About The Open Wealth Consortium

The Open Wealth Consortium is a backbone organization supporting an expanding collection of nonprofits across the nation, providing innovative data, research, and interactive tools to better understand and address the growing wealth disparities that chip away at the stability of American communities. The Open Wealth Consortium approaches its work through the lens of an elevated definition of wealth that isn't solely based on the accumulation of assets, but instead as resources that enable a greater sense of stability, sustainability, and prosperity for themselves, their families, and future generations. Wealth, more so than income, provides the resilience needed to weather the ups and downs of life, as well as plan for an uncertain future threatened by everything from climate change to the economic upheaval AI may cause. There has not been a more important moment in modern times than now to understand the destabilizing nature of wealth disparities and collectively work toward a future where all people share in the promise of prosperity offered In America.

Conversations about wealth and the debilitating nature of wealth disparities aren't new, but those conversations are typically limited to national perspectives on wealth and occasional publications focusing on the compelling stories of individual communities. While those contributions have been critically important, all communities, regardless of race or ethnicity, struggle with the effects of wealth inequality — but there are no sources of consistent, disaggregated local data able to describe conditions of hardship and prosperity present on the ground. The Open Wealth Consortium was designed to fill this void, allowing local communities to support their unique stories with good, rigorous data that can undergird decisionmaking and power advocacy. The Open Wealth Consortium publishes wealth data on 373 metro areas across the country to illuminate conditions related to class, race, age, and a host of social economic factors including income, education, business ownership, and homeownership. Through this work, the Open Wealth Consortium is doing its part to realize a nation where all people are prosperous, have the wealth necessary to thrive, and the agency to make decisions to their benefit and that of their families.

The Open Wealth Consortium’s parent organization is Nonprofit Knowledge Works, a 501(c)(3) organization.Click here to access our Form 990 on Guidestar (opens in a new tab).

Mission

The Open Wealth Consortium provides nonpartisan, rigorous localized wealth data, analysis, research, and tools for the benefit of communities across the country to serve as a catalyst for informed policy and decisionmaking and elevated narratives about wealth.

Goals

• Democratize local wealth data by increasing its availability, value, and use to enable sound decisions, actions, legislation and/or public policy, better planning for prosperity and resilience, and well-informed community advocacy
• Create transparent partnerships to form a data savvy network of organizations interested in the development and preservation of local wealth data
• Be a prominent and reliable source for local wealth data and research, advancing national understanding and adoption of an elevated definition of wealth based on collective thriving and personal agency

Values

1. 1)We believe in democratizing dataLocal data in the hands of local people is critical to solving local problems.
2. 2)We believe in collective prosperity in a multi-racial democracyFor cities and towns to flourish we must seek prosperity for all people in the region.
3. 3)The Open Wealth Consortium is grounded in an elevated concept of wealth based not on affluence and influence, but on having the wealth necessary to thrive and the personal agency to make good decisions to their benefit and that of their families.Wealth is the accumulation of all of our success and failures, advantages and disadvantages in our pasts, our opportunities in the present, and hopes for the future, and, as such, can provide a pathway for structural change at scale.
4. 4)We have a basic belief in the power of collaboration and empowering local communities.If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
5. 5)We embrace both pragmatic and innovative thinkingWhen common solutions fail, we must be comfortable dreaming bigger. We could use available data and problem solving to chip away at problems, but instead we seek novel solutions that attack root causes, not just band-aid symptoms.

In June of 2024 The Data Center published the first disaggregated estimates of wealth at the local level. These statistical estimates, based on gender, race, age, income, educational attainment, home ownership and value, employment classification, family structure, disability status, citizenship, English proficiency, public assistance, social security, and poverty status, produced a deep look at wealth inequality for the New Orleans metro area. By September of 2025 and in partnership with Milwaukee data intermediary Data You Can Use, The Data Center had expanded wealth data availability to 373 metro areas across the country and published its methodology for modeling local wealth data and its code, effectively democratizing both the data and production of the data.

Between the first publication of wealth data in New Orleans and the national expansion of that data a year later, the Open Wealth Consortium took shape. Its work consists of the following activities:

• Advancing techniques to create, maintain, and evolve disaggregated wealth data and analytical products
• Enhancing national understanding and awareness of wealth as a driver of personal agency and good quality of life for all and as a tool for generational wellbeing
• Exploring wealth practices that concentrate and facilitate inequality
• Developing tools to build interventions and test policies that would decrease wealth inequality
• Partnering with communities to deliver localized analysis of wealth data to facilitate local action and good, data informed decisionmaking
• Providing methodologies and data to support academic research advancing both our understanding of the effects of wealth inequality and its potential to unify unlikely allies to solve class, racial, and gender wealth disparities and related social maladies
• Ongoing development of an affiliate network working together on an open source code base to decentralize, strengthen, and expand the production of local wealth data