Building Community Wealth

Our Fife
Leadership Conversations

Building Community Wealth

Recording of Leadership Summit Stocktake presentation by Gordon Mole, Head of Business & Employability, Fife Council

Our economy should work for everyone. We are committed to a thriving Fife for all communities. We know that our current ways of working are not preventing problems early enough or addressing the economic, environmental, and other challenges we face quickly enough. Community wealth building (CWB) provides some solutions.

(CWB) is a different way to approach improving communities and their wellbeing. It puts people and communities firmly at the heart of everything we plan and on the basis that:

  • We can better prevent problems when communities are fully involved
  • Everyone owns a stake in the local environment and economy
  • Our financial power will work for communities and more of our spending will stay local
  • Better use of our land and assets will benefit local people and communities
  • Fair employment and labour markets will work for all our communities
  • Improving wellbeing should be a key outcome for everything we do.

As we move on from our immediate response to the pandemic, we need to focus on building back through a more inclusive and sustainable approach to economic recovery. Despite a range of interventions and some successes, Fife, and particularly the people and communities of mid-Fife, continue to experience economic challenges.

Like other parts of Scotland, Fife’s economic growth is not fully achieving the wider social benefits that promote social justice, environmental sustainability, and prosperity for all as part of a wellbeing economy.

Community wealth building is a way to reframe the development of our local economies and environments. It provides a unifying approach to meeting challenges as diverse as economic recovery, wellbeing, poverty, climate action and our aspiration for people and place-based, local leadership

The Recovery & Renewal Plan for Fife 2021 -2024 sets out our strategy for change through a CWB approach to each of our recovery and renewal priorities. We need to explore what this means for the way we as anchor institutions choose to deploy our public sector resources – our economic levers- to develop resilient, inclusive local economies with more local spend and fair employment, as well as a larger and more diverse business base - ensuring that more of our wealth is owned locally and benefits local people.

The leadership workshops on CWB will explore:

  • the concept of community wealth building
  • our ambition and our progress to date
  • what needs to change to achieve our ambition
  • examples and evidence of success from other places
  • what’s needed from across the partnership to deliver transformational change

The Programme

Useful documents