Women in Canada have been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic to an extent that threatens to roll back equality gains. Economic losses have fallen heavily on women and most dramatically on women living on low incomes who experience intersecting inequalities based on race, class, disability, education, and migration and immigration status.

With discussions of race, reconciliation, and revolution on the forefront, there has been no better time to demand the restructuring of the economic practices that have led to the income equality and social exclusion of the current market.

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended our world. It has laid bare the inequity, the limits, and the failures of capitalism. The door to a better future beyond capitalism, already cracked open by the Great Recession, has been pushed open a little wider.

With funding for federal, state, and local loan and grant programs maxing out,  it is more important than ever that we utilize a multitude of creative strategies to harness the financial capital of our communities towards self determined outcomes.

The Community Economies Collective (CEC) seeks to bring about more sustainable and equitable forms of development by acting on new ways of thinking about economies and politics. Building on J.K. Gibson-Graham’s feminist critique of political economy, the CEC challenges two problematic aspects of how “the economy” is understood: seeing it as inevitably capitalist, and separating the economy from ecology.

Over the last few years, Prosperity Now has increasingly focused on developing and strengthening its approach to addressing racial economic inequality and advancing racial wealth equity. In 2015, we launched the Racial Wealth Divide Initiative to integrate a racial economic equity lens, framework and analysis to focus our work and bring expertise to this issue.