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The Community Prosperity Initiative

What it is?

The Community Prosperity Initiative (CPI), led by United Way of Greater Los Angeles (UWGLA), is a community-centered, asset-driven approach to economic development that empowers historically underinvested neighborhoods to build and control their own economic futures. CPI is grounded in a simple premise: communities already possess the ideas, skills, relationships, and cultural traditions needed to build thriving local economies. What is often missing are the resources, shared infrastructure, and partnerships needed to help these assets grow and circulate locally.

What's the impact?

  • Community governance and resident leadership.
  • Shared ownership models such as cooperatives and land trusts.
  • Infrastructure that enables informal entrepreneurs to formalize and grow.
  • Strategies that retain wealth locally rather than extracting it.
  • Economic development that affirms culture, dignity, and self-determination

Shared Wealth, Local Ownership, and Economic Power

Recognizing that residents are the true experts of their own neighborhoods, the initiative focuses on uplifting community leadership, scaling existing economic practices, and investing in shared infrastructure that allows local enterprises to grow. 

Building on Existing Community Assets

CPI combines systems-level engagement, place-based experimentation through neighborhood pilots, and catalytic investment through the Prosperity Fund to build on existing community assets and support neighborhoods in building shared economic power. Rather than funding isolated projects, CPI integrates these components into a coordinated model that moves beyond traditional grantmaking to support long-term community ownership and economic resilience.