#18: Kate McLaven - JRF

This week’s guest is Kate McLaven.Kate is the York Local Lead at Joseph Rowntree Foundation, working on their place based Emerging Futures Team. She is leading local York based work in service of social, economic and climate transition. She also works as a project lead, facilitator and grassroots organiser with Story Of The Changing in York.In this episode we start by giving a bit of background on Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Emerging Futures Team, including what Kate’s role as York local lead involves. We talk about the New Constellations journey, which was a project that JRF funded in 2023, which later became Fieldwork - the action research collective bringing you this podcast.We then talk about how the way we work is just as important as the actual work itself, with JRF taking on the role of Field builder in place based work, and Kate highlights some of the community wealth building projects across the country that are taking over assets and using them to generate community wealth in perpetuity. Finally we chat about what it means to go beyond assets and financial wealth when it comes to placemaking and building community wealth.I hope you enjoy this conversation with Kate, I’m Ben Porter and this is the York Community Wealth Building Podcast, brought to you by Fieldwork. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit wearefieldwork.substack.com