6,056 New CICs — and Most of Them Started in a Food Bank Queue

Six thousand and fifty-six new CICs in 2023. That’s a 12% increase on the previous record, set just two years ago. The cumulative register now stands at 28,878. The number of CICs has more than doubled in five years.

But the composition of those new CICs tells a different story than previous years. The pandemic-driven surge of 2020-2021 was about COVID response — food delivery, mutual aid, remote services. The 2023 surge is about something else entirely. It’s about the cost-of-living crisis.

CICs are being formed to run food banks. To provide warm banks. To deliver mental health support to people whose financial stress is overwhelming them. To offer debt advice, benefits guidance, and emergency assistance. The cost-of-living crisis is generating a new wave of community enterprise that’s more urgent, more basic, and more survival-focused than anything we’ve seen before.

The CIC model is proving its adaptability again. When the economic environment changed, communities responded by forming new organisations to meet new needs. The CIC structure, with its low cost of incorporation and flexible operating model, is the vehicle of choice for that response.

But there’s a worrying dimension to this. The CICs being formed now are serving the most basic needs — food, warmth, mental health — in communities that have been systematically underfunded for years. They’re filling gaps that the state should be filling. The fact that they exist is a testament to community resilience. The fact that they need to exist is an indictment of the support system that should have prevented this crisis.

Twenty-eight thousand, eight hundred and seventy-eight CICs. Thirty-eight percent of them were formed in the last three years — in a pandemic and a cost-of-living crisis. The CIC movement has never been tested like this, and it’s rising to the challenge.

The question is whether we can sustain it. Food bank CICs and warm bank CICs don’t have sustainable business models. They depend on donations, grants, and volunteer labour. When those run out, the dissolutions will follow — as they did with the pandemic CICs.

That’s not failure. That’s mission. But it’s a mission that shouldn’t be necessary.