Community Shares, Get Ready!

This is a unique support programme offering practical and relevant help based on the experience of practitioners who have successfully done it!

 Why offer community shares? Here are just three reasons:

• Community shares are about community ownership where the motivation and payback is not financial but social;

• Community shares provide long term risk capital and can often leverage other funding;

• Community shares are not speculative and the principle “one member, one vote” applies making your organisation truly accountable to your membership.

The support will be tailored to address the development needs of the successful organisations and communities. You can download the form from this post or at  http://www.coopalternatives.coop/community-shares/ if you want to read more about the project.  Please complete the form and return it to [email protected] by the 16th June 2014. 

From September to March 2014, the “Community Owned : Community Shared” workshops series gave us the opportunity to show how community shares can be used to benefit community projects.

Community shares are a tool to raise finance for starting or growing community enterprises but also to build on your social capital and inspire communities.  Community investment is an excellent way to address an identified social need – this can be for a community service, for a civic space, for alternative ways to generate energy or produce food. 

If you did not have the time to attend in person, Co-operatives Alternatives have gathered the information given out at the events on their website http://www.coopalternatives.coop/resources/ so feel free to give a look!

Following that workshop series, Co-operative Alternatives is currently running Master Classes on community shares. The first one is planned on the 24th June 2014 in Belfast. To receive more information on those, just drop us an email.

The project "Community Shares, Ready!" delivered by Co-operative Alternatives was commissioned by the Building Change Trust.