1. Community Business: Sustaining rural services
Introduction to myself – Chris, Head of Community Business at Plunkett Foundation
About Plunkett Foundation
We are a charity
We are celebrating our centenary in 2019
We provide advice and support to community groups all across the UK.
Study visits
Legal structure
Governance and training
Networking
Community shares and fundraising
Go to place when setting up and running a community business
Signposting to other support bodies in the sector
Plunkett Foundation is a national charity that works with predominantly rural communities across the UK. We work with community groups looking to save an asset or service that is important to them through community ownership. This is very often the local shop or village pub, but could be anything from woodland, to launderette, bookshop, café, brewery, distillery.
Today we will primarily focus on Plunkett’s work with community shops, although I do want to touch on other models such as pubs which is a growing sector.
Before I tell you more about Plunkett, I wanted to share this film with you. It features Barkers of Huby, in North Yorkshire and the tells their story of how the community pulled together to save their local shop and it also touches on the importance of retaining the post office in the village.
Chris Cowcher, Plunkett Foundation
RSN Conference
4 September 2018

2. Barkers of Huby Film

3. There are 362 community shops open and trading
There are 362 community shops open and trading. We are working with a further 67 community shop groups working towards opening.
Community ownership is a resilient model – they enjoy a 95% long-term survival rate – compared with an average of 45% average survival rate for SME.
The community business model we promote is typically a community benefit society which means:
Mass membership – open to everyone in the community and beyond
Equal democratic rights regardless of level of investment
No one stakeholder benefits over any other
The business is there for the benefit of the wider community – so profits raised are invested back into the business or local community projects – e.g. school, playground, lunch clubs.
Funding – typical mix of community shares, grants, loan finance and donations. Often raising enough to purchase, and enhance, premises.
As well as supporting community groups directly – we play an advocacy role to be a voice for rural communities and raise the issues important to them on a national level.

4. I’ve included this photograph to illustrate that communities think outside the box when saving their local shop. On the face of it, there may not be an obvious location to house a shop, but this community in Beech Hill near Reading have created a shop in their local church.
Many groups find interim solutions in portable cabins, shipping containers, village halls, even converting toilet blocks.

5. Taking on a shop through community ownership also brings a range of social benefits.
It creates a vibrant social hub that brings every member of a community together.
They provide additional services such as prescription collection, home deliveries when people are less mobile (snow conditions, hospital stays)
Providing just one table and chair brings people together to chat – and often a visit to the shop can be the only social interaction some people get that day, or even week.
An informal care network – if someone doesn’t arrive for their morning paper, a volunteer will go and check all is well. Very often it isn’t and it can be life-saving.
A safe space for carers to take family members with dementia for example
Volunteering provides a host of benefits –
for young people CV experience,
social activity for older people (typical volunteer range 16 – 80!) mixing generations
A focus after a bereavement
New skills for people, e.g new mums, re-entering the job market
Also provides local employment.

6. Taking on a shop under community ownership is often the mechanism to protecting and providing post office services.
Retaining a Post Office is very often a high priority for a community given the range of services it provides, from banking and access to cash and pension collection.
Plunkett is pleased to have a close working relationship with POL.
Community groups are not experienced retailers
Contracts – business too business, understanding that it is a committee, not an individual
PO local – training
Attending events – offering bespoke advice to groups
Looking forward to working more closely to standardise processes to smooth the takeover for community groups and help support the recommendations and their implementation identified through the research.

7. Community-pubs the growth sector.
More than a Pub has enabled Plunkett to support a number of groups through loan and grant finance – MHCLG / Power to Change
According to our latest stats, we have seen 49 community pubs open in the last five years
Assets of Community Value Orders are commonly used by pub groups to safeguard the facility, and the first case of a pub by CPO’d is currently taking place in Cambridgeshire.
We’d like to see changes made to the timescales associated with ACVs, to enable greater development time for groups seriously looking to take on the ownership and running of their local pub. Plunkett would also like see greater pressure applied to Local Authorities that their default position, in relation to ACVs should be to firstly support a community-led option. Where a CPO has to be used it could be hugely beneficial for groups if there was a national fund to enable quick purchases of community assets via CPO, which in turn can be sold on to community groups.