Our impact on our social investment partners

Since we were established in 2015, we have worked with 122 organisations to support charities and social enterprises to sustain or grow their impact. Our partners are the experts at what they do, whether that be investing in impactful organisations, providing tailored enterprise development support, or connecting local community actors together.

We understand that without a thriving set of social investment partners, charities and social enterprises will not be able to receive the support or investment that they need. 

This is why we have worked to expand the number of partners in the social investment sector, supported them to increase their reach using the right products and support, and worked to strengthen their resilience.

We have expanded the number of partners, enabling them to offer tailored products to different parts of the market. For example, the Growth Fund successfully broadened the number of investors in the market and strengthened the capabilities of those in the sub-£150k part of the social investment market. Independently, the New Philanthropy Capital review of Blended Finance in 2022 found that the increase in the number of partners in the market had allowed for more local and tailored support, and that it had helped specialist sectors increase their involvement in social investment. 

However, there is more we could be doing to support black and minoritised specialist intermediaries. That’s why we are working with the Pathway Fund, a new impact investment wholesaler focussed on creating opportunities for black and minoritised communities in the UK.

We also know that a resilient system requires resilient social investors, and we have been working to better measure what exactly it looks like for our partners to be resilient. We have developed individual financial resilience Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for five of our blended finance partners. These are specific to each organisation and will help us support them to reach their financial resilience goals. 

Finally, we have worked alongside our partners during times of crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing cost of living crisis. During Covid-19 we funded the costs of all our Growth Fund partners for six months so they could pass on repayment holidays to our borrowers and also relaxed our reporting requirements, reducing the burden on both our partners and on the charities and social enterprises they work with. Recognising the need to move quickly, this was also one of the highest periods of investment for us ever at Access. Through our existing programmes and a targeted emergency programme – the Emergency Lending Programme – we delivered £27.7m of investment in 2021, our highest total investment in any year except for 2024, which delivered a total investment of £32.5m 

Convening and connecting our partners 

• Alongside working individually with our partners, we also play a role convening around specific topics to enable learning and connections. We hold two Blended Finance partner meetings per year across England, an opportunity for our partners to connect around topics such as EDI and evaluation and learning, with these consistently receiving positive feedback.
• We also host an annual Local Access conference which brings together the organisations delivering our place based programme Local Access across six different places. 

Resilience 

KPI 4: The social investors we work with are more resilient

This KPI explicitly looks at the resilience of the social investors we work with. This matters because they play a central role in our ecosystem. Without resilient and well capitalised social investors, charities and social enterprises will simply not receive support. 

It is measured using two metrics. Firstly the results of individual social investor resilience KPIs, which we set with the social investors themselves. They are based around what resilience looks like to each individual organisation. We have not yet established a baseline on this, but have given it an interim amber score. 

Secondly we have planned a review of our partner finances with them to understand whether Access’ contribution helped to ensure that our social investor partners’ costs were appropriately covered in the fund structure. This is important because we don’t want our partners’ to be out of pocket through their work with us. We are still awaiting on data on this metric. 

Lydia Levy Director of Impact and Evaluation