Hear from

• Patrick Fensham is a Principal and Partner at SGS. He has dual qualifications in urban planning and specialises in metropolitan and local strategic planning, infrastructure planning and funding analysis, housing and employment lands planning, regional and community economic development, and development feasibility analysis. He has been a leading contributor to SGS’s delivery of the Economic Development Australia training modules since 2020.
  
  Patrick leads SGS’s work promoting Community Wealth Building in Australia's local economic development. Patrick spent a month with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies in Manchester, UK, in 2019, after which he prepared an SGS occasional paper on Community Wealth Building, which has been foundational in positioning the practice in Australia. He jointly delivered Community Wealth Building masterclasses with Neil McInroy in Sydney and Melbourne in October 2022, and in Castlemaine, Victoria, in 2025.
  
• Neil McInroy is a Senior Fellow for the Global Advancement of Community Wealth Building at The Democracy Collaborative – a USA-based research and Development lab.
  
  Neil is an economics of place specialist, policy thinker, practitioner and organisational leader, and over the last 25 years has worked extensively across the UK, USA and internationally (including Australia and New Zealand), and has been commissioned by and collaborated with a range of international, national and local governments and agencies.
  
  At present, Neil is driven by the perfect storm of economic, social, environmental and democratic challenges. In this, he focuses on thinking through and applying new economic policy and practice for people, place, and planet. Community Wealth Building is a key part of that, and Neil was instrumental in developing the ‘Preston model’ in the UK and was the originator of the current Community Wealth Building model and five-pillar practice, which is now being deployed in a number of locations worldwide. This includes Neil’s direct work with the Scottish Government (where he is a CWB adviser) and his work in locations across the USA, including Chicago.
  
  From 2000 until 2021, Neil was the Chief Executive of the Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES)- the UK national organisation for local economies.
  
• Annie Smits is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Neighbourhood Economics, where she works alongside Bill Mithen to build more democratic, locally owned and community-led economies in Australia’s most disadvantaged places.
  
  Annie has more than 20 years’ experience across social enterprise, community development, impact investment and systems change. Through Neighbourhood Economics, she is co-leading work in Norlane and Corio in Geelong that is testing how community wealth building can move from theory into practical neighbourhood economic change.
  
  This work includes resident listening, anchor institution engagement, enterprise development, worker ownership, procurement reform and new forms of community-aligned investment. Her work asks what it would take to build neighbourhood economies where residents are not only included in growth, but help shape, own and benefit from it.
  
  Annie will speak to Neighbourhood Economics’ work for Norlane and Corio, and to insights from Community Wealth Building: What Will It Take?, a Neighbourhood Economics report developed in partnership with SGS Economics & Planning. Drawing from neighbourhood-level work in Geelong, she will explore what the barriers reveal about the broader system shifts needed for community wealth building to move from a promising idea to serious economic practice in Australia.
  
• Joost den Hartog is an Adelaide-based social entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience designing and leading services, institutions and civic processes that put people at the centre of change. He co-founded Neighbourhood Node, building The Pear Coffeehouse and QT community hub from the ground up, including the Minor Works Program, a replicable model for community-led civic participation. He previously led the development of Australia's Science Channel at the Royal Institution of Australia and helmed the Australian International Documentary Conference through a decade of digital disruption. He currently sits on the Libraries Board of South Australia, having chaired its Public Libraries Committee, and served two terms as an elected councillor for the City of Port Adelaide Enfield.
  
• Angus Chapman is an Associate at SGS. He is an economist and public policy analyst with qualifications in economics, political science and public policy. He started his career at the Commonwealth Treasury, in Canberra, before relocating to London to work as a consultant and researcher on international macroeconomics and international development, with a focus on Africa.
  
  He has been a prominent contributor to SGS's work on Community Wealth Building, working with communities and councils in NSW, Victoria and South Australia to reshape how their economies operate. He also works on economic impact assessment, economic and financial evaluation of policies, programmes and investments, workforce development and climate risk assessment and adaptation. Since 2023, he has led the delivery of Economic Development Australia training modules to practitioners across Australia.

More speakers to be announced.