The Connect Fund programme made 133 grants, totalling £5.8m, between January 2018 and February 2024. Grantees included voluntary and community sector infrastructure organisations and networks, social investment fund managers, think tanks and researchers, standard setters, as well as new emerging networks.

The grants focused on building capacity and knowledge in infrastructure to better support charities and social enterprises to understand and access social investment, developing awareness of barriers and opportunities for particular communities in accessing finance, building tools, resources, standards and templates, sharing data and driving forward the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) agenda in social investment.

Although the programme is closed, the resources developed by the grantees are all hosted on the Barrow Cadbury Trust website.

The emerging evaluation fundings, led by the fantastic Niamh Goggin, point to several themes: existing knowledge of social investment, the importance of long-term trusting relationships (often across sectors), a clear focus on strategic goals and the relevance of projects to specific issues or places.

In the discussion, excellent provocations from Bonnie Chiu and Sara Llewellyn helped steer the conversation, highlighting the significant impact the work has had on the social investment sector’s mindset and ambitions around EDI, and the urgent need to accelerate this work.

We discussed the opportunities of project funding for infrastructure development in creating a ripple effect, but also the challenges of short-term funding. Colleagues highlighted opportunities for enabling new models of infrastructure and breaking down cultural barriers to accessing finance.

It’s clear that effective infrastructure is key to connecting community-based charities and social enterprises with the finance they need, but the sector has faced profound funding challenges over the last 15 years.

We have seen examples through the Connect Fund of high quality development work in local infrastructure organisations which hasn’t been sustained beyond the project because of wider funding pressure. While Access does not have the scale, or the mandate, to directly support the breadth of infrastructure playing this vital role we hope that the lessons from the Connect Fund will add weight to the broader case for investing in the sector’s infrastructure.

We can also draw lessons from the range of different delivery models which we see across our programmes and the various roles that infrastructure organisations can play. In many of our Local Access places, local infrastructure organisations are at the heart of the delivery partnerships. In our Enterprise Development Programme, sector specialist infrastructure bodies coordinated the programme and built granular expertise in sector-specific business models.

As we await the publication of the Government’s Dormant Asset strategy we have been integrating the learning into our future plans at Access. While it may be more limited than before, we hope to have some ongoing resource to support infrastructure and will seek to concentrate this on the market interventions that best support our shared vision of a market that is equitable, efficient, and tailored to the needs of charities and social enterprises, while also providing long-term support. One clear priority is to continue to support the sector’s efforts around EDI.

We will also be encouraging broader delivery partnerships which allow infrastructure organisations to be paid in a sustainable way for the vital role they can play in expanding the reach of social investment.

We will be inviting views on the delivery of infrastructure support in Access’s short consultation that will follow the publication of the Dormant Asset’s strategy.