At the London Funders Festival of Learning, I led a session on community wealth building and what it genuinely requires from the funders who resource it. The room was mixed: people who knew the framework well, others newer to it, all engaged with racial justice in some form. What I wanted to do was resist the usual move, spending the time making the case that inequality exists and community wealth building is a good idea. That case has been made. The harder question is what stands between conviction and action.
I opened with this: community wealth building is gaining momentum in the UK. The question is who actually captures the gains.
Most philanthropy responds to poverty after it has been produced. Community wealth building works upstream, shaping who owns, controls, and benefits before wealth concentrates elsewhere.
That shift, from redistribution to predistribution, is the conceptual foundation of Power to Prosper’s work. Predistribution asks different questions: who owns the land? Who controls the capital? Who governs the institutions that shape economic life in a community? If those questions are not answered differently, every intervention that follows is building on sand.
The UK has developed a strong community wealth building tradition, much of it inspired by the Preston Model. That work has produced real gains. But something was lost in translation. The original Evergreen Cooperative model in Cleveland, Ohio, from which much of this derives, was built explicitly in a majority-Black neighbourhood in direct response to racially structured economic exclusion. Race was not incidental to that model. It was the reason the model existed. The UK adopted the mechanisms and left the mandate behind.
Evidence published in 2025 found that Preston’s programme increased employment by 4%, with greater effects among minority ethnic groups. Those gains were incidental, not designed. Incidental gains cannot be scaled, cannot be sustained across political cycles, and do not address ownership or wealth accumulation. The difference between an incidental benefit and a designed outcome is the difference between luck and justice.
Power to Prosper exists to recentre what the original framework was built to do. We work across five interdependent pillars: organising and community power, inclusive land and property ownership, finance and capital, enterprise and workforce development, and spending and procurement. The sequence is deliberate.
Organising comes first because power precedes access. Without organised community power, access to assets, finance, and procurement is given on terms set by others.
Greater Manchester’s hub acquired an asset off the open market. Nottingham’s hub levered several million pounds for its next phase of work. These are what happens when organised infrastructure has had time to take root. Building that across nineteen hubs nationally by 2031 is the Phase 2 ambition. What comes next depends on whether funders are willing to stay for the decade, not just the cycle.
The session was designed to create productive discomfort rather than agreement. What I wanted to surface was specific: the gap between what people in the room believe and what their institutions are actually doing differently.
Some of what is required is genuinely structurally difficult, governance constraints, investment committee processes, risk appetites shaped by peer norms. But some of what sits between values and action is a decision that has not yet been made. Courage is knowing the difference.
What thriving looks like is specific. Families in secure homes on land held in perpetuity. Black and Brown-led co-operatives viable because capital is accessible and procurement is fair. Children who inherit assets, not debt. The wealth gap narrowing not because wealth is being redistributed case by case, but because it is being built structurally into the system from the outset.
That is what predistribution means in practice, and it is where the economic argument becomes as important as the moral one.
Every pound spent addressing a crisis that organised community ownership would have prevented is a pound spent twice. Philanthropy that shifts who owns and controls before harm occurs is not only more just. It is more efficient. The question for any funder serious about impact is not whether they can afford to resource community wealth building at the right scale and timescale. It is whether they can afford not to.