Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) provide a new approach for community stakeholders to have more say on strategic direction of the high streets alongside local authorities, businesses and other local stakeholders. Power to Change has piloted this model in six places across England, with a learning process led by The Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, and Shared Assets.
This report was written by Clear Impact Consulting and retrospectively evaluates Community Business Crowdmatch, which ran between 2017 and 2022 in partnership with Crowdfunder UK.
Since 2015, Power to Change has made significant investments in research, evaluation, and data analysis to better understand whether community businesses improve places, and, if so, whether we have supported them to do so.
This report, produced by Spark Insights and Locality, and commissioned by Power to Change, explores the experiences of community businesses and organisations led by or supporting people experiencing marginalisation on the barriers and solutions to accessing funding and support.
A new report by the British Academy and Power to Change explores how social infrastructure contributes to communities’ wellbeing, helps develop their resilience and tackles deepening geographic inequalities.
Community businesses can transform the progressive social intentions of younger generations into meaningful and sustainable community action. This report showcases the many ways young people came to be and are involved in community businesses.
This report reviews the existing evidence on the importance of volunteering to community businesses and derives estimates of the overall economic value of volunteering to community businesses.
This paper explores the funding landscape for community businesses. In doing so, it also explores what is distinctive about Power to Change’s offering, so that it can plan for its eventual exit from the market.
Better business support will have a positive outcome on the community business sector and increase not only
the number of community businesses, but also their success.
This is the fourth in Power to Change’s series of annual reports on the community business market. This year’s report reviews the structure, size and shape of the community business market in England in 2018 and considers the outlook for the year ahead.
Drawing on the views and experiences of more than 40 community businesses and 20 experts, Community Business in 2030 illustrates the transformative effect the sector could have on both local people’s lives and society as a whole.
This working paper was produced as part of an evaluation and learning review of Power to Change’s Community Business Fund, led by Renaisi. This paper takes some of the learning from the evaluation of the Community Business Fund, and other work, and applies it to wider questions about community businesses, the places that they exist in and how those two things interact.
Each year, the Power to Change Research Institute commissions research to estimate the size and shape of the community business sector in England. This year’s report considers the structure, size and shape of the community business market in England in 2017 and considers the outlook for the year ahead. The report follows on from those of 2014, 2015 and 2016, and presents the most accurate portrait to date of the size and shape of the community business market, as a result of innovations in methodology and an increased use of secondary data for triangulation.
A common feature across community businesses in different sectors is for their business model to be heavily reliant on and/or driven by Community Asset Transfers (CATs). A CAT is the transfer of the ownership and/or management of an asset from its public-sector owner (usually a local authority) to a community organisation for less than market value. These transfers are made in order to achieve social, economic or environmental outcomes in the community in which the asset is located.
At the end of 2016, the Bank of England’s Chief Economist warned that regional inequality was ‘among the most important issues that we face today as a country’. Then as now, local economies in different parts of the UK were growing at an uneven rate, and some were simply not growing at all. Can hyper-local, socially-responsible businesses help the economic performance of the place where they are based? As part of this work, this paper specifically asks which factors are associated with growth in the sort of start-up, entrepreneurial businesses which can power a local economy.
The Power to Change Research Institute commissioned Social Finance in July 2016 to provide an updated assessment of the state of the community business market. This follows 'What if we ran it ourselves?' and 'The State of the Community Business Market'
The Power to Change Research Institute commissioned Social Finance in September 2015 to provide an updated assessment of the state of the community business market
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