From Third Sector Online
A support service to help communities take ownership of their resources was launched last week by the Department for Communities and Local Government.
The Community Shares Unit, which will have a budget of £590,000 over three years, will be run by Co-operatives UK, a trade body that promotes cooperative enterprises, with support from Locality, the network for community-led organisations.
The unit will support the use of community shares and bonds, which allow large numbers of people to invest small amounts of capital in local projects without the costly regulation involved in a standard share issue.
Community share issues have increasingly been used to take over ownership of local resources, such as shops, pubs and sports clubs, as well as to set up green energy projects.
A good idea for Canada too? We could build on the expertise of the Centre for Social Innovation with their community bonds.
The Home Safe documentary film is a powerful educational resource on the realities of homelessness in Canada. With World Homelessness Day coming up on Oct 10th and the International Day for the Elimination of Poverty on Oct 17th, now is the perfect time to host a screening and spark a community dialogue about homelessness and housing issues. 
Chains have little need for local goods and services, and keep local labor costs to a minimum. Most of the revenue that these stores and restaurants capture leaves the community.
One in six Americans now lives in poverty — the highest level in half a century. Poverty has spread beyond cities to suburbs and rural communities and is being transferred from one generation to the next. At the same time, we know more about what it takes to build vibrant communities and to help people lead healthy, productive lives. We also know that expanding access to affordable housing, good schools, transportation, jobs, and even supermarkets and parks, can mean better health and life outcomes for people and revitalize whole communities.
Accelerating Impact, a report prepared by E.T. Jackson and Associates and commissioned by The Rockefeller Foundation as part of a third-party evaluation of our Impact Investing initiative, provides one of the most recent and comprehensive scans of the global impact investing industry to date. The research is informed in part by insights from interviews with more than 100 impact investing leaders from 11 countries.
The Canadian Homelessness Research Network has developed a definition and typology of homelessness intended to improve understanding, measurement and responses to homelessness in Canada. According to the definition, “The problem of homelessness and housing exclusion refers to the failure of society to ensure that adequate systems, funding and support are in place so that all people, even in crisis situations, have access to housing.”
On June 6, 2012 the Canadian CED Network teamed up with the Social Purpose Enterprise Network (SPEN) to take over thirty participants on a social purpose enterprise tour around the Greater Toronto Area. Visiting these diverse enterprises across the city truly illustrated that business can be done differently! The tour included visits to five social purpose enterprises including 
