Blog

29/03/17

Filtering posts by topic

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

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 […]

01/08/17

What have we learned from collecting and collating early Growth Fund data?

One year on since the launch of the Growth Fund’s first social investment fund, we reflect on what we have learned so far. Although it’s too early to draw any conclusions about the financial and social impact of the loans, just collecting and collating the early data has taught us a lot already… It’s been […]

28/07/17

#AccessEd 22 – Taking a second look at research…

Last week I attended a meeting of the Social Investment Research Council, (SIRC). This is a group of funders who commission research relating directly or indirectly to social investment, brought together and managed by colleagues at Big Society Capital (BSC). We meet around 4 times a year, to discuss current projects, explore common areas of interest […]

28th June 2017

Dodging the bookshelf – paying for research dissemination

How many times have you heard the expression ‘we don’t want this research to just sit on the shelf’? Sometimes people add something along the lines of ‘gathering dust’ for extra effect. But what’s behind it never changes – we want the research to be listened to, acted on. We researchers want our work to […]

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