This resource is for economic development professionals working in deprived places, whether as practitioners or commissioners of social purpose business support. It captures the learning from 6 distinct UK towns – Bradford, Wigan, Leicester, Grimsby, Hartlepool and Plymouth, over the 5 years of the Empowering Places programme.
Empowering Places was funded by Power to Change and managed by Co-operatives UK, with support from NEF and CLES to help start and grow community businesses. The Innovation in Business research, by Participate Projects, looked at how relational, place-based business support and grass-roots networks benefitted the overall effectiveness of local support to SME’s.
Our 6 catalyst organisations, along with their partners and Local Authorities, helped shape the research and enabled rich learning about what works at the place level. We have developed an Empowering Places logic model for place-based social purpose business support, which may help you design and implement more effective support locally.
We are now sharing this learning, along with the methods used, to allow you to understand what works in areas similar to yours, and how to access resources that can help you. We have created this interactive website for you to explore our learning, through stories collected through our work and resources you may use under Creative Commons.
The website includes an interactive logic model, which you can use to assess the current and future health of the business support ecosystem in your area, in relation to the Empowering Places model. You are also invited to join our peer-support network, which will support each other to learn from and further develop and scale the model across the UK.
Our principles:
- Creating the conditions for sustainable, inclusive and relational business support to the social economy
- Ensuring that those working at the place level are valued, resourced and supported to provide – trusted local intelligence; access to the most marginalised groups; support appropriate to the ambitions and challenges of those living in their communities
- Encouraging, inspiring and helping to maintain local support ecosystems which place the needs of local people at their heart – through relational methods such as coaching, business owner peer support and practical help
- Nurturing the growth of local referral networks, practitioner and commissioner peer-support – ensuring equitable access to resources, education on social business types and their unique support needs
- Identifying and achieving tangible improvements to outcomes for local people and communities, which build a solid evidence base for funders to continue to support the work longer term
- Maintaining and contributing to a healthy, balanced local business support ecosystem that serves the social economy
Our Goals
1. To collectively nurture healthy support ecosystems for the social economy, leading to greater impacts for social purpose businesses
2. To connect like-minded economic development professionals and practitioners, who recognise, and champion, the value of relational support
3. To help and inspire people to organise around our principles, make best use of the resources available, and further their business case in providing support
Our Manifesto
We are in the process of creating our manifesto, please join our Community of Practice (here) to help us shape, promote and embed it
Our Principles
Our principles can be found on this page, and are taken directly from the logic model (here). You can read more about the thinking which underpins the logic model in the research section (here).
Sign-up here for information about joining our Community of Practice network for practitioners and commissioners of place-based support to social purpose businesses.