Our impact
Our vision at People’s Economy is of economies that are democratic, equitable and liveable, and enable communities to meet their needs and priorities.
To achieve this, we:
-Build deep, long-term relationships with communities experiencing economic injustice and work together to achieve economic change
-Remove barriers and create routes into economic change work for communities experiencing injustice
-Invest in the sustainable development of People’s Economy to scale our impact and live our values.
Some of our recent impact highlights include:
Built the foundations of our work: Launched three place-based programmes in North Wales, Birmingham and Hartlepool and two national thematic programmes with migrant justice and youth sectors. For each, we have built long term relationships with grassroots changemakers, co-designed the work so that it is relevant to the specific context, and built wider coalitions including researchers, campaigners and funders. We have recruited staff to lead our work in Wales, Birmingham and on migrant justice, who are deeply embedded in their communities and networks.
Developed our participatory approach: Our strategy commits us to becoming meaningfully led by and for the communities we are working with. In our migrant justice work, we piloted a co-design approach, resourcing Migrants Rights Network and Ubuntu to work with us for a year on developing a programme that would be deeply embedded in and responsive to the migrant justice ecosystem. We are now adapting and rolling out this approach for our youth programme. We have also paid and facilitated groups of changemakers with intersectional experiences of injustice to work with us to develop our current strategy and curriculum.
Built economic change knowledge, confidence & skills: We facilitated forty grassroots changemakers across Birmingham on two year-long journeys to understand and reimagine the city’s economy. We supported ten young people involved in the criminal justice system in Newham (London) to explore how they want to shape the council’s Community Wealth Building strategy. We trained twenty community researchers from across three slate valleys in North Wales in tourism economics and research methods and supported them to research what their communities need to understand, reimagine and reshape local tourism. We used collective imagination methods to support seventy young people in Gwynedd to imagine what would make them want to stay in their area as adults.
Facilitated coalitions to build economic power and agency: We facilitated a mixed group of community researchers, community organisations and academics to collaborate to set up a pilot community research network in three Slate Valleys and secure one million pounds over five years from UK Research and Innovation for local communities to run a community research network. The network is now operating in five areas and developing local place plans which articulate an alternative vision of community benefiting sustainable tourism for the region as well as building practical community led tourism initiatives such as the Slate Valley Trail. We supported the design, launch, facilitation and strategic comms for Economic Justice Brum, a regular meeting space which has brought together over one hundred people from local communities and civil society in Birmingham to form relationships, learn about the economic system, develop shared analysis and strategy, and take action together.
Expanded our training and facilitation offer: We have developed our ability to facilitate community research and collective imagination processes with communities. We have conducted a full review of our community education curriculum and pedagogy and developed training on topics including the links between racial and economic justice, community research and collective imagination. We have upskilled the staff team by recruiting two experienced trainers and running training for staff in trauma informed facilitation and transformational justice approaches.
Supported wider practice: We are supporting the spread and exchange of practice and learning, for example, partnering with Joseph Rowntree Foundation in Hartlepool to support the development of a community research programme, and with Barrow Cadbury Trust, to support the design of Economic Justice Brum with learnings from our expertise facilitating community economic change spaces. We have also begun working with national new economy organisations and grassroots groups to build the conditions for more and better-quality collaboration between them.
Shift Birmingham: In the 2024-25 year, People’s Economy finished its second 12-month Shift Birmingham learning journey. Over the two learning journeys, it has supported forty grassroots changemakers from across the city to understand and reimagine the city’s economy. Participants came from diverse backgrounds, including a nursery manager, a housing campaigner, and a community hub manager.
The programme explored pressing economic problems from housing to climate justice. It built participants’ confidence in understanding root causes and developed their skills in media engagement.
Community Research Network in Gwynedd – Community Tourism: In November 2022, UK Research and Innovation awarded six months of funding to a partnership including representatives from Partneriaeth Ogwen, Siop Griffiths CYF and Cwmni Bro Ffestiniog. This partnership was supported
by People’s Economy and academics from Foundational Economy Ltd. This funding was extended until March 2024 under a bridge-funding scheme designed to maintain relationships and project development until the opening of the main UKRI fund for community research networks. The project’s aims are to explore how a community research network could help communities in the slate valleys have more voice and control on the issues which matter to them, support community dialogue and development, and build a prosperous and sustainable future. The network has developed a collective vision for an alternative tourism model that benefits communities, and held an event to launch their findings and proposals. In September 2024, the network was awarded £1 million of funding from UKRI to expand and evolve this work over the next five years.
Growing Community Benefitting Enterprise: In March 2024, People’s Economy, Foundational Alliance Wales and Foundational Economic Research Ltd were awarded a Supporting Great Ideas grant from National Lottery Community Fund Wales for a two-year action research project on community benefiting enterprises in Wales. In March 2025, we published our first year of research in ‘the precarity of community benefiting social innovation’ report available here.
How we capture our impact
We aim to take a continuous learning approach to all of the activities that we undertake at People’s Economy. That means:
1
We collect data using a two-minute survey for all participants and collaborators in our education and co-production activities. This helps us get top-level feedback on our impact and to monitor the diversity of the participants that we are engaging with.
2
Whenever we’re delivering an extended piece of work or project we produce a monitoring and evaluation plan. This sets out the specific measurement tools and indicators that will be used and how the data collected will be analysed.
3
We collect data on engagement with our digital outputs and our overall organisational impact on a rolling basis, and review it regularly together as a whole staff team as part of a monthly discussion on what we have learned.
Our annual reports
As a registered charity, People’s Economy submits an annual report and accounts to our regulator the Charity Commission each year. The reports are all available for public viewing (note that pre-2023 reports will refer to us by our old name, Economy):
People’s Economy Annual Report and Accounts
People’s Economy Annual Report and Accounts
People’s Economy Annual Report and Accounts
Economy Annual Report and Accounts