How do you scale a radical idea without diluting it?

Changing a system can mean challenging the power and structures within it. Can you protect that challenge as you scale? Community wealth building’s journey from a local experiment in Cleveland to national policy in Scotland offers us some clues.

Guest author: Evelyn Henderson-Child
Senior Researcher, CLES

October 27, 2026
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In February 2026, Scotland became the first country to legislate for community wealth building (CWB), an approach to economic development that sets out to reshape who owns and benefits from economic activity. The Community Wealth Building Act marks another chapter in a story that connects local practice across the UK and internationally. For social sector leaders, the lesson is not simply how CWB has spread, but how to expand a systems-change approach without diluting its challenge to ownership and power.

Community wealth building has scaled not by replicating a fixed model, but by combining a clear analysis of ownership, extraction and economic power with principles that can be adapted to different places and institutions. Its story therefore poses a wider question for systems change: how do radical ideas spread without losing the analysis that made them radical?

What made CWB scalable

The not-so-secret sauce: A shared diagnosis and set of flexible principles

Community wealth building starts from a precise diagnosis: economies that concentrate ownership and decision-making while extracting wealth from communities produce inequality and poor social outcomes. Wealth created locally often leaks out through low pay, insecure work, and extractive contracts. For instance, public care contracts generate enormous private profits, while care workers face low pay and precarious conditions disproportionately affecting women and from ethnic minority backgrounds.

These dynamics are what CWB seeks to change: who owns assets, who captures wealth, where profits flow and how labour power and business models shape outcomes.

CWB draws on a rich history of progressive economic thinking. What makes it distinctive is that it translates analysis into practical, adaptable principles that pre-distribute the benefits of economic activity. Rather than prescribing one model, it offers anchor institutions five levers for changing who owns wealth, who benefits and where money flows:

Plural ownership: Supporting co-operatives, social enterprises, and employee-owned businesses.
Making financial power work locally: Directing capital, municipal investment, and pension funds toward local productive use.
Fair employment: Ensuring anchor institutions offer living wages and good work.
Progressive procurement: Re-routing public spending toward local, social economy suppliers.
Socially productive use of land and assets: Ensuring property and land deliver long-term community benefit.

The journey to scale

Community wealth building shows how local experiments cross borders through iterative learning and adaptation.

Roots – Cleveland, US, mid-2000s:

The Democracy Collaborative convened local stakeholders around the power of government, hospitals and universities to shape local economies by buying from democratic local organisations. This led to the Evergreen Cooperatives, which began with a hospital laundry contract and grew into employee-owned businesses that root jobs and ownership locally.

First UK Adaptation – Preston, England, 2010s:

In the UK, leaders in Preston were working with the Centre for Local Economies (CLES) to find a new way forward for a city hit hard by the financial crisis. They pioneered progressive procurement and integrated learning from Cleveland to develop a broader CWB framework. By redirecting spending to local businesses and supporting cooperatives, Preston’s approach has been associated with improvements in deprivation and mental health and, more recently, with relative resilience on child poverty.

Institutionalisation – Scotland, 2026:

The Government pursued CWB nationally alongside action-plan pilots in five regions. A practitioner network, dedicated officers, local plans, and resources for the third sector gradually created the infrastructure for the Community Wealth Building Act. This work aligned with existing movements and legislation on land reform and community empowerment, and with Scotland’s strong social enterprise sector.

Scotland shows what becomes possible when conditions align and the infrastructure to support it exists. But the Act also reveals the limits of scaling something radical through bigger institutions. It puts CWB on a statutory footing through statements and action plans without rewriting rules on ownership, procurement or employment. Its radical challenge to ownership and power still depends on how those duties are interpreted and implemented.

Three lessons for scaling systems change without diluting

Precisely because CWB is political — as systems change must be — it is hard to scale. Challenging where power sits is difficult, but making that challenge more palatable risks weakening it. Law can give CWB legitimacy and reach; it can also reduce a political-economic project to statements and action plans if ownership, extraction and labour power fall from view. The test is whether institutions change who owns assets, captures wealth and shapes economic decisions.

For social sector leaders pursuing systems change, CWB offers three core strategic lessons:

1. A precise diagnosis paired with adaptable principles:

Cleveland, Preston and Scotland share an analysis of concentrated ownership, extractive wealth flows and weak local economic power.

CWB scales because its principles can be adapted without needing to reproduce the same programme.

2. A combination of scale pathways:

A single route to systems change is fragile. Legislation creates duties and legitimacy; networks spread learning; anchor institutions (like local government, hospitals and universities) redirect resources; and a movement of social sector organisations demonstrates how economies can be organised differently.

Resilience comes from pursuing these pathways together while connecting each to CWB’s analysis of ownership and power.

3. Strategic alliances with aligned partners:

Think tanks, academia, political leaders and social sector organisations have collaborated to build CWB infrastructure and connect it with work on community ownership and empowerment. Scotland’s policy-led approach was sometimes criticised as top-down and at risk of reinventing work the third sector already knew.

Effective scaling requires genuine alliances and a real seat at the table for the social sector.

The role of the social sector

The social sector plays a dual role: it often demonstrates what it looks like to build economies grounded in local strengths and inclusive practice, while CWB challenges it to ask difficult questions about ownership and power. The Scottish Communities Alliance’s CWB series illustrates what community organisations across the nation are already doing to build wealth in their places.

Too often, the social sector is treated as a secondary service provider, picking up the pieces of systemic economic failure.

Yet it is a major economic actor, driving local resilience and preventative approaches that save public resources. It contributes £18.3 billion to the UK economy, employs nearly one million people and creates further value through prevented health costs, volunteer time and restored habitats.

The challenge for the social sector, then, is not only to advocate for a different economy but to help build one through its own choices about ownership, employment, procurement, and investment: who it employs, what it buys, what it owns, where its money goes, and whether its organisational practices distribute or concentrate power.

The real test of whether CWB has scaled successfully is not how widely its language is adopted, but whether it changes where wealth and power actually sit.