Community Wealth Building, Creating, Resilient, Thriving Communities

With the current poverty crisis and the long term social, economic and environmental impacts brought about by lockdown and the pandemic, the importance of Community Wealth Building and the Climate Emergency emphasised in the Scottish Government’s 2024 Programme for Government makes clear the importance of resilient communities with the ability to deliver services, employment, health care, wellbeing, economic services, environmental benefit and more at a local level. This capacity to deal with the issues that previous economic, infrastructure and social structures left us vulnerable to has created a wealth of opportunity. This has been reflected with £100m Green Jobs Fund launched in 2022, continued investment in the regeneration of communities and town centres, £200m remaining to be invested in Active Travel infrastructure over the final 2 years of a 5 year programme.

With this level of investment available, now is the perfect time for thought leaders and innovators in these fields to share their experiences, knowledge and best-practice with each other and with organisations that are perhaps less experienced in some of these fields.

The topics covered in this event will include:

• Local food production, supply chain and the alleviation of food poverty
• Support for local businesses, buying local and ‘local currency’
• Local energy networks, green energy and heat and the alleviation of fuel poverty
• Economic regeneration, the repurposing of existing space, land and assets to support the new economy and the creation of green jobs
• 20 Minute Neighbourhoods
• Investment and access to funding

This event is an ideal opportunity for all those involved in the future of our communities, economy, environment, social regeneration, economic regeneration, public health, the supply chain, infrastructure and more, including local and national government officers, elected representatives at local and national level, private sector organisations, community organisations, housing associations, charities, social enterprises, government agencies, representative bodies and membership organisations among others to engage with other thought leaders and potential partners that can help forge solutions to the challenges we currently face.

Below you will find the event agenda, which will be updated regularly.

Event Agenda:

14:00 Opening Remarks from the Chair

14:10 Plenary sessions

• Understanding the importance of community empowerment - Annoushka Dayton, Right Here
• Planning resilient places – Petra Biberbach, Biberbach Consultancy
• Retrofitting for the future of our communities – Prof Lori McElroy, Professor of Smart, Resilient Cities, University of Strathclyde
• Fina​ncial inclusion in our communities - Jim Garrity, Operations Manager, Pollock Credit Union
• Creating affordable local energy and heat - Community Energy Scotland representative
• The importance of the social economy
• Inclusive housing for thriving communities - Jill Dyson-Fyffe, Senior Housing Options Broker, Housing Options Scotland

16:50 Closing Remarks from the Chair

17:00 Close

• As per today's marketing email, please use the Promo Code Friday ( which is case sensetive, to receive a further discount, reducing your ticket cost to just £25.

There are a limited number of Early Bird tickets available for this event for just £40 (reduced from a full rate of £60). These will be served on a first -come-first-served basis, so we recommend booking early if you don't want to miss out.

We hope you can make it.