The Impact World This Week: 10 July 2026

UK: Social enterprise Community Shop serves up social supermarket partnership with bread brand Warburtons

A new social supermarket will open in Great Lever, Bolton, thanks to a partnership between social enterprise Community Shop and Warburtons, one of the UK’s most well-known bread manufacturers. Announced on Wednesday, the partnership, supported by £400,000 of funding from Bolton Council, will create Community Shop Sunnyside, turning a currently vacant building into a community asset. The financial contribution from Warburtons, which was founded in Bolton, is undisclosed. Opening later this year, Community Shop Sunnyside will include a store selling heavily discounted food and household essentials, a Community Hub offering support and development programmes and a café, with children eating for free every day.

UK: Dame Caroline Mason to step down as Esmée Fairbairn Foundation CEO 

Dame Caroline Mason is to step down as CEO of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation in early 2027, after 13 years in the role. Before joining Esmée, Dame Caroline co-founded Investing for Good, a social investment advisory firm, and held senior roles at Charity Bank and Big Society Capital, following a career in the finance industry. She is considered to have transformed Esmée Fairbairn Foundation’s work, turning it into a social investor using a whole range of tools beyond grants. The foundation’s social investment fund has risen from £26m to £60m, and it is considered among the leaders in social impact investing in the UK. She said: “Throughout the last 13 years I have tried hard to balance the potential that exists in Esmée with its wonderful unique qualities of a trust-based, low ego culture... It has been the privilege of my career to be CEO at Esmée.”

Europe: Eight corporates spent more than €71m with European social economy enterprises in 2025 – new report

Eight multinational companies have spent €71.4m with European social economy suppliers in 2025, according to a new report published by Telos, the research organisation part of Social Enterprise UK Group. The report, The Hidden Impact in Corporate Supply Chains, analyses the supply chains of Buy Social Europe corporate members across 11 European countries, including Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and Austria. Out of a total of 175,000 suppliers, the report identifies 526 social economy entities – described in the study as “mission-led organisational forms”, which can take different legal structures across countries, including co-operatives, associations, foundations, charities, mutuals and not-for-profit suppliers. The most common sectors for social economy suppliers include health, wellbeing and care (for 44%), skills and workforce development, and inclusive employment (both representing 19%). The report highlights the strength of the European social economy and potential impact of corporate social procurement; however at this stage, social economy providers still only represent 0.3% of the total number of suppliers used by the corporates in the study. 

UK: New report calls for £200m in government funding for community ownership

A new report, Keys to the future - How we build a new era of community ownership, published by Locality and Power to Change, has called for £200m in government funding in the next budget to support community ownership across the country. Community ownership of assets has proven highly valuable for local areas, the report finds, showing that every £1 of government grant leveraged an additional £2.26 in local investment. The demand for funding to support community ownership organisations is vast – the Conservative government’s now closed Community Ownership Fund was 12 times oversubscribed. However, current support, including the £61m Pride in Place Community Right to Buy Fund announced in June falls short of what is needed, according to the report. Support needed for groups seeking to take ownership of community assets in disadvantaged areas is lacking, and there is poor co-ordination between different stakeholders including funders, intermediaries and public bodies. To fully achieve the potential of the movement, the report recommends a £1bn community assets fund to be rolled out over the next five years, bringing together philanthropic capital, social investment and public funding.

Europe: Impact Europe advocates for systemic redesign of capital allocation

Current fund structures are not aligned with the realities of impact investing, and need substantial redesign, according to Impact Europe’s latest position paper, Shaping Capital Markets for Impact in Europe. Based on the work of the “Impact Fund Model 2.0” working group, the report calls for more flexible fund structures, especially in terms of duration, to remove the pressure to complete quick exits – which is incompatible with the longer-term approach needed to achieve impact. It also calls for the use of blended finance structures to reduce risk, and increase technical assistance and ecosystem support in parallel with investment funds. The report further explores the possibility of developing secondary markets, to enable investors to find liquidity if needed, without having to sell underlying assets.

UK: London Early Years Foundation CEO publishes new book

June O’Sullivan, the award-winning CEO of social enterprise nursery group, the London Early Years Foundation (LEYF), has published a new book that outlines the key principles of nursery design through the lens of social justice. The book, titled Nursery by Design: Creating spaces for learning and belonging, is intended for nursery educators and leaders, as well as policymakers, architects and interior designers. It argues that buildings, spaces, materials and layout all play a big role in children’s development, how they learn and play, giving examples of how LEYF applies those principles in practice.

• Listen: ‘A decent CEO sticks around when things are hard’ – June O’Sullivan on the Good Leaders podcast

UK: Sign language learning platform SignLab wins national Social Enterprise Award

SignLab, an AI-enabled digital learning platform for sign language, was announced as the winner of the 2026 Boston Consulting Group UK Social Enterprise Award, delivered in partnership with Ashoka, Impact Hub and the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation, on Monday. SignLab provides apps to teach multiple sign languages, including British, Chinese and Indian. As part of the prize, SignLab will have pro bono access to Boston Consulting Group UK’s resources for an eight-week consultancy focused on growing their impact. The other finalists for the award were Connection Crew, Fine Cell Work, Living Wage Foundation and BorrowMyDoggy. 

Movers and Shakers

• B Lab has made two new appointments to its executive team: Emma Schned, who has worked with the organisation for nine years, becomes chief people & operations officer, and Marcel Fukayama – the co-founder of Sistema B Brasil and former executive director of Sistema B International – takes the role of chief impact & movement officer. Read Marcel’s article in Pioneers Post from 2024.
• Spring Impact has appointed Emma Colenbrander as its new CEO, after three and a half years as managing director. Before joining Spring Impact, Colenbrander founded a social enterprise dedicated to bringing clean energy to urban informal settlement communities in India. She succeeds Mohamed Osman who spent six years at the helm of the organisation.

Top image credit: eastleighbusman, Flickr