Delivering Zero-Carbon Schools: A practical and innovative business model for the community energy sector


Published: 2022

Schools are at the heart of our local communities; they represent a quarter of public sector carbon emissions, so fully decarbonising their energy will be essential. While two-thirds of local authorities have declared a Climate Emergency, many do not have plans in place to tackle schools’ emissions. This report presents a new business mo…

Evaluation of the Next Generation programme for Community Energy – innovation Year 2


Published: 2022

Power to Change’s Next Generation programme aims to support the development of innovative business models for community energy businesses.  This evaluation report from CAG consultants summarises findings from Year 2 of CAG Consultant’s evaluation of the innovation programme.  Support and funding from the Next Generation programme …

Nourishing Community Businesses: Beyond Market Development


Published: 2022

This report, written by CRESR at Sheffield Hallam for Power to Change, builds on the themes of an earlier insight report, Food for Thought: Understanding Market Development (Dobson, Macmillan and Wells, 2020), which was prepared in late 2019 and published in February 2020. Since then there have been major changes within Power to Change, the com…

Rapid research COVID-19 Briefing #16: Community responses to COVID-19 – Connecting communities? How relationships have mattered in community responses to COVID-19


Published: 2022

This briefing, the 16th in a series seeking to understand how communities across England respond to COVID-19 and how they recover, explores the importance of ‘relational working’. It argues that approaches which rely on relationships to work, but also pay attention to the importance of relationships to the people that community groups …

The Power of Community: Learning from Bristol’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic


Published: 2022

During 2021, Voscur worked with academics and students from the University of Bristol to investigate how the sector had adapted to ensure delivery of vital services during Covid-19.

With many in our sector unable to deliver vital services by established means, we wanted to find out how our colleagues from across the sector had continued to ful…

Thematic Paper: Assets & Community Businesses


Published: 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…

Understanding the lived experience of ethnic minority students in postgraduate research


Published: 2022

This report presents the findings from the first qualitative research on the experiences of ethnic minority postgraduate research students accessing and studying at GuildHE member institutions. It captures, through interviews, students’ perceptions and experiences of studying a postgraduate research degree at smaller and specialist higher edu…

Community Power and Health Equity: Closing the Gap between Scholarship and Practice


Published: 2022

This discussion paper draws on learnings from Lead Local: Community-Driven Change and the Power of Collective Action, a collaborative effort funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It shows how the power-building ecosystem works in practice, showcasing examples of state and local power-building organisations and campaigns nationwide and r…

Reaching Further: Lessons for Funder Practice


Published: 2022

This report sets out eight lessons in funder practice from the work of Lloyds Bank Foundation for England and Wales from 2018 to 2022. During the five years of their strategy Reaching Further, the collision of unprecedented social, health and economic crises brought both the strength and fragility of civil society into sharp focus – funders and…

Deductions: Drivers of Poverty


Published: 2022

Deductions are impoverishing individuals and families against a backdrop of low incomes, rising living costs and widening inequalities during Covid.

Deductions are payments that DWP automatically takes out from benefit payments to pay off debts owed to government from loans such as advance payments, or errors and historic benefit overpayments …

Lloyds Bank Foundation: 360 Giving Data


Published: 2022

This spreadsheet contains details of all grants awarded by the Lloyds Bank Foundation from 2010 until June 2020, formatted to the 360Giving data standard. The Foundation will continue to publish new grants via 360Giving biannually.

This spreadsheet contains details of all grants awarded by the Foundation from 2010 until June 2020, formatted to…

Charities responding to COVID: Summer 2021 Update


Published: 2021

This report builds two previous reports- published by Lloyds Bank Foundation in May and December 2020 respectively and how small charities have fared since the first national lockdown in March 2020. This provides a snapshot of the experiences of small charities throughout the crisis.

In it, Lloyds Bank Foundation share their findings of how ch…

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