Blog

29/03/17

Filtering posts by topic

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

11/04/22

Enterprise Growth for Communities

In February it was announced that Access will receive an additional £20m from dormant assets to extend our support for charities and social enterprises in England. Now known as Enterprise Growth for Communities (EGC), the new programme launches following a detailed consultation process to inform its design. We are grateful to all of the organisations […]

09/03/22

Improving our data – lessons from our first efforts at data visualisation

Access has started to make some changes to the way we use our data. Last week was a particular milestone with a new approach to the publication of our quarterly data, using an interactive visualisation platform (PowerBI). Sharing learning and knowledge is central to Access’s approach, and part of our commitment to learning from what […]

27/01/22

5 years of the Growth Fund: what have we learnt?

This week Ecorys published their most recent evaluation report on the Growth Fund, examining the progress and impact of the programme up to the end of 2020. The Growth Fund is a partnership between The National Lottery Community Fund and Big Society Capital, delivered by Access through a range of social investors., It makes up […]

04/01/22

ED&I: The Year Ahead

Last month I blogged about our progress over the last 12 months in our work on developing equity, diversity and inclusion within social investment. This blog outlines our priorities for the year ahead. These are baked into our strategy and operational plans, and build on the progress made and the commitments we have made both as part of the Quadrennial […]

23/12/21

Equality impact investing – reflecting on progress in 2021

A year ago I blogged about our progress on strengthening our equality impact including on equity, on diversity and inclusion across Access’s work. 12 months on and we have made progress in a number of areas, but we know there is much more to do. This blog reflects on the last 12 months. As last year this update is broadly structured around the […]

02/11/21

BSC Deal Level Data 2020: How does the Growth Fund compare?

Big Society Capital recently published their Deal Level Data (DLD) and their broader Market Data to December 2020. This data contains a wealth of information about the social investment market and how it is changing over time. At Access, one aspect that we are always particularly interested in is how the Growth Fund (managed by […]

24/09/21

Reaching Further, much further

To justify the use of precious grant to blend with social investment we have to be confident that blended finance programmes are doing things which social investment on its own (without grant subsidy) cannot do. This has always been the logic behind the Growth Fund; it was designed to fill a gap in the supply […]

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