We create social enterprise communities where people connect and thrive
We create and support social enterprises which reinvest profits into their local communities through higher pay, community events and giving away free goods. Our local hubs nurture enterprise and human connection through our culture of optimism, hard work, diversity, tolerance and forgiveness. Together, people can thrive, make their ideas reality, and work towards a fairer and more resilient future.
Brimscombe Mill
The current site of the Stroud Grace Network hub, open since 2015, hosting our retail businesses.
Download our Brimscombe Mill social impact report here.
Cirencester
The Cirencester Grace Network hub, opening in 2024.
Aston Down
The Aston Down Grace Network hub, based in Minchinhampton, operating our non-retail businesses.
Download our Aston Down social impact report here.
Our Brands
Our mission
We’re re-imagining the economy. We believe that together, we can model a new way of doing business that not only provides money and resources, but also nurtures health, happiness, community, and spiritual wellbeing, and centres the needs of the most marginalised.
Our Model
The Grace Network takes over large buildings and moves in social enterprises. All the enterprises on site are part owned directly by the wider Grace Network, and part owned by the local enterprise community hub. This means we share the intellectual property, risk and development of ideas throughout the network, whilst ensuring that the local hub has direct control of the businesses within its own space. We then provide jobs, products and charitable goods through the incomes of the trading companies.
Our Monastery Principles
Our monasteries are built around some basic principles that we have been developing and honing over the past eight years. Through a process of trial and error, we have learned how to do economic and community development in way that is repeatable and explainable. It is a blueprint for changing our community, one space at a time.
Place-based
Each hub is rooted in a geographic community. It doesn’t have to worry about other places, but focuses on the here and near. This allows the hub’s people to focus on delivering change in the place they can influence- their own community.
Economic engine
Each hub, once fully launched, is self sufficient. This gives its staff control, agency and self determination. The extra profits are all returned to the community, helping to make real our Luke 4 vision of a fairer, healthier economy.
Blended community
Each hub is a mix of different people: left and right, spiritual and secular, well and ill, intellectuals and learners, artists and engineers, young and old. This diversity is an asset, making us stronger than a group made of just one type of person.
Individual and community development together
Our hubs create an environment which fosters both personal and collective development. When we combine individual self actualisation with collective support and communal goals, we create the potential for world changing activity.
