Repository
A curated and searchable collection of community-related research reports, case studies and publications
How can funders support established community businesses? Lessons learnt from the Community Business Fund programme
Published: 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
Published: 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…
Better understanding the financial impact of funding programmes through the ‘Year Zero’ approach
Published: 2022
Through funding programmes such as Trade Up and the Community Business Fund, Power to Change supports community businesses to trade for the benefit of their local community; yet how can we understand the financial impact that Power to Change has had on community businesses? The answer is not straightforward, and programme impact can be difficul…
Empowering Places: The impact of the programme on community businesses
Published: 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…
Good Evidence: A guide to help community organisations produce research that gets taken seriously
Published: 2022
This guide is for community organisations undertaking their own research or doing research in partnership with other institutions. It has been informed by consultation with members of the Greater Manchester Third Sector Research Network.
Part I comprises three short sections on Trustworthiness, followed by Ethics and Bias, which are c…
Models of Value that Community Organising Generates for its Adopters
Published: 2022
Over recent years, the principles and practice of community organising have proliferated across a range of organisations and sectors. Keen to understand the impact of community organising and its potential as a tool for communities to tackle local issues, Power to Change commissioned a piece of research in 2020 looking in-depth at the experienc…
Thematic Paper: Sector & Community Businesses
Published: 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…
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…