Across the UK, work to build community power and local wealth has been growing for many years, from resident-led, long-term place-based programmes to community ownership, local enterprise and neighbourhood-level organising. Today, this ongoing work is meeting new momentum: strengthened community rights, expanding devolution reforms, and major investment programmes that are shifting how power and resources flow into places.
Yet this momentum raises hard questions. Whose communities are genuinely benefiting? What does it take to make place-based change endure? How do we move from isolated projects to something more systemic? And what does all of this demand from funders, in terms of how they invest, how they share power, and how they show up as long-term partners rather than short-term grant-makers?
This strand brings together practitioners, organisers, community leaders and researchers to explore those questions with honesty and rigour. Across six sessions spanning panel discussions, workshops, place visits and an online session, it builds a picture of what community wealth and power really requires: from the relational and the place-based to the structural and the systemic, from the ground up as well as the policy down.
These sessions form a connected learning journey, and we encourage you to attend the full strand if you can. Every session also stands on its own, and you are warmly welcome to join whichever are most relevant to where you and your organisation are right now.
