What is it?

Social businesses generate social value as well as income. They bring social and economic aims together. Through the creation of social supply chains, local communities left out of the mainstream economic system can build up their economic base again while also tackling a range of social issues, from lack of housing and jobs to loneliness and debt.

Who’s doing it?

Anfield, Liverpool: Re-building a high street, brick by brick, loaf by loaf

‘We nurture each other. As the dough rises, we rise.’ These are the words of Fred Brown, co-founder of Homebaked in Liverpool. Its base is a bakery in the shadow of Liverpool football ground, in an area that has been ravaged by big failed regeneration schemes. It began life as an arts project in 2010, called 2Up2Down, which used the bakery as a base to engage local people in their neighbourhood. Young people came together to answer the question: ‘What does it mean to live well?’. They became involved in the process of retrofitting the bakery and the flats above it. Other local residents join in and a crowd-funding campaign raised over £18,000 to buy a new oven and start baking again. From those early meetings a community land trust and a co-operative bakery were launched. Today the bakery’s award-winning pies are bought by football fans on match days and now by Liverpool Football Club itself to feed to their corporate visitors and VIPs. From small beginnings it has become a major supplier and its profits are ploughed back into the neighbourhood. It is now in the process of regenerating the rest of the high street on which the bakery sits, providing workspace for social enterprises, ‘proper’ high street shops, affordable housing and communal green space.

  • Read the full story of Homebaked here.

 

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