Our approach to delivering our enterprise development programme is to begin by working within sub-sectors, in order to tailor a menu of support to their specific needs.

In order to achieve this we will build a coalition of partners which will include the lead infrastructure bodies and networks in those sectors, enterprise support agencies, advisors, knowledge hubs like Good Finance, and a grant management partner who can also provide clear advice to charities and social enterprises about the support which is on offer. Gathering data and learning from across the programme will be critical and is part of the design process from the start.

In April 2018 we began this process by issuing a request for proposals for a grant administrator and for a partner to run our peer learning programme. We have appointed Social Investment Business to be our grant administrator and School for Social Entrepreneurs to run the learning programme. We will work with these organisations to run our pilot Enterprise Grants and Enterprise Learning programmes, which we launched in September 2018.

Over the longer term the partnerships we are seeking to build, may formalise with shared governance, and a key role for charities and social enterprises in that governance. Once we become clearer on which elements of this support are best devolved, and which may be best centralised (such as grant management, advice) we can start to define how this partnership can be structured in the long term, and how it might meet the needs of other funders, not just Access.

This might look something like this:

We will refine our approach to partnerships as we understand more about what works best for charities and social enterprises. During 2018 we will be sharing what we are learning through our work within the Youth and Homelessness sectors, and how this will influence and shape how we expand our programme to further sub-sectors.

If you are interested in discussing the potential for collaboration, please get in touch via email.