WCA audited accounts
New Boost for Rural Homes Initiatives
Community organisations trying to build affordable homes in the rural towns and villages of Somerset and Dorset are to get valuable business support from a new partnership between Resonance and Wessex Community Assets
Welcome
What we do
Wessex Community Assets (WCA) offers support and advice to organisations wishing to obtain community investment, avoiding reliance on grant funding.
A community benefit society can raise money from a community by issuing shares. WCA has registered 'model rules' with the FSA and can advise on this. 25 organisations have used our model rules to date.
A share offer can finance the purchase of an asset (with an asset lock) for a community and can offer a social and small financial return to investors. This avoids expensive bank loans and demonstrates community engagement to funders.
Within the Wessex group there is extensive knowledge of financing not-for-profit organisations and Wessex Community Assets is currently running a programme of support for community investment in the South West. This programme includes intensive support for four organisations through the community investment process, and the sharing of learning about community investment through events and a web based forum.
In partnership with Resonance, we are also advising on the formation of community land trusts in the Somerset and Dorset area in order to address the chronic shortage of housing in rural communities. see above
Who are we?
Wessex Community Assets is part of the Wessex group www.wessexrt.co.uk
WCA is also on the expert panel of the Office for the Third Sector’s Community Shares project.
We see community investment as a solution to the market’s failure to provide communities with fundamental amenities and affordable housing.
Community benefit societies offer a source of community investment also creates opportunities for community engagement and economic democracy: every member has an equal say in how the money is spent. We also believe that this process creates sustainable communities where top-down regeneration has failed.
People can invest in what they want rather than get what they are given.