What community businesses can tell us about business in the post-COVID world
Expectations of businesses are changing — people want to see how businesses support their communities and contribute to making the world a better place. Community businesses should be recognised as leading examples for what modern and responsible businesses can look like.
What community businesses are learning from their challenges in the COVID-19 crisis provide incredible insights about a business’ role within communities.
This article explores 3 lessons from community businesses on being a sustainable business that provides value to a community:
- Building genuine ties with a community creates vested interest on both sides — where the community’s issues become the business’s issues and the other way around
- Being accountable to a community creates resilience, as it forces you to think differently and find ways to be truly inclusive
- Focusing on relationships with the community allows you to be innovative and adaptable with how you deliver on your vision
In the post-COVID world, businesses will need to discover how they can unlearn some traditional business advice and instead focus on how they can become integral part of communities, be open, and experiment with models that are going to support community needs.
THE BUSINESS LANDSCAPE BEFORE THE PANDEMIC
In August 2019, the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs of America’s leading companies, issued a statement redefining corporate purpose. The new definition goes beyond increasing shareholder value to also include delivering value to customers, investing in employees, dealing fairly and ethically with suppliers, and supporting the communities in which they work. The Business Roundtable initiative followed the widely publicized letter from Larry Fink, Blackrock CEO emphasizing an inextricable link between profit and purpose and noting “as divisions continue to deepen, companies must demonstrate their commitment to the countries, regions, and communities where they operate.”
This is in line with the rise of Certified B Corporations — businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose. There are now 2,500 Certified B Corporations in more than 50 countries, and more joining this movement every day.
The shift to balancing profit and purpose, going from shareholder accountability to stakeholder accountability, and putting an emphasis on participation in communities are becoming business imperatives.
ENTER COVID-19
In her essay, The Pandemic is a Portal, Arundhati Roy explains that pandemics force us to think the world anew.
There is endless speculation about what the future will look like after the pandemic, but one relevant forecast emerging is that with disruption in travel and supply chains, there will be a greater emphasis on local economies.
With many businesses under existential threat and trying to change so they can better fulfill their roles in communities and society, they should be looking to build mutually beneficial relationships with experienced community businesses to learn from them about connecting to their own communities and customers.
LOOKING AT COMMUNITY BUSINESSES
According to Power to Change, an independent charitable trust that supports and develops community businesses in England:
Community businesses can be shops, farms, pubs or call centres, among many other types of business. What they all have in common is that they are locally rooted and traded, are accountable to their community, and that the profits they generate deliver positive local impact.
Community businesses and the people who work and volunteer for them have been building ties within their localities and discovering how to make a difference for years. But as they are often small, operate with hybrid models, and are busy figuring out how to do their work; their knowledge of creating positive community impact hasn’t quite translated into the commercial business landscape — to the detriment of everyone.
As a Trustee of a trust which manages the Upper Norwood Library Hub, I have first-hand experience of how community businesses can promote economic and social resilience, create and deliver services which make a difference to peoples lives, and reach people many traditionally fail to engage. In this role, I recently attended the School of Social Entrepreneurs Community Business Trade-Up Programme class on Purpose, Mission, Vision and Values led by Bev Morton with other community businesses in the cohort.
Throughout the class, some common themes began to emerge. The questions many community businesses are grappling with in COVID-19 are:
What is a community? How do you define your ties to it and role within it? How do you create a vision of positive local impact regardless of how your activities are delivered?
The responses to these challenges and the experiences of community businesses are incredibly relevant to any business that wants to be more community-focused.
LESSONS
Building genuine ties with a community creates vested interest on both sides — where the community’s issues become the business’s issues and the other way around
What successful community businesses do to build ties with their community that commercial businesses can learn from:
- Intentionally get to know the people in the community and find out about other organisations in the area
- Set out how and what you contribute to the community and find ways to communicate activities in an open and inviting way
- Involve the local community in planning and creating products and services
- Encourage local residents to be part of the offer and part of creating positive change locally
- Actively look for opportunities to collaborate and be generous with time and resources
- Critically challenge the norm — disruptive, but for the common good
- Generally, be open and supportive players in the community
When businesses do this, especially when everything is going well, they create reciprocal relationships with the people in the community. This means the community’s issues become the businesses issues — and when a business is active in solving community issues, the community can become active in helping to sustain a business.
This is visibly translated into an online and national context with the #PayitForward scheme with Crowdfunder and Enterprise Nation. Crowdfunder is providing the tech and tools for small UK businesses to pre-sell their goods or services — allowing people to pay for future activities and community businesses to stay afloat. The support for community businesses on this platform has been incredible, with £6,392,049 from 111,833 supporters going towards 1,538 community businesses.
One example of a conventional business who has successfully adopted the community business value of forming close links with their community is The Grand in Clapham. Using this scheme, they reached out to past attendees of their epic shows and at the time of writing had raised £20,000 of their £50,000 target. They write; “We’ve been your home for over 120 years, but due to Covid-19 we may never reopen… We are a truly magical place, we are a silly place, we are the place you go to laugh and dance your troubles away. You’ve made friends for life here, got engaged here, some of you have even got married here!”. Businesses with relationships are asking people in their community to help, and people are responding.
But how do you do this in an online world, where your business isn’t based in a physical location? In COVID, community businesses who no longer have buildings to operate out of have gone online — along with everyone else. Suddenly, every type of content creator and event manager on the planet are hosting virtual meetings of every kind, and people are spoiled for choice on what they want to pay attention to. But many people are choosing to tap into businesses that are helping them to create the same feeling of community they had before.
In the early days of the pandemic, Upper Norwood Library Hub began to livestream some of its arts and culture programming run by local artists who needed new ways to share their business. People were feeling lonely and needed connection, and people who knew the library began to tune in and tag their friends to spread the word. The streams regularly get over 20k viewers with purely organic marketing. Now, not only are people regularly engaging but they’re building new relationships across the community through the library. And they’ve been responding to fundraising asks, helping the library to continue to survive and prepare for the uncertain future. This was because the library communicated and gave space to volunteers and artists in a way that made it clear it could be trusted to be a source of comfort and community when people needed it most.
Community businesses are intuitively forming meaningful relationships between their community members online, which are helping them to cut through all of the increased digital noise.
And they are responding to issues their communities are facing — divisions of wealth, income, race and respect, to name a few. These are global issues that are playing out on the local level, and businesses that are active in helping to address them are more likely to earn goodwill and be able to count on others when facing their own challenges.
Being accountable to a community creates resilience, as it forces you to think differently and find ways to be truly inclusive
If not post codes, then how do you define community? In COVID-19, many community businesses had to ask themselves this question. Community becomes based on people with shared interests and a shared vision of how the world could be.
In most communities, you can have any manner of people of varying circumstance and demographics who will want or need your services and fit into that definition.
Traditional business advice, especially for marketing, is to ‘narrow and clearly define your audience’. But in community businesses, in order to survive you need to be creating something that’s for everyone in your community. And this means you need to grapple with how you can be truly inclusive.
Watershed in Bristol has always taken inclusion seriously, having many conversations about how they can create a welcoming environment and ensure their organisation is representative of society. Some of this is evident in how they’ve designed their space, working hard to make their cinema accessible and to be inviting at their Pervasive Media Studio by creating a welcome video and commissioning murals for the Studio walls to represent a visibly diverse range of Studio residents. Jo Landsdowne at Watershed stresses that they aren’t always getting it right — an acknowledgement they echo in their recent Black Lives Matter statement, saying “we recognise that there are times when we have fallen short of our values, and times when we haven’t acknowledged and understood the labour and toll that doing our inclusion work has taken on people of colour.”
With the conversation happening across the world about race through the #BlackLivesMatter movement, businesses would do well to take note of how community businesses have responded and how they’ve attempted to adapt their environments and their services for everyone in a community. No one is quite ‘getting it right’, but those who have been open in their attempts and who have actively tried to build inclusivity into their business offerings are more resilient.
‘Resiliency’ is one of the big words being used right now. The way to create a resilient business is to have a clear vision, an understanding of the positive impact you intend to have, and designing a business, products, or services for everyone. Community businesses and commercial businesses have a lot to learn from each other on all of these points.
Focusing on relationships with the community allows you to be innovative and adaptable with how you deliver on your vision
A regular part of the day for anyone operating a community business is to have a conversation with someone in the community. These conversations are not usually profound; they’re not market research, they’re not transactional.
Merely by being available for people and engaging with them on a daily basis, community businesses have a natural and authentic immersion in many parts of the community, and that means they’re able to build a dynamic picture of the needs of the community faster.
This is coupled with the fact that community businesses often have the freedom and autonomy to experiment — which means when they have a sense there’s a need in the community that isn’t being fulfilled, they can respond by finding new ways to fill that need.
The people who run community businesses are some of the most creative business operators — they are constantly adapting to changing circumstances with new activities while still staying true to their purpose of positive local impact.
For example, when looking to organise Mutual Aid in response to COVID, Anne Redelinghuys from the Hornbeam Centre and Cafe in Walthamstow says their centre was the first place the local authority turned to. The Hornbeam has a vision of being a place where people are empowered about environmental issues and learn about low cost living. Food rescue had always at the heart of the Hornbeam — before the pandemic volunteers would cook rescued food and deliver it on bicycles to other local organisations in need. For the COVID response, they converted this idea to a food distribution centre, which has allowed them to fast track one of their goals of making people more aware of food supply chains and their connection to the climate crisis. The support of the councils and volunteers has helped them to create a kit for ‘How to Start a Food Hub’ and they’re using it to empower other local organisations to build their own low-cost living food rescue programmes.
Being linked directly to their community’s needs allow community businesses the flexibility and adaptability they need to respond to events with new activities that still achieve their vision.
Adaptable businesses recognise the value of space for their people on-the-ground to chat, and give autonomy to propose ideas in response to community needs. As Anne says, empowerment and making people feel as though they are making a difference is the key to achieving change and sustaining a venture.
CONCLUSION
Community businesses have a lot of expertise to offer — commercial businesses would be wise to use some of their budgets to engage with them to learn, build alliances, and find common purpose around creating positive local impact where you do business.
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Special thanks to Power to Change, the School for Social Entrepreneurs, the Hornbeam, the Upper Norwood Library Hub, Watershed, Lucy Hawthorne, and the Trade Up Cohort for your time and support in writing this article!
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Sam Brown is a business coach and the co-founder of Consequential, a community interest company which supports people who invest, accelerate, and scale digital and emerging technologies to build their own responsible innovation practices. Prior to that, she led the programme on responsible innovation at Doteveryone -the responsible technology think tank- and was a senior business management partner in financial technology, supporting massive transformations from waterfall to agile and collaborating with executives and product teams to deliver award-winning online experiences.
Twitter: @SamCatBrown | LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-brown-67613225/
