Cultivating community power

What is community ownership?

Community ownership describes a situation where a group of people come together to collectively own, manage, or control an asset, resource, or decision-making process for the benefit of a place and/or community rather than for private profit. This group of people may come together for a variety of reasons, including geography (they live in the same neighbourhood) or to meet a common need such as securing housing, food, child care, entertainment, energy, or education.

Although co-ops offer a wealth of inspiration around this topic, community ownership approaches come in different flavours. In the UK, community ownership can include Charitable Incorporated Organisations, Co-operative Societies, Community Benefit Societies, Community Interest Companies, and non-constituted groups such as “friends of” groups linked to a green space, or unincorporated associations or mutual aid networks.

What unites community ownership approaches in my eyes are ways of organising that facilitate participation and distributed decision-making to meet real community needs. In these cases, the purpose of an organisation is shaped by the needs of a defined community, and sees shared values beyond financial resilience shape decisions. Financial and other surpluses are then re-invested back into furthering the purpose of an organisation and the communities it serves.

Varieties of community ownership models

Through writers such as Silvia Federici, and by listening to stories from Lush Spring Prize projects and those living outside industrialised societies, I have also come to understand that community ownership approaches can work within and beyond market logic (even if it is difficult to imagine and realise this). 

Some, like co-ops and social enterprises, work to change the market system from within. 

Others are creating living experiments of post capitalist living whilst working within the shell of the current economic system. They seek to resist enclosure by markets and embody an alternative logic of use, care, and participation over profit or market exchange – no easy feat!

I believe all approaches play an important role in eroding corporate power and there are some examples included in this article. 

All redistribute control and decision making away from profit-driven corporations and toward local, collective interests.

In doing so they facilitate culture shifts: away from the idea of passive consumers or workers, and towards being creative, active co-owners, land stewards, decision-makers and citizens who directly challenge the concentration of wealth and influence that arguably defines corporate power. 

Market-based community ownership approaches

These include co-ops, Community Land Trusts, and Community Wealth Building.

• Democratises ownership within markets and redistributes profits and decision making power. This can shift economic and political power, reduce extractive approaches, and social inequalities.
• Wealth concentration in corporations can lead to political influence through lobbying and campaign funding. When communities own more of their local economies, they build grassroots power that can advocate for fairer policies, regulation, and economic justice. 

Beyond-market/hybrid approaches to community ownership

These would include commons, mutual aid networks, and time banks.

• De-commodifies resources and creates non-market social relations. This lends itself towards ecological stewardship approaches – treating energy, land, and biodiversity as commons rather than commodities.
• Redistributes decision-making power and surpluses.
• Challenges systemic ideologies and, in doing so, can shift economic and political power.

Evidencing the benefits

A growing body of evidence and case studies highlight how community ownership approaches can increase
community resilience, as these models lead to longer-term decision making, re-investment into a local community (building community wealth), and more agile decision making during harder times.

This is highlighted through the Plunkett Foundation’s work supporting community business. During the
COVID-19 pandemic, community-owned shops and pubs had a 99% survival rate in 2020–21, compared to high closure rates among private retailers. Its 2024 Report also highlights the continued role rural community-owned businesses play in delivering vital services to areas abandoned by conventional business, and how these ventures have been described as “transformative for people on low incomes, living with disabilities, or those with caring responsibilities”.

Studies also show how local procurement keeps more money circulating in local economies, building community wealth. 

For example, the Centre for Local Economic Strategies evidenced how the Preston model increased local spending by anchor institutions from £38m in 2012 to £111m in 2016, reducing economic leakage from the Lancashire economy to large corporate contractors. This case study highlights the potential impact procurement policies could have if they direct money toward community-owned business.

All the above and more presumably lies behind Labour’s manifesto commitment to double the size of the co-operative and mutual economy. Ethical Consumer challenged the movement to think bigger than this in an article on ethical business structures.

How the government can help

New community ownership models can form and develop regardless of the wider political environment – out of necessity if nothing else. But investing in networks of support that offer encouragement, funding, training, and advice, alongside supportive regulation, can go a long way to enabling this movement to thrive.

Examples of supportive regulation include Assets of Community Value in England which forms part of a Community Right to Bid process, and the Community Right to Buy land in Scotland, which allows registered community bodies to have a pre-emptive right to purchase land, with several options depending on the situation. 

Organisations such as the Plunkett Foundation are also recommending a Community Right to Buy Act in Wales to support community-owned projects. There is an English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill passing through Parliament in 2025 with an improved right to buy element too.

Although government funding such as the community ownership fund and levelling up money is great, the quick turnaround that may be required can make it difficult to deliver meaningful participatory processes.

If the government is serious about supporting cooperative development, it needs to start with making sure new and existing business-support programmes actively support co-operative development, whilst investing in bespoke development support for co-operatives and mutuals that is delivered at the local level. These recommendations are drawn from the recent “Grassroots Growth” report from the Co-operative Party, which also discusses other policy recommendations.