Waseem Meghjee

People shaping places, places shaping people: Community asset ownership

Repository entry 1 June 2022

More than 6,300 assets are in community ownership in England today. This model plays an essential role in ensuring places are built on resilient entities and benefit those living locally. As well as improving service delivery and financial sustainability, community asset ownership has been found to reduce vacancy rates, enable ‘bottom-up’ r…

Helping community businesses be more resilient – Lessons learnt from the Trade Up programme

Repository entry 1 April 2022

One of Power to Change’s three strategic priorities for 2021-2025 is ‘more resilient community businesses’. This paper explores whether the Trade Up programme – designed to support the growth of community businesses and being delivered between May 2017 to March 2022 – made community businesses more resilient. Findings show that while diff…

How can funders support established community businesses? Lessons learnt from the Community Business Fund programme

Repository entry 1 April 2022

Power to Change funded the Community Business Fund (CBF) programme between 2016 and 2021 to support existing community businesses to progress towards greater self-sufficiency by increasing their trading income, securing an asset and / or significantly reducing revenue costs. This short evaluation report outlines the impact that the programme ha…

How can funders support early-stage community businesses? Lessons learnt from the Bright Ideas programme

Repository entry 1 March 2022

Power to Change funded the Bright Ideas programme between 2016 and 2021 to support community groups to develop, test and launch their community business ideas. This short evaluation report outlines the impact that the programme had on community groups and early-stage community businesses, and recommends ways in which funders can support them go…

Empowering Places: The impact of the programme on community businesses

Repository entry 1 February 2022

Empowering Places aims to build more resilient and prosperous communities by building the capacity of local organisations to ‘catalyse’ and support the growth of new community businesses. It funds locally rooted ‘catalyst’ organisations in six areas of high deprivation. The evaluation aims to take a realistic approach to understand…

Thematic Paper: Sector & Community Businesses

Repository entry 1 February 2022

This working paper explores how the concept of sector can be useful for funders to understand and support community businesses. It also presents recommendations for using sector typologies going forward.

While sector trends in the community business market are not always clear to identify, this research shows that sector typologies can nonethe…

Thematic Paper: Assets & Community Businesses

Repository entry 1 January 2022

Community assets – buildings or land which are used for the social interest or wellbeing of the wider community – can be essential to a community business’ service delivery and financial sustainability, and can contribute to greater community empowerment and pride. Power to Change supported communit…

Volunteering in community business: a digest of recent research

Repository entry 1 December 2021

Volunteers are critical to how community businesses help to make places better. They help root community businesses in their local communities, and their time is central to community businesses’ financial viability. In fact, some community businesses would not exist at all were it not for volunteers.

This digest summarises three re…

Empowering Places – Change Framework

Repository entry 1 November 2021

This is a working ‘change framework’ for the Empowering Places programme – a five-year programme designed to empower communities to build community businesses. The framework sets out the desired vision and outcomes of the programme, as well as pointing to the elements of the programme that enable progress towards the vision and outcomes. …

Valuing the contribution of volunteers to community businesses supported by the Community Business Fund

Repository entry 1 September 2021

This research seeks to understand the value of volunteers to community businesses supported by the Power to Change Community Business Fund (CBF). To do this, the report looks at:

the types of roles that volunteers fulfil;
why community businesses decide to engage with volunteers and why some roles are fulfilled by volunteers;
the type…

Catalyst Profile: Abram Ward Community Cooperative, Wigan

Repository entry 1 August 2021

# Preview | Download ptc_area_profile_wigan_v3.pdf457kB Author(s) Lily O’Flynn Naomi Jones Waseem Meghjee Citation O’Flynn, L., Jones, N. and Meghjee, W. (2021) Catalyst Profile: Abram Ward Community Cooperative, Wigan. Case Study. Power to Change. Details Report type: Case Study Publisher: Power

Enablers and barriers to delivering place-based change through the Empowering Places programme