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The signs are everywhere:
These are more than isolated victories. They are signs of a larger shift: communities are challenging concentrated corporate control and asserting their power to shape the essential systems they depend on. We now have an opportunity to turn this momentum into lasting, structural change.
From algorithmic pricing to government surveillance to AI data centers, there’s a growing sentiment that modern technology is too often working against us rather than for us — extracting wealth, concentrating power, and making life more expensive. Our work advancing distributed energy ownership and community broadband provides a model for democratizing technologies to serve communities rather than distant shareholders. With two Amazon monopoly trials looming in the new year, and policymakers increasingly recognizing the need to move beyond incremental policy change toward structural reform, we have a moment to put local self-reliance at the center of the debate over how to restructure our economy and society so that everyone shares the benefits of human progress.
Your support is essential at this inflection point for the path our country takes. We’ve endured nearly 50 years of a failed ideology favoring bigness and absentee capital, and as we face the realities this has wrought, we have a rare chance to turn the page and establish a new framework that centers diversity, resilience, and community.
ILSR depends on individual donors for the flexible funding to meet this moment. We thank you for your contributions — for engaging deeply with our work, sharing it with others, and giving us the financial resources to continue shaping a future that puts people and community first.
In gratitude and solidarity,
Stacy Mitchell & John Farrell
ILSR Co-Executive Directors
Building Local Power host Danny Caine“This is a fight for agency in the face of out-of-control corporate power.”
Big Tech’s speculative race for AI dominance is imposing enormous costs on communities, from strained water supplies and heavy air pollution to rising electric bills and a loss of local control — costs that are too often framed as inevitable. Backed by decades of work on monopoly power, environmental justice, digital equity, and local autonomy, we set out to challenge that narrative.
In “The Data Centers Are Coming,” a special six-part podcast series touching each of ILSR’s core initiatives, we approached the data center boom and its backlash as part of something much bigger: a fundamental struggle over whether technology will serve communities or the other way around.
Listen to the series
In a moment when climate and digital equity commitments are as important as ever, local communities are rising to the challenge by establishing clean, affordable, and accountable systems that keep authority and economic benefits rooted in the places they serve.
All across the country, communities are building momentum by learning from proven successes and recognizing their collective power to shape their own futures. ILSR has helped transform this determination into sustainable local capacity by providing practical tools, hands-on training, peer support, and replicable models for community ownership.
ILSR’s Energy Democracy Initiative left its mark at the Minnesota Solar Energy Industries Association (MnSEIA) conference in October, 2025.
A new Maryland law establishes a $250,000 annual grant program for on-farm organics recycling and compost use, wasted food prevention, and food rescue.
Interactive resources and examples of how to use local government to promote local clean energy and hold monopoly utilities accountable.
A one-stop resource for public power advocates preparing campaigns to take over their electric utility.
The story of 19 small Western Massachusetts towns that worked together over a decade and a half to build an alternative to the monopoly marketplace.
Kelly Doordan, executive director of Trash Free Maryland on ILSR's Brenda Platt receiving the US Composting Council’s Jerome Goldstein Lifetime Achievement Award“Brenda has been a resource and an inspiration in my work for over twenty years! Initially, I knew her work through ILSR’s publications. More recently, I’ve had the opportunity to dive shovel first into compost piles with Brenda at hands-on workshops in DC and Montgomery and Prince George’s County. Her impact on policies and the resulting effects on the ground are incalculable. I’m grateful for her deep passion and commitment to just and ecologically sound environmental solutions, and I’m delighted that Brenda has received this well-deserved honor.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Co-Chair of the Monopoly Busters Caucus“ILSR’s new map paints a stark picture, revealing corporate monopolies have taken over our food system. As people struggle under the weight of an affordability crisis, corporate profits are higher than ever. When we take on corporate power, we can make a meaningful difference in the everyday lives of working people across the country — and we must, the American people are counting on us.”
To demonstrate how corporate concentration has reshaped food access in the U.S., ILSR's interactive map shows food deserts alongside the location of grocery stores.
Broadband surge is the result of Tribal Nations’ mission to establish "network sovereignty," says census researcher Jessica Auer.
ILSR collaborated with the EPA to include 483 community composting sites on their Excess Food Opportunities Map (EFOM).
In 2025, we saw seven new municipal broadband networks across the country that were lit up for service.
As rising prices strain household budgets, the link between the cost-of-living crisis and the unchecked power of dominant corporations has become increasingly visible.
As ILSR’s Ron Knox wrote in The Nation, “The growing collective outcry against corporate control suggests there’s something far larger going on: Americans, fed up with decades of declining fortunes, have found a common and culpable enemy in the powerful companies that control so much of our lives and politics.” Through new research, legal action, public education, and legislative advocacy, we have helped turn that growing outcry into concrete challenges to monopoly power.
TikTok comment responding to ILSR post“I was wondering why soda was expensive everywhere but Walmart and I had a feeling but couldn’t point to it.”
ILSR’s work has long involved helping people see how concentrated corporate power shapes their lives — and how they can build meaningful, locally rooted alternatives. This year, we developed a powerful new avenue for translating decades of research and policy analysis into compelling stories: short-form video. By connecting everyday experiences like grocery shopping and electric bills to the systems shaping them, our content generated more than 3.5 million impressions and prompted thousands of comments across social media platforms.
A More Perfect Union documentary explains a Pepsi/Walmart price discrimination scheme — exposed by an FTC lawsuit unsealed by ILSR.
ILSR's short video explains how excessive profits for utility shareholders, also known as return on equity, drive up electric bills.
Online price swings may look like fierce competition. In reality, they’re part of an invisible strategy Amazon uses to maintain its dominance of e-commerce and...
The Mamdani administration has a crucial opportunity to reverse New York City's affordability crisis; this ILSR policy memo suggests strategies to do so.
Changing the world often starts with changing the nature of the conversation. ILSR continues to successfully change the narrative from bigger is better to distributed, local power in the hands of the people is paramount.
Our work and our experts are frequently cited in the country’s largest and most respected publications, and we publish think pieces regularly with these same outlets. We also engage with reporters and content creators who reach target audiences most energized to build a more just economic system and more sustainable communities.
Nikki Forrester, director of communications for Tucker United, the community group formed in opposition to a W. Va data center project“I just had a chance to listen to the final episode of Building Local Power. It is excellent! Thanks again for the opportunity to be part of this important national story.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) uses ILSR report "Turning Public Money into Amazon’s Profits" to go after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
First reporting on ILSR's revelations that school districts and local governments are overpaying for basic supplies because of Amazon contracts binding them to dynamic pricing.
John Farrell argues that state and local governments can expand access and slash electric bills by simplifying slow, expensive permitting processes.
Ron Knox explores how state officials are continuing efforts to bring more access, opportunity, and affordability to their residents through expanded antitrust law and enforcement.
The need to decentralize economic power and reinvigorate democracy is stronger than ever. Join us today. With your support, ILSR can continue working to build an American economy driven by local priorities and accountable to people and the planet.
Cory Doctorow, author, activist, journalist, and blogger“Thank you for the work at ILSR. It’s such an inspiration. It’s so important. I cite ILSR work all the time. You guys are doing really important work, and Stacy is such a force of nature. I’m just so impressed by your organization.”