Our client list includes local authorities of all sizes and types across the country, regional development agencies, NDC programmes and central government.
Some of our current projects include:
The special experience available in and around the development trust movement focuses on community regeneration, community assets and community enterprise. The Advancing Assets for Communities programme is funded by the department for Communities and Local Government to work in 110 local areas over four years to 2011. The Development Trusts Association leads the delivery of the programme in partnership with the Local Government Association, Action for Communities in Rural England and Community Matters. The Pool provides consultancy to support local authorities and their community partners to explore the potential of asset transfer.
Website: www.atu.org.uk
The New Deal for Communities (NDC) programme was designed to regenerate some of the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in a sustainable way and to provide the resources to tackle their problems. As the NDC programme reaches the final stages of grant funding, the Pool is supporting CLG to assess the long-term viability of the succession strategies, particularly the safeguarding of assets for local communities and the resilience of business plans to sustain the successor organisations in the longer term.
Website: www.communities.gov.uk/publications/communities/ndcsuccessionstrategies
Community Sector Trading is a learning programme designed and delivered by the Pool to support voluntary and community organisations to understand how they can develop their trading activities to grow and diversify their income streams. It offers a hands-on approach to helping community organisations develop a business idea and think about future planning, exploring in detail how others have succeeded. Community Sector Trading is delivered by the Pool as part of anacevo contract with CapacityBuilders.
Website: www.communityst.co.uk
The Pool leads some of DTA’s most innovative and experimental work. Meanwhile is both a new philosophy and a practical programme of support. The idea of bringing empty shops into use (while we wait to see what happens next) combines efficiency with rescuing ghost-town high streets and boosting community, arts, educational and cultural uses that wave goodbye to the clone-towns we were beginning to worry about. In Germany the planning system deals systematically with meanwhile use as a matter of course. Here we are in the ‘explore, develop and test’ phase – finding out what other people are doing, networking them together, supporting a few early projects and dealing with issues. A specialist legal firm is developing a new Meanwhile Lease, an insurance company is working up a meanwhile insurance product, planning powers have changed so that councils can smooth the way for changes of use in a meanwhile zone, and we’re working up a simple Rates Matrix to make the rules clear. We’re heading for a bigger phase of the project from September onwards. The Pool is working with Meanwhile Space, a specialist community interest company to keep all this happening
Website: www.meanwhile.org.uk, Ning: www.meanwhilespace.ning.com.