“You’re regularly told that ‘this bus has changed my life’.”

Drew Smart is one of the founders and Chairman of the Glenfarg Community Transport Group (GCTG). He’s speaking from the front seat of one of the nine community buses the group now own and run, a sight that would have seemed unlikely only a few years ago.

For decades, the story of Glenfarg felt like one of slow, managed decline. Once a bustling stop on the Great North Road, the Perthshire village was bypassed by the M90 in the 1970s. One by one, the railway station, hotels, library, post office and pub closed their doors. When the last commercial bus service was withdrawn for the second time in three years, it felt like a decisive blow.

“People in the village were feeling a bit down in the dumps,” explains Douglas Fraser, co-founder and Trustee of GCTG. “There was an air of inevitability that things and services were just going to be withdrawn.”

For a community with an ageing population, this wasn’t an inconvenience, it was an existential threat. As older residents lost their licences, many found themselves cut off from essential services like healthcare or just being able to go out shopping. “You had isolated people who were stuck in their houses,” says Douglas. “They were losing their independence and were moving out of the village.”

The community takes the wheel

In 2023, residents decided to act. They set up Glenfarg Community Transport Group with the aim of making a local bus service accessible to everyone. The group started with a borrowed 16-seater minibus and a £100 grant to cover the fuel.

What followed was remarkable. Within just two years, GCTG had built a full-scale, professionally run bus service operated entirely by the community. It now runs nine buses, employs 26 local drivers, and enables more than 2,100 passenger journeys every week.

Their two core routes – the 55 and 23 – provide a reliable, hourly service linking Glenfarg to Kinross, Perth and Tillicoultry. They have become a vital link in the local transport ecosystem, connecting with national services at the Kinross Park & Ride. Running from 7am to 7pm, six days a week, it gives residents something they hadn’t had for years: a reliable service they can depend on.

The group also responds directly to community requests and changing needs. Volunteer bus drivers run social trips to museums, shopping centres and concerts, and provide an affordable school bus service.

For GCTG, it’s not about running a bus service, but a people service. As Drew puts it: “We’re not really about buses and we’re not about numbers. It’s really the stories that are behind those buses and the numbers”. Older residents who feared they would have to leave the village can now get around and not have to leave their homes. Young people can travel independently, getting to school and sports clubs.

But it is in the daily journeys that the community bus service reveals its soul. Drivers are local, and they know their passengers by name. Every journey brings its own quiet acts of care.

“They’re not just bus drivers,” says Drew. “They’re friends and they’re social workers, occasionally we have a singing bus driver. They’ll chat and watch out for people. If people aren’t on the bus or if they haven’t seen somebody for two or three days, they’ll be looking out for them.”

Smiling, driver George Hutt adds: “I like the community spirit. People talk to each other, not like on the big buses. For the older people it might be the only other people they’ve spoken to all day. Sometimes it’s very quiet, other times it’s like a party.”

Building community wealth

This is Community Wealth Building in practice.

It stands in stark contrast to commercial models. The previous commercial service sent profits to shareholders outside the area; when those profits weren’t high enough, the service was cut, risking the viability of the community itself.

Glenfarg’s community bus service turns that around, starting with investing in the viability of the community. It is designed, owned and operated by the local community, for the community.

Money spent on the service is directly reinvested into the community’s economy, paying local drivers, renting the village hall and the local bus garage, providing a vital income stream for other community assets. It is a powerful example of a circular economy, creating “a virtuous cycle rather than a vicious cycle”, says Drew.

But Community Wealth Building is about more than money, and this community bus service delivers more than passengers. It is delivering social wealth, strengthening relationships, reducing isolation, and a renewed sense of agency.

Its success has challenged the “inevitability of decline” that had plagued Glenfarg for decades. By proving that the community could successfully run a complex, professional service, it restored a sense of confidence, possibility, and hope. This newfound belief has become a catalyst for wider regeneration, inspiring other community-led efforts to save the local shop and even build a new pub. As Drew says: “We’ve shown that we can do it.”

The network behind the success

GCTG are clear that they couldn’t have done this alone. They credit the Community Transport Association (CTA) as key to their success, giving them the knowledge, guidance and connections they needed at the start.

“One of the main catalysts for our success was being put in touch with the Community Transport Association,” says Drew. A CTA conference in Perth proved “game-changing”, linking the fledgling group with funders, regulatory experts and a mentor organisation – Community Transport Glasgow – who helped guide them through their early decisions.

CTA is a national charity supporting hundreds of similar organisations, providing the essential behind-the-scenes infrastructure that turns motivated and passionate community efforts into professional, sustainable services. They provide toolkits on complex licensing, advice on funding, connections to other operators, and advocacy at national level.

“Community transport is one of the clearest examples of Community Wealth Building in action.” says David Kelly, Scotland Director/Head of Policy and Campaigns at CTA. “When a community runs its own buses, the money stays local – it pays local drivers, builds local skills and supports the community’s own priorities, not a shareholder somewhere else.”

For Glenfarg, the support was transformative. As Drew recalls, “joining CTA was probably the best bit of advice that we were given.” With CTA’s guidance, GCTG developed the capacity to launch a legally compliant, fully scheduled bus service in just six months – a timeframe their local council believed was impossible.

Fragility beneath the success

Despite its success, the entire operation – now an essential piece of local infrastructure – is built on a precarious foundation of one-year contracts and grant funding.

“At the moment we have a one-year contract,” explains Douglas. “It could just take a change in the political wind out there, that could disappear and all of a sudden we would be out on our backside.”

This instability prevents long-term planning. Without multi-year agreements, they cannot secure loans to invest in new vehicles. Bureaucracy adds further strain: a minor timetable change can take three months to approve, and funding for electric buses often exists without the necessary funding for the charging infrastructure required to run them.

A moment of national change

As the Scottish Parliament considers the Community Wealth Building Bill, GCTG’s experience offers a real-world case study of what the legislation could mean in practice. The Bill aims to embed approaches that keep wealth and decision-making local. For groups like GCTG, this could open the door to more supportive partnerships with public bodies and more consistent funding.

As David Kelly puts it: “If the Community Wealth Bill is going to mean anything, public sector bodies need to partner with community transport. Right now groups are filling gaps that statutory services can’t reach – but they’re doing it on short-term funding and goodwill. With proper long-term investment, the impact could be transformational.”

A model for Scotland’s future

Glenfarg is a local success story. But it is more than that. It is a powerful argument for systemic change. Their routes now carry more than twenty times the passengers delivered by the previous commercial operator, for the same public subsidy. And they deliver social, economic and community benefits far beyond traditional transport metrics. 

They are proving every day that community-led services can not only replace withdrawn commercial routes but outperform them, and help rebuild the fabric of a place.

To secure this future, they need more than just praise; they need to be valued, given recognition, stability, and the ability to plan. “We need recognition that community transport is here to stay and is a viable contribution to the public transport delivery in Scotland,” says Douglas.

For Drew, the ambition goes even further. “I would like to see it being a mandated right that rural communities had a public transport system,” he says. “That all communities should have access to some form of regular public transport.”

In Glenfarg, the buses don’t just get people from A to B. They deliver confidence, connection and hope. They show, in the clearest terms, how communities can take control of essential services and create a different future: one where viability is measured not in shareholder profit, but in community wellbeing, resilience and pride.

Read more from our series This is Community Wealth Building and what we’re calling for to support Community Wealth Building across Scotland.

Approaching the wind-buffeted island of Tiree after a four-hour ferry journey, visitors and residents alike are greeted by the sight of Tilley – the community-owned wind turbine that rises fifty metres above the Atlantic. More than a landmark, Tilley has become a symbol of what happens when a community takes its future into its own hands.

“We are very lucky,” says Phyl Meyer, Chief Officer of Tiree Community Development Trust (Urras Thiriodh). “We’ve got a wind turbine right now that is providing the vast majority of funding, which allows my staff and I to be here to do all of these things and to professionally run projects and services.” 

Like many rural and island communities, Tiree’s population has been declining for many years, as people move to the mainland to look for jobs, housing and other opportunities they couldn’t find on the island. Local people became increasingly worried about the sustainability of the school, and the risk of a tipping point for further population decline. 

“There are families who are considering leaving the island because of the lack of childcare,” says Meyer. “And if we lose those families, it’s the impact of their jobs not being filled anymore, and how we replace them, less kids in the school, potential threats to the funding for that, etc. It’s all interconnected and if one domino falls over, another domino falls and another. We spend a lot of our time worrying about how we head off the cascading dominoes.”

In 2006 a group of local people came together to take the future of the island into their own hands, based on the belief that the community needed to generate its own income to be able to make the investments needed in the community, and set up Tiree Community Development Trust.

Their ambitious plan to harness the powerful natural resource flying over their heads paid off. Managed through the trading arm Tiree Renewable Energy Ltd, Tilley – a 900 kW turbine – has channelled about £4 million back into the community of just 650 people, funding everything from critical infrastructure to essential community services.

When the island’s two main harbours were crumbling, threatening the viability of the local fishing fleet, the Trust led a major regeneration, securing the livelihoods of dozens of families. When the island’s only petrol station faced closure, they built a replacement, sparing residents a two-day trip to the mainland for fuel. They run a community broadband service – recently the only working connection after a major storm – and rescued the village shop, which is now also a post office.

To further nurture local enterprise, they constructed four modern business units, providing permanent space for a hairdresser, art gallery and creative social enterprise, allowing small businesses to thrive where they once struggled for space. Now, with housing being the most urgent need on the island the Trust is driving forward a major project to build affordable community-owned homes. 

Their work goes beyond physical infrastructure. The income from Tilley also funds a full-time youth officer who runs a year-round programme of activities, to make Tiree a vibrant place for children to grow up, a Ranger Service to manage tourism, a home energy efficiency improvement and community advice service, a vital electric community minibus and provides small grants for local groups.

At their core, the Trust is responsive to community needs, building solutions and resilience against the threat of domino effects, where one missing service can collapse the viability of industries, ways of life, and ultimately the community itself. Currently the Trust is working to find a solution to the retirement of the last vet on the island, exploring a community-owned practice to ensure the crofting economy remains viable, and working to develop a solution to the lack of childcare on the island.

Rhoda Meek, Head of Communications and Gaelic, says: “The work that community development trusts do is absolutely vital in places like this. You could argue these are things that should be done from a statutory level, but we are where we are. Our development trusts are vital for healthy communities and to keep economic development going.”

“We’re not just about one project,” she adds. “You’re running a petrol station, a business centre, broadband, youth work and a wind turbine, and you’ve only got a population of 650. It’s a lot.

“Core funding is what’s missing. You can get capital to build something shiny, but you can’t get money to keep it running or pay people properly.”

Networks Behind the Success

But this success of community ownership doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It requires an equally expert support system. Enter Community Land Scotland (CLS), an intermediary body providing the critical support organisations like the Tiree Trust need. 

More than 500 communities across Scotland have taken ownership of buildings and land, covering over 200,000 hectares.  As the representative body for Scotland’s community landowners CLS underpins that movement by providing specialist advice, peer learning and national advocacy.

“Our strength in Scotland is that breadth and the way organisations work together,” says Linsay Chalmers, Director of Communities & Operations at CLS. “We support emerging and existing community landowners with networking and peer-to-peer learning opportunities.”

When Tiree began tackling its housing crisis – nearly half of homes are empty or used seasonally – CLS helped by arranging visits to Eigg and Knoydart so the Trust could learn directly from peers who had already delivered affordable homes. That exchange of experience saved time, risk and money.

CLS also supported Tiree’s Gaelic work, providing funding for a development project and convening community groups on Raasay to share learning. Rhoda Meek who works on developing Gaelic on the island says: “Gaelic is hugely linked to crofting and to the sea. For those of us whose roots are in Tiree, our grandfathers fished and worked the ground. Crofting and fishing are still a huge part of our local economy – vitally important and completely intertwined with our Gaelic language and culture.”

Other networks and organisations – Development Trusts Association Scotland, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, and the Community and Renewable Energy Scheme (CARES) – have also provided invaluable technical and financial support, such as funding their new solar array and upgrading insulation in community buildings.

For the leaders doing this challenging work, the connections forged by these intermediary bodies and the support they provide are a lifeline.

Community Wealth Building in Action

Tilley remains Tiree’s financial backbone, but after major repairs it is uninsurable and nearing the end of its life. As Meyer says: “If that turbine breaks tomorrow, we are not insured for loss of business. There will be a cliff edge that we will fall off without more core funding from the government.”

In response, the Trust is investing in more resilient and scalable solar arrays and exploring a local energy co-op to keep profits circulating locally. The strategy is clear: resilience through community ownership.

The work done by the Tiree Community Development Trust shows what Community Wealth Building looks like in practice. Wealth created locally stays local. Contractors are hired on the island, surpluses fund new services and decisions are made by residents.

It reflects a wider shift – now enshrined in the Community Wealth Building Bill going through Holyrood – to root economic power closer to communities. The Bill would require public bodies to develop local action plans that help generate, circulate and retain wealth within their areas.

For Community Land Scotland and its members, Chalmers says Community Wealth Building “resonates with a lot of communities because it really describes what they’re doing naturally. A lot of our members’ models are about creating wealth and reinvesting that back in their communities.”

Josh Doble, Director of Policy & Advocacy at Community Land Scotland highlights that some members have concerns that the Bill won’t do what it needs to. He says there’s been some discussion about a lack of clarity about what ‘wealth’ means and too much focus on state-led approaches: “There’s a fear that Community Wealth Building becomes too fixated on economics, and doesn’t capture the holistic benefits it can deliver for local communities. There’s a danger of it just becoming government jargon rather than a genuinely transformative way of rewiring the economy. That’s why we want to show that communities are already doing community wealth building, so successful community-led approaches don’t get lost.”

Jill Keegan, Partnerships Manager at Scottish Community Alliance, agrees: “Communities have been doing this for decades. The Bill is an opportunity for government and other stakeholders to make what’s already happening easier and more sustainable.”

Tiree’s story shows that Community Wealth Building isn’t a theory – it’s already happening. It’s being built from the ground up by local people, delivering real results, and filling the gaps where both market and state have struggled to keep rural places alive. What the island needs now is meaningful long term support to enable them to continue meeting the local community’s needs, ensuring life on Tiree remains viable and resilient for future generations.

Read more from our series This is Community Wealth Building and what we’re calling for to support Community Wealth Building across Scotland.

Across Scotland, people are quietly transforming their local economies. They’re running bus services, opening community spaces, regenerating town centres and creating jobs. Whether they use the term or not, these communities are practicing Community Wealth Building in real time.

Community-led organisations – the part of the third sector owned and led by local people – are established leaders of Community Wealth Building (CWB). Their work already shapes fairer, more resilient local places at a time when many communities feel increasingly fragile.

You see this in communities across the country: from Glenfarg to Govanhill, Tiree to Tarras Valley. We have been visiting community organisations whose work on the ground is strengthened by national networks such as Community Land Scotland, the Community Transport Association, the Community Woodlands Association, Scottish Rural Action, Scottish Beacon and Get Growing Scotland.

The Scottish Government’s 2025 consultation paper on Building Community Wealth in Scotland describes CWB as ‘growing the influence communities have on the economy and ensuring communities receive more of the benefits from the wealth they help to generate.’ For this to be realised, CWB needs to become a consistent priority across government. If Scotland is serious about moving to a wellbeing economy, CWB principles must be built into economic development, planning, health, transport and climate policy.

The Community Wealth Building Bill completing Stage 1 presents a vital opportunity – but legislation alone won’t deliver change. The real test is whether it helps devolve decision-making and investment so local economies work for local people.

Empowering councils and public bodies is welcome, but it must go hand in hand with empowering communities themselves. Public bodies should act as supportive partners, enabling communities to generate and retain local wealth for both their own benefit and wider society. That means recognising community anchor organisations as credible, equal partners in shaping how CWB is delivered. It means investing in community capacity so people can fully engage with practical processes like procurement, service delivery and the transfer of public assets into community hands.

Across Scotland, community organisations are proving what is possible when local people have the tools and trust to act. Glenfarg rebuilt its bus service after commercial operators withdrew. Tiree has reinvested community-owned energy income into essential services, homes and local businesses. Community land stewardship at Tarras Valley is delivering environmental, economic and social benefits. In Fort William, the Nevis Centre keeps vital community space in local hands. Greater Govanhill’s community-led journalism strengthens local decision-making. And in Mayfield and Easthouses, community-led growing projects are building food security, skills and resilience.

These examples are not isolated success stories. They are part of a coordinated ecosystem of national networks and intermediaries representing Scotland’s diverse community sector. Their collective strength lies in deep local knowledge, shared learning and the ability to scale practical solutions – a ready-made infrastructure that could deliver Community Wealth Building equitably and effectively, if properly recognised and resourced.

The Scottish Community Alliance’s This is Community Wealth Building series, delivered in partnership with Greater Community Media, shines a light on exactly this kind of work. Each story shows a community-led organisation responding to local needs in practical, grounded ways – because they are led by the people who live there. From community-owned transport and renewable energy to local journalism, regeneration projects and village halls, these initiatives show what CWB looks like when rooted in local ownership. They are the community anchors providing communities with a fixed point to navigate from when it is most needed. 

The Scottish Community Alliance is a coalition of national networks and intermediaries who all represent a different aspect of Scotland’s vibrant community sector. What brings us together is a commitment to the community led organisations who shape our sector. Together, we influence local and national policy development to help us create more equitable ways for community organisations to be at the forefront of decision making. That’s why we wanted to platform the impact community-led organisations are making through this project.

Real progress towards Community Wealth Building depends on supporting the community-led action already happening in our towns, villages and neighbourhoods. Each story offers a snapshot of Community Wealth Building being built from the ground up across Scotland. Communities understand that wealth is more than money – it is wellbeing, fairness, resilience and opportunity.

As Scotland moves toward embedding Community Wealth Building in law, we should remember that communities have been leading this agenda for years. The role of government now is not to reinvent it, but to invest in it – to create the conditions where local people can continue building the fairer, more inclusive economy we all want.

Today we have launched This is Community Wealth Building, a series of stories showing what Community Wealth Building looks like in action across Scotland. The series will be published over the next five weeks. You can read more about the series here and follow us on LinkedIn to stay updated.