Community-led housing alliance

At the Building and Social Housing Foundation we see many examples of communities coming together to provide homes for themselves in innovative and inspiring ways.

Our consultation event in May 2014 explored how we might get more communities solving their own housing challenges in the UK, building on a long established but under-valued sector.  Our exploration into this topic led us to discover a real appetite for scaling up across the sector – people with great conviction and belief in the potential and benefits of community-led housing, all eager to work together to inspire communities and organisations to get involved, creating momentum and growth.  Working with a wide range of organisations and individuals, World Habitat has recently led the development of a successful bid to the Nationwide Foundation for a two-year programme to support the scaling up of community-led housing in England.

Through this new programme, working with the sector and beyond, we hope to establish an alliance that can help achieve this objective by:

• Strengthening support and representation for those providing community-led housing
• Communicating clearly and widely the benefits of community-led housing
• Creating the conditions for scaling up community-led housing activity (with a view to a potential second phase which focuses on supporting increased delivery)

Although the focus of the programme is on England at this stage, we intend to build and strengthen links with partners in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as continuing to link to relevant international good practice.