Community power is an idea whose time has come. At its heart, community power is based on the principle that communities have a wealth of knowledge and assets within themselves, which if understood and nurtured by practitioners and policymakers, has the potential to strengthen resilience and enable prevention-focused public services.
Community Power: The Evidence draws on extensive existing evidence to set out the impact of a wide range of community power initiatives.
Taken together, they chart a new direction for the wider system of public services – one that is community-led rather than institution-led. Yet at present public services are trapped in a hybrid of statism and market fundamentalism – what we term the state-market hybrid paradigm.
This means that the real value of community-led approaches is not fully recognised by the current system. In this way, for community power to reach its full potential, we need a deeper shift towards a new way of looking at the world: a new community paradigm.
Grace Pollard, Jessica Studdert and Luca Tiratelli
Senior Researchers
New Local
New Local (formerly the New Local Government Network) is an independent think tank and network with a mission to transform public services and unlock community power
