About Empowering Places

Empowering Places is a programme which demonstrates the role that concentrated clusters of community businesses can play in creating better places and reducing inequality in local areas. Funded by Power to Change, the programme is delivered by Co-operatives UK in partnership with CLES and NEF.

Changing lives for the better

Community businesses – owned and run by local communities themselves – have been bubbling up in neighbourhoods across the country over the last decade. People are coming together to save local pubs, to revitalise local assets and spaces, to give people back control over their housing or their work. Community spirit and action is building. It is impacting on people's lives and keeping wealth local.

Empowering Places is taking that community participation and impact to the next level. An £8 million programme, it is focused on six local areas and established community organisations in each. These are provided with a mix of grants, support and practical tools they need to be catalysts for new networks of community businesses in their areas.

The theory is great, but the impact of this programme is best told by the people themselves...

Empowering Places - a case study

B-inspired is a charity and trading company in Leicester that invests money back into the community to counter the entrenched socio economic issues that local people face.

Making the case for Empowering Places

There are six participating ‘catalyst’ areas and organisations selected by Power to Change:

Bradford (Manningham) with Made in Manningham
Grimsby (Southward, Nunsthorpe and Bradley Park) with Centre 4
Hartlepool (Dyke House) with Wharton Trust
Leicester (Braunstone) with B-Inspired
Wigan (Abram) with Abram Ward Community Co-operative
Plymouth (Devonport and Stonehouse) with the Real Ideas Organisation (RIO), and Plymouth Social Enterprise Network and Millfields Trust as delivery partners

We know it takes a long time to create lasting change. So we’ve made a long-term commitment to a commercially driven regeneration approach in these places.

– Ed Whitelaw. Head of Enterprise and Regeneration, Real Ideas Organisation (Empowering Places catalyst organisation)

Creating a 'square mile of opportunity'

“We want to buy a home on every street, and in every one of those homes have a Community Organiser who works with neighbours to commit to social action that makes their street the best it can be.”

Read about catalyst organisation Wharton Trust

Empowering Places Interim Report

Content by Empowering Places

Empowering Places aims to build more resilient communities by supporting community businesses to provide benefits and opportunities for local people.

3 years 5 months

Empowering Bradford women to work together

Content by Empowering Places

Manningham in Bradford is in the bottom 10% of deprived UK neighbourhoods. It has a significantly younger population too, with 31% of people aged below 18 – and with it comes a high rate of youth…

4 years 2 months

Meaningful change for Plymouth communities

Content by Empowering Places

Plymouth is a social enterprise city. It has more than 200 social and community business that employ some 8,000 people...

4 years 3 months

VIDEO: Community economic development

Community Economic Development (CED) gives people the opportunity to meaningfully shape the economy where they live. It enables those living, working and doing business in an area to work together to…

4 years 5 months

Local wealth is made in Wigan

Content by Empowering Places

Some 15,000 people live in Wigan’s Abram Ward. “It used to be called ‘Giro City’,” says David Baxter, Principal Officer of Made in Wigan – which is tackling social inequality in the area.

4 years 3 months