Insight #1 - Rethinking Prosperity: Why Real Community Growth Isn’t Always Measured in GDP

For years, I’ve worked in community economic development—supporting places often labelled as “deprived,” “under-performing,” or “left behind.” The policy logic is familiar: equip people with skills, support enterprise, and prosperity will follow. Sensible? On paper, yes. In practice? Not quite.

The reality is that some communities start from a much lower baseline. Expecting them to “catch up” using the same tools as more affluent areas is unrealistic—and unfair. When we apply universal measures of success, we risk labelling communities as failures, even when they’re making real progress. This leads to disenfranchisement, which kills aspiration and ambition. As the saying goes, “Tell a child they’re always naughty, and they’ll live up to the label.”

 Too often, we see deprived or depleted communities as problems to fix. During my PhD research, an elderly man in Walker told me, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” That stuck - What we as professionals see as deficits, communities may see as assets—or quite simply as life.  So what if we flipped the script, stopped asking, “What’s wrong?” and started celebrating “What’s strong?”. – What happens if we were to reframe prosperity?

 Prosperity: What Does it Really Mean?

 Prosperity - “successful, or thriving, good fortune, success, well-being, wealth” – sounds good? But here’s the truth: prosperity isn’t one-size-fits-all, and context matters.  Government policy equates prosperity with traditional economic growth measures - rising GDP, job creation, and infrastructure investment. These are important, yes—but they’re not the whole story. They assume a one-size-fits-all model of success that often fails to reflect the lived realities of diverse communities.  For communities, prosperity isn’t about GDP. It’s about access to quality healthcare, affordable housing, food security, public safety, and belonging. It’s about social cohesion, cultural identity, generational ties and a strong sense of place. These things make a community thrive—even if they don’t appear in economic spreadsheets.  

 The divergence between the government and community contexts creates a disconnect between policy intent and community impact. We miss the deeper story when we measure success only through economic growth. A place may celebrate rising GDP, but that doesn’t mean its people are thriving - many still face inequality and insecurity. This creates a fractured landscape where prosperity is unequal and experienced in profoundly different ways. If the context is not considered, some communities will always be seen to lag behind and never “make the grade” no matter how much progress they make.

 Can Prosperity Exist Without Growth?

 So, the first question is – can prosperity be achieved without conventional growth?

 Yes. In Prosperity Without Growth, Tim Jackson challenges the pursuit of endless economic expansion. He offers a vision for a sustainable, post-growth economy - one that values purpose, well-being, and resilience over profit and scale. His ideas, once radical, are now central to rethinking progress in a post-crisis world. Yet, policy frameworks haven’t fully caught up. So, let’s turn the tables.

 A New Vision for Prosperity

As practitioners, we can fall into the trap of seeing communities as something to “fix” or “make better”.  But do we really understand what “better” means to them? Our perspectives as professionals can differ from those of communities themselves. 

 We must reframe how we think, measure, and act to support real community change. Here’s how:

 Reframe how we “label” communities: If I had to choose a “label” to describe the communities I’ve worked with, I’d choose “depleted” over the more popular label of “deprived”. Depleted communities are those left behind in an uneven landscape of development - often following a period of decline. These formerly thriving places have lost their economic lifeblood when their once strong industries moved out – think the shipyards of Walker to the coalfields of East Durham. While these are communities low in economic prosperity, they are rich in connection, identity, and belonging – socially resilient and strong – an asset that should be celebrated and mobilised but often overlooked.

 Accept communities have different starting point: If we acknowledge a place as depleted, we accept that it may lack the typical infrastructure for economic growth. So, expecting it to perform like a thriving place is unrealistic.  They simply have different starting points.

 Build from strengths and co-design outcomes: You need to understand a community’s capability to flourish and define prosperity goals within their reach. Prosperity should not be a top-down concept. It must be co-created with the community. When communities define what prosperity means to them, we move beyond measures such as GDP. Policy becomes not just a growth tool but a pathway to shared, sustainable well-being.

 Celebrate Success: Some baseline conditions need to be addressed—communities don’t become “traditionally” productive with high-growth businesses overnight, and changes, however small, need to be acknowledged, but seldom are in the same way as metrics such as job creation or percentage turnover growth.

 And more over …

 Invest in social businesses as catalysts of change:  If we’re serious about community prosperity, we must look beyond traditional business models and embrace the social economy - a sector built on purpose, not just profit. From community-owned energy projects to social care cooperatives, social businesses are redefining value. They’re rooted in place, driven by impact, and powered by lean teams, freelancers, and volunteers. They’re not chasing unicorn status - they’re chasing social transformation. Their goals are not transactional, but transformational: tackling child poverty, social isolation, poor health, and educational inequality. These businesses are doing the hard work of building cohesion, inclusion, and resilience - where it’s needed most.

 But here’s the problem…

 Not only are we measuring prosperity as a one-size fits all approach we’re also measuring social business with the wrong tools and outdated metrics like turnover, growth, and job creation which remain the default. These may work for larger traditional businesses—but they miss the mark (by miles) for social enterprises. When policy frameworks rely on these old measures, they risk misrepresenting, undervaluing, or even excluding the very businesses that are driving community-led change. Measuring them by the same standards as say a high-growth tech startup is like comparing apples to pears.  Until we reframe how we measure value, we risk undervaluing or excluding the very organisations driving grassroots change.

 We need a new model. One that captures the true value of the social economy—not just in pounds and pence, but in lives changed, communities strengthened, and futures reimagined. That’s a whole other article—within this 30 to 30 series.

 So what’s the solution?

Einstein purportedly said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” If we want real community prosperity, we must stop repeating the same top-down approaches and outdated metrics. Instead, we must:

Change what we measure: Move beyond GDP. Use indicators like well-being, access to services, and social cohesion.

 Design from the ground up: Co-create prosperity with communities. Small wins matter.

 Redefine what we value: True prosperity is social, cultural, and human—not just economic.

 Embrace the plural economy: Recognise the social economy as a driver of transformational change and raise the baseline for future development.

 In nearly 30 years of working in this field, the same narrow metrics have defined success. But the world has changed—and so must we. It’s time to reframe how we work with communities. Context matters. Impact matters. And the social economy is ready to lead—it just needs to be empowered to do so.