Afternoon sessions

1pm

Room: Main room and breakout rooms (see below)

This event is now sold out – click here to be added to the waiting list →

Building community wealth and power: a new vision for local economies

To set the scene for our afternoon sessions, CLES’s Director of Policy and Practice, Tom Lloyd Goodwin, will talk through the findings of his forthcoming paper, which makes the case that we need a new commitment to building wealth and power in our communities.

Councils and other anchors are agents of change who can affect positive outcomes across a range of economic development functions by deploying robust community wealth building approaches. Nevertheless, weighing up your options when it comes to generating new investment, jobs and opportunities remains extremely challenging for local government. In the research for the paper – due out in late November – we spoke with local authorities and their partners across the country to determine the state of local economic development in 2023, the challenges being faced, the opportunities arising and the best practice happening on the ground.

Breakouts

Our analysis of these discussions found four thematic areas for the ways in which anchor institutions are attempting to build community wealth and power at the local level, which will set the themes for our breakout sessions:

Take back control (of regeneration). Explore this breakout →
Grow your own. Explore this breakout →
Make investment work harder. Explore this breakout →
Measure the change. Explore this breakout →

Tom Lloyd Goodwin is CLES’s Director of Policy and Practice. He has been leading the development of these functions since joining the organisation in 2018 and is responsible for overseeing the output of all policy and practice related work and communications. With a background in political economy and political theory, as well as health services research, Tom is an experienced public policy professional. Since completing his PhD in 2009, Tom has worked with numerous organisations across academia, local government, the NHS and the voluntary and community sector, delivering an array of research and local economic development projects. He is an honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester. Tom is a regular contributor to the New Statesman, the Municipal Journal, Local Government Chronicle, the Health Services Journal and The Guardian.