Community Sector Trading

This course aims to support voluntary and community organisations to develop their trading activities. The headline outcome of the course would be an enhanced capacity for community and voluntary sector organisations to develop successful “pitches” for investment to develop specific trading activities. Basically it is a hands-on approach to helping you develop a business idea, thinking about future planning, and looking at how others have succeeded in starting to make money and using their experience to learn from.

We have invited a number of groups to create a short film about their business as well as some business planning tools and we will look at these and discuss them in the fortnightly on-line sessions with the course participants to demonstrate transferable skills and approaches.

We think that this peer-to-peer learning is an important source of support for community and voluntary groups and we hope that they can get a lot of good advice and help from the successful ideas that we can show them.

The course itself is free, however, as with our pilot last year, we anticipate that there will be more people applying than we have places for. In this light, we ask the applicants to complete an 'expression of interest' form to help us sift through those who apply. We ask for a refundable deposit of £100. Although we do have an initial residential in London at the beginning of the course, the rest of the learning is held on-line to minimise travel costs and time.

Expression of Interest Form

Community Sector Trading Flyer