CLES at 40: 4 Decades of Redefining Local Economies

In early April CLES celebrated 40 years. This fantastic achievement marks 4 decades of being at the forefront of the movement for economic and social justice. 
Since their roots in the 1980's, to leading the charge on Community Wealth Building across the UK today, they have spent 40 years building the alternative and creating space for local creativity to thrive. 

As is standard for any CLES event, it was packed full of thought provoking conversations and networking and featured guest speakers; 

Professor Carolyn Wilkins - CLES Chair of Trustees 
Alison McGovern MP - Local Government Minister
Mayor Andy Burnham - Mayor of Greater Manchester,
Rt Hon Lord David Blunkett - CLES Founder
Cllr Bev Craig - Leader of Manchester City Council
Hannah Spencer MP - MP for Gorton and Denton 

 CLES Chief Executive, Sarah Longlands highlighted 4 core words at the heart of all CLES do;

Human - Human relationships, human insights are at the heart of what we do at CLES.

Place - It is a real privilege for us at CLES to be able to work with people in lots of different places across the country, helping them to think about what makes that place tick, what can we do to tackle the challenges that those places are also facing.

Places are also changing at the moment, so how do we help places to adapt to those challenges? Whether that is about improving healthcare, improving the determinience of health, improving access to employment and education. Or taking ownership of economic assets like land and housing and all of the things actually we need to function as a society and using that to actually build wealth from within. I think that is crucially important as we go forward and that will continue to be a guiding principle of our work at CLES.

Wealth - What we want to do more and try to understand the geography of wealth, the flow of wealth and how we redirect and rewire it so that it actually makes a difference to peoples lives- that it gets to the places that we need it to get so that peoples lives start to improve. That has never been more important.

Team - We can only do the work we do at CLES because of the team around us. The people who work at CLES are some of the most talented people in the UK (in my opinion.) We realise that we stand on the shoulders of many many people who worked at CLES over the years, and we are holding CLES for a future generation.

 

Sarah also shared the newly launched video which demonstrates succinctly the aims of CLES and is part of the rebranding- view here. 

If you would like to learn more about CLES and their upcoming online session,  "An introduction to community wealth building, September 2026" - click here.