Across all of its work, Access works with partners to deliver its programmes. If you are charity or social enterprise seeking support, follow the links below to our delivery partners websites.

Current Programmes

The Enterprise Development Programme is a five year programme, providing a broad range of support for charities and social enterprises in England, helping them make a transition to new enterprise models, or grow existing ones.

Two year-long pilots of the Programme have launched in September 2018 for charities and social enterprises working in the Youth and Homelessness sectors.

Enterprise Grants is administered by Social Investment Business and will award grants of £1.85m over the course of the pilot. Enterprise Learning is a leadership peer-learning initiative which will offer business support and expert guidance to 40 leaders of charities and social enterprises, and will be run by the School for Social Entrepreneurs.

If you are a charity or social enterprise in the Homelessness or Youth sector click here to find out more.

The Reach Fund provides support to charities and social enterprises who are already close to the point of taking on social investment. In order to apply to the fund, an organisation must be referred by a social investor registered with the fund, known as an ‘Access Point’. 

All the details about how to apply, including a list of active Access Point social investors, is available on the The Reach Fund’s dedicated website. You can also see a summary of grants made via the Reach Fund on our Quarterly dashboards.

The Impact Management Programme provides support for charities and social enterprises seeking to grow their ability to quantify, report on, increase and ‘get paid for’ their impact. Delivered on our behalf by a partnership led by NPC, it has been co-designed by the sector to ensure it is user-friendly and reflects organisations’ needs.

If you are a charity, social enterprise or community business actively seeking investment or contract opportunities looking for support with impact management, please visit accessimpact.org for information about the programme, impactsupport.org for practical tools and guidance, email Access@thinkNPC.org or follow @Access_Impact on Twitter. 

The Connect Fund is a partnership between Access and the Barrow Cadbury Trust, providing support to organisations delivering services for charities and social enterprises seeking social investment.

We know that supporting the social investment sector’s infrastructure is a critical part of building this ecosystem for the long term. Hence we have committed 10% of our endowment to directly fund social investment and broader voluntary and social enterprise infrastructure to better meet the needs of charities and social enterprises.

With a particular focus on catalysing new networks, products and support from the infrastructure sector which helps meet the enterprise development and finance needs of the sector, The Connect Fund plays a key role in helping Access achieve its objectives for our enterprise development programme.

For more information, visit the Connect Fund website.

Programmes in Development

As set out in ‘Our Approach’, from 2018-2023 Access will commit £40m to a programme to support enterprise development for charities and social enterprises in England.

This will provide a broad range of support to help organisations make a transition to new enterprise models, or grow existing ones, with a focus on the models which are best enabled by access to finance, and on enabling organisations to utilise the tool of social investment as part of that transition.

We are committed to taking a responsive and iterative approach to developing this programme. We are also committed to building a movement with partners who share our ambitions to grow enterprise, and they will play a role in shaping how our work evolves. In practice, this means running a pilot grant programme and a pilot learning programme – both were launched in September 2018. We have appointed the School of Social Entrepreneurs to run Enterprise Learning and Social Investment Business to manage Enterprise Grants.

We have chosen to focus these pilot programmes on two sub-sectors – homelessness and youth services. This is because we believe that these sectors have significant untapped potential for enterprise development and therefore a latent requirement for social investment, and it is where we believe we can be particularly additional. We are working with Homeless Link, The Centre for Youth Impact and UK Youth as our sector partners on the programme. Our ambition is then to build on what we have learned and broaden our programme out to further sub-sectors.

If your organisation works within either of these sectors, please visit the programme site to find out more.