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Category E: Reforming and building

These disciplines are about building civic alternatives: institutions, enterprises, or working examples of an alternative way of running a local economy. They tend to work at a higher level of the system than many of the other disciplines we have covered; for example, by creating a new local institution that can buy and restore buildings. These disciplines construct alternatives, which then survive alongside the existing system – they speak to the idea that ‘other futures are possible’ by building working examples.

10 Civic institution-builders and systemic imaginers · 11 Community and social entrepreneurs

  5. Category E, Reforming and building
Reforming and building

Discipline 10. Civic institution-builders and systemic imaginers

An East Asian woman in her forties at a table, placing the roof on a cardboard model of a hall.

Maturity of support

  • 2Codification
  • 4Institutions
  • 2Training
  • 4Communities
  • 3Academia
  • 3.0Overall, mean of the five

Institution-builders and imaginers work in an ambitious space, creating living demonstrations of alternative civic futures. The work tends to operate at two levels. They often start by creating a new institution, usually rooted in a place – such as Nudge Community Builders in Plymouth, Hastings Commons, and the LS14 Trust in Leeds. Then they use that institution as a demonstrator, inspiring and provoking people, and informing system-level change. This goes beyond rhetoric to also building their own scaling architecture: creating institutions to pool risk, and establishing peer networks to spread ideas and skills. The goal ultimately is to support alternative civic and economic systems at scale. The most celebrated practitioners – Dr Jess Steele in Hastings; Hannah Sloggett and Wendy Hart in Plymouth; Immy Kaur in Birmingham – work at both levels simultaneously.

Examples

Assessing the supporting architecture

This discipline is unusual in that it is supported by an impressive array of institutions, while the work itself is largely uncodified. There is a remarkable network of demonstrators: a network of neighbourhood-level institutions stretching from Birmingham, Hastings, Plymouth, Leeds, Watchet (the Onion Collective), Liverpool and Glasgow (Kinning Park Complex), many founded in the last fifteen years, most well-known to each other. At system-level there are think tanks and networks such as CLES and New Local, and publishers such as the worker co-operative Stir to Action, and frequent well-attended gatherings, among them New Local’s Stronger Things and Stir to Action’s annual ABCs of the New Economy festival. There are strong intellectual underpinnings, running through the literature on the commons and on alternative economic models, and the field has recently begun crossing into mainstream evidence.2

Codification and training are weaker, and we believe mostly by choice. Community wealth building is a sub-specialism that has been codified into a five-pillar framework by CLES, now embedded in Scottish primary legislation through the Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act 2026 – the first legislation of its kind. Several leading organisations have published frameworks of their own. However, none of these act as a competency framework for individual practitioners and local leaders. This partly reflects that the work tends to be exploratory in spirit and against the grain. Training exists for specialisms – short courses on co-operative finance and community land, for example, or regenerative economics. The most mature support for learning exists in a growing number of study visits supported by organisations like Stir to Action.