Wealth in Our Hands – Community Wealth Building in Wakefield

This year, Just Transition Wakefield has had a focus on community wealth building as a key long term project.  This resulted in a really successful conference and the creation of a Community Wealth Building Network for the district with over 60 members.

So exactly what is community wealth building?  

Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) is the main UK think tank for community wealth building. It defines community wealth building as “a new people centred approach to local economic development, which redirects wealth back into the local economy, and places control and benefits into the hands of local people”.

The concept is built on five pillars:

• Many owners of economic power and assets, rather than concentrated in few hands
• Making financial power work for local communities
• Fair employment and just labour markets
• Progressive procurement by public bodies of goods and services
• Socially productive use of land and property

In principle, this can be applied through a combination of top-down and bottom-up strategies.  

Top-down strategies start with anchor institutions (big public sector institutions) using their economic power to procure increasing proportions of more goods and services locally, including from small businesses and local co-operatives.  This is  enhanced by actively supporting community owned start-ups to fill gaps in the local economy, and by supporting small local businesses to collectively/jointly bid for public sector contracts.

Bottom-up strategies start with providing business advice and support for new start-ups in communities to deliver services that are not currently available.  These might range from care services to home retrofit, from community agriculture to community transport, depending on local need and interest.

Does it work?  

Preston City Council reports that their established community wealth building policies, known as the Preston Model, have led to millions of additional pounds being spent in the borough and the wider county.  Public body local spending in the borough grew from 5% in 2012/13 to 18.2% in 2016/17.  Across Lancashire, it has risen from 39% in 2012/13 to 79.2% in 2016/17.  Community wealth building is not a total answer because there will always be goods and services that are too specialised to provide locally, but this shows that it can have a significant positive impact on the local economy.

What triggered our focus on community wealth building this year?

Several of our group had been interested in the concept for some years, believing that it could be a way to kickstart the low carbon transition in communities, contribute to a just transition and improve community resilience.  This was after years of austerity, with shrinking funding for local authorities and for the green transition.  We have a collective belief that we can no longer wait for unicorns: we need a new approach.  As one member of our organising committee says “The cavalry aren’t coming”

Just Transition Wakefield worked with Unite Community on a number of campaigns, like “Better Buses”, so we had an existing relationship. Also, our local Unite Community branch had written a pamphlet on community wealth building, and organised a launch event in Leeds in 2023.  Wakefield Council published their new Economic Well Being Strategy at the start of this year and in it, we identified opportunities for new, community-based approaches to sustainable regeneration in our district.  

The alignment of all of these factors pushed us to actively pursue community wealth building through a conference to bring actors in community, public and private sectors together into one room, and to kickstart a conversation.

The Conference

We approached council leaders and the regeneration team, then Nova the 3^rd sector umbrella organisation.  All offered practical or financial support for the event.  We received further support from Climate Action Leeds and our local Trades Council.  In fact, everyone we spoke to about the conference volunteered support and enthusiasm.  We felt the stars were aligned, that the time was right, and this was reflected in the rate of conference registrations.

Council leaders brokered an introduction to Matthew Brown, co-creator of the Preston Model, who joined us to deliver the keynote session.  Matthew works for the Democracy Collaborative and appeared in this capacity rather than as leader of Preston City Council.

Our collective network brought us two case studies: from the Carbon Co-op and Spectrum Community Health CIC.  We also created a local panel with an anchor institution, a trade union and community organisations.  The conference was built on the strength of the local network.

We had two purposes and some hoped for outcomes.  The purposes were to get everyone up to a shared basic understanding and then to begin to consider local applications and opportunities.  Our hoped for outcomes included the initiation of a network to collectively develop ideas and projects.

The day was buzzing, with plenty of questions and discussions.  Feedback from the evaluations were extremely positive, with comments like “Inspiring!”, “Lots of passion and expertise locally” and under next steps “…use any political networks we have, to keep community wealth building prominent in people’s thinking”.  

Where next for us?

We now have a network with over 60 people on a mailing list and plans for this group to continue to meet and develop ideas and infrastructure for grassroots projects.  

The council has promised to continue work with other Anchor Institutions.

We have recordings of the formal sessions to run further information and education events online.  These are embedded in the community wealth building page on our website.

We have key organisations involved, but also others target to draw into the network where we know we have gaps.

How did we plan for success?

We have spent the last five years building a network of organisations and individuals; through conversations, events and council/community partnerships, but also using connections that our members have collected through their own work and volunteering.  Without this broad network we would never have had the confidence or the connections to approach key people to pitch the idea and invite participation.

We worked really hard to find quality contributors to sell the ideas, but also to give real world examples and local context.  We really felt the need to pre-empt the risk of “it won’t work here” responses.

We knew what we wanted as outcomes, and we pitched some of the outcomes to key players beforehand, so that we had “leaders” in the room to help facilitate discussion – although as it happened, the enthusiasm in the room made this unnecessary!

We prepared further reading resources on a linktr.ee that we can continue to add to, and added a Community Wealth Building page to our website.  

We made sure that we had network sign-up sheets and a WhatsApp group ready to join in the room.

What have we learned?

Organising a conference is really hard work over an extended period of time!  We had a strong team.

Despite apparent attention to detail above, with hindsight we left too much to chance through inexperience: none of us are professional event organisers…  We got away with things because of the enthusiasm and engagement created by our speakers.

Planning for success and pre-planned follow-up is vital, especially as we were all exhausted after the conference!

Find out more: Just Transition Wakefield