The Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) says its annual conference will challenge local government leaders to learn from the cost of living crisis and put community wealth building into practice.
The Community Wealth Building Summit will gather delegates from the public, private and community and voluntary sectors at the Library of Birmingham on Friday 18 November, from 9.30am – 4pm.
It says the summit, which will be preceded by a series of optional webinars to introduce the key concepts of the model, is “the flagship event for progressive local economic approaches in the UK and the only conference dedicated to uniting, informing and inspiring the community wealth building movement”.
This year it will “examine how community wealth building can be used to diagnose the disfunctions that long predate this summer’s lack of leadership on the cost of living crisis and redesign our local economies accordingly”.
Sarah Longlands, chief executive of CLES, said: “The cost of living scandal is savagely highlighting where local economies are failing local people. We can no longer afford to repeat the mistakes of the past. Now is the time to be brave. In recent years we’ve seen economic development practice start to make the right noises about building more inclusive local economies.
“The scale and the urgency of the challenges we now face mean we need to ask hard questions about whether this shift will be sufficient. The summit will provide the inspirations and tools to not only survive the coming storm, but to think differently and put this new thinking into action.”
