We envision societies where people have healthy, empowered relationships with their economies — where they understand and act on their economic rights, and where economic and financial infrastructure actively supports their participation and well-being.
Economic Culture, What’s That?
People are disconnected from the economy.
Too often, we experience the economy as passive participants rather than co-creators of the systems shaping our lives. Although communities are deeply connected to local and national economies, the cultural foundations of these systems — our norms, values, and beliefs that govern them — remain invisible or unclear.
This disconnect limits our understanding of economic rights and fuels harmful narratives: electing leaders who promise prosperity but fail to deliver; viewing safety nets as “handouts” instead of tools for stability; and crediting corporations for job creation while overlooking the public investments that make growth possible.
To create lasting change, we need to make these invisible forces visible and reshape them, so that structural inequities are dismantled and families can thrive.
The Culture Change We Seek
Shared beliefs and values can drive a fair and strong economy.
The programs that public servants implement with Economic Culture Lab aim to demonstrate, incentivize, and mainstream these values:
Innovation should serve the public. New ideas and investments should make life better for everyone, not just grow the economy.
Everyone deserves the basics. Good governance ensures everyone has what they need to live with dignity — not separate policies and programs for some, and scraps for others.
No person or institution should have too much power. Our economy works best when wealth and influence are shared fairly, not concentrated in a few hands.
We all benefit from shared wealth. The value we create together should support the public good — through effective public services, shared spaces, and community care.
Powering Public Sector Collaboration
The public sector needs organizers too.
Culture can change—and local governments are powerful drivers of that change. By collaborating across cities, public servants can design and deliver economic programs that reshape what people value and prioritize.
Economic Culture Lab takes a place-based, regional approach to shaping economic culture by organizing public servants, together with political and civic leaders, to conduct real-world demonstrations. These demonstrations unlock new understandings of the economy, reshape economic values, and model new practices — changing how public leaders and the families they serve align with economic policies and programs.
Our first initiative, the California Economic Rights & Culture Table (CERC), activates economic development municipal leaders to pool resources, generate combinative strategies, and implement largescale demonstrations.
Starting with the New Economy
The current economy is not the future economy.
We focus on the New Economy — often described as the fundamental restructuring of the economy in a rapidly evolving era of data and technology — looking to the future and working backwards to understand how we need to shift today. This, for example, means expanding the lens of economic solutions such as for wealth building, from traditional assets like income and real estate, to emerging sources like data and digital assets.
Grounded in the lens of the New Economy, Economic Culture Lab is:
informing public understanding to demystify the economy
incentivizing values that lead to equitable outcomes
influencing everyday economic practices to support the well-being of families