Working with Co-operatives UK, Locality and the Community Shares Unit (CSU), we set up the Community Shares Booster Programme earlier this year to help community businesses explore this option. It will try and help established projects as well as those starting from scratch.
As Power to Change’s Ged Devlin told Pioneers Post this week:
Successful applicants to the programme will get up to £10,000 as a development grant to help launch their share offer, and then up to £100,000 in match-funding once the share offer goes live. In other words, every time someone decides they are up for investing in a local project, we will invest along with them.
The market in community shares is already pretty sizeable (since 2009 nearly 100,000 people have invested over £100m to support 350 UK community businesses, according to the CSU). Now is the time to find out what further demand is out there and what more the market can deliver.
Community businesses can apply to the fund here.
Ged’s full Pioneers Post article is here.