Building community wealth in neighbourhoods

The principles of community wealth building and the Big Local model are closely linked in many ways; drawing on community empowerment and progressive economics to inform practice. These similarities have come into greater focus as the Big Local programme has unfolded and an increasing number of Big Local partnerships have undertaken activity which aims to build local ownership and control wealth.

However, the relationship between community economic development and community wealth building has previously been under-explored. CLES undertook this research to analyse the activities of Big Local partnerships and use these findings to address this gap.

This report presents the findings of this study, surveying the scale of activity across the 150 Big Local areas and analysing the case studies of six partnerships. Drawing on this data, the report identifies the implications for advancing community wealth building at a neighbourhood level and proposes a model for taking this forward in practice.