Blog

29/03/17

Filtering posts by topic

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

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 […]

19/02/21

The Growth Fund: Would we change it?

This month Ecorys and ATQ published the latest instalment of their Growth Fund evaluation, which is commissioned by The National Lottery Community Fund – a funder of the programme alongside Big Society Capital and co-investors. Alongside some programme data, the report is based on interviews that Ecorys and ATQ conducted with eleven of the fifteen […]

18/12/20

Enterprise Development Programme – a first year for the Mental Health sector

Access launched the Enterprise Development Programme (EDP) because the growth of earned income is one key way that charities and social enterprises can achieve greater resilience. EDP uses a sector-focused approach to identify relevant charities and social enterprises and provide them with an appropriate combination of grants and peer-learning opportunities. In 2020, the Enterprise Development […]

27/11/20

Reviewing our progress on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

The clues are in the names. Access’s work is all about opening up social investment so that barriers to accessing finance are removed and more organisations can benefit. We called our major investment readiness fund the “Reach” Fund to highlight how we wanted to enable social investors to be able to reach further into the […]

14/10/20

Flexible Finance for the Recovery: Creating a co-development cohort

We are now open for applications from social investment providers to join a co-development cohort to develop plans for our flexible finance for the recovery programme. This is the second of two major new blended finance initiatives which we have launched in response to the impact of COVID on the sector, funded through £30m of […]

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