Community Wealth Building (CWB) is a practical approach to strengthening the local economy by keeping more jobs, spending, and investment within the Hawkesbury.

Rather than relying solely on attracting outside investment, Community Wealth Building focuses on supporting local businesses, local employment, local suppliers, and local community organisations.

The principle is simple:

When local organisations buy from local businesses, more money stays in the community, creating jobs, strengthening supply chains, and supporting long-term prosperity.

The Hawkesbury Chamber of Commerce is championing this approach by helping connect businesses, community organisations, and major local institutions to create greater economic opportunity across our region.

Why Community Wealth Building Matters

Every day, organisations across the Hawkesbury purchase goods and services. When those purchases are made locally:

– Local businesses grow

– More jobs are created

– Skills and expertise remain in the region

– Supply chains become more resilient

– Economic benefits circulate throughout the community

When spending leaves the region, those opportunities often disappear with it. Community Wealth Building seeks to reduce this economic leakage and maximise the benefits of local spending.

A Practical Approach to Local Prosperity

Community Wealth Building is not just an economic theory. It is a practical framework that helps:

– Increase local procurement

– Support small business growth

– Encourage collaboration between organisations

– Strengthen social and economic resilience

– Improve outcomes for the wider community

By working together, businesses, community groups, local government, health services, educational institutions, and major employers can create lasting local impact.

The Role of Anchor Institutions

A key part of Community Wealth Building is engaging with Anchor Institutions. Anchor Institutions are organisations that:

– Have a long-term presence in the community

– Employ significant numbers of people

– Purchase large volumes of goods and services

– Have substantial influence on local economic outcomes

Examples: Hospitals, Universities and colleges, Local government, Large manufacturers, Major community organisations, Utilities and public service providers

Because of their purchasing power, these organisations can play an important role in supporting local businesses and creating local economic opportunities.

The first focus of the Hawkesbury Community Wealth Building initiative is procurement.

This means encouraging Anchor Institutions to:

– Understand where their procurement spend currently goes

– Identify opportunities to purchase more goods and services locally

– Increase awareness of capable local suppliers

– Improve connections between buyers and businesses

– Share knowledge and best practices

The principle is simple: “If you can measure it, you can improve it.”

By understanding how much procurement spending remains within the Hawkesbury and how much leaves the region, meaningful targets and improvements can be developed over time.

The Hawkesbury Chamber will encourage the creation of an “Anchor Collaborative Network” to share ideas and initiatives to increase local spending.

An example of what can be achieved can be seen in the Preston Story in the UK: In 2013, a spend analysis finds that of £750m spent, only 5% (£38m) is spent in Preston, and 39% (£175m) in Lancashire, meaning a £450m leakage. After introducing the CWB initiative four years later, Preston’s economy’s spending increased from £38m to £111m.

There is no reason why we cannot duplicate this in the Hawkesbury!

The CWB principle relating to employment is to improve the local labour market through the anchor institutions’ employment practices and supply chains.  By analysing how many employees are currently locally employed versus those coming into the Hawkesbury daily, we establish another baseline to improve upon.

As large organisations, Anchor institutions are significant employers in their local areas.  Their employment practices can influence the local community’s employment prospects and incomes.  Leading by example and committing to fair and innovative employment practices is a first step before seeking similar commitments from others in the business community.

The “Anchor Collaborative Network”, previously established, now collaborates and shares on initiatives to improve the local workforces career pathways, generating employment opportunities, equal opportunities and improving recruitment of lower socio-economic communities.

By nurturing the growth of enterprises with diverse ownership models, jobs are created across a range of sectors, and wealth in the form of retained profits that are more broadly shared and held in the community.

Diversity amongst the cohort of business leaders will also add to the voices yielding influence in the community.

A variety of corporate structures need to be evident in a healthy and diverse economy.  This includes not-for-profit enterprises, social enterprises, mutuals and cooperatives, sole traders, start-ups and scale-ups, as well as small and medium enterprises and major companies. The coexistence of businesses of different sizes and structures within the same market benefits all.  This enhances competition, creating supply chains to develop products and services, creating distribution networks, and adding to the overall customer base within the Hawkesbury.

The Community Wealth Building approach puts businesses along a continuum from ‘extractive’ to ‘generative’.

• Extractive organisations are typically major corporations owned by shareholders.
• Generative organisations can take many forms, but all are purpose-driven. Most are for-profit organisations, and some operate in the not-for-profit charitable sector.

A healthy economy relies on the vast majority of businesses being financially sustainable.

Economies with a healthy mix of generative organisations benefit from the multiplier effect that they create, where their purpose is centred on social and economic value maximisation.

• More of the proceeds of enterprises is invested back into the local community with the creation of jobs and purchase of goods and services from other local businesses.
• Through the distribution of profits to employees through social business structures such as: ESOPs. EOTs, cooperative or employee-owned structures.
• If a business purpose is focused on broader environmental or social goals, profits are distributed more widely in the community.

Where gaps are identified concerning the diversity of business structures that can be found in the local economy, consideration will be given bythe Hawkesbury Chamber supporting these mechanisms that can establish and grow these successful business models.

Land and assets held by key institutions are a platform for generating community wealth or benefits.  Who has access to or benefits from those assets should always be examined to optimise equity and public good.

Equitable forms of ownership, management, and development can ensure that land and property assets realise benefits for the wider local community and are distributed equitably.  We need to ensure that land and property can be used for the provision of high-quality services and outcomes for the community and not privatised or used in such a way that only a few in the community benefit.

By optimising the equitable public benefit from land and property, shared community facilities, public places, parks, and other public assets, can contribute to building strong local communities and economies. It supports the community’s environmental, social and cultural goals.

Various solutions can be implemented, e.g. assets such as sporting facilities and libraries owned by the Council could be transferred to community organisations to own, manage and provide services.  The University, Hospitals, and Clubs could allow community groups and organisations to use their facilities and grounds at no charge for events such as farmers’ markets and conferences.

We do this by stopping wealth from flowing out of the Hawkesbury by redirecting it back into the local economy.  By building local financial systems and vehicles owned and controlled by local people.

A cornerstone of CWB is the idea that “stakeholders have an actual stake”.  This has fundamental implications for attracting capital into CWB initiatives and projects, shaping the types of capital that is available to support the stakeholders.

To encourage investors to invest locally, not out of the Hawkesbury or internationally.

Access to capital is restricted; by harnessing the capital from within the community, investment can be facilitated while delivering appropriate returns to investors, aligning capital with the community’s broad environmental and social goals.

The aim is to address financial exclusion faced by small to medium-sized business and the business start-up community.