What If We Got Public Investment Right?
In housing, healthcare, childcare, and energy, the state is a central architect of markets — shaping prices, risk, and returns through large-scale public investment. Yet as ownership has grown more concentrated, private interests capture the value those public dollars create. When public investment fuels private control, democracy weakens. We fund campaigns that win progressive revenue and restructure public investment so it delivers broad public benefit.
Learn HowA structural transformation in three charts.
FIRE vs. Manufacturing Share of GDP
The Value Capture Gap (218 Cities, 2000–2023)
The Fissured Workplace
It’s Not Just How Much We Invest. It’s How.
The question isn’t whether to invest in housing, healthcare, and childcare — it’s how that investment is structured. Market design, program architecture, ownership models, and revenue systems all determine whether public dollars create shared prosperity or fuel further concentration and democratic instability.
Public Investment Shapes Markets and Creates Wealth
Government spending on housing, healthcare, childcare, and energy structures entire markets — setting land values, shaping supply chains, and generating enormous downstream wealth. But in an economy that has shifted from production to asset ownership, who captures that wealth depends on who controls the underlying structures.
Structure Determines Who Benefits
Our economy has undergone a material transformation: wealth no longer flows primarily to those who produce goods and services, but to those who own the assets underneath — the real estate, the debt, the platforms, the infrastructure. Market design, program structure, and ownership patterns determine whether public investment builds shared prosperity or fuels further concentration and democratic instability.
Changing Outcomes Means Changing Structures
Spending more through existing structures won’t change who benefits. Durable affordability requires progressive revenue systems, public ownership models, accountable institutions, and labor standards that give workers real power — restructuring the economy so that public investment builds broad-based wealth.
“Affordability and economic security are not produced simply by expanding spending or supply — they are produced by how public revenue moves through institutions, markets, and ownership structures, and by whether democratic actors retain structural control over that flow of value.”— PNEF Theory of Change
Four Levers of Structural Change
We invest in campaigns that reshape the structures determining who benefits from public investment — at four critical pressure points.
Progressive Revenue
Generating public resources through fair taxation — so those who benefit most from public systems contribute the most to sustaining them. Without revenue, there is no public power.
AZ · CA · MN · NYPublic Options
Building publicly-owned alternatives in housing, banking, energy, and care — where the market has failed to deliver affordable, reliable services. Public options set the floor.
CA · NY · MN · MIWorker Power
Strengthening labor standards, bargaining rights, and worker ownership — because good jobs are the foundation of a stable economy. Workplace campaigns connect to public policy.
LA · NM · PA · MNSocial Investment
Expanding direct public provision of care, education, health, and housing — the services that determine quality of life and that markets chronically underprovide.
MN · MI · CA · NYInvesting in Structural Power
Resources deployed to campaigns building lasting economic change.
organizing campaigns
across the country
active campaigns
of structural reform
Eight States, One Strategy
We invest in multiracial community and labor formations running campaigns at the intersection of revenue, public investment, and worker power.
- Arizona Center for Empowerment
- People’s First Economy Campaign
- CA Green New Deal Coalition
- Million Voters Project
- ACT-LA
- Step Up Louisiana
- Power Coalition
- We The People Michigan
- Michigan Statewide Alignment Formation
- ISAIAH
- TakeAction Minnesota
- Tending the Soil
- CTUL
- Inquilinxs Unidxs
- Unidos Minnesota
- New Justice Project
- Organizers in the Land of Enchantment
- Somos Un Pueblo Unido
- Invest in Our New York
- For The Many
- Fiscal Policy Institute
- Make the Road Pennsylvania
The question is not whether to invest. It’s whether the structures that investment flows through are built to create shared prosperity — or to concentrate it.
The Powering a New Economy Fund supports campaigns that change those structures — through progressive revenue, public ownership, democratic governance of economic institutions, and labor standards that build real power for workers and communities.
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