” way of doing business. It is supported by standards, regulations, policies, budgets, and other features that give it a degree of stability and permanence. One example of institutionalization is the permanent tariff related to How$mart KY – a keystone of institutionalization that supports implementation at scale.
When we began this work six years ago, we were already talking about institutionalization as defined above as the end game. The only reason I can see to keep talking about institutionalization as a separate stage in this work is to emphasize the goal of changing systems to create a new normal.
WealthWorks is a 21st-century approach to local and regional economic development that belongs in every community and economic development toolkit. For information about Yellow Wood's engagement with WealthWorks, see our WealthWorks and Wealth Creation pages and related resources.
