Our Oakfield Terrace Partners: August 2023
This month, we want to shout about the amazing partners who are helping us make our Oakfield Terrace scheme a reality. Each expert in their respective fields, these partners are essential in delivering the community's shared vision.
Although we need the support of these partners to make it possible, the Oakfield Terrace scheme will always be by the community, for the community. Once the development is completed, the CLT will ‘buy it back’ – through a combination of community-owned shares, loan and grant funding. We have already secured some of this funding from the National Lottery Community Fund, which will be available when we reach practical completion of the scheme, and we will launch a community share offer to allow local people to become co-owners with us.
Your Housing Group (YHG) is our development partner on the Oakfield Terrace scheme. Having a development partner is one of the ways community land trusts can deliver housing projects, whilst learning from them along the way. After a competitive tender process, we selected YHG because of their knowledge and experience of delivering homes in the Anfield area. They are currently nearing the end of their assessment of the increased costs of the scheme and finalising the support needed from Homes England.
Penny Lane Builders (PLB) have been providing construction and renovation services for social housing clients for more than 20 years. They will lead on the construction of the scheme, and were chosen because of their strong commitment to social value: investing in the communities in which they work by employing local labour. While we wait to start on site, the team at PLB have been supporting the recosting of the scheme to make it viable, despite cost increases across the construction industry.
Based in the Baltic Triangle, Wordscape are an award-winning team of writers, listeners, doers and thinkers, who have supported Homebaked CLT for many years to share our story locally, nationally and internationally. With a commitment to supporting local organisations in our community, Wordscape are helping us prepare to launch our community share offer, which will offer local people the opportunity to become co-owners of Oakfield Terrace.
We are also working with Andy Woodcock and Dave Boyle: specialists in the field of community shares, to help us develop a robust and attractive offer to facilitate the buy-back of the Oakfield Terrace development.
Andy Woodcock is an experienced ecological community entrepreneur with a speciality in housing co‑ops, land trusts, community ownership and worker co‑ops that have an ecological or sustainability focus.
Dave Boyle is an expert in Community Shares, and has worked with over 100 voluntary community sector enterprises like Homebaked CLT, including community-run pubs, shops, and recreation facilities.