COMMON GROUND

Too often, the spaces that bind communities together are treated as expendable.
Pubs are gutted for profit. Halls fall into disrepair. High streets hollow out into sameness or vacancy. When a building is boarded up, it is not just timber and plaster that’s lost, it is memory, gathering, and shared life.

Common Ground exists to resist this dispossession.

We campaign for places to be held in common and stewarded for long-term social life rather than short-term private gain. Each building we protect is a refusal to accept that our commons must be stripped away. Each space we revive is an act of kinship with place.

But saving buildings is only part of the work.

For places to remain alive, the people who inhabit them must be able to stay.

Across the UK, those doing work that sustains wellbeing care, creativity, learning, food, culture, reflection, repair are pushed out by rising rents, short leases, and extractive commercial models. The result is burnout for workers, loss for communities, and streets emptied of meaning.

This is where equity credit comes in. 

Rather than paying rent that disappears into extraction, people operating within Common Ground spaces participate through a membership-based equity credit system.

Membership contributions service the building’s mortgage and essential costs. Over time, these contributions are recorded as equity credits, accumulating collectively rather than individually. Equity credits are not speculative and cannot be sold or cashed out. They represent stewardship, responsibility, and shared governance not private profit.

As equity credits accrue, ownership of the building gradually transfers into the hands of the people who use and care for it. When a building is fully owned, extractive rent is removed entirely. Contributions then support maintenance, accessibility, shared services, and the creation of future community-owned spaces.

Ownership becomes a foundation for solidarity, not enclosure.

Common Ground exists for people whose work sustains life but is rarely supported by the structures around it.

We prioritise access for those systematically excluded from secure space and ownership: people from low-income or asset-poor backgrounds; women and carers; racialised and migrant communities; disabled people and those with fluctuating capacity; LGBTQ+ people; and younger founders without inherited advantage.

These are the people most likely to be pushed out by rising rents and precarious leases and the people most likely to offer work that nourishes communities, restores culture, and builds real resilience when given stable ground to stand on.

Our commitment is not to charity, but to structural belonging: creating conditions where people can remain, contribute, and steward place over time.

By pairing community stewardship of buildings with an equity credit model, Common Ground creates impact on multiple levels at once.

It enables marginalised people to build long-term collective ownership without debt.
It regenerates neglected community assets and declining high-street units, bringing them back into shared use.

It stabilises work rooted in care, culture, learning, and creativity work that sustains wellbeing but is usually priced out.

And it keeps value circulating locally, strengthening community wealth rather than extracting it.

The result is not just saved buildings, but living places: resilient, rooted, and accountable to the communities they serve.

When people have secure ground beneath their work, everything changes.
Care deepens. Craft improves. Relationships form. Places regain their soul.

Common Ground is not just about saving buildings. It is about restoring the conditions for shared life where people and places can mature together over time, and where the commons are once again something we belong to, not something we lose.