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💡 About themes and insights
This page explores key themes that emerged during our research, the challenges they present and opportunities for progressing the field.
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Strengthening knowledge infrastructures
Enabling effective partnerships
Financing community asset development
Building a connected ecosystem
Navigating inconsistent policy landscapes
Democratic governance and community mobilising practices
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Across our research, key themes emerged for community asset development and the infrastructure supporting it. Here those themes are explored in depth, alongside the opportunities they present for progressing the field.
Knowledge plays a central role in how communities engage with asset development. We often understand knowledge only as technical expertise but knowledge in this field is much broader. It also includes the stories that inspire action, the lived experience that shapes how people work, and the cultural and ancestral wisdom that guide communities in how they organise. These forms of knowledge are not always represented in mainstream support, but they are equally important to how community asset development happens in practice.
Across our research, participants described the difficulty of accessing information when it’s needed. Asset developers found themselves searching for relevant guidance across different websites, relying on personal contacts, or simply trying to work things out in isolation. Some groups described starting from scratch, even when we know many similar projects have gone on the same journey before them. Toolkits were valued but were felt to lack specificity, up-to-date information or were difficult to find when they were needed. Peer networks, advice and signposting were highlighted by some but access to them was sparse.
“Toolkits and guidance exist, but they’re not specific, or they’re not up to date, or you can’t find them when you need them.”
At the same time, there are some forms of knowledge that groups might be more likely to have access to. Many marginalised communities hold cultural and ancestral knowledge that is essential for collective organising. Young people often hold deep place-based and relational knowledge, cultural capital and digital fluency. These forms of knowledge are often not valued by traditional infrastructure in community asset development.
“We’re really tapping into our own ancestral and diasporic knowledge base”
Knowledge infrastructures are the systems and practices that allow this knowledge to be captured, shared and used. They show up in different ways from research and documentation to peer networks and events, and from toolkits and advice to signposting.
There are strong examples of what good knowledge infrastructures can look like. Guides and directories, such as Power to Change’s Understanding Community Asset Transfer and the MyCommunity Directory, help groups understand their options and navigate the process. Peer learning spaces, for example the Mycelial Network, show how experience can be successfully shared between peers relationally. Asset developers, like Civic Square, model ways of working in the open, documenting their practice as they go and making learning accessible to others. Digital tools like Land Explorer bring together practical information in a way that makes it easier for communities to explore opportunities and understand the landscape around them.
Other fields are solving similar challenges around knowledge flow. In social investment, Good Finance is a knowledge hub, learning portal and directory for the field. For training and leadership development in the social sector, where providers are fragmented and opportunities are difficult to find, the Collective Leadership Group created the artificial intelligence supported Learning and Leadership Navigator tool.
There is scope for better coordination, more accessible and up-to-date materials, and stronger connections between technical knowledge, lived experience and alternative ways of knowing. A first step may be further research into understanding of what exists, how knowledge currently flows and where gaps are. This approach would build the foundation for systematically filling gaps in knowledge infrastructures across the field.
Partnerships sit at the centre of most community asset development journeys, even if they rarely receive the same attention as finance or technical expertise. Many of the assets communities want to secure are owned or controlled by councils, housing associations or private developers. These organisations hold the power to unlock access to land and buildings, provide financial support and contribute technical expertise. Because of this, partnerships with councils and developers are almost always key to the success of community asset development projects.
“More than three-quarters of the projects our members have completed have been done through those partnerships [with councils, housing associations and property developers]”
Our definition of partnership is broad. Some are formal arrangements with contractually defined roles, responsibilities and decision-making structures. Others are informal, based on trust and overlapping intentions. Fundamentally, constructive partnerships depend on mutual understanding, shared purpose and the ability to navigate the power differences that sit beneath most of these relationships.
The work of building partnerships is often supported by people and organisations who bridge the gaps between different stakeholders. These can be local intermediaries, such as regional authorities or place-based development programmes, who connect communities to aligned actors. Relational support can also come from within communities, councils and developers directly, where these groups intentionally seek to connect across their functional roles and build collaboration. Regardless of where they are situated, these connectors play an important role in translating between cultures and expectations to create the conditions for constructive conversation. This work is often slow and time-intensive. Although it can be key to the success of projects, it remains largely invisible in mainstream accounts of asset development.
Partnership building has struggled to gain recognition across the field. We heard how narratives about individuals driving success of asset development projects can overshadow the collective and relational work behind successful projects. Funding tends to prioritise activity that is easier to quantify. Guidance on building partnerships exists but is significantly less developed than guidance on areas such as fundraising or business planning. At the same time, cuts to local authority funding and voluntary sector infrastructure mean councils and local intermediaries have far less capacity for relationship building now than they did a decade ago. Following cuts to local authority funding and voluntary sector infrastructure. These shifts have weakened the continuity and local knowledge that many asset development journeys rely on.
“One of the bits of infrastructure that’s really missing is organisations able to facilitate these partnerships and give confidence to both parties… to make that equitable and effective.”
There are, however, valuable examples of partnership-building in practice. Platform Places supports communities and institutions to work together in neighbourhoods and helps build a clearer pathway to partnership work through resources and storytelling. Power to Change has previously invested in place-based catalyst organisations, recognising that long-term local intermediaries matter. The Co-operative Councils Innovation Network works with local authorities and council officers to build practice in working more closely with communities around shared goals.
Looking forward, there is a need to bring greater attention to the role that partnerships play in community asset development. Beyond narrative shift, investment in those already promoting partnership work will develop this practice further. Greater support to build the capacity of councils, and other stakeholders with the power to unlock resources for communities, will stimulate an increase in intentional relationship building. Doing so would help ensure that the relational work at the heart of this field is better understood, valued and sustained.
Finance is a critical enabler of community asset development. It enables feasibility work, funds technical input and physical works during the development stage, and helps organisations reach sustainability once an asset is operational. Groups draw on different kinds of finance across their journeys - grants, social investment, crowdfunding and community shares.
Despite its enabling potential, finance, or the lack of it, was reported as one of the leading constraints to asset development across our research engagements. The funding system places significant emphasis on capital development and building works while giving far less attention to pre-development and long-term sustainability. Without revenue to resource feasibility work, governance design or community engagement, projects can stall before they get started or start from weak foundations. Groups who do make it through pre-development and developing an asset can then struggle to secure the ongoing income needed to operate them.
Development finance itself comes with its own challenges. Funding cycles rarely align with realities of asset development. We heard how communities find themselves waiting to secure finance while trying to maintain momentum with other stakeholders. Finance is all too often expensive, inflexible, and on short cycles that can limit the choices available to communities. This has implications for groups from marginalised backgrounds with less access to capital and for asset types that do not generate strong commercial returns. Interviewees told us that in some situations, organisations feel compelled to adopt more commercial uses of assets to meet funding requirements. This can lead to business models that sit in tension with aims around community leadership, social purpose and local regeneration.
“We are seeing in the community asset development space bonkers interest when borrowing money for assets.”
Finance also brings administrative burdens that are not always recognised. Groups described the weight of reporting requirements, re-financing cycles and navigating multiple funders’ conditions at once. For small organisations, these demands sit on top of already stretched capacity and can divert time and energy from core activities.
“…we have now secured more than 100 grants and loans…tons and tons of really small ones… there’s a huge burden of relationship management, of bureaucracy and administration, not to mention the bidding itself and then not always being successful.”
There have been some moves to improve the financing landscape. The Architectural Heritage Foundation provides project viability grants for asset developers to explore the feasibility of projects, but opportunities like this are limited. Resonance offers an Enterprise Investment Fund releasing capital that’s more flexible into the market, though it is still not long-term or low interest enough to meet the needs of many community asset developers.
Inspiration may be taken from more innovative approaches. Esmee Fairbairn offers a Land Purchase Facility providing funds for land acquisition upfront and leasing that land to conservation partners with the option to buy later. This reduces the risk and time-pressure on partners of purchasing land of high environmental value. We also heard of historic Property and Green Pre-Planning funds where finance was made available for pre-development costs and were only repayable if capital funds were secured.
More radical approaches, taking into account the historical underinvestment in marginalised communities, exist globally. The Black Feminist fund provides eight year core grants to organisations who work to build collective power, claim justice and create alternatives. The Lilly Endowment’s investment $100 million in the United Negro College Fund to establish a permanent endowment to sustain 37 historically Black colleges and universities.
“I would love in 15–20 years’ time that we’ve got versions of the Black Feminist Fund…where we’re no longer looking abroad for examples of what good looks like, but we’ve got them at home.
Looking ahead, financing community asset development requires approaches that reflect the full scale and non-linear nature of the work, as well as prioritising social returns over financial. It also requires recognition of the histories of under-resourcing and exclusion that some communities face which shapes who finds it easiest to access funding. Practitioners in the field are leading calls for, and work on, transitions in funding and financing practices through initiatives such as the Community Asset Developers Finance Initiative. Foundations, with the resources, independence and a clear mandate for social change, are well placed to invest in more expansive approaches to financial resourcing the field.
Community asset development is supported by an ecosystem of infrastructural support working with communities to take on land and buildings. This ecosystem includes organisations with different functional roles and from varying thematic backgrounds. For ecosystems to function well, they rely on shared purpose, clarity of roles and connection. The ecosystem supporting community asset development is made up of a fragmented set of actors working with different approaches and frameworks, often duplicating efforts and competing for resources, and missing opportunities for collaboration.
“I just think it’s a very uncoordinated space. I don’t think that there’s been a whole ecosystem view taken of what we’re trying to achieve.”
The landscape of infrastructure for community asset development fragmented. This issue is, in part, down to actors with different functional roles such as funders, technical consultants, peer networks and more, being disconnected. It is, in part, due to the fact that organisations approach community asset development from different thematic perspectives.. For example, there are varying:
From our research we heard that this fragmentation is experienced by communities as difficulty knowing what path to take with asset development projects and challenges finding appropriate and timely support.