Civic Wealth Creation: A New View of Stakeholder Engagement and Societal Impact

Abstract

Positive societal change happens when community members, supporters, and entrepreneurially minded agents come together to aggregate resources and build new capacities. To explain and inform how societal impact happens across categories of stakeholders, we set forth an integrative framework of civic wealth creation to account for the social, economic, and communal endowments generated by local communities. Our framework shifts the conversation to a “civic” level of analysis that captures the variety of local settings where many societal change initiatives take place—in neighborhoods, villages, and communities where the people who are being helped are intimately involved in creating and implementing the solutions. Civic wealth extends beyond the material resources and physical assets of a community to include intangibles such as health, happiness, and social justice. We draw attention to the importance of citizen engagement and entrepreneurial commerce in the discourse surrounding contemporary societal change efforts. The civic wealth creation framework offers scholars and practitioners across disciplines a new lens through which to view societal impact.