Community Wealth Building

Community Wealth Building is a new people-centred approach to local economic development, which redirects wealth back into the local economy. It uses combined power of anchor institutions such as Queen Elizabeth Hospital and Gateshead College, to retain as much wealth as possible in the local economy, whilst creating local opportunities, new jobs, and new enterprises.  There is a particular need to demonstrate that CWB should be understood as one of many tools to help implement and advance the Thrive agenda.

Community Wealth Building progress

We have been working with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES) to progress Community Wealth Building (CWB) across Gateshead for some time now with a major focus on further developing our approach to social value.

Within the Corporate Commissioning & Procurement Strategy 2022, there is a strong focus on the delivery of CWB and Social Value outcomes. The aim is to achieve better outcomes for the people of Gateshead through our procurements and by working more closely with officers across the Council including Economic Development and HR.

The future

We intend to make Community Wealth Building central to Gateshead strategic direction through a CWB strategy and has developed E-learning modules on CWB which will shortly be available via the intranet.  The training will allow officers and members to become more familiar with CWB and to understand the importance of CWB in Gateshead.

We want to improve SME's access to contract opportunities and we have been working to improve our internet pages, to make them more user friendly, updating how to do business guides. We have improved our social media presence by advertising contracts on our own web pages, via LinkedIn, and through our Gateshead Business Newsletter. We have redesigned our Intranet pages for internal colleagues making them easier to use and navigate. We have also implemented User Guides for the commonly used contracts giving information on how to call-off from the contract and ley personnel.

We also want to support the development of a more inclusive economy by working with other organisations to embed CWB through the Community Practice meetings and discussions at Anchor institute meetings.

We will also review spend analysis to look for gaps in the market and identify where spend and supply chain spend can be made local.