Ujima Welcomes Community WEB Chicago as a Translocal Member

Join us in welcoming Community WEB Chicago as the eighth member of Ujima's Translocal Membership Program!

The Community WEB is both an acronym and a metaphor. Their name stands for The Community Wealth Ecosystem Builders and is a metaphor for the interconnected set of relationships and resources that work together to build community power through community ownership.

Community WEB Chicago partners with Black and Brown working-class residents in Chicago to make it easier for them to build community power and self-determination through collective ownership.

Their vision is for an equitable and just economy where people thrive without extracting from one another or from the environment; where communities collectively own and democratically govern the assets in their neighborhood (land, labor, housing, and enterprises) to build community wealth, health, and safety.

Ujima's editorial manager Alula Hunsen recently spoke with Community WEB Executive Director Nneka Onwuzurike to learn more.

I would love for you to start this conversation off by introducing yourself to our membership in your own words.

My name is Nneka Onwuzurike. I am the executive director of the Community WEB, and we've existed for about two years now, independently. Prior to this I worked at the City of Chicago Mayor's Office, working there for about five years across two administrations on different topics related to affordable housing, business development, and commercial real estate. I’m originally from the Detroit suburbs; both my parents are Nigerian, and my dad immigrated in the late seventies, my mom in the early eighties. I'm one of four siblings. I've lived in a variety of places in the Midwest; I very much identify as a Midwestern girl. 

I was politicized and brought into movement work through two different avenues. One was through the arts. I'm a writer; my political and artistic home is in Minneapolis, Minnesota, I lived there for five years and was just embraced by a really beautiful Black writing community of folks who were also organizers. I was invited from writing spaces into more movement spaces, and realized that one of the best things that I could offer this work is leveraging my class privilege. And so I started getting into donor organizing and resource mobilization. The things that drive me are moving money to movements and writing and expressing myself through art. 

How did you move from donor organizing and fundraising towards the work that you began with the city, in economic development and community wealth-building?

It all started with me wanting to better understand the racial wealth gap, and very quickly turned into personal questions about how to democratize wealth. I started hearing that phrase in Minneapolis, when I was learning a lot about class, race, power, and privilege through donor organizing for a non-profit theatre company, and we were moving money to projects that were re-imagining our economy and thinking about what's wrong with the status quo and what could be better. And that's how I got exposed to cooperatives and community land trusts and started to learn about, um, their role in like black radical social justice movements. It was the first time I ever really heard of the concept, although I think the values and ethos of cooperativism feel very familiar to our cultures in the diaspora around collectivism. I grew up in a very Nigerian household where that was very much emphasized, the collective and the family. 

Then I went to grad school at Harvard, doing a master's in public policy and an MBA. And while I was there, I got introduced to an organization called Transform Finance and took a training with them and then that also became a gateway for me; Ujima was one of the first projects that I remember learning about when I was in school. Once I learned about you all, it was like, okay, well who else is doing this work? Is there a broader organizing community here? And then once I got involved, my thinking moved toward democratizing decision-making, not just in where capital goes, but in how we own land or steward land and own housing, own our own labor.

Tell me the story of how the Community WEB was founded, first as a city program before becoming its own standalone non-profit.

I began at the City of Chicago with their Community Wealth Ecosystem Building initiative; one of the first things that we did was create a community advisory council of 20 different leaders in the community across the city, south and west side, Black and Latino folks. There were folks who were researchers, like Stacey Sutton at UIC, legal practitioners like Renee Hatcher, and different co-op incubators and co-op members, et cetera. They were helping us define a framework: our definition of community wealth building came from that advisory council. And then when the money came from the Chicago Recovery Plan for us to implement the initiative, we went to them and were like, “how should we spend this money?” And that's where we were advised by them to bucket it into these three different buckets. 

About a third of that money went to the ecosystem builders themselves:different organizations that helped to start and sustain and scale cooperative models, to be able to continue to do that work and to do it for free, at no cost to community members. The second bucket went to planning and pre-development grants. And so we gave up to $150,000 to 25 different organizations who had had an idea around shared ownership but didn't have the early funding that they needed to hire a project manager, to do community engagement, and so on. And that was the first time ever the city had invested capital at that early of a stage on development projects—typically they like to work on big developments, and to be the last dollar in. The third chunk of money went to large scale development grants: we had a fund on the housing side, as well as a fund on the commercial side and folks could access those funds for acquisition, development, things like that.  

The initiative was a three year program, with $15 million to spend. And one of the big lessons we learned was that we lacked a backbone infrastructure organization on the ground to convene and cohere all of this kind of development work that was happening in Chicago. Things felt really siloed and fragmented; then, the University of Illinois, Chicago also received funding to do a lot of really great research and convening. They had incubated this work in many ways, and then the funding ran out and we said, “okay, it's time for us to think about a long-term strategy that doesn't fully require or rely on government funding to sustain this work.” By the end of 2024, I had reached a point in my own career and time with the city where I was just like, I think it's my time to leave and do this, specifically. I kept hearing from folks in our communities that were nervous about this funding running out; so, I made the decision with a lot of support from folks in the community to take the leap and co-found the Community WEB as a non-profit. 

The Community WEB stands for the Community Wealth Ecosystem Builders; the WEB is a metaphor for all of the individuals and organizations and resources that are needed to build community power through community ownership. Our work is hugely informed by the needs from that pilot project with the city. We heard from folks three major things that an organization like the Community WEB would need to do. The first was coalition building: folks need someone to really be in charge of bringing us together; bringing us together to party and build relationships, but also bringing us together to build a shared agenda. The second was pipeline building; working with projects individually, helping people with the concrete tactical things they need to improve community ownership projects focusing on housing or labor; less panels, more one-on-one coaching. So we hired coaches in multiple different areas: a worker co-op coach, a housing co-op coach, et cetera, and set each of them up to work with a pipeline of projects in Chicago. The third thing was infrastructure building: organizing capital, meeting with the city and philanthropy and convincing them that we need to be raising money and directing money exclusively to this type of work. And those are our three main areas of work. 

Narrative change is another one that's come up that we're starting to work on, narrative and culture organizing: redefining wealth, telling the story and the impact of these projects to make folks become aware of them. 

All of this was rooted in the city taking notice of the decades of organizing, investing capital, some projects not getting off the ground and faltering and then myself and my co-founders realizing the need for a backbone, infrastructure organization. We did a couple convenings and folks concretized the need for this, so I hopped over from the city and started the non-profit in January 2025. We became an official 501c3 in January 2026.  

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And, like you mentioned, it seems like there’s a lot of research that undergirds your work, and that you’re starting to produce (in partnership with Community Desk Chicago, and with Renee and Stacey). What does this research look like, and how has it informed your work?

In the early days we benefited a lot from Stacey Sutton's research at UIC. She did a lot of research nationally on how cities support co-ops (from the top-down, from the bottom-up), and how to balance leadership from community members with incentives and city leadership to create opportunities for community ownership. Stacey and Renee also created a map/diagram of what makes up a co-op ecosystem and who plays what roles in that ecosystem here in Chicago, which we learned a lot from in thinking about ecosystem building. Our role is really to uplift the research work that's being done by research entities and organizations like the community desk that created a whole community investment vehicle playbook.  

But, I do feel like we've learned a lot in the last two years; we were just having this conversation about if we would ever publish some of our learnings—I don’t see us as a research entity, but I guess we are like learning a lot through failure <laughs>, and through practice that we now have some things to share right with the broader field. I think we've seen a lot of our projects scale. I think we've seen a lot of our projects steady, and we're in the process of working with a few projects that are sunsetting and we're figuring out what it looks like to sunset with dignity. So I think we wanna start to publish different learnings based on some of the relationships that we have with the partners that we're working with. 

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The Ujima Translocal Membership is an action-oriented initiative to support peers outside of Boston in getting closer to creating economic democracy ecosystems where they are. Ujima's Translocal Membership is comprised of five components: partnership on Ujima's Quarterly Office Hours, joint fundraising, private organizational 1-on-1 support, whole team check-ins, and ecosystems exchanges. Membership in the Translocal Program is by invitation only.