Overview
The Growth Fund is now closed.
Launched in 2015, the Growth Fund was a partnership between The National Lottery Community Fund and Better Society Capital, delivered by Access through a range of social investors. It made £48.6m available between 2016 and 2023 to support charities and social enterprises to grow and create social impact in their communities.
The Growth Fund used a combination of grant funding, made possible thanks to National Lottery players, and loan finance from Better Society Capital and other co-investors, to address specific gaps in the social investment market.
How the programme was funded
The Growth Fund used a combination of £22.5m grant funding, made possible thanks to National Lottery players, and £27.5m loan finance from Better Society Capital (originating from Dormant Assets) and other co-investors.
Governance
The Growth Fund portfolio is overseen by a Joint Investment Committee (JIC). The Committee still meets to oversee the portfolio, even though there's no more funding to commit.
The committee meet every quarter, and delegates decisions between meetings to a Growth Fund management group, which comprises representatives from each of the Growth Fund partners.
The JIC comprises two representatives from each of the partner organisations, Better Society Capital, The National Lottery Community Fund and two representatives from Access. It is chaired by Access. The current membership of the Joint Investment Committee is:
Chair: Nick Hurd (Access)
For Access: Seb Elsworth, Neil Berry
For the National Lottery Community Fund: Sue Ormiston, Mark Purvis
For Better Society Capital: Jeremy Rogers, Gabriel Ng
Growth Fund funding partners
Growth Fund delivery partners
Insights
-
725
Investments
-
14
Investors
-
£48.6 m
Total Investment
The finance offered was principally in the form of small, flexible, unsecured loans, to organisations seeking to use the funds to create more social impact. Those social investors delivering the Growth Fund offered charities and social enterprises up to £150,000 of flexible finance by combining grants with loans into simple products.
Typically, this type of finance has not been readily available. This is often because social investors consider such finance to be high risk and therefore charities and social enterprises find it unaffordable, or the finance needs to be of a larger minimum size to cover deal costs which is too big for an organisation’s stage of development.
Evidence from the Growth Fund suggests that the blend of finance is helping to address the well-evidenced gap for smaller, unsecured lending, and reaching organisations who may not have benefited from social investment before.
-
Use of Subsidy Report – Growth Fund
This report analyses how subsidy was applied, its alignment with original goals, and the key lessons learned.
-
Growth Fund Evaluation
The second report from the independent evaluation of the Growth Fund, written by Ecorys and ATQ consultants, examines the progress and impact of the programme up to the end of 2020. The report finds that the Growth Fund has succeeded in making social investment accessible to smaller organisations requiring smaller levels of finance.
