Beyond Profit
How Sacramento Is Beginning To Reimagine Prosperity
SACRAMENTO, CA — Along the well-trodden corridors of Capitol Avenue, where marble ambition and legislative rituals still dominate the skyline, something quieter, and far more radical, is unfolding. It doesn’t announce itself with slogans or fanfare. It grows slowly, like morning light in a garden, or laughter shared over borrowed tools. Beneath the din of government, Sacramento’s wellbeing economy is taking root. And if you listen closely, if you follow the scent of compost, or the hum of a borrowed drill, you might just find yourself in a city that is learning to thrive on a different kind of wealth.
To arrive here as an outsider is to feel two worlds brushing against each other. You might come for a policy summit or a conference. You might stay in a chain hotel, coffee in hand, your head full of budgets and growth curves. But if you take a detour down neighborhood side streets, into backyard plots, and onto open porches, you’ll find something else beginning to emerge. A quieter revolution. One that measures prosperity not in profits, but in relationships. Not in quarterly reports, but in shared meals, mended fences, and soil rich with possibility.
Where Wealth Stays Home
On a bright morning in midtown, the Sacramento Credit Union building doesn’t shout its values. Its glass reflects the sky like any other, but inside, the air feels different. There is no marble opulence here, no smell of old money. Just the quiet hum of community, of members speaking directly with staff who know their names, of loan officers approving funds not for hedge funds, but for small groceries, barber shops, and daycare centers.
Founded during the Great Depression, this credit union is still governed by its members. Not a single shareholder to please, no out-of-state boardroom calling the shots. Their capital stays close, circulating like groundwater between neighbors. Across the city, institutions like SAFE Credit Union and California Community Credit Union echo the same spirit, each one a bastion of fiscal democracy.
Yet beyond these institutions, the wider landscape of cooperative ownership remains thin. Few worker-owned businesses have taken hold. The roots are strong, but the canopy has yet to grow. Still, the soil is fertile for those with the vision to plant.
Soil, Tools, and the Rituals of Trust
If the credit unions are the arteries of this new economy, the community gardens are its pulse. Scattered across Sacramento’s many neighborhoods, these spaces are more than places to grow food. They are sites of memory, of healing, of coexistence. In the Martin Luther King Jr. Garden, a Cambodian grandmother teaches a local teenager how to care for lemongrass. Down the row, a father and daughter harvest cucumbers to pickle at home. Spanish, Vietnamese, and English rise and fall in the morning air like birdsong.
There’s nothing transactional about these spaces. They don’t demand productivity. They ask only for care. And in return, they offer abundance, not just in tomatoes or chard, but in shared purpose and belonging.
A few miles north, another experiment blooms. In a modest room lined with shelves and pegboards, the North Sacramento Free Tool Library quietly rewrites the rules of ownership. Need a jigsaw? A power sander? A post hole digger? Take it. Use it. Return it when you’re done. No fees, no contracts. Just mutual trust. The library is staffed by volunteers who greet visitors with the same warmth as a friend handing over a favorite book.
Alchemist CDC is preparing a second branch in Oak Park, another node in a slowly emerging constellation of shared infrastructure. These are spaces where tools circulate the way books once did, freely, generously, and with care.
Yet, in all of this, something is missing. You won’t easily find repair cafés, those beautiful gatherings where elders pass on the quiet magic of fixing a toaster, darning a sock, coaxing life from broken things. It is a thread yet to be woven into Sacramento’s fabric. But the loom is ready.
Earth as Teacher, Justice as Harvest
Just outside the city, beyond the last stretch of strip malls and traffic lights, the land begins to breathe differently. Here lies a project that feels less like an organization and more like a promise. Planting Justice, a Bay Area–born nonprofit, is now deeply embedded in Sacramento’s soil. At the old City Tree Nursery site, they are preparing something special, a training ground for regenerative agriculture, permaculture, and human dignity.
Three Sisters Gardens and Yisrael Family Farm are among their partners. Together, they’re transforming a forgotten acre into a place of learning, healing, and employment. Formerly incarcerated people are not just hired here, they are mentored, empowered, and invited to become stewards of land and community. The future nursery will grow native plants, herbs, and vegetables, all while teaching the art of catching rainwater, building food forests, and honoring ecological cycles.
It’s about food, yes. But more than that, it’s about justice, justice that smells of mint and compost and hard-earned freedom. Sacramento’s official language may speak of food insecurity and workforce development, but on the ground, the words you hear are different. People talk of healing. Of roots. Of homecoming.
Still, the broader permaculture movement has not fully arrived here. Transition towns, cooperative eco-villages, these visions flicker on the horizon. For now, permaculture lives in pockets, in garden beds, in the dreams of organizers still gathering strength.
Digital Commons and Shared Signals
In library basements and community halls, a different kind of garden grows, one built not from seeds, but from code. Here, civic technologists are tinkering with apps that map mutual aid resources, host participatory budgeting experiments, and imagine broadband as a commons, not a commodity.
It’s a quiet, hopeful corner of the tech world. One where ambition bends toward equity, not disruption. Sacramento doesn’t yet have a community-owned broadband network. But the groundwork is there. University students run hackathons. Library workshops teach parents how to safeguard digital privacy. And slowly, a vision of tech as a bridge (not a barrier) is taking shape.
Threads That Touch
What’s striking about Sacramento’s wellbeing economy isn’t just what exists, it’s how it all connects. The woman who serves on her credit union board also volunteers at the tool library. The apprentice learning permaculture at Planting Justice helps coordinate food giveaways on weekends. The guy running a civic data project is also growing sweet potatoes in his front yard.
There’s a shared vocabulary of resilience, justice, sovereignty, and mutual aid. But more than that, there’s a shared rhythm. A sense that we belong to each other. That wealth is only wealth if it touches many hands.
You’ll see it in a smile passed over garden beds. You’ll feel it in the handshake of someone who trusts you with a borrowed spade. This isn’t community built by grant cycles or campaign slogans. It’s made by small, repeated gestures of care. That’s how it feels to walk inside this tapestry.
What Comes Next
And yet, even a living fabric has holes. Sacramento is still waiting for more worker-owned businesses, especially in food and tech. Housing cooperatives are few, and community land trusts have yet to find broad footing. There is no visible Indigenous-led landback project reclaiming stewardship in this region, despite its long and painful colonial history.
There is so much room to grow. So many threads yet to be woven. And for those with the hands to do the weaving, the invitation is clear.
A Morning in the New Economy
Picture it: early light over the MLK Jr. Garden. The sky still pink. The air, damp and alive. An elder kneels beside a raised bed, humming softly while loosening the soil. A child splashes water onto carrot tops. Someone walks by with fresh bread, still warm, sliced and shared. You head north, past painted fences and cracked sidewalks, to the tool library where Marcus, a retired contractor, is showing two teens how to steady a drill.
Later that evening, you find yourself in a civic tech gathering. The walls are covered in sticky notes and diagrams. People speak with urgency, yes, but also with hope. They’re mapping a city not just of infrastructure, but of belonging.
In this Sacramento, prosperity is not distant. It’s not abstract. It’s the food on your plate. The neighbor who knows your name. The seed you plant, not for sale, but for sharing. All that is needed now, is for people like you to join in and seed your own wellbeing projects and expand this into a city-wide system of mutual care.
This is what it means to live inside a wellbeing economy. To feel its warmth in your hands, to hear it in the rustle of compost, the click of a shared tool, the low murmur of friends planning a better world together.
This isn’t a utopia. It’s more real than that. It’s happening, quietly, already.
Inspiring! My Dad lives in Sacramento so the whole area feels scary to me (despite living in San Francisco as a young adult). It’s nice to re-map community wealth to the geography in my mind. Thanks