The Connect Fund was run in partnership with Access – The Foundation for Social Investment and housed at The Barrow Cadbury Trust between 2017 and 2024, making over 130 grants in total. The fund was established to increase the amount of social investment flowing to social sector organisations to enable them to maintain and grow their social impact.

The goals of the Connect Fund were to:

1. Improve the social investment market for charities and social enterprises
2. Advance a more open, diverse and accessible social investment market

Why did it make sense to house the Connect Fund at The Barrow Cadbury Trust  

The Barrow Cadbury Trust has had a long history of championing social investment and blended finance as well as the need for infrastructure and DEI initiatives for the VCSE sector. It has been involved in many social investment projects including the first-ever social impact bond launched by the UK government aimed at reducing re-offending at HMP Peterborough. Housing the Connect Fund at the Trust meant that the Connect Fund could really make use of the social investment experience of the Trust itself as well as connections to the social investment market and the wider voluntary sector infrastructure. Working in an organisation that was functionally operating as a social investor also meant that the Connect Fund had a direct view into the challenges that social investors face of building pipeline, making investments and managing a portfolio. On practical level the Connect Fund could rely on the grant making, finance and human resources of the Trust.

What were some of the successes of the Connect Fund?

• In a time of reckoning for the sector, the Connect Fund championed Equality, Diversity & Inclusion, supporting successful infrastructure for the market and collaborative projects including the support to Women in Social Finance, The Social Investment Forum, The Diversity Forum, the Equality Impact Investing Project and a series of data definition and standardisation projects.
• The fund helped to grow innovation in the market with feasibility grants for new initiatives like the Growth Impact Fund and research and practice for more inclusive financing such as Shariah-powered community shares.
• The close relationship with Good Finance throughout the Connect Fund meant the spillover impacts were numerous. Many of Good Finance’s programmes were influenced by Connect Fund grant projects and our shared goals to influence the market with an equality lens led to some exciting programmes of work including Addressing Imbalance.

What were some of the learnings from the Connect Fund?

• Convening is a really powerful way to make things happen. The hint is in the name but the ‘Connect’ Fund aimed to bring together stakeholders in the market to deliver shared infrastructure which was a really successful element of the fund. For some partners convening meant networking and sharing learning from their projects, for others it meant specific training on areas they wanted to improve in. There wasn’t a one size fits all approach.
• The ability to pivot and iterate with market demand is particularly important for an infrastructure fund. With COVID-19 and the Cost-of-Living crisis affecting all the organisations we worked with the ability to adapt our strategy to the needs of the organisations we were working with was essential.
• Social Investment needed to be better integrated. The Connect Fund was originally conceived as a mix of grant and social investment for infrastructure however the fund only made one investment into Singlify. The investment was very successful, but clearly this offering from the fund was too bespoke and could have been designed as a more complementary product alongside the grant funding.

The Connect Fund is now closed but the resources created from the fund can be accessed here.

See this presentation for an overview of the fund.