Originally written by Meaghan Burkett, posted in LinkedIn.
The Bellingen Shire community is diving into Place Based Capital — learning how to take greater control over the capital that shapes their daily lives and future.
This is part of a hands-on, participatory learning series designed to equip Bellingen Shire locals and organisations with practical knowledge and tools to influence the flows, forms and functions of local capital to their benefit including both financial capital (like income, revenue and funding) and capital assets (like land, buildings, infrastructure, enterprises and natural resources).
Their reasons for exploring Place Based Capital are real and deeply important — from tackling the housing crisis and rising cost of living to addressing growing inequity and ensuring a fairer and more resilient future for everyone.
Over the past two months, locals from across the Shire have been coming together to learn about how place based and community-led capital works and how they can use these approaches to meet their community’s needs.
They are building capacity in critical functional areas including determining capital needs and aspirations, generating capital, accessing capital, acquiring and owning capital, governing capital, investing capital, pooling capital, using capital and re-distributing capital.
They’ve started mapping capital flows, forms and functions — and in our last session, we explored four big areas of potential:
💰 Generating more capital locally – through household income, funding, business revenue and shared assets
🏢 Owning commercial property – rethinking how they can better use and own commercial property to benefit the community
⚡ Providing renewable energy – building community-owned systems that return value to them
🌐 Building whole-of-place capital systems – connecting all the dots for long-term resilience
It’s early days, but there’s so much energy in the room.
Next up: they’ll focus on solutions — how we can turn ideas into action and unlock new models of community wealth and resilience.
Huge thanks to everyone in Bellingen who’s showing up, sharing ideas, and helping shape a stronger future — and to the Bellingen Housing Matters Action Group, especially Rose and Kerry P., for hosting the sessions.