Resources & Research

The Michigan Municipal League’s evolution into the concept of Community Wealth Building will be front and center during our upcoming, first-ever Virtual Convention. The League revamped our mml-prod-clone.local home page earlier this year to focus on this direction for Michigan communities. Our organization has multiple sessions planned to explain it...

“Do you remember back in March, when school announced it was closing for three weeks?” I asked my wife recently. Obviously, few of us had been pessimistic enough about the protracted impact of Covid-19 on our lives. The breathless announcements of that time about the end of commuting, and how...

“The only constant in life is change.” – Heraclitus Chances are good you have heard that famous 2,500-year-old quote from a colleague or relative. You may have even uttered it to help yourself or a coworker process yet another major shift in a project that seemed so straightforward and simple...

Used with permission from Bridge Magazine. As the outrage over George Floyd’s murder has spurred nationwide protests this summer and demands for changes to our police and criminal justice systems, the League has been sharing resources and trying to help communities unpack what it means when people talk about “defunding...

One takeaway from the League’s Policy Forum series this year was a call to be attentive to how policy can have inequitable impacts on different people. The effect of a policy might vary wildly based on factors like their race or income, and local leaders need to carefully consider these...

This guest blog comes from Ted Howard, co-founder and president of The Democracy Collaborative. As our nation continues to suffer a staggering health crisis, the unprecedented economic shutdown induced by the pandemic is leading to a shattered economic landscape. Shattered with it is the possibility of returning to the status...

A lot of us have been spending a lot more time at home lately, either laid-off, furloughed, working-from-home, or caring for family. This has drawn acute attention to the way that community wealth hits closest to home for people: whether they have an appropriate, affordable, accessible place to live. The...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what role that I, and the financial choices I make for my household, play in the local economy. For years, I’ve participated in the Buy Local movement; First Fridays events; subscribed to farm shares; dedicated most of my monthly eating out budget to...

We stand at a unique juncture in history. Across the globe, every country is in the midst of a global pandemic. While we attempted to grapple with the fallout from this health crisis, collective passions have been inspired to action by the injustices we have witnessed. Across America and beyond,...

As we evolve the Michigan Municipal League’s work into community wealth building, we’ve organized our approach into four focus areas, or “pillars.” These four pillars work together to support healthy and thriving communities, and can be found at various scales. From the League’s traditional position working at the municipal scale,...