The Big Lottery Fund is looking to develop social investment and help community organisations operate more sustainably.
This month marks the 18th birthday of National Lottery and in that time the good causes money generated from every ticket sale has helped change thousands of lives. But how will the method for investing this money evolve in the years to come?
For the Big Lottery Fund, the largest distributor of good causes funding, the social investment market is an exciting opportunity to deliver investment in a more creative way. Its potential to help budding social entrepreneurs fits perfectly with our people powered change values, where people and communities most in need are supported to make the most of local skills and opportunities.
Today we are announcing awards totalling almost £15.5m to two major England-wide programmes that will provide financial support and mentoring for social entrepreneurs.
UnLtd will receive just over £8.5m to run the next phase of the Big Venture Challenge, a programme that focuses on the high-risk social investment market. It will help 100 social entrepreneurs raise investment and rapidly grow their ventures by providing them with access to business support, expert connections and match funding. Having funded the first phase of the programme, we have seen the positive impact it has had on social entrepreneurs, and we are delighted that BIG is helping to make the second phase happen.
The School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE) will apply £7m funding from BIG to the expansion of its programme for social entrepreneurs, in partnership with Lloyds and Nominet. The school runs mentoring and networking programmes across the country, focusing on training and early seeding support. Big Lottery Fund support will mean it will be able to double the number of areas the programme works in, helping 1,100 aspiring social enterprises transform disadvantaged communities, providing jobs and other benefits.
Big Venture Challenge will open for new online applications in January, and the School for Social Entrepreneurs will follow in February. For anyone considering applying, both organisations have already produced notable success stories.
Jayne Hulbert and Jayne Cresswell in Birmingham came to the first round of the Big Venture Challenge with their Social Work Education, Employment and Training (Sweet) Project. Having been made redundant from a charity, the two Jaynes wanted to help fill the gap in support services in King's Norton, Birmingham, using their knowledge and experience of the sector. Their business model is based on using trainee social worker placement fees as a revenue source to sustain the business and, after receiving grant funding and intensive support from the Big Venture Challenge, they have secured investment of £130,000, won numerous awards and have supported more than 400 families in the area.
Roger Wilson-Hinds, an SSE graduate, runs a charity called Screenreader that provides digital solutions for the blind and partially sighted community. His latest creation, a smartphone app called Georgie, hit the headlines this summer.
The two funding programmes developed by UnLtd and SSE are two examples of the proposals that the Big Lottery Fund wants to help develop through our wider social investment strategy. It has been designed to complement of interventions being made by the Big Lottery Fund, the Cabinet Office and others to support social enterprises at different stages of growth and investment.
Since March 2012, the Big Lottery Fund has awarded money to 13 organisations through our programme, Next Steps: Supporting Social Investment in England, which is exploring the potential of new approaches to raising finance that will attempt to address significant social issues.
These awards include support for a £30m investment fund to provide specialist housing to those with learning disabilities and a £4m retail bond to reduce care placement days. All the proposals funded through Next Steps are required to share their learning, successes and pitfalls, and make this knowledge available to the wider sector.
The experiences and learning from Next Steps has also helped inform the Big Lottery Fund's future social investment interventions in England, which include the development of two new funds, launching next year.
The first of these is an investment readiness fund that will launch in the first half of 2013 to deliver up to £10m funding over three years. Informed by research, this fund aims to assist voluntary community and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations wishing to start on an investment journey in order to deliver social and charitable impact at greater scale.
The second is a co-commissioning fund that will contribute towards outcome payments for new social impact bonds and similar investment instruments. We believe this funding should facilitate greater commissioner participation in this emerging part of the market and enable more VCSE organisations to deliver better preventive services via payment-by-results contracts.
With today's in-principle funding announcements and two new major social investment initiatives coming on-stream next year, the Big Lottery Fund is demonstrating our commitment to develope the social investment market. This will help VCSE organisations operate on a more sustainable footing and, above all, broaden the ways that lottery funding can help people to lead richer, more fulfilling lives within their communities.
Dharmendra Kanani is England director of the Big Lottery Fund
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