Community Wealth Building 2020

CLES’s annual summary of community wealth building policy change and practice captures the state of community wealth building in the UK. It presents in detail the activity taking place, particularly as relates to the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, and outlines the conditions that are required for community wealth building to flourish.

The community wealth building movement has ascended to new heights in 2020. Its utility is being harnessed at a national level in Scotland and Wales. In some local authority areas it is now the cornerstone of economic strategy and it is being applied across the country as a key tenant of efforts to reform local economies in the wake of Covid-19. This report delves deeply into some of these success stories before exploring the enabling factors required for the movement to progress:

• purposeful intent to build inclusive local economies;
• the importance of intermediaries and change agents; and,
• the ethos which underpins a whole place approach to community wealth building.