The story of how a community has done the important work themselves.
Nov 10th, 2026
Robert Cervelli, Senior Consultant for Centre for Local Prosperity
One way to understand what community wealth building is, is to see it in action. The Shelburne community greenhouse and garden is one recent example of a community taking ownership of its future.
View the playbook here:
“What started with an idea and conversations between a local municipal staff member and the Principal of the community college nearly a decade ago led to the completion of the town’s first greenhouse in 2026, operated by volunteers.“
Things that work towards system change are often bold and experimental, but that doesn’t necessarily make them complicated or hard to implement. Through demonstration projects we are able to show how projects that seem ambitious are actually rooted in simple ideas: local control, democratic ownership, community relationships, and supportive policies. When innovative ideas get put into practice, they become easy to understand, approachable, and replicable.
Sometimes the easiest things to predict are the pitfalls of an idea. Demonstration projects allow us to work through growing pains, build collaborations, set precedents other communities can lean on, and highlight ways community wealth building and relocalization are already being implemented.
At the Centre for Local Prosperity, we focus on those innovative and inspirational stories that develop within the many small communities across Atlantic Canada. These are stories of how a community has done the important work themselves, galvanized through the engagement of citizens, community organizations, and local governments. For this reason, inspirational stories are infectious, and other communities want to find out how it happened, and how they can do it as well.
With today’s increasingly fragile global economy, looking after local needs locally has become essential. The Shelburne story is one in which greater food security became a full-community effort. This is one inspirational story that needed to be understood, documented and made available to everyone. It is a story that slowly developed over many years around the idea of a community-run greenhouse. Momentum took off over the past 2 years, with today seeing significant and expanding food production – all being run by volunteers. Already, other communities are inquiring about how they can do the same thing.
With today’s increasingly fragile global economy, looking after local needs locally has become essential. The Shelburne story is one in which greater food security became a full-community effort.
In our work to document the Shelburne story, we have been fortunate to partner with Dr. Annika Voltan and Taylor Davies, St Mary’s University Sobey School of Business, to create this Playbook. The playbook is a valuable step-by-step tool kit for other inspired individuals and communities.
It is our hope that this playbook will help create similar initiatives across Atlantic Canada.