The Index
Financial infrastructure that changes the norms around how we measure wealth.Our Index addresses the core tension at the heart of all such efforts: the most essential ingredients of wealth are the most irreducible and hardest to quantify. Building on the lineage of alternative indices, our aim is to make assets communities actually hold (real estate, cooperative infrastructure, ecological assets, practitioner networks, wisdom) legible to capital. We’re building with communities, in community, and publishing our methodology openly.
Fifty years of brilliant local work has stayed brilliant and local. This is not for want of trying. A serious lineage of alternative indices—the Genuine Progress Indicator, the Thriving Places Index, the Social Progress Index, the Inclusive Wealth Index, the Eight Capitals framework, community wealth building scorecards—has been working this problem for decades. Each represents genuine intellectual achievement; however, none has become the infrastructure that moves capital at scale. Understanding exactly why is the foundation of what we build.
Our six-month deliverable is a forensic analysis of that failure. Why have these frameworks not crossed the threshold from advocacy tool to financial instrument? What are the precise points of breakdown—methodological, institutional, political, commercial? Where does each attempt stop short, and what would it take to go further? Conversely, what has made our current set of indices succeed? How were these crafted and marketed? How have they come to dominate so much financial behavior?
This analysis, grounded in deep engagement with the people who built and use these frameworks, is the intellectual architecture on which a genuinely new instrument can be constructed.
This work is inherently relational. You cannot conduct a credible forensic analysis of alternative indices from the outside.
It requires sustained conversation with the economists, community development practitioners, municipal finance officers, CDFI leaders, and capital allocators who have lived with these tools—who know where the data breaks down, where the governance fails, where the instrument loses the room. Which is to say, these six months have two inseparable purposes: build trusted relationships and produce the analysis itself. The network we develop in conducting the research is the beginning of the institutional fabric that a functional Local Wealth Index will require.
There are two reasons why we are well positioned to move this work from the margins to the center. One is timing. The world is readier now than ever for new ways of measuring community wealth and amplifying it. The costs of relying on mainstream indices are no longer hidden, and few are immune from them.
The other is tooling. LLM-assisted ingestion of unstructured municipal data, community-submitted qualitative data validated through AI, and rapid synthesis across heterogeneous public datasets represent a genuine technical capability that prior index efforts did not have. We intend to make this a working data layer.
Our design process also has wide application to enterprises and institutions currently mired in data with no good theories and narratives to shape and make use of it. This means we can repurpose much of our foundational work on the Index into a revenue-generating product line.