Thanks 2017

A year ago today I wrote a blog reflecting on what we had achieved during 2016. I predicted that 2017 would be the year when “we will start to see the impact [of our work] on the ground and we will be able to begin sharing that story.” I am pleased to say that this has really started to happen, and we know that there is so much more to come.

Most significantly, investments are now being made at scale in charities and social enterprises.

As of the end of September, 103 applications for investment had been approved and 73 of those loans had been disbursed to the sector, totalling £4.8m. Key points about these loans to highlight:

• The charities and social enterprises who have received investment are based all around England, with a bias towards places with higher levels of deprivation. You can see our interactive map here.
• The average loan size is £66k, close to the £80k median investment size sought by social enterprises cited in the latest report from SEUK.
• The median turnover of the organisations who have received investment through the Growth Fund is £285k – showing that social investment can support smaller charities and social enterprises in the sector.

As the new funds ramp up their activity we expect to see a peak of lending activity under the Growth Fund in the latter part of 2019 and new loans continuing to be made until at least 2021.

This time last year there were three funds live making investments in charities and social enterprises under the Growth Fund. There are now eleven, covering a wide range of different places and sub-sectors, and seeking to support charities and social enterprises in different ways.

We have received 65 expressions of interest from organisations wanting to run a loan fund under the Growth Fund and we have now committed over 75% of the grant available (this is how we track progress of our commitments because the grant is the fixed resource). We also have a strong pipeline and so will be closing to new expressions of interest at the end of December. We expect the full Growth Fund to be committed by the second quarter of 2018.

Our capacity building programmes have also significantly increased their activity during the year. By the end of September, the Reach Fund had made 45 grants with deployment continuing to accelerate. Grants have been made to organisations all over the country (full details here). There are now 21 Access Points who can refer charities and social enterprises into the programme.

The Impact Management Programme awarded the first round of grants in the spring and a second round in December. The final deadline for organisations who have received impact management training to apply for a grant from the programme is 29 January 2018.

More than 100 charities and social enterprises have been engaged in a co-design process to develop a new support service which will guide organisations to get started with impact management techniques with minimal external input. This will be launched in February next year.

2017 has also seen the launch of the Connect Fund, run by Barrow Cadbury Trust, to support the development of the social investment market. Two rounds of applications have been received, one focused on supporting existing social investment intermediary organisations, and another on voluntary sector infrastructure organisations seeking to develop their role in supporting the use of social investment. The first round of grants was awarded in November.

Good Finance was fully launched in April and is already building its role as a key resource for the sector in navigating the market.

We have sought to develop the way we share our data and the performance of our programmes over the last year. We published our first dashboard in February and have now published the forth. Data up to the end of December from our programmes will be published in February 2018.

We have also published some specific learning on the levels of subsidy in the Growth Fund to date and on our reach so far. We also published our first learning report which reflected on the lessons our how Access was set up.

We also played a key role in supporting The Gathering, which has led to a number of key initiatives across the social investment sector being carried forward. These include projects to address the lack of diversity in social investment, growth venture philanthropy in the UK, understand the role of pension funds in the social investment market, and others.

We have also published research on the impact readiness fund, risk finance in the social sector, subsidy in social investment, and data maturity in the sector.

As our programmes and processes have continued to evolve we have continued to try to capture the lessons from our work, and some of the mistakes we have made along the way. Getting the process right for gathering and analysing data from our programmes has been one such area which we have blogged about.

Through our investment management partner, Rathbones, we have continued to seek to invest as much as possible of our endowment into charities and social enterprises. 35% of our endowment is currently invested in this way. The chair of our endowment investment committee, Martin Rich, published a full break down of our portfolio on our blog in March.

Over the last six months the Access team has spent a significant amount of time focusing on developing the strategy for the next five years of our life when we intend to deploy the majority of our grant funding. This has been agreed by the Access trustees and more details about this approach will be published in the new year. We plan to expand our programmes to offer a much broader range of support to charities and social enterprises seeking to develop their enterprise activity and seeking finance to do so.

Developing this strategy has involved extensive consultation with the sector and other stakeholders including key infrastructure organisations, foundations, social investors, advisors and government. As part of this work we have been working closely with our learning partners, the TI Group, to further develop our learning strategy and our model of transformation, a summary of which is here. 

Access itself remains a small organisation and all that has been achieved during 2017 is the product of the amazing work which is undertaken by the organisations which Access funds. So a huge thank you to everyone who has made this all happen and there is much to look forward to in the year and years ahead.

2017 Image credit: Alan O'Rourke