Blog

29/03/17

Filtering posts by topic

Read about how to filter ACCESS’s blog posts by topic.

1st November 2017

Social investment – is it all about the money?

Sophie joined Access for six months as part of the On Purpose Associate Programme, which helps professionals move into purpose-driven careers through a year-long programme comprised of two work placements, training, coaching and mentoring. Here she reflects on her time with Access. My six months at Access has sadly come to an end and, unbelievably, […]

27th October 2017

Looking at our reach so far

Access exists to bridge the gap between charities and social investors, and to help more charities and social enterprises to benefit from social investment who haven’t been reached to date. We know that social investment isn’t reaching the whole sector. There is some understanding of the gaps, for example we know that smaller organisations have […]

02/10/17

Listening to social enterprises in the North East

Seb, Simon and I recently visited Northumberland to meet with a group of social entrepreneurs from eleven organisations at a gathering kindly convened by Big Issue Invest. This is one of a series of roundtables that we have recently co-convened in order to hear directly from organisations about their experiences of social investment and investment […]

25th September 2017

The First Billion (of Subsidy) – What Next?

As my report about subsidy in the social investment market over the last 15 years shows, at least £1bn has been spent on efforts to grow the market, most of that over the last 10 years. Whether you consider that this has been money well spent rather depends on how you see the role of […]

15/09/17

Final call for running a Growth Fund

The Growth Fund focuses on filling a well evidenced gap in the social investment market, for small scale unsecured simple debt finance. Access provides a blend of grant and loan, allowing social lenders to overcome the challenges which had stopped this sort of finance being available previously: namely having the wrong tolerance for risk, uneconomic […]

31/08/17

Our third dashboard…

The latest of our quarterly dashboards covers the period up to and including April to June 2017. Here we share the headlines. The Growth Fund (Dashboard Part 1) The Growth Fund funds organisations to make small loans to charities and social enterprises. At the end of June, five social investment funds were open and […]

04/08/17

Off and running – the Connect Fund steps out

A new fund hits the circuit The Connect Fund was born this spring. The fourth young fund in the Access Foundation stable, it has slowly found its legs, teetered around the field, and poked its nose into the social investment market. The initial task was to map and consult with many social investment actors to […]

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