This contribution shares a personal story about navigating the changing landscape of regeneration in the UK over the last 25 years. It is an inspiring journey showing how people can gain a sense of agency and make change happen, but also a cautionary tale on how being right is often not sufficient to win the day and that knowledge does not mean power.

Jess Steele relates a number of stories of how local communities have galvanised themselves in order to save and reimagine the public purpose of neglected physical assets in their communities. These buildings often became catalysts for action in the community, motivating and mobilising others. Repeatedly, local communities came up against public institutions – particularly local councils – which acted, to use Sirianni's (2009) term as a ‘civic disabler’. Rather than supporting these community initiatives, they actively worked against and stifled communities’ efforts to take control. But the contribution also shows a process of learning – from experience and elsewhere – about how to mobilise a community, challenge the established ways things go by ‘doing politics’ and developing an alternative way of making decisions and managing public assets and resources.

This contribution is fundamentally about power and what can be learned from experiences of working outside, within, against and with holders of established power in policy making. Government at different levels is able to use its power to advance its agenda and in doing so often divides, disenfranchises and frustrates communities. The response in this contribution was to generate community power through the tactics of community organising: realising the power of numbers, conducting power analysis, listening emphatically and doing politics. It concludes that in order for the potential of co-production of policy to be realised and the risk of co-option to be avoided, disruption and challenge to the usual way of doing things, acting entrepreneurially and realising the agency and power of communities is vital.