About Us
Community Sector Trading is delivered by Locality and funded by ACEVO and CapacityBuilders.
Locality – Communities ambitious for change
Locality is the nationwide movement of communities ambitious for change formed through the merger of bassac and the Development Trusts Association.
Members of Locality are community owned and led. They include settlements, development trusts, social action centres and community enterprises and they have expertise in community asset ownership, collaboration, commissioning, social enterprise, community voice and advocacy.
Our member organisations often work in areas of profound deprivation, and therefore in marginal economies. In recent years we made considerable efforts to help members bring land and buildings into community ownership, and reduce grant dependency through community enterprise. Locality’s members now have assets of £750m and combined income of £350m, of which £200m is earned income, and include the majority of the most successful community organizations in the county.
Locality helps people to work together to create and capture local wealth. We help people to set up locally owned and led organisations for the benefit of their communities and we support existing organisations to work more effectively through peer-to-peer exchange and mutual support. We support best practice on community asset ownership, collaboration, commissioning support, social enterprise, community voice and advocacy.
The Pool – Locality’s Consultancy Service
Locality has a very special asset within its staff, members and wider contacts – a wealth of grassroots expertise and knowledge of community regeneration, asset development and cultivating local enterprise. We have developed a unique form of consultancy that taps into this fabulous resource bringing the first-hand skills and hard-won knowledge of frontline practitioners from within the movement to the service of clients across all sectors. The Pool offers an uncompromising quality of advice in the regeneration of neighbourhoods, support for community enterprise and social action and assistance in the transformation of services.
Our client list includes local authorities of all sizes and types across the country, regional agencies, NDC programmes and central government. We established the Advancing Assets programme for CLG, and have continued to provide consultancy support to 100 local authority areas to pilot community asset transfer by supporting viability assessments for potential transferred assets and third sector partners.
The Pool’s services include:
- Community and social enterprise support – Robust business planning and enterprise support services including capacity building, governance advice, fundraising, finance, marketing, legal issues, visioning/prioritisation and asset development.
- Research and feasibility studies – Collective intelligence reports through expert panels and sector specialists.
- Change support – Solutions and support from practitioners to help your organisation respond to challenging times.
