Shared Assets is heading into its next era. We have a pipeline of committed work, a real opportunity ahead of us, and a refined focus on our purpose; to act as an action-focussed think and do tank.

We are inviting new leadership to take Shared Assets forward, shaping the organisation in its next steps to deliver a mixture of grant-funded advice and support work, consultancy, action research and peer learning, all supporting new and emerging models of land use for the common good.

Shared Assets was founded in 2011 to support the community management of environmental assets: what we used to call building a ‘21st century commons.’ Over time, that work led us deeper into the systemic issues our partners kept running into: the price of land, the planning system, and the business and governance models available to community groups. This took us into research, policy and convening work on common good land use and land-based social enterprise, and into closer relationships with the emerging land justice movement.

A year ago, Mark Walton, our founder and Executive Director left Shared Assets - marking the end of a long period of transition and organisational change. He worked with us over 14 years, developing Shared Assets from a small consultancy to an infrastructure organisation addressing many issues in the land movement.

Over the last couple of years, we had been deliberately moving away from a traditional director-led structure and experimenting with collective self-management. This process was already well underway when Mark left, and we continued with the new model after his departure, learning through experience what collective self-management meant for Shared Assets in practice. It taught us a great deal, but it hasn't worked as we'd hoped, and a number of our team have decided to move on. Since the spring of 2026, our Non-Executive Directors have stepped in directly to hold existing relationships and funder commitments, steady the organisation, and think carefully with the remaining team about what should happen next.

What we need now is the right person, or people, to step in and deliver that work, and, just as importantly, to lead and reshape the organisation.

There is real momentum for change in the land system: a growing land justice movement, supportive policy developments such as the Land Use Framework and the Community Right to Buy, and new funding coming into community land and assets work. Shared Assets has a track record as a trusted, boundary-spanning actor in this system, good, established internal systems and processes, and a pipeline of agreed work to build on.

Could this be for you, or someone in your network?

An Invitation to Lead Shared Assets CIC: Recruiting our next Executive Director…. or something else?

We're genuinely excited to see what you bring to this. If you can see a future for Shared Assets that we haven't yet imagined, we want to hear about it.