Repository
A curated and searchable collection of community-related research reports, case studies and publications
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…
Community Business Climate Action Programme Scoping Study Literature Review
Published: 2021
This rapid literature review was undertaken by CAG Consultants in late 2021 as part of a scoping study to inform Power to Change’s new Climate Action Programme under development. It takes a wide perspective of available data to provide an overview of development needs/opportunities, funding and support gaps for community businesses …
Empowering Places? Measuring the impact of community businesses at neighbourhood level
Published: 2021
Empowering Places is a programme of place-based investment that aims to demonstrate the role that concentrated clusters of community businesses can play in improving local areas and reducing inequality. To measure the impact of the programme, Power to Change commissioned Kantar in 2020 to conduct six ‘hyperlocal’ extensions of the gove…
The Community Business Market in 2021
Published: 2021
This is the seventh in a series of annual reports published by Power to Change on the state of the community business market. This iteration is the fifth researched and written by CFE Research. It uses survey and interview data to describe a community business market bouncing back financially from the worst of the pandemic, diversifying t…
The Community Business Market in 2021 – Summary
Published: 2021
This report summarises the seventh Power to Change annual report into the structure, size, shape and outlook for the community business market in England. It finds that community business are bouncing back from the impact of the pandemic more financially confident and economically stronger.
Understanding local patterns of volunteer activity during COVID-19
Published: 2021
The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport commissioned The Young Foundation to undertake an initial scoping study to identify some of the ways in which volunteers were mobilised at local levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the research was:
to identify some of the ways in which volunteer groups operated and develo…
Volunteering in community business: a digest of recent research
Published: 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…