About us

At Power to Change, our mission is to strengthen community businesses to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges at a local level, including the three biggest challenges of our time: climate change, digital transformation and social inequalities. 

In the next five years, using strategic funding, trusted partnerships, rigorous research, policy insight, and a strong network of remarkable community businesses who are changing the world one day at a time, Power to Change will be a catalyst for the whole sector, creating the ideas, evidence, and exemplars that can make a case for others to back community business. Ultimately, we will amplify the efforts of community businesses and put them at the heart of a fair recovery. 

We apply five values to everything we do:

We are open: We will seek partners and allies beyond the community business sector to better help the community business model go mainstream, and will be open about our learnings as we test and discover new approaches to community-led resilient places.

We are bold: Our plans are ambitious, and we will continue to enter markets where we see community businesses could thrive, and boldly speak to decision makers alongside community businesses.

We are informed: We will continue to work closely with community businesses and be informed by their lived experience and needs. We will approach new challenges with fresh eyes and take an evidence-led approach before rolling out solutions.

We are collaborative: We will continue to work with existing partners and new ones, drawing on each other’s skills to achieve what we couldn’t do alone.

We are authentic: We will integrate the priorities that we have for community businesses into our own practice. We will aim to advance dignity, justice and belonging in our own organisation, become climate positive, actively embrace digital transformation, and continuously build our own capacities in many areas.

Power to Change was set up in 2015 with a £150m endowment from The National Lottery Community Fund (NLCF) and was due to close in 2022. Responding to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, we realised that community businesses needed us more than ever. We received a further £20m from NLCF which enabled us to set out a new five-year strategy to continue supporting the sector.