Deadline: 26-Jun-23
Do you lead an early-stage organisation which involves local people and meets local needs? Do you want help and support to grow your organisation’s impact and develop its trading income? The Community Business Trade Up Programme is for early-stage community businesses that are planning to grow their trading.
Key Features
- A free learning programme, to help you build your income, confidence, resilience and impact.
- Up to £5,000 Match Trading grant.
- A community business peer mentor.
- An opportunity to meet regularly with other people running organisations like yours, so you can help each other out.
Programme Benefits
- Grow a stronger, more sustainable community business or project.
- Start or build your income from trading and sales.
- Benefit from time to reflect and map out next steps.
- Improve your leadership and business skills.
- Build a local support network of other people running organisations like yours.
Eligibility Criteria
- Your organisation must be committed to and working towards meeting the Power to Change criteria for a community business. A community business is run by and for a local community for a social purpose. Its profits are reinvested for the benefit of that community. It must be aiming to be:
- Locally rooted. It should be based within a defined geographical area (e.g. a village or town, or a ward, or borough).
- Accountable to the local community. It must demonstrate that the local community is involved in planning and supporting the community business, as well as simply using its services.
- Trading for the benefit of the local community. It must be trading or planning to trade with profits reinvested in the community or to support activity in the community.
- Making a broad community impact. You may have a specific focus on a disadvantaged group, e.g. people from minoritised ethnicities or disabled people, if you are also supporting the local community more widely.
- Working towards the social impact goals Your organisation must have social impact at its heart. By this they mean that it must be set up with the intention of making a difference locally through at least one of the following social impact goals:
- Increased employability
- Improved health and wellbeing
- Better access to services
- Reduced social isolation
- Improved environment
- Greater community cohesion
- Greater community pride and empowerment
- Economic regeneration
- Improving access to digital products or services
- Tackling racial injustices and inequity
- Your community business must be early stage, with plans to grow its trading over the next year. You may have set up recently, or you may have been running your community business for several years at a low level, but are now ready to seek help to develop your business model and grow your trading. You are likely to have few or no paid staff, but with clear plans to grow over the next year.
- Your organisation must be based in England and working mainly in England.
- You must have at least two people involved in leading your organisation, as board members, a steering group, a committee or as volunteer or paid leaders. They cannot accept applications from sole traders.
- Please note that you must commit to having at least three unrelated board members (and no one person with more than 33% voting rights) by the end of the programme in October 2024.
- Your organisation must be currently active, and have a constitution, set of rules or legal structure. Your community business may be a registered charity, a Community Benefit Society (CBS) or a Community Interest Company (CIC).
For more information, visit School for Social Entrepreneurs.