We held a launch event, ‘Rethinking our Local Economy’ with leaders from Lambeth’s community networks, business, Lambeth College, Lambeth Living, and Lambeth Coop Council. The project explored how money flows into the area and then how nearly all of it flows straight out again, like a leaky bucket. It then looked at how we might start to plug the leaks and start to keep more value in the borough, in terms of money, resources, people’s time, skill and knowledge. The ‘Local Multiplier Effect’ means that money that is spent locally with independent local businesses brings between two and fourtimes more value to local people than money that escapes out through large chains and corporates.
We produced two reports on the real benefits of localising the food and the energy economies. They can be downloaded here.
We hosted a programme working with local Transition entrepreneurs culminating in 2015 in the first Local Entrepreneur Forum to be held outside Totnes. See a short film here:
The Lambeth REconomy Project led to the setting up of Open Projects Nights, a free facilitated weekly space for social enterprise and community organising, to help further develop projects and ideas for a new economy for the local community.
Special events included ‘Local Food is Growing’ in 2016 and ‘Local Food is the Business’ in 2017 where local food enterprises and entrepreneurs presented their projects and ideas and attendees discussed how to support them and meet the challenges in moving towards a local food system that supplies real local needs.
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