Starting Point Community Learning Partnership (Stockport)

Starting Point is a Stockport based social enterprise which uses enterprise (catering) to fund and provide a base for community activity. The focus of the enterprise is individual and community learning, including digital literacy, financial resilience and wellness, but since 2013 community organising has provided an underpinning ethos and approach to everything that Starting Point does, seamlessly integrating the enterprise and community work. The organisation is both a Social Action Hub and an Affiliated Training Provider able to deliver quality assured course in community organising.

Starting Point aims to work in three specific communities in Stockport over a three-year period starting from the existing Starting Point coffee shop in Woodley as the first hub, then moving out to a new hub in Stockport town centre with a third opening in Adswood. The aim is to use these social businesses as an anchor for community action. The new town centre site was once the home of The Radical Stockport Union For The Promotion Of Human Happiness who marched to Peterloo to fight for universal suffrage. Starting Point hope this Social Action Hub will be a place for people to come to, share their hopes and concerns and bring about action (radical or otherwise).