Overview

Our report “Community powered neighbourhoods: How community anchor organisations can transform our places” tracks over 100 years of community power to explain why community anchor organisations’ time has come. 

We examine how, in a time of increasing social division and a loss of trust in politics, we must we get power back to communities through the local organisations that know them best. 

Through real-world examples in Birmingham, Sunderland, Wigan, and Leeds, we explore how community anchors are already having a huge impact on the things the government cares about most: regenerating economies, providing preventive services, and creating trusting, cohesive communities. 

And we explain how the range of neighbourhood-focussed government policy programmes – from the Pride in Place Strategy, to the Neighbourhood Health Service, to Get Britain Working – could achieve maximum impact if they put the community anchor model at their heart. 

Finally, we set out to government the big, national shifts we need to see to ensure community power keeps growing for another 100 years – through a National Community Ownership Strategy, neighbourhood governance based around community anchors, and community-led public service reform.