The Preston model: UK takes lessons in recovery from rust-belt Cleveland
As councils struggle with cuts, one Lancashire city adapted a pioneering grassroots approach from America to tackling inequality and keeping profits local.
Community wealth building
Inclusive growth: Making an economy work for a few more?
The report from the RSA inclusive Growth Commission has now been launched – ‘Making our economy work for everyone’. Chaired by Stephanie Flanders, of JP Morgan Asset Management, this work sought to identify practical ways to make local economies across the UK more economically inclusive and prosperous. However, it is arguable that the ideas are limited in terms of wider social justice and economic resilience. Instead of making an economy work for everyone, it’s more likely that it will merely make our economy work for just a few more.
For many years, economic development has been a thin gruel for social inclusion; based overly on economic growth (sometimes at all costs), trickle down and spatial agglomeration. So, it is heartening that the commission seems to have partly picked up on the ideas of CLES and others (you can read our RSA submission here). This includes the understanding (if not a truism) that investment in social institutions and people is as important as investment in economic infrastructure; or, how the spheres of the economic and the social are not separate, but linked. They also highlight the excellent practical work CLES are engaged in: Community Wealth Building and Anchor Institutions.
A blueprint for a new local economic development
The function of local economic development needs to evolve. Understanding and working with the wealth of local anchor institutions is one way forward, says Matthew Jackson
PROJECT REPORT
Community wealth building through anchor institutions
This 2017 report documents 6 years of local wealth building work with anchor institutions in Preston......
Community Wealth Building through Anchor Institutions
Places across the UK are striving to find new ways of attracting wealth, enhancing economic growth and addressing poverty. For the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), the attraction of wealth through inward investment is important; but of more importance is understanding and harnessing existing wealth for the benefit of local economies and communities.
Bournville again: can a new Birmingham hospital recreate the Cadbury effect?
“Cities need to understand and harness the potential of their existing wealth,” says Matthew Jackson, deputy chief-executive of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, who helped create the Preston model and is now running the Birmingham project.
CLES 10
Community Wealth Building: Harnessing the potential of anchor institutions
Our historic and contemporary work around anchor institutions has led to a realisation that in times of economic uncertainty and a...
Building a local civil economy
The word ‘economy’ can be traced back to the Greek word oikonomos, – ‘one who manages a household’. However, the idea that the economy is intimate and social is often lost from modern day economic discussions. Indeed, all too often the social sphere, is seen as an assumed outcome of economic activity, rather than a planned for and locked-in necessity.
This connectedness with the social sphere should be central to any local economic development. What is the point of local economic development if it does not deliver social outcomes or address poverty? In this we need to think about building a local civil economy – an economy which is decent, fair and works for people.
