Tagged - equity

Social Investment Scotland subsidiary secures £1m for its Impact First fund from Chroma Ventures, a Scotland-based investment arm of video game developer, 4J Studios.

Group urges social investors to step up inclusion and equity efforts with new pledges, following damning findings last week from the influential Adebowale Commission.

Global leads on diversity, equity and inclusion – including from eBay and Bad Robot – tell the Ashoka Changemaker Summit that no-one is an expert and learning from diverse groups and people's lived experiences is the only path ahead.

Government-backed Covid lending schemes have been a lifeline – but in the long term, high levels of debt cause problems. One solution: transitioning at-risk, viable private businesses into employee or community ownership at scale. 

Crunching the numbers from social sector organisations that have closed could help others to predict and prevent financial fragility. From salary spend to income type, financial benchmarking specialist MyCake suggests key questions to explore.

Covid-19 has highlighted the fact that many common forms of social investment are inflexible and have failed the social enterprises they seek to support, says Ben Smith, head of social investment at Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. But being patient and flexible is not without its challenges.

Must social enterprises take what they can get – or can they shape the (patient) social finance they need? Lisa Ashford draws on experiences with community shares and investment platforms in the UK and Africa to explore a way forward.

Our WISE100 Social Finance Champion on 'copy-pasting' lessons from a career in venture capital and equity research – and why Sumerian Partners is proud to call itself a 'contrarian' impact investor.

In the first of a series looking at 'patient, risk bearing' capital, Duncan Brown asks why social investment is so dominated by short-term, rigid debt instruments – and why there's so little support for higher risk, high return social innovation.