Real-life Tales of Earning - Community Links

Finding your assets, both visible and invisible.

Based in Canning Town Public Hall, East London Community Links is a network of community initiatives working with children, young people and adults learning and developing new ways of tackling the familiar problems of disadvantaged communities since 1977.

Community Links believes that 'we all have the potential to do great things.'

Visible Assets

Community Links' trading activity takes several forms.

It's an excellent example of what turns up when you look really closely at an organisation's assets - visible and invisible - and of developing a sustainable funding mix, a broad base of diversified income streams. It's also a good illustration of being very clear as to when an activity can and cannot generate its own income.

To find out more about the work of Community Links visit their website at www.community-links.org  Or order an Ideas Annual call Richard McEver on 0207 473 2270.

When we started writing this case-study, Community Links were keen to present themselves less as experts than as fellow travellers in the search for a more sustainable funding future. They've learnt lessons along the way not in the fashion of a rocket-scientist or gene-splicer, solving great conundrums though unique insights, but rather by way of trial and error.

Community Links negotiated with the local authority to transfer Canning Town Hall to on a year peppercorn lease on condition that Community Links restore a decaying building within 2 years: if they failed and the restoration was not achieved the property reverted to council control. They made it.

Although the freehold on the building is not owned by Community Links - meaning that it cannot be shown on the balance sheet and used as equity for attracting loan finance - the acquisition has saved significant sums in rent and enabled Community Links to expand significantly the range of services that it provides in the local community.

Visible assets also extend to equipment. A corporate sponsor asked Community Links if it could hire its nursery's bouncy castle for an employee family day. Now the community centre has developed an occasional trading enterprise whereby it sells a complete package to corporate family days: it hires out the bouncy castle and other toys and sends along a couple of young people who have completed a short course as children's entertainers.

Invisible Assets

Beyond the tangible, Community Links has generated considerable revenue from selling a training package developed from its own volunteer training programme to Thames Water. Community Links relies on voluntary action and in building such a wealth of social capital had accumulated a great deal of know-how on training and motivation. A private company values that savvy highly.

"We get results - motivation and team building - from people who aren't paid, which is what interested our sponsor Thames Water," says Community Links' Director, Robinson. "They asked us to run a training programme for them, on the clear understanding that we'd be paid at commercial rates."

That's an example of mission-related trading designed purely to make money for other aspects of the organisation's work. However, other trading activity developed from Community Links's core activity, makes money and advances mission simultaneously.

The "Ideas Annual" has been published for 12 years now. The first edition simply aimed to collate the good ideas that different community groups were putting into practice, and stop them duplicating each other's work. Like many successful publications, it ended up being repeated every year, with focuses on different themes and geographical regions. Priced on a scale of £5-25, the Ideas Annual makes enough money to cover its own costs, freeing up other income.

The "First Steps" training course, which draws on the expertise built up over 21 years of working with community groups, has a similar sliding pricing structure that allows it to pay in part for itself and, by sharing expertise, develop the core aim of tackling the familiar problems of disadvantaged communities.

Some trading activities are designed to make money to help finance other, unrelated initiatives taking place within the organisation; others are developed as a part of a self-financing project furthering core aims.

David Robinson is, however, clear on the balance between making money and sticking to mission, on the extent to which services can be developed as self-financing ventures.

"You have to agree your limits, but sometimes it's O. K. to say there's a social purpose and you'll also make some money," But other potential spin-offs are not an option.

A café, for example, located in the building's spacious front hallway might have been conceived as a means of making money. Instead it's been cast as an extension of core services and Community Links has accepted that its earning potential is restricted.

"We want a café where you can sit over a cup of tea for an hour: we could make a lot more out of a different sort of place, but we don't want that," explains Robinson.

Some places there's money-making potential, others there isn't. In the case of this café, mission and money were hard to combine.

In all instances income generation is an additional source of income, not a replacement for all grant income.

"I'd say we cover about 70 per cent of our costs now, without distorting our original purpose. There'll always be a mix."