Wealth with nature
Jill Keegan, Scottish Communities Alliance
“As Scotland moves toward embedding Community Wealth Building in law we should remember that communities have been leading this agenda for years. The role of government now is not to reinvent it, but to invest in it.”
The Community Wealth Building (CWB) Bill, currently going through the Scottish Parliament, seeks to transform our local and regional economic systems through legislation, enabling communities to have a greater stake in, access to, and benefit from the wealth our economy generates.
The grassroots approach to the concept of CWB is community-led, practical, local action and opportunities, with a focus on community well-being and reciprocity. This approach is exemplified by community growers in spades. Legislated-for and community-led, these approaches can be complementary in co-designing a future in which the economic delivery model partners with nature to create wealth and abundance.
Community food growing is delivering wealth and, above all, sustenance in communities across Scotland. It’s about us sharing, not necessarily owning our soils; it’s about local people investing their energy and skills in revitalising public spaces, facilitating essential connection to nature, food and one another. This ‘wealth’ fosters resilience and well-being, though it is exhausting for pioneers who take this approach in an economic system that disregards these principles.
When we measure ‘wealth’ in terms of abundance, from investing in the ground beneath our feet, more of us can participate and benefit because every community food project, regardless of size of the land or the group, is wealth building from the ground up; working with soil and sunlight to grow fresh nutritious food, supporting and welcoming pollinators without whom we cannot survive. This culture of partnering with nature in a non-extractive, social-profit way is not naive; it’s fundamental and should form the basis of government policy.
If this sounds like the kind of wealth you would like to see in your community or invest in, please get in touch.
This is Community Wealth Building
Be inspired by the Scottish Communities Alliance series here.