Project: Community Shares E-course
City: Brighton   Grant: £25,000

The Community Shares Company (TCSC) provides specialist advisory services to community groups seeking to raise capital through community share offerings. TCSC has helped more than 25 groups raise over £5.5m in the last 4 years.

TCSC will develop online e-learning courses to build the knowledge and skills of communities to carry out community share offerings. The project is designed with volunteer community members in mind, providing readily accessible information, available 24 hours/day, to multiple group members in remote locations. The programme provides access to peer support, and creates a learning forum, with periodic access to expert advisors to give groups confidence in the decisions they are making.

The project will provide community groups with cost effective, up to date expert advice about community shares, giving a greater chance of success in the fund raising and transfer of assets to community ownership. Ideally this will grow the market and better disseminate knowledge about community shares, allowing expansion of this positive form of social finance. Delivering content via online classrooms should open up the potential of share issues to a younger, more economically and ethnically diverse generation of community activists.