Business Planning

It’s 8am on a Friday morning and the draft budget for this year has been signed off. We’ve been so thrifty with the no strings cash investment in the neighbourhood that we might just have enough for a deposit for the first community house. How exciting is that? Yesterday we met with GMCVO to explore Reach funding as part of the Proper Good investment stuff.

We want some help working out the feasibility of the housing and thinking too about the best governance model. We ended up paying some corporation tax this year and we’d like to keep hold of the cash locally if possible in the future. We are also thinking about leaky bucket and community businesses that would keep the cash here locally. 

It feels like we need to shift from the predominant social enterprise model in the town which seems to start with service provision / replacing services that have been cut and then bolting on how to make some cash; to, one that centres – this is how we make the cash and that gives us the freedom to spend it on whatever social purpose we see fit. A really liberating approach.  (thanks to Erika Rushton for that top tip). 

After numerous meetings with GMCVO and talks about the Proper Good monies, our ideas are not well developed enough to qualify and there doesn’t seem to be any cash around that helps with early feasibility. It felt like the proper good programme isn’t proper good for us. Undeterred, we got in touch with our Wigan link to ask how we access some cash for early stage feasibility.  And they might be able to fund it which is great news. If so, we’d like to invite in Jess Steele of Jericho Solutions to coach us. That would be awesome.