Ben Reynolds PhD (Culture & Urban Regeneration) BSc (Hons) CMRS FRSA
Ben is the founder and Director of Urban Foundry. He has a Doctorate (Swansea University, 2004) in the creative regeneration of cities and over 20 years experience in regeneration. He is Entrepreneur in Residence and Expert in Residence at Swansea University and is also a Big Ideas Wales Role Model for Welsh Government, through which he has visited numerous schools, FE and HE institutions as well as young people with the Kings’ Trust to talk about social entrepreneurialism and purpose-driven business. He is also a Certified Member of the Market Research Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, and he has been both an executive and a non-executive director of a number of social businesses and charitable organisations.
Ben is an industry-leading expert in urban regeneration – he has led on placemaking work in various towns and cities, lectured and spoken on urban regeneration, including for the Design Commission for Wales, Swansea University, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, University of Northampton, and he has spoken/participated in expert panels at various regeneration and wellbeing economy conferences. He has also authored placemaking strategies and guidance for several towns and cities and written best practice approaches for Welsh Government on meanwhile spaces and street markets and he has been published on the cultural regeneration of city centres.
Ben has led commissioned works delivering a range of feasibility studies and business support for start-ups, micro-enterprises, and social businesses; he is an advisor on the Social Business Wales support framework and has delivered work for national scale projects, including Missing People, Lottery distributors and the Money and Pensions Service for Central Government. He has also designed and delivered numerous stakeholder engagement projects, facilitating collaborative/partnership working for a wide range of clients in Wales, England, and Scotland, and he has designed and delivered a number of evaluation commissions for large and small scale projects across the UK delivering Theory of Change as an approach.
He is also a social entrepreneur and in addition to founding Urban Foundry as Swansea’s first (Wales’ third) BCorp, he has founded and developed award-winning social enterprises and served on the boards of various non-profit initiatives. He is a pioneer of pop-up urbanism initiatives, developing projects in public space such as street markets, live music and art events, and pop-up parks, as well as pioneering Meanwhile/Pop-up uses in empty buildings in Wales. Ben’s work and that of Urban Foundry has directly led to street markets, popup urbanism projects and green infrastructure featuring in the Welsh Government’s programme for government and its Transforming Towns funding streams.
Ben has also served as a Commissioner for the Welsh Government’s Cooperatives and Mutuals Commission and as a Business Commissioner on the Swansea Poverty Truth Commission, is a member of the Regeneration Swansea partnership and the Private Sector Advisory Board for the Corporate Joint Committee for south west Wales.
He has a sharp understanding of public funding and has supported a wide range of groups in raising millions for various regeneration projects, from public and private sources, and has served on various funding panels as well as raising millions of pounds of public funding.
Ben’s approach, central to our brand, is one that uses creative thinking combined with a strong theoretical understanding and entrepreneurial thinking to solve a range of problems, from small community initiatives to nationwide schemes and programmes. He knows how to make projects happen, how to make them last, and how to demonstrate that they make a difference. Over 25 years he has developed a detailed working knowledge of the public, social/purpose-driven business, and third sectors.