Community wealth building: a history

Over the course of the last decade, community wealth building has advanced, what was once a marginal sport is now a widely-adopted corrective to a failing economic model. To celebrate this flourishing movement, CLES has produced two podcasts, the first of which focuses on the provenance of the approach.

In this, we felt there was an important story to tell. A lot of people have heard about the “Preston model” but few are clear about its history, and how that relates to the movement we see now. Yet this wider historical context contains a series of important lessons.

This transcript is our attempt to document these lessons. In part, for posterity but also to provide a shareable resource to help fellow travellers in the movement deepen their understanding of community wealth building, and to inspire the uninitiated to take their first steps.